Explorers

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about the deck as if you were Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and Christopher Columbus all rolled into one.

JEROME K. JEROME Three Men in a Boat, 1889

Cortés Hernando Cortés (or Cortez) (1485-1547) was a Spanish adventurer who conquered Mexico, then known as New Spain. Darien, mentioned in Keats' poem below, was the name for the isthmus of Panama.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise-

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

JOHN KEATS On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 1816

This was the first sign of humanity she had encountered among the Starkadders, and she was moved by it. She felt like stout Cortez or Sir James Jeans on spotting yet another white dwarf.

STELLA GIBBONS Cold Comfort Farm, 1932

Sir Francis Drake Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540-96), English explorer and privateer, was the first Englishman to see the Pacific and the first to sail round the globe. He harried the Spanish, both in Spain and in South America, and took a leading part in foiling the Spanish Armada in 1588. Despite Spanish protests, he was knighted in 1581 by Queen Elizabeth I.

Amerigo Vespucci Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512), was an Italian-born navigator in whose honour the Americas were named. He made two voyages to the New World, in which he discovered the mouth of the Amazon and explored the north-east coast of South America. His distorted and embroidered account of his travels was published in 1507 (Four Voyages), and based on this, the Latin version of his name, 'Americus', was given to the two American continents.

She first reached Wildeve's Patchs, as it was called, a plot of land redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour: the man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself in fertilizing it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci and received the honours due to those who had gone before.

THOMAS HARDY The Return of the Native, 1878

Failure

This theme encompasses the inability to achieve a particular goal

(SISYPHUS, CANUTE), a more general failure in life (WILLY LOMAN, EDWIN

REARDON), and a decline in one's fortunes, a metaphorical 'fall' (ICARUS, LUCIFER). CHAPPAQUiDDiCK can be invoked in the context of an incident

FAILURE 1 4 3

that subsequently and irrecoverably tarnishes a, usually political, career.

• See also Defeat, Poverty Success.

Canute Canute (d. 1035) was the Danish-born King of England, Denmark, and Norway who is traditionally believed to have reproved his flattering courtiers by demonstrating that, although he was king, he nevertheless did not have the power to command the advancing waves to stay back. However, it is almost always the figure of Canute himself who is used to represent the stupidity and futility of believing that one can halt the advance of something that is in fact impossible to stop.

'Louise,' he called, 'Louise! There was no reason to call: if she wasn't in the living-room there was nowhere else for her to be but the bedroom . . . yet it was his habit to cry her name, a habit he had formed in the days of anxiety and love. The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide—the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.

CRAHAM CREENE The Heart of the Matter, 1948

Two tough women. So it is not surprising they talk as tough as they are. 'The level of deprivation in this country goes down and down and down,' Ms Morgan says. 'It spirals. Whatever we do. It's not even like King Canute. The water is lapping round our feet before we've even had the chance to order the tide to turn back!

The Independent, 1998

The words are all so similar, so utterly useless really, that after a while they merge into a blur. It is not their fault; no one can say anything. Even the promise of a crossborder security summit, announced last night, sounds like King Canute's courtiers raging at the waves.

JONATHAN FREEDLAND in The Guardian, 1998

Casey Casey is the eponymous hero of the late 19th-century ballad 'Casey at the Bat' by Ernest L. Thayer. Casey was confidently expected to save the day in a baseball game but, having not even tried to hit the first two balls, he struck out on the third: 'There is no joy in Mudville—Mighty Casey has struck out.' The name can be used to refer to failure when success was confidently expected.

Chappaquiddick On July 8 1968 Edward Kennedy, at that time a likely US presidential candidate, drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned, and Kennedy himself was found guilty of leaving the scene of an accident. It is widely thought that this event blighted his chance of becoming president. Chappaquiddick can be used to allude to a serious error of judgement that subsequently dogs someone's career.

Resettled in Soweto, the vast black metropolis outside Johannesburg, she set up her own office, built her own following, spoke her own mind and organised the now infamous Mandela United Football Club. Ostensibly a soccer team intended to keep youngsters out of trouble, it became a band of thugs who terrorised the township. By 1991, four members of the club had been convicted of murder. The most notorious case, that of the 14-year-old resistance hero, Stompie Mocketsi Seipei, became Mrs Mandela's Chappaquiddick.

The Independent, 1995