Fancy Free And In Charge

I have long been a fan of the Horatio Hornblower series of novels, which depict an officer of the British Navy rising through the ranks during the Napoleonic wars. A vivid picture is painted of life at sea. Back then, a captain took his ship out of port, and had no contact with his superiors for long stretches of time- sometimes many months. He would leave with orders and the discretion to complete them as he saw fit. He might periodically receive fresh order upon landing at some far-flung government outpost, but mostly was on his own. He was totally free and on his own, all kinds of authority and institution rolled into one in the eyes of his men.

This was so in the American frontier during the same time and for decades more, I gather. To be out West meant there might as well have been no 'back east'.You led the men out of some fort, and were on your own with enough supplies to get started and your wits and grit to acquire more in support of the mission. There were no ties to anything outside of the here and now: just pressing forward at your leisure with no orders except to find out what's out there, and no imperatives except to stave off death at the hands of the elements, the wild beasts and the hostile tribes into whose land you were riding. Of course, the rapacious policy of Manifest Destiny has been discredited, and the era of spotty communication is over, and so no one could really hope to be so free and and in command.

There seems to be no area of the world you can run to out reach of any other part of the world, but there are parts where you maybe could come close. You have to go to the furthest, most margins of the world, where things like passports have no meaning and there is no infrastructure to support even satellite phones. You couldn't have any connections to begin with- no one who would even think to communicate with you. You'd have to be in a place of people incredibly distinct from you. Maybe then you could know the life that Lewis and Clark lived fleetingly. Maybe not- even our emissaries into the reaches of space are accessible by their superiors via live video. There are many good things about the world we live in, but I mourn the end of so much that paved the way.