Discussions on the relative inputs of Nature and Nurture in moulding us has been of passing interest to me for many years. And in this context I have wondered just how much of our interest in travelling arise from genetic components. Why do some people move restlessly around the planet while others are happy to put down roots and stay where they are?
A book I read a year or two back raise some points that made a deal of sense to me – that book was nature via nurture by Matt Ridley. His theme was that although we each have a genetic proclivity towards certain actions and behaviours, these need some kind of ‘trigger’ to get them up and going.
Using this approach, and various bits and pieces of data that had accumulated in my memory over the years, it seemed to me that most people did not have what I thought of as a ‘travel gene’. The majority of mankind are, and have for centuries, been content to live and die within a fairly small radius. One genetic study around the Cheshire Gorge in England showed an amazing number of people with genetic fingerprints going back centuries all from within a radius of about ten miles. So why do some people move a good deal more than ten miles? And more pertinently, why do Rab and I and my siblings, all of whom have roamed the globe rather more than most people do? At one time my three siblings and I were living on four separate continents!!
My first thought was that the mere fact that people living away from their ancestral lands was a prime indicator that they might have the travel gene. This putative thought was derailed momentarily by an Australian study suggesting that about 80% of people in Australia lived within 20 kilometres of where they had been born. This seemed to clash with the idea that Australians were great travellers, but in fact the majority are not. The ones who do travel, travel frequently. The majority do not travel much beyond their State boundaries.
Personal experience endorses this. At the dizzying peak of my corporate life the domestic airline pilots went on strike, which made moving around this vast Australian continent a bit difficult. I wanted to meet with my senior State managers on some urgent issues and in a masterstroke decided to have the meeting in New Zealand – only a two hour flight away. Couldn’t do that because none of these men had passports!!
But…..maybe this lack of enthusiasm for travel was because, despite the fact that the Australian population is made up largely of immigrants, they did not have the travel gene. Their voyage to the Antipodes may not have been entirely voluntarily. This was especially true of the Founding Fathers, but many of the later arrivals had been driven from their homes by war or other major events. Uprooted, they weren’t going to move again.
But I digress, as is my wont. Back to us and why Rab and I are peripatetic.
The strongest evidence I could adduce to support my travel gene theory came from my brother Steve’s genealogical work, primarily on our maternal side. He started there because it was easier to obtain the information he was looking for. My maternal grandmother’s father was definitely a volunteer voyager. He was essentially a mercenary, or as he might have been categorised in those days, a soldier of fortune. Of Irish stock he was heading for a career in accountancy when he was diverted by a call to arms to fight the Border Wars in the Cape Colony in South Africa. But there was less evidence for my maternal grandfather. His family seemed at first glance to come from a fairly settled stock. A doctor in country Denmark, it seemed that he moved, perhaps unadvisedly, to a war zone in the Cape Colony and all because he had been persuaded to do so my a relative and because Denmark was suffering a financial crisis.
Looking further back up this branch of the family tree revealed the truth. Large doses of enthusiastic travel through the centuries. Perhaps the best example being Toger Abo who was a captain in the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century and who met his wife in 1781 in Cape Town of all places on his way back from a voyage to the Spice Islands which are now Indonesia. That would likely have given his direct descendants a double dose of genetic material - and that was evidenced by their spread across the globe in the decades that followed.
Added to that, my father volunteered to leave his homeland of England. It is difficult to trace his ancestry because his father was born in India where his grandfather was working as a civil engineer – further evidence of a high probability of a travel gene for my money. Rab’s father was also the son of a voluntary immigrant to South Africa who recognised an opportunity greater than those available in England.
That seems to indicate a high probability of the ‘nature’ side – of having travel genes. So what was the trigger to start us moving? Well, both of us moved around a fair bit as children – I went to half a dozen schools – travelling by steam train and ship. We both remember the excitement of those voyages. We both went to Europe for a year or two before we met, travelling by ship again and having a great time. I think it was that background that kicked the genes into action. And since we shared that kind of background, how could we fail to move on as opportunities arose to do so? The first joint cruise we went on was to South America. We were thinking of buying our first house and sought advice from my mother. She urged us to travel while we could – and so we did. Thirty days on a ship, ashore in Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires – what a ball!!
And with that kind of background, how could we fail to move on as opportunities arose to do so later in our lives?
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