IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 221

In 1803 the United States bought from France a vast territory west of the Mississippi, a transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase. The acquisition roughly doubled the size of the country, yet nobody in Washington knew what the land contained, where its rivers led or which peoples lived there. President Thomas Jefferson therefore asked Congress to pay for an expedition to explore the new territory, to look for a practical route to the Pacific and to record everything it encountered.

To lead the venture Jefferson chose his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, a young army officer from Virginia. Lewis had no experience of commanding men in the field and little scientific training, so Jefferson arranged for him to spend some months in Philadelphia, learning astronomy, mapmaking, botany and medicine from the scholars of the day. Lewis then invited William Clark, who had been his commanding officer in the army, to share the leadership. The two agreed to treat each other as equals, and the party they assembled became known as the Corps of Discovery.

The expedition set out on 14 May 1804 from a camp near the mouth of the Missouri River and began to work its way upstream. Its largest vessel was a keelboat fifty-five feet long, with a sail and rows of oars, while two smaller boats carried extra stores. On the river the men lived under military discipline, standing watches at night and keeping their weapons ready, and each day they recorded the distance covered and the weather. Game was plentiful and the party made good progress while the river remained deep.

On the Great Plains the party met people of several Native nations, among them the Oto and the Sioux, and began to collect unfamiliar animals and plants. Prairie dogs were captured with difficulty, and one was eventually sent alive to Jefferson. Grizzly bears caused greater alarm: they were far larger than the black bears of the East, showed no fear of people and on several occasions chased the hunters. On 20 August 1804 the expedition suffered its only death when Sergeant Charles Floyd fell ill, probably with appendicitis, a condition that could not then be treated.

Winter forced the party to build a stockade, Fort Mandan, near the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in what is now North Dakota. There they hired a French Canadian trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, as an interpreter, although his wife Sacagawea proved far more useful. A Shoshone woman captured in childhood by a rival nation and taken far from her homeland, she could speak the language of the peoples ahead and acted as interpreter. In February 1805 she gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste.

In April 1805 the expedition resumed its journey, and the river soon grew shallow and difficult, so that the men had to drag and pole the boats through rapids. At the Great Falls of the Missouri, where the river drops nearly 190 metres over about ten miles, the boats, supplies and instruments had to be carried overland around the falls. This portage of some eighteen miles took nearly a month in the summer heat and left the party short of food and strength.

By late summer they had reached the Rocky Mountains, and Lewis crossed the Lemhi Pass, where he met a band of Shoshone from whom the party hoped to buy horses. The meeting was tense until the Shoshone chief returned to the camp and recognised Sacagawea as his sister. That connection helped: the expedition obtained horses and a guide, and with their help crossed the mountains in bitter weather, at times eating tallow candles when food ran out.

Down the Clearwater and the Columbia rivers the party travelled through country where Native people had traded for generations, and in November 1805 it reached the Pacific Ocean. Rain fell almost without pause, and before long the explorers held a vote on where to build their winter quarters, in which every member took part, including Sacagawea and Clark's enslaved servant York. The majority chose a site south of the Columbia, where they built Fort Clatsop and spent a wet, comfortless winter.

The return journey began in March 1806. To cover more ground the party divided into smaller groups, which explored different rivers before meeting again on the Missouri. One group, led by Lewis, ran into trouble near the northern Rockies when Blackfeet warriors tried to steal the party's horses and shots were fired; two Blackfeet were killed. Reunited, the expedition travelled east and in September 1806 arrived at St Louis, where the townspeople came out to welcome it. They had been away for more than two years.

In one respect the mission had failed, since Jefferson had hoped for a continuous water route to the Pacific and no such route existed: the mountains could be crossed only on foot or on horseback. In other ways it had succeeded handsomely. The men had described hundreds of plants and animals unknown to American science, and had made maps of rivers and mountain ranges that later travellers relied on for decades. Their journals, edited and published in 1814, became a classic account of the American West. Lewis, appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory in 1807, died two years later of gunshot wounds whose cause has been debated ever since; Clark settled in St Louis and lived until 1838.

In the towns of medieval Europe, most skilled work was organised by guilds: associations of craftsmen who practised the same trade and who jointly controlled how it was carried out. The earliest of these bodies, found in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were merchant guilds, whose members were traders rather than makers of goods. Craft guilds, such as those of the weavers, bakers, goldsmiths and masons, appear in the records rather later, and by the thirteenth century most substantial towns had dozens of them. Each had its own rules, officers and patron saint.

A guild's first concern was to keep control of its trade. Its ordinances fixed the quality of goods, sometimes the price, and often the conditions in which work could be done: bakers were told the weight of a loaf, weavers the width of a cloth, and tanners where they might soak their hides so that unpleasant smells did not offend the neighbours. Members were forbidden to work at night, to undercut one another or to advertise. Officers inspected workshops and could fine or expel those who broke the rules, and a customer who had been cheated might complain to the guild rather than to a court.

Entry to a trade was controlled through apprenticeship. A boy, usually in his early teens, was bound to a master for a fixed term, most often seven years, during which he lived in the master's household and received food, lodging and training but little or no pay. At the end of the term he became a journeyman and worked for wages, often travelling from town to town. To set up as a master he had to satisfy the guild of his competence, in some trades by producing a piece of work of exceptional quality, the masterpiece, and he usually had to pay a substantial fee and provide a feast for the members.

Guilds were also associations of mutual support. Members paid into a common fund that provided a funeral, supported a widow or helped a craftsman too ill to work. Most guilds were religious confraternities as well, maintaining a chapel, paying for masses for the souls of dead members and marching behind their banner on the feast day of their patron saint. Belonging to one was therefore as much a matter of social standing as of economic advantage, and in this respect the guilds resembled countless other medieval associations that bound neighbours together.

Because they commanded money and manpower, guilds played a large part in town life. They built and decorated churches, paid for bridges, roads and schools, and financed windows and sculptures that still survive. In some towns they staged plays on wagons at the feast of Corpus Christi, each guild responsible for one scene of a long cycle drawn from scripture. Their halls were used for meetings, banquets and storage, and their members served as civic officials, kept watch on the walls and supplied men for the town's defence. A few halls still stand and are used by successor companies of the trades that built them.

Rivalry between guilds was often fierce, especially over precedence in religious processions, where the order in which trades walked was understood to reflect their standing in the town. Disputes over who should walk nearest the host were carried to the town council and sometimes to the courts. Within a single guild similar quarrels arose about seating at the annual feast, where masters sat according to seniority while journeymen and apprentices were placed far from the head of the table. Such details survive in account books that record the purchase of banners, candles and food.

Membership, however, was not open to everyone. Guilds limited the number of masters, restricted competition and often required entrants to be the sons of members or to pay heavy fees, which kept poorer craftsmen out. Most excluded women, although the picture varied: women are recorded in brewing and silk-making, and in their husbands' trades after being widowed, and a few guilds admitted them as independent members. In many towns Jews and foreigners were barred from particular trades, and guild membership was sometimes a condition of citizenship itself.

From the sixteenth century the independence of the guilds was gradually reduced. Governments, anxious to control prices and to raise revenue, took over the regulation of trades. In England an Act of 1563, commonly called the Statute of Artificers, made a seven-year apprenticeship compulsory for many crafts and gave local justices the power to set wages, so the guilds were no longer the only authority in their own trades. In France the guilds were abolished outright in 1791, during the Revolution, and in England their civic role faded with the reform of town government in 1835.

For historians, the difficulty is that the surviving records were written by the guilds themselves. Ordinances describe how a trade ought to be conducted, not necessarily how it was, and prosecutions for bad workmanship prove that rules were broken without showing how often. The archives of rich guilds survive far better than those of poor ones, and crafts that left no written rules are almost invisible. Economic historians have also reopened the question of whether guilds mainly guaranteed quality or mainly restricted competition. Some argue that by keeping outsiders out and prices high they slowed the growth of trade; others reply that in an age without reliable courts or standards they gave customers the only assurance available.

A visit to almost any large museum will sooner or later bring the visitor face to face with a dead person. Egyptian mummies wrapped in linen, skeletons arranged in rows, the preserved body of a man who died in a peat bog two thousand years ago: such exhibits are among the most popular that museums possess, and the queues in front of them are rarely short. They are also among the most contentious. In the past three decades a number of institutions have removed human remains from their galleries, sometimes after campaigns by descendant communities and sometimes after argument among their own staff, and travelling exhibitions of mummies now raise the same questions in cities far from the museums that own them.

The case for keeping such exhibits on show rests on the power of the real object. A photograph of a mummy, however good, is a picture of a thing; the thing itself, with its wrappings and its evidence of disease and hard labour, conveys the past in a way that no replica can. Museums exist, their defenders say, so that people may meet authentic objects, and the encounter can be profound: visitors often describe a mummy as making a distant civilisation suddenly human. Popularity alone, however, is not a justification; crowds also gather at fairgrounds.

The second argument is scientific, and it is stronger. Bones yield evidence about diet, disease, work and migration that no document can supply, and the study of ancient DNA and of chemical signatures in teeth has transformed what can be learned from them. Yet this work requires access to remains, not their exhibition. A skeleton kept in a climate-controlled store, available to any qualified researcher, serves science at least as well as one in a case, and probably better, since light and changes in humidity damage old bone. Museums also owe something to the people whose bones were studied, many of whom were excavated without anyone's consent.

Against display stands a different kind of argument, concerned with dignity. We do not put the body of someone who died last year in a glass case, and most people would be shocked if we did; the question is why the passage of centuries should make an exhibition acceptable. Critics answer that it should not. To display a person, they argue, is to turn a subject into an object, and a visitor who stares at a skeleton learns to see a human being as a specimen. Many cultures hold that the dead can still be harmed by how they are treated, and museums' own codes of ethics increasingly acknowledge this.

The claims of descendant communities have moved to the centre of the debate. In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 requires museums that receive federal money to identify Native American remains in their collections and to return them to the peoples with the closest links. The most celebrated case involved a skeleton found on the bank of the Columbia River in Washington State in 1996, more than eight thousand years old and known to scientists as Kennewick Man. After a long dispute, genetic research showed a close relationship with living Native Americans, and in 2017 the remains were returned to a group of tribes for burial.

Other returns have followed similar campaigns, including that of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman taken from southern Africa and exhibited in London in the early nineteenth century, whose remains were returned to South Africa in 2002. Such cases are comparatively straightforward because there are people with a demonstrable connection to the dead. Far more difficult are the countless remains for which no descendant community can be identified: Egyptian mummies, Roman skeletons, the contents of medieval church crypts. Here the argument that the dead have interests of their own is sometimes invoked, though it is hard to say what those interests could be, or who is entitled to speak for them.

Practice varies widely between countries. In Britain the Human Tissue Act of 2004 made a licence necessary for the public display of the remains of people who died within the past hundred years, and it requires museums to consider the views of relatives. Older remains fall outside the Act and are governed instead by professional guidance, which asks museums to show them only where there is a clear educational or scientific purpose, to label them honestly and to allow visitors to avoid them. Some museums have gone further, removing every human remain from public view; others continue to present mummies as star exhibits.

My own view is that neither a blanket ban nor a refusal to discuss the matter is defensible. Display can be justified, but only where it achieves something that a photograph, a model or a written account could not, and where it is carried out with restraint and with explanations that treat the dead as people rather than as props. Where a community with a genuine connection asks for the return of its ancestors, the museum should normally agree, and the burden of proof should lie with the institution that wishes to keep and show them. For the very recently dead, the case for display is weakest of all.