Geographic Exploration

VI

Exploration for Knowledge and Power

By the late 18th century the nations of Europe were reaching across the globe. They did so in two closely related ways: first, by means of expanding colonial empires; second, by means of expanding scientific efforts to understand the world—its physical processes, living creatures, and natural history. The history of geographic exploration from the late 18th to early 20th century is a story of science and imperialism.

A

Captain Cook

No one exemplifies the intersection of geographic exploration, science, and empire better than Captain James Cook. In three Pacific Ocean voyages in the late 18th century, Cook not only established the pattern for a properly scientific expedition, but also added significant territory to the British Empire.

In Cook’s first voyage, from 1768 to 1771, he circumnavigated the globe, observed the transit of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti, charted the coasts of New Zealand and Australia, and brought back a shipload of new botanical and zoological specimens. On his second voyage (1772-1775) Cook sailed farther south than any previous explorer and into the Antarctic pack ice, laying to rest the notion of a habitable continent south of Australia. On Cook’s last voyage (1776-1779), he became the first European to visit the Hawaiian Islands (see Hawaii) and explored thousands of miles of the west coast of North America from what is now Oregon to far northern Alaska. On his return to the Hawaiian Islands in 1779, Cook was killed in a skirmish with islanders.

B

Exploration of Africa

Over the course of the 19th century the relationship between Europe and Africa changed completely. In the early 19th century, Europeans knew little about the interior of the African continent, and influence was limited to a few coastal trading posts. Just a few decades later, the whole of Africa was divided into precisely delineated European colonies. Exploration was central to this process.

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Europeans knew of the existence of several large rivers flowing through the interior of Africa. Determining the courses and finding the sources of these rivers were the goals of European explorers at the start of the 19th century. Scottish explorer Mungo Park focused on the course of the Niger River, which was known to flow just south of the Sahara in West Africa. Park’s first expedition, from 1795 to 1797, determined that the river flowed east, leading some geographers to hypothesize that the Niger was somehow connected with the Nile River. Park died on his second voyage (1805-1806) trying to find the true course of the Niger. It was not until 1830 that Richard Lemon Lander established that the Niger flowed into the Gulf of Guinea and that it was a navigable, commercially valuable route to the interior. German explorer Heinrich Barth provided a painstaking account of West African geography after traveling some 16,000 km (10,000 mi), from 1850 to 1855, across the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad and down the Niger.

B

1

Source of the Nile

People had wondered about the source of the mighty Nile for thousands of years—Ancient Egyptian and Roman expeditions up the Nile are documented—but the age-old mystery remained up to the mid-19th century. British explorers Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke headed west from the Indian Ocean coast in 1857 and became the first Europeans to sight Lake Tanganyika, which Burton took to be the source of the Nile. Traveling alone, Speke found Lake Victoria to the northeast and correctly surmised this to be the Nile’s true main source. The difference of opinion led to an acrimonious falling out between the two explorers.

From 1860 to 1863 Speke and British army officer James Augustus Grant made a follow-up expedition to the same region, pushing north and exploring the western edge of Lake Victoria. They followed what they suspected were the upper reaches of the Nile, a surmise that was confirmed by their unexpected encounter with British explorer Samuel White Baker and his intrepid wife Florence, who had ascended the river from Cairo, Egypt. Speke and Grant were thus able to confirm that “the Nile is settled,” that Lake Victoria was indeed the main source of the Nile.

B

2

Livingstone and Stanley

In southern Africa, it was the most famous of the Victorian explorers, Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who made his mark on uncharted territory. Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert and mapped much of the area from what is now Angola to the mouth of the Zambezi River in Mozambique from 1849 to 1856. He returned to the Zambezi in 1858 and explored its tributaries and Lake Malawi. In 1866 he began tracing the drainage systems to the north, exploring Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru, Lake Bangweulu, and the watercourses of rivers flowing into and out of these lakes. When he failed to report back in 1871, a number of search expeditions were mounted, among them one by the New York Herald journalist Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley found Livingstone at Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, greeting him with the famous words, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” Livingstone assured Stanley that he was not in need of rescue and continued exploring the region until he died in what is now Zambia in 1873.

Following up the discoveries of his predecessors, Stanley returned to Central Africa in 1874 for one of the largest and most ambitious overland journeys across Africa ever undertaken. He circumnavigated Lake Tanganyika and followed its outflow to the headstreams of the Congo River, which he descended all the way to its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of about 3,000 km (about 2,000 mi). The terrible journey lasted 999 days and cost the lives of more than 200 of his men.

The work of the great explorers of Africa resulted in maps. It was on those maps that European leaders drew lines symbolizing their respective claims on the continent. The swift process of divvying up the continent into European colonies in the last two decades of the 19th century became known as the Scramble for Africa.

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