In 1798, an English cartographer called James Rennell did something so audaciously memorable, so uniquely unpredictable, that no one in the map world has been able to match it since. He invented a mountain range. Not just any range, either: a central belt that stretched through thousands of miles of West Africa – mountains of ‘stupendous height’ that would prove an impassable mental barrier to Livingstone, Stanley, and any other European explorer with ambitions to penetrate one of the most lucrative blanks on the map.
The Mountains of Kong, named after a once-prosperous trading region in what is now Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso, are one of the great phantoms in the history of cartography, and not just because of the ridiculous novelty of their length, extending west to east from modern-day Nigeria to Sierra Leone. The Mountains of Kong were also extraordinary because of their longevity. Once on the map, they stayed on it for almost a century – until finally an enterprising Frenchman called Louis-Gustave Binger went to have a look and found that they weren’t there, an achievement for which he was awarded the highest domestic honours. But who could possibly perpetrate such an absurd act of cartographical chicanery? And how could they get away with it?
In the latter part of the eighteenth century James Rennell was something of a cartographical hero. His survey of Bengal was justly regarded as the most detailed and accurate yet undertaken, a feat achieved along newly scientific mapping principles. He was a pioneer too in the new science of oceanography, and he is remembered as one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society. It was only to be expected, therefore, that any map he drew displaying a new discovery was not only believed but welcomed, particularly if it appeared in one of the most significant books of travel literature written in his lifetime.
And so it was: his most elaborate apparition made its debut in two maps published to accompany Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa by Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer’s account of his quest to find the source and course of the Niger. (For more than a century, almost all African explorers’ principal quests concerned rivers, and the ancient Greek conundrums of locating the source, the flow and the outfall – whether the White and Blue Nile, the Niger or the Congo.)
Park’s challenge was set by the newly formed African Association, the London-based society established by Joseph Banks, William Wilberforce and others with the joint ambitions of intellectual and commercial conquest. Africa’s gold reserves and the prospects for British trade were believed to be limitless, and although the coastline had been well-mapped by 1780, the interior remained largely a mystery. Park’s journey through Senegal and Mali in 1795–97 was more circuitous and less penetrating than his second fateful mission a decade later (at the end of which he is thought to have drowned after a pursuit by spear-chucking natives), but his journals offer a vivid topography of a vanishing world on the eve of a colonising stampede.
The Mountains of Kong – ‘a Chain of Great Mountains’ – arrive on James Rennell’s map in 1798.
James Rennell’s accompanying maps are based on Park’s written account, but also on additional information provided to the cartographer after Park’s return to London. Rennell wrote an appendix to the book in which he explained how Park’s discoveries had provided a ‘new face’ to the continent and had proved ‘that a belt of mountains, which extends from west to east, occupies the parallels between ten and eleven degrees of north latitude, and between the second and tenth degrees of west longitude (from Greenwich). This belt, moreover, other authorities extend some degrees still farther to the west and south, in different branches …’ In his book, Park reported seeing only two or three peaks, but Rennell knitted them together. It wasn’t by chance that the existence of these non-existent mountains reinforced Rennell’s theory (vaguely suggested by Park) about the route of the Niger. He believed, erroneously, that it began in the mountains, travelled east-to-west along its range, but was prevented from travelling south and reaching the Gulf of Guinea … by the mountains. He showed the Niger evaporating inland in Wangara.
He then explained how these ‘other authorities’, including the fifteenth-century Moorish geographer Leo Africanus, had previously referred to mountain ranges in the area but had failed to give them a name. But now they did have a name, inspired by Park hearing a native description of ‘the Kingdom of Kong’. It was an intrepid and resolute act, the modern equivalent, perhaps, of drawing a thick contoured line through more than half of Western Europe and calling it the Mountains of Luxembourg.
And of course that wasn’t the last of it. Mungo Park’s account was a bestseller, and Rennell’s maps had an immediate influence on others. The mountains were not just a dramatic obstacle; the legend grew that they glistened with gold. In 1804 the German map-maker Johann Reinecke produced what looked like a fluffy snow-covered range (titled Gebirge Kong) for a new atlas. A year later, the leading London engraver John Cary produced another map with the Mountains of Kong looming ever more menacingly over the plains (this time linked to the similarly fictitious Moon Mountains, the supposed source of the White Nile since the days of Ptolemy). Cary’s work was titled, with some conviction, ‘A New Map of Africa, from the Latest Authorities’.
The phantom mountains stubbornly refusing to leave this American atlas of 1839.
How did the mountains remain standing for so long – at once both falsifiable and unverifiable? The American scholars Thomas Bassett and Philip Porter have identified forty maps which show the Mountains of Kong in various stages of development from 1798 to 1892, eventually forming a range the size of a small African state. Faced with a lack of evidence to the contrary, cartographers copy each other – we know that. But the fact that some of the most convincing representations of the Mountains of Kong appeared on maps many years after the Lander brothers confirmed that the Niger flowed into the Gulf of Guinea quite undermined the theory that we had entered a new scientific age. As Bassett and Porter found, cartographic knowledge in the nineteenth century was still ‘partly based on non-logical factors such as aesthetics, habit, [and] the urge to fill in blank spaces …’
Rennell, one of England’s most garlanded geographers (he was buried in Westminster Abbey), changed the cartography of Africa for ninety years. One needs look no further for a pristine example of the power of the printed word to confer status, or the power of the printed map to confirm authority. It was only in 1889, with the travels of the French officer Louis-Gustave Binger, that things began to change. In December 1889 Binger addressed a distinguished audience at the Paris Geographical Society, and recounted his previous year’s journey along the Niger from Bamako (in present-day Mali) to the outskirts of Kong. What did he find? ‘On the horizon, not even a ridge of hills!’
Binger’s demolition job had an immediate effect: the Mountains of Kong disappeared from almost all maps as quickly as they had appeared. They last featured in Rand McNally’s map of Africa of 1890, although as late as 1928 the esteemed Bartholomew’s Oxford Advanced Atlas featured this in its index: ‘Kong Mountains, French West Africa, 8°40 N 5°0 W.’
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Charlie Marlow, the chief narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, arrived in Africa just a few years too late to see the Mountains of Kong. But his regret lay elsewhere – in the fact that most of the white spaces he had seen on the map as a boy had been filled in. ‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps,’ he tells his fellow crew members as they sit anchored on the Thames estuary waiting for the tide to turn at the beginning of the novella. ‘I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there.”’
Even though by Marlow’s adulthood Africa ‘had got filled … with rivers and lakes and names … It had become a place of darkness’, he remains entranced by a map in a shop window of a snake-like river curving over a vast country, and he endeavours to join any enterprise that will get him there. Before his interview with an ivory company, he sits in a waiting room with another map, both shiny and colourful. ‘There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch…’ He wasn’t interested in any of this. ‘I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre.’
Charlie Marlow’s apocalypse lay ahead of him, and maps wouldn’t be of much use. But his concept of Africa becoming ‘a place of darkness’ is an illuminating one. Beyond the spiritual darkness of those he encounters, Marlow (and one presumes Conrad, who had himself travelled up the Congo in the 1870s) viewed the continent as dark when it was full: fully explored, fully colonised, fully mapped (and conceivably, one imagines, as was the fashion, full of the dark-skinned).
Most Victorian-era explorers and cartographers had an entirely different interpretation of dark. It was a term for the barbarian unknown, and the unmapped. When Henry Morton Stanley entitled his book Through The Dark Continent in 1878 (two decades before Conrad completed Heart of Darkness) Africa was still dark, despite the recent intentions of Mungo Park, Richard Burton, John Speke, David Livingstone and Stanley himself, to name the British alone. In fact, Africa was getting darker by the year: Stanley’s follow-up, another bestseller, was In Darkest Africa (1890).
But there is an even stranger tale of light and dark, and it is unique to Africa: the story of how we consciously placed blank spaces on a map that was hitherto crammed with life and activity.
Among cartographers, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift is known for these four lines from his long poem ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’:
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Certainly this was once the case. The Belgian map-maker Jodocus Hondius had a nice safari of elephants, lions and camels on his map of 1606, and in 1670 John Ogilby had an elephant, rhino and what may have been a dodo doing their worst in Ethiopia. But in 1733, when Swift wrote those lines, it was hardly true at all. Africa was emptying out. There were no animals, or such animals that did exist had been confined to the cartouche, alongside naked natives. This wasn’t to make way for the latest geographical discoveries and a new topography, but the opposite: the interior was turning blank again. It wasn’t just symbols and illustrations that were disappearing, but a multitude of rivers, lakes, towns and mountains, and it was a remarkable thing – one of those rare instances of a map becoming less instructive and less sure of itself as the decades and centuries passed.
Here are two examples. The first is Blaeu’s popular Africae Nova Descriptio from the early 1600s. The outline of the continent is essentially correct, there are many recognizable kingdoms and lakes (alongside elephants, crocodiles and large frogs), and the map looks full. Partly this is a trick, with the text of coastal locations named by Portuguese explorers in the previous two centuries being turned inland, rather than the usual practice of displaying them towards the oceans. And partly it is wishful thinking, the interior topography a combination of Herodotus, Ptolemy, haphazard Portuguese expansion in the quest for gold, and hearsay. It is not wholly inaccurate, but there is a lot of supposition.
Compare this to the key map of the country made more than a century later in 1749. This is by the influential French cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourgignon d’Anville, who is notable chiefly for two things: the scientific accuracy of his maps elevating the art of cartography throughout Europe, and the fact that he hardly left Paris. His map of southern Africa is noteworthy for its extreme honesty; d’Anville rejected hearsay and plagiarism, and sought verification on every mark he placed; if there was no confirmation yet he believed a river or settlement to exist, he would duly note an uncertain provenance. D’Anville’s map thus contains substantial details of three areas only. The kingdom of Congo on the west coast, the state of Manomotara and its immediate neighbours on the east coast, and the southerly tip by the Cape of Good Hope, ‘Le Pays des Hotentots’. Madagascar is also well documented. But the rest of the country is a vast swathe of blank, a brave act for a map-maker.
Africa full in Blaeu’s Africae Nova Descriptio.
Africa empty in a 1766 map based on d’Anville.
The blanks fired intellectual curiosity; many regarded them as an insult to the enlightened age. But d’Anville’s gaps also made huge political suggestions: the continent, universally known for its troves of slaves and gold, is wide open for conquest; the indigenous population, such as it exists, can have no claims on the unmapped territories, and will therefore present no resistance to subjugation. The blank spaces, swept clean of their inhabitants, were now all potentially white spaces too. Over the next fifty years, d’Anville’s map became the dominant impression of Africa throughout Europe, and went through many editions unchallenged. And in this way science yielded to commerce and avarice. Did d’Anville have such intentions himself? Almost certainly not. But when members of the African Association gathered in London to gaze upon the map towards the end of the century (and potentates did likewise in Antwerp, Paris and Amsterdam), they must have been licking their lips.
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The blank spaces didn’t last long. In 1873, William Winwood Reade drew an engaging thematic map of the ‘Literature of Africa’, a textual display showing where the key explorers of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had travelled. ‘David Livingstone’, the first to traverse the central width of the continent, straps the map like a belt, while ‘Mungo Park’ and the French explorer René ‘Caillie’ both curve around the Niger. Stanley had located the fading Livingstone near the shore of Lake Tanganyika by the time the map was drawn, but he was yet to set off on his own big discoveries to Lake Victoria and beyond, and so barely features.
But Stanley does feature prominently in the one of the most brutal accounts of colonisation that we possess. In fact there are two such accounts. One is in Stanley’s own hand, his bestselling journals of his violent sashays from the western mouth of the Congo to Zanzibar, alive with death as he hacks his way through the forests with his valiant and modern expeditionary force.
Explorers make a name for themselves in 1873.
And the other is a map of equatorial Africa, the region once known as Congo Free State, which shows Stanley basically doing the same thing. Stanley’s magnificent achievements as an explorer – not only the successful location of Livingstone, but the confirmation of Lake Victoria as the source of the White Nile – have been undermined by his participation in what may be the worst humanitarian disaster ever conceived by colonial hubris and greed.
Encouraged by Stanley’s heroics along the River Congo between 1874 and 1877, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, co-opted him to take part in a rather less ‘scientific’ venture. Leopold had seen the blank maps and wanted a piece for himself. In a period that saw Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Portugal carve up the continent in a wild imperial looting expedition, the conquest of land through a mixture of industrial ambition and religious divination might have seemed merely like the natural order of things. Leopold made his intentions clear at a geographical conference in Brussels in 1876, proposing the establishment of an international committee with the purpose of increasing the ‘civilisation’ of Congo natives ‘by means of scientific exploration, legal trade and war against the “Arabic” slave traders.’
He claimed a higher goal: ‘To open to civilisation the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.’ But his ideas of progress and scientific methods were cruelly unconventional, involving as they did brutal enslavement, a military dictatorship and the ruthless control over the ivory and rubber trade, an ambition only made possible initially with Stanley as his entirely respectable agent, buying up vast areas for Belgian control with sweet-talk and trinkets. To what extent Stanley knew of Leopold’s intended subterfuge has long been the subject of debate, but the king reportedly informed him, ‘It is a question of creating a new state, as big as possible, and of running it. It is clearly understood that in this project there is no question of granting the slightest political power to the Negroes. That would be absurd.’
Belgian Congo – the darkest and bloodiest of colonial maps. Stanleyville sits at the top.
Leopold (and Stanley’s) conquest of the Congo was one of the prime motivations behind Otto von Bismarck’s Berlin Conference of 1884-5, an attempt to divide the rightful ownership of this recently blank continent. (In Heart of Darkness, Bismarck’s Berlin Conference becomes a parody: the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’.) The subsequent map looks colourful and ordered enough, and suddenly full again. But the new appearance of King Leopold’s massive Congo Free State heralds one of the truly dark periods of colonial rule. And the bright new partitions on the rest of the map at the start of the twentieth century – French Algeria, Portuguese Angola, Italian Libya, German Cameroon and British South Africa – show only the ability of maps to conceal what’s really there, and to mask the misery to come.
A quarter of a century after Conrad’s Heart of Darkness first appeared, and in the year of the author’s death, a private press published the author’s own thoughts about the lightness and darkness of maps. Like Charlie Marlow, Conrad was a map fan. He had to be: he had led such a peripatetic life on land and sea that they were the only way he could find his bearings. In Geography and Some Explorers he wrote of how ‘map-gazing, to which I became addicted so early, brings the problems of the great spaces of the earth into stimulating and direct contact with a sane curiosity and gives an honest precision to one’s imaginative faculty.’ He was aware he was living through a revolution in which ‘the honest maps of the nineteenth century nourished in me a passionate interest in the truth of geographical facts and a desire for the precise knowledge which was extended to other subjects. For a change had come over the spirit of cartographers. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, the business of map-making had been growing into an honest occupation, registering the hard-won knowledge, but also in a scientific spirit, recording the geographical ignorance of its time. And it was Africa, the continent of which the Romans used to say “some new thing was always coming,” that got cleared of the dull, imaginary wonders of the dark ages, which were replaced by exciting spaces of white paper.’
What really excited him about maps, he realised, was a simple thing: ‘Regions unknown!’ Not defined certainty, but the opposite – the mystery, and the life-enhancing possibility of discovery.
The Mountains of Kong were far from the only fictional features of nineteenth-century maps. The Pacific was littered with more than a hundred imaginary islands, floating around happily for decades in every atlas. Then in 1875 a disgruntled British naval captain named Sir Frederick Evans began crossing them out. In all, he removed 123 islands from the British Admiralty Charts that he believed were the result of: a) mistaken coordinates, b) too much rum and nausea, and/or c) restless megalomaniac commanders longing for posterity. In his eagerness, Evans also removed three genuine islands, but it was a small price to pay for cleaning up an ocean.
One of the worst offenders, of the megalomania variety, was an American called Captain Benjamin Morrell. Between 1822 and 1831 Morrell had drifted around the southern hemisphere in search of treasure, seals, wealth and fame, and failing to find much of the first three, opted for posterity. The published accounts of his travels proved popular and convincing enough for his findings – including Morrell Island (near Hawaii) and New South Greenland (near Antarctica) – to be entered on naval charts and world atlases, where they endured for a century. In fact, Morrell Island caused a westward diversion of the international dateline until 1910, and appeared in The Times Atlas as late as 1922.
The strange thing was, the true nature of Morrell’s travels and deception had begun to unravel much earlier. In March 1870, the Royal Geographical Society in London gathered to discuss Morrell’s claims. The debate was led by Captain R.V. Hamilton of the Royal Navy, who was a Morrell fan. He spoke of how the British had recently made great discoveries in the southern oceans, and claimed that Morrell, valiantly slicing through the ice in his schooner Wasp, had made the greatest headway. He explained that the story of his voyages were on the RGS shelves – not only in book form, but on new maps as well. Hamilton had recently placed the results of Morrell’s discoveries on the new Admiralty charts, for they were ‘curious and important’. His main regret was that Morrell’s narrative was ‘not as detailed as it might be.’
Benjamin Morrell: the world was his football.
That was the understatement of the year. Even the least experienced captain will diligently log his progress through unfamiliar waters, noting his coordinates alongside sailing and weather conditions. But Morrell’s Antarctic log contained blank weeks, and pages torn out. It observed no ice where others had seen nothing but; and birds of paradise suited only to the tropics. Other navigators at the meeting were rightly sceptical, chief among them J.E. Davis, who had followed Morrell’s Antarctic ‘course’ sixteen years later, as a member of Sir James Ross’s expedition. Davis concluded that Morrell’s work not only lacked credence but resembled the fiction of Robinson Crusoe (Morrell had in fact sailed to the Juan Fernandez Islands (off the coast of Chile), where Alexander Selkirk washed up in 1704, inspiring the Defoe novel.)
However, it was half a century later before the matter of New South Greenland was finally laid to rest, when Ernest Shackleton, on his Endurance expedition of 1914–16, found that its supposed location was in fact deep sea, with soundings up to 1,900 fathoms. With Shackleton’s reputation far stronger than Morrell’s, off the map it came.
It wasn’t the last of Morrell’s fabrications to be removed: Morrell Island, in the Hawaiian archipelago, soon followed. However, the modern naval historian Rupert Gould has identified some useful and verifiable Morrell discoveries. Among them – and perhaps a fitting memorial – is Ichaboe Island off the coast of Namibia, which Morrell found to be rich in guano deposits from native seabirds.
