Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River as seen from Zambia. G. Holton—Photo Researchers
The earlier European explorers in the Pacific were primarily in search of trade or booty; the later ones were primarily in search of information. By the end of the 16th century, Portugal held only the ports of Goa and Diu, in India, and Macau, in China, in the East. The English dominated the trade of India, and the Dutch that of the East Indies (Indonesia). It was the Dutch, trading on the fringes of the known world, who were the explorers. Outfitting their ships at the Cape of Good Hope, they soon learned that, by sailing east for some 3,000 miles (5,000 km) before turning north, they would encounter favourable winds in setting a course toward the Spice Islands (now the Moluccas). Before long, reports were received of landfalls made on an unknown coast; as early as 1618 a Dutch skipper suggested using this coast in order to get a fixed course for Java. Thereafter, the west coast of Australia was gradually charted. It was identified by some as the coast of the great southern continent shown on Gerardus Mercator’s world map and, by others, as the continent of Loach or Beach mentioned by Marco Polo, interpreted as lying to the south of Malacca (Melaka); Polo, however, was probably describing the Malay Peninsula. In 1642, Anthony van Diemen, a farsighted governor-general of the profitable Dutch East India Company, sent out the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman for the immediate purpose of making an exploratory voyage but with the ultimate aim of developing trade.
Other traders in the Pacific, for the most part Spaniards, established land portages from harbours on the Caribbean to harbours on the west coast of Central and South America; from the Pacific coast ports of the Americas, they then set a course westward to the Philippines. Many of their ships crossed and recrossed the Pacific without making a landfall; many islands were found, named, and lost, only to be found again without recognition, renamed, and perhaps lost yet again. In the days before longitude could be accurately fixed, such uncertainty was not surprising.
Some voyages—for example, those of Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, the Spanish explorer, in 1567 and 1568; Mendaña and the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós in 1595; Quirós and another Portuguese explorer, Luis de Torres, in 1606—had, among other motives, the purpose of finding the great southern continent. Quirós was sure that in Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides he had found his goal; he “took possession of the site on which is to be founded the New Jerusalem.” Torres sailed from there to New Guinea and thence to Manila, in the Philippines. In doing so, he coasted the south shore of New Guinea, sailing through Torres Strait, unaware that another continent lay on his left.
The English were rivals of the Spaniards in the search for wealth in unknown lands in the Pacific. Two English seamen, Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, circumnavigated the world from west to east in 1577 to 1580 and 1586 to 1588, respectively. One of Drake’s avowed objects was the search for Terra Australis. Despite the fact that he participated in several buccaneering voyages, the English seaman William Dampier, who was active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, may be regarded as the first to travel mainly to satisfy scientific curiosity. He wrote: “I was well satisfied enough knowing that, the further [sic] we went, the more knowledge and experience I should get, which was the main thing I regarded.” His book A New Voyage Round the World (1697) further popularized the idea of a great southern continent.
In the late 18th century, the final phase of Pacific exploration occurred. The French sent the explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville to the Pacific in 1768. He appears to have been more of a skeptic than many of his contemporaries, for, while he agreed “that it is difficult to conceive such a number of low islands and almost drowned lands without a continent near them,” at the same time he maintained that “if any considerable land existed hereabouts we could not fail meeting with it.”
The British, for their part, commissioned John Byron in 1764 and Samuel Wallis and Phillip Carteret in 1766 “to discover unknown lands and to explore the coast of New Albion.” For all the navigational skill and personal endurance shown by captains and crews, the rewards of these voyages in increasing geographical knowledge were not great. The courses sailed were in the familiar waters of the southern tropics; none was through the dangerous waters of higher latitudes. Capt. James Cook, the English navigator, in three magnificent voyages at long last succeeded in demolishing the fables about Pacific geography.
Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603?–1659/61), the greatest of the Dutch navigators and explorers, discovered Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, and the Fiji Islands. He entered the service of the Dutch East India Company in 1632 or 1633 and made his first voyage of exploration to the island of Ceram (now Seram, Indon.) as captain in 1634. He sailed in 1639 on an expedition in search of the “islands of gold and silver” in the seas east of Japan. After a series of trading voyages to Japan, Formosa (Taiwan), Cambodia, and Sumatra, he was chosen by the governor-general van Diemen to command an ambitious exploration of the Southern Hemisphere.
By 1642, Dutch navigators had discovered discontinuous stretches of the western coast of Australia, but whether these coasts were continental and connected with the hypothetical southern continent of the Pacific Ocean remained unknown. Tasman was assigned to solve this problem, following instructions based on a memoir by Frans Jacobszoon Visscher, his chief pilot. He was instructed to explore the Indian Ocean from west to east, south of the ordinary trade route, and, proceeding eastward into the Pacific (if this proved possible), to investigate the practicability of a sea passage eastward to Chile, to rediscover the Solomon Islands of the Spaniards, and to explore New Guinea.
Leaving Batavia (now Jakarta) on Aug. 14, 1642, with two ships, the Heemskerk and Zeehaen, Tasman sailed to Mauritius (September 5–October 8), then southward and eastward, reaching his southernmost latitude of 49° S at about longitude 94° E. Turning north he discovered land on November 24 at 42°20′ S and skirted its shores, naming it Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). A council of officers on December 5 decided against further investigation, so he missed the opportunity of discovering Bass Strait. Continuing eastward, he sighted on December 13, at 42°10′ S, the coast of South Island, New Zealand, and explored it northward, entering the strait between North Island and South Island, supposing it to be a bay. He left New Zealand on Jan. 4, 1643, at North Cape, under the impression that he had probably discovered the west coast of the southern continent, which might be connected with the “Staten Landt” (Staten Island) discovered by W.C. Schouten and Jacques Le Maire south of South America—hence the name of Staten Landt, which Tasman gave to his discovery in honour of the States General (the Dutch legislature).
Convinced by the swell that the passage to Chile existed, Tasman now turned northeast, and on January 21 he discovered Tonga and on February 6 the Fiji Islands. Turning northwest, the ships reached New Guinea waters on April 1 and Batavia on June 14, 1643, completing a 10-month voyage on which only 10 men had died from illness. Tasman had circumnavigated Australia without seeing it, thus establishing that it was separated from the hypothetical southern continent.
The council of the company decided, however, that Tasman had been negligent in his investigation of the lands that he discovered and of the passage to Chile. They sent him on a new expedition to the “South Land” in 1644 with instructions to establish the relationships of New Guinea, the “great known South Land” (western Australia), Van Diemen’s Land, and the “unknown South Land.” Tasman sailed from Batavia on February 29, steering southeast along the south coast of New Guinea, sailing southeast into Torres Strait (which he mistook for a shallow bay), coasting Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, and then following the north coast and then the west coast of Australia to 22° S.
Although he was rewarded with the rank of commander and was made a member of the Council of Justice of Batavia, his second voyage was also a disappointment to the company because it had failed to reveal lands of potential wealth. In 1647, Tasman commanded a trading fleet to Siam (now Thailand), and in the following year he commanded a war fleet against the Spaniards in the Philippines. He left the service of the Dutch East India Company several years later.
The English admiral Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540–96) was the most renowned seaman of the Elizabethan Age. In 1577–80 he led an expedition that circumnavigated the world. Drake went to sea at about age 18 and gained a reputation as an outstanding navigator. He became wealthy by raiding and plundering Spanish colonies in the New World.
In 1577, Drake was chosen as the leader of an expedition intended to pass around South America through the Strait of Magellan and to explore the coast that lay beyond. The expedition was backed by Queen Elizabeth I herself. Nothing could have suited Drake better. He had official approval to benefit himself and the queen, as well as to cause the maximum damage to the Spaniards. The explicit object was to “find out places meet to have traffic.” Drake, however, devoted the voyage to piracy, without official reproof in England. He set sail in December with five small ships, manned by fewer than 200 men, and reached the Brazilian coast in the spring of 1578. His flagship, the Pelican, which Drake later renamed the Golden Hind (or Hinde), weighed only about 100 tons. It seemed little enough with which to undertake a venture into the domain of the most powerful monarch and empire in the world.
Upon arrival in South America, Drake alleged a plot by unreliable officers, and its supposed leader, Thomas Doughty, was tried and executed. Drake was always a stern disciplinarian, and he clearly did not intend to continue the venture without making sure that everyone in his small company was loyal to him. Two of his smaller vessels, having served their purpose as store ships, were then abandoned after their provisions had been taken aboard the others, and on Aug. 21, 1578, he entered the Strait of Magellan. It took 16 days to sail through and reach the Pacific Ocean. Then, as he wrote, “God by a contrary wind and intolerable tempest seemed to set himself against us.” During the gale, Drake’s vessel and that of his second in command had been separated; the latter, having missed a rendezvous with Drake, ultimately returned to England, presuming that the Golden Hind had sunk. It was, therefore, only Drake’s flagship that made its way into the Pacific and up the coast of South America. He passed along the coast like a whirlwind, for the Spaniards were quite unguarded, having never known a hostile ship in their waters. He seized provisions at Valparaíso, attacked passing Spanish merchantmen, and captured two very rich prizes that were carrying bars of gold and silver, minted Spanish coinage, precious stones, and pearls. He claimed then to have sailed to the north as far as 48° N, on a parallel with Vancouver [Canada], to seek the Northwest Passage back into the Atlantic. Bitterly cold weather defeated him, and he coasted southward to anchor near what is now San Francisco, Ca. He named the surrounding country New Albion and took possession of it in the name of Queen Elizabeth.
In July 1579 Drake sailed west across the Pacific and after 68 days sighted a line of islands (probably the remote Palau group). From there he went on to the Philippines, where he replenished provisions before sailing to the Moluccas. There he was well received by a local sultan and succeeded in buying spices. Drake’s navigation skills were excellent, but in those totally uncharted waters his ship struck a reef. He was able to get her off without any great damage and, after calling at Java, set his course across the Indian Ocean for the Cape of Good Hope. Two years after it had nosed its way into the Strait of Magellan, the Golden Hind came back into the Atlantic with only 56 of the original crew of 100 left aboard.
On Sept. 26, 1580, Drake took his ship into Plymouth Harbour. It was laden with treasure and spices, and Drake’s fortune was permanently made. Despite Spanish protests about his piratical conduct while in their imperial waters, Queen Elizabeth herself went aboard the Golden Hind, which was lying at Deptford in the Thames estuary, and personally bestowed knighthood on him.
Two French navigators—Jean-François de Galaup, count de La Pérouse (1741–c. 1788), and his successor, Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842)—conducted wide-ranging explorations in the Pacific Ocean in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, respectively. La Pérouse disappeared in 1788 while on a voyage in the South Pacific, and it was not until d’Urville’s journey there three decades later that information on the earlier party’s fate came to light. Both expeditions led to increased understanding of the region but that of d’Urville in 1826–29 resulted in extensive revisions of existing charts and discovery or redesignation of island groups.
Commanding the ship La Boussole, which was accompanied by the Astrolabe, La Pérouse sailed from France on Aug. 1, 1785. After rounding Cape Horn, he made a stop in the South Pacific at Easter Island (April 9, 1786). Investigating tropical Pacific waters, he visited the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and, with the object of locating the Northwest Passage from the Pacific, he made his way to North America. He reached the southern shore of Alaska, near Mount St. Elias, in June 1786 and explored the coast southward beyond what is now San Francisco to Monterey. He then crossed the Pacific and reached the South China coast at Macau on Jan. 3, 1787. Leaving Manila on April 9, he began to explore the Asian coast. He sailed through the Sea of Japan up to the Tatar Strait, which separates the mainland from the island of Sakhalin, and also visited the strait, named for him, that separates Sakhalin from Hokkaido, Japan. At Petropavlovsk, on the Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, he dispatched his expedition journal and maps overland to France. The ships then made for the Navigators’ (now Samoa) Islands, where the commander of the Astrolabe and 11 of his men were murdered. La Pérouse then went to the Friendly (now Tonga) and Norfolk islands on his way to Botany Bay in eastern Australia, from which he departed on March 10, 1788, and was never heard from again. However, his records survived and were published in 1797.
D’Urville had previously served on a circumnavigation of the world (1822–25) before embarking on his great voyage to the South Pacific. A main objective of this next mission was to search for traces of La Pérouse. During the journey he charted parts of New Zealand and visited the Fiji and Loyalty islands, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Amboyna, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), the Caroline Islands, and the Celebes.
In 1826–27 the English captain-adventurer Peter Dillon found evidence that La Pérouse’s ships had been near Vanikoro, one of the Santa Cruz Islands (now in Solomon Islands). In February 1828 d’Urville also sighted wreckage at Vanikoro, and he learned from islanders that about 30 men from the ships had been massacred on shore, though others who were well armed managed to escape.
The expedition returned to France on March 25, 1829. The voyage resulted in extensive revision in charts of South Sea waters and redesignation of island groups into Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Malaysia. D’Urville also returned with about 1,600 plant specimens, 900 rock samples, and information on the languages of the islands he had visited.
The renowned British naval captain, navigator, and explorer James Cook (1728–79) was one of the most intrepid of the great discoverers. Over the course of two decades he led expeditions that explored the seaways and coasts of Canada (1759 and 1763–67) and conducted three expeditions to the Pacific Ocean (1768–71, 1772–75, and 1776–79), ranging from the Antarctic ice fields to the Bering Strait and from the coasts of North America to Australia and New Zealand.
Cook went to sea at the age of 18 as a merchant seaman, learning to sail stout, seaworthy collier-barks made at the town of Whitby and receiving splendid practical navigational training in the treacherous waters of the North Sea. In 1855 he joined the Royal Navy. During the Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France (1756–63), he spent much of the war in North America, during which time he charted and marked the more difficult reaches of the St. Lawrence River. Between 1763 and 1768, after the war had ended, he commanded a schooner while surveying the coasts of Newfoundland.
In 1768 the Royal Society, in conjunction with the Admiralty, was organizing the first scientific expedition to the Pacific, and the rather obscure 40-year-old Cook was appointed commander of the expedition. He was given a homely looking but extremely sturdy Whitby coal-hauling bark that was renamed HMS Endeavour. Cook’s orders were to convey gentlemen of the Royal Society and their assistants to Tahiti to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. That done, on June 3, 1769, he was to find the southern continent, the so-called Terra Australis, which philosophers argued must exist to balance the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. The leader of the scientists was the rich and able Joseph Banks, age 26, who was assisted by Daniel Solander, a Swedish botanist, as well as astronomers and artists. Cook carried an early nautical almanac and brass sextants but no chronometer on the first voyage.
Striking south and southwest from Tahiti, where his predecessors had sailed west and west-northwest with the favouring trade winds, Cook found and charted all of New Zealand, a difficult job that took six months. After that, instead of turning before the west winds for the homeward run around Cape Horn, he crossed the Tasman Sea westward and, on April 19, 1770, came on the southeast coast of Australia. Running north along its 2,000-mile (3,200-km) eastern coast, surveying as he went, Cook successfully navigated Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef—since reckoned as one of the greatest navigational hazards in the world—taking the Coral Sea and the Torres Strait in his stride. Once the bark touched on a coral spur by night, but it withstood the impact and was refloated. After the Endeavour was grounded on the nearby Queensland coast and repaired, Cook sailed it back to England. He stopped briefly at Batavia (now Jakarta) for supplies, and, although the crew had been remarkably healthy until then, 30 died of fever and dysentery contracted while on land. None of the crew, however, died of scurvy. This was because, in addition to ensuring cleanliness and ventilation in the crew’s quarters, Cook insisted on an appropriate diet that included watercress, sauerkraut, and a kind of orange extract. The health in which he maintained his sailors in consequence made his name a naval byword.
Back in England, Cook soon began to organize another ambitious voyage. The success of the expedition of Joseph Banks and his scientists (which established the useful principle of sending scientists on naval voyages—e.g., Charles Darwin in the Beagle, T.H. Huxley in the Rattlesnake, and J.D. Hooker with Sir James Ross to the Ross Sea in the Antarctic) stimulated interest not only in the discovery of new lands, but in the knowledge of many other scientific subjects. The wealth of scientifically collected material from the Endeavour voyage was unique. Cook was now sent out with two ships to make the first circumnavigation of and penetration into the Antarctic.
Between July 1772 and July 1775 Cook made what ranks as one of the greatest sailing ship voyages, again with a small former Whitby ship, the Resolution, and a consort ship, the Adventure. He found no trace of Terra Australis, though he sailed beyond latitude 70° S in the Antarctic, but he successfully completed the first west–east circumnavigation in high latitudes, charted Tonga and Easter Island during the winters, and discovered New Caledonia in the Pacific and the South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia Island in the Atlantic. He showed that a real Terra Australis existed only in the landmasses of Australia, New Zealand, and whatever land might remain frozen beyond the ice rim of Antarctica.
There was yet one secret of the Pacific to be discovered: whether there existed a northwest passage around Canada and Alaska or a northeast one around Siberia, between the Atlantic and Pacific. Although the passages had long been sought in vain from Europe, it was thought that the search from the North Pacific might be successful. The man to undertake the search obviously was Cook, and in July 1776 he went off again on the Resolution, with another Whitby ship, the Discovery. This search was unsuccessful, for neither a northwest nor a northeast passage usable by sailing ships existed, and the voyage led to Cook’s death. In a brief fracas with Hawaiians over the stealing of a cutter, Cook was slain on the beach at Kealakekua by the Polynesian natives.
Cook had set new standards of thoroughness in discovery and seamanship, in navigation, cartography, and the sea care of men, in relations with natives both friendly and hostile, and in the application of science at sea; and he had peacefully changed the map of the world more than any other single man in history.
The German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a major figure in the classical period of physical geography and biogeography—areas of science now included in the earth sciences and ecology. With his book Kosmos he made a valuable contribution to the popularization of science. The Peru, or Humboldt, Current off the west coast of South America originally was named for him.
As an adolescent, Humboldt obtained some training in engineering and in his late teens became passionately interested in botany. He then took up an interest in mineralogy and geology, trained intensively for two years, and began working for the mining department of the Prussian government. However, Humboldt had a growing conviction that his real aim in life was scientific exploration. He resigned his post in 1797 to thoroughly prepare himself for the task. In 1799 he obtained permission from the Spanish government to visit the Spanish colonies in the New World. That summer he set sail from Marseille accompanied by the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, whom he had met in Paris. The estate he had inherited at the death of his mother enabled Humboldt to finance the expedition entirely out of his own pocket. Humboldt and Bonpland spent five years (1799–1804) in Central and South America, covering more than 6,000 miles (9,650 km) on foot, on horseback, and in canoes. It was a life of great physical exertion and serious deprivation.
Starting from Caracas, they traveled south through grasslands and scrublands until they reached the banks of the Apure River, a tributary of the Orinoco River. They continued their journey on the river by canoe as far as the Orinoco. Following its course and that of the Casiquiare River, they proved that the Casiquiare River formed a connection between the vast river systems of the Amazon and the Orinoco. For three months Humboldt and Bonpland moved through dense tropical rain forests, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes and stifled by the humid heat. Their provisions were soon destroyed by insects and rain; the lack of food finally drove them to subsist on ground wild cacao beans and river water. Yet both travelers, buoyed by the excitement provided by the new and overwhelming impressions, remained healthy and in the best of spirits until their return to civilization, when they succumbed to a severe bout of fever.
After a short stay in Cuba, Humboldt and Bonpland returned to South America for an extensive exploration of the Andes. From Bogotá to Trujillo, Peru, they wandered over the Andean highlands—following a route now traversed by the Pan-American Highway, in their time a series of steep, rocky, and often very narrow paths. They climbed a number of peaks, including all the volcanoes in the surroundings of Quito, Ecu.; Humboldt’s ascent of Chimborazo (20,702 feet [6,310 metres]) to a height of 19,286 feet (5,878 metres), but short of the summit, remained a world mountain-climbing record for nearly 30 years. All these achievements were carried out without the help of modern mountaineering equipment, without ropes, crampons, or oxygen supplies; hence, Humboldt and Bonpland suffered badly from altitude (mountain) sickness. But Humboldt turned his discomfort to advantage: he became the first person to ascribe altitude sickness to lack of oxygen in the rarefied air of great heights. He also studied the oceanic current off the west coast of South America that was originally named for him but is now known as the Peru Current. When the pair arrived, worn and footsore, in Quito, Humboldt, the experienced mountaineer and indefatigable collector of scientific data, had no difficulty in assuming the role of courtier and man of the world when he was received by the Viceroy and the leaders of Spanish society.
In the spring of 1803, the two travelers sailed from Guayaquil to Acapulco, Mex., where they spent the last year of their expedition in a close study of this most developed and highly civilized part of the Spanish colonies. After a short stay in the United States, where Humboldt was received by Pres. Thomas Jefferson, they sailed for France.
Humboldt and Bonpland returned with an immense amount of information. In addition to a vast collection of new plants, there were determinations of longitudes and latitudes, measurements of the components of Earth’s geomagnetic field, and daily observations of temperatures and barometric pressure, as well as statistical data on the social and economic conditions of Mexico.
The river systems were the key to African geography. The existence of a great river in the interior of West Africa was known to the Greeks, but the questions of which direction it flowed and whether it found an outlet in the Sénégal, the Gambia, the Congo, or even the Nile, were in dispute. A young Scottish surgeon, Mungo Park, was asked to explore it by the African Association of London. In 1796, Park, who had traveled inland from the Gambia, saw “the long sought for majestic Niger flowing slowly eastwards.” On a second expedition, attempting to follow its course to the mouth, he was drowned near Bussa, in what is now Nigeria. In 1830 an English explorer, Richard Lander, traveled from the Bight of Benin, on the West African coast, to Bussa, and he then navigated the river down to its mouth, which was revealed as being one of the delta tributaries that, because of the trade in palm oil, were known to traders as “the oil rivers” on the Gulf of Guinea.
The Zambezi, in south central Africa, was not known at all until the Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone traveled its length in the mid-19th century. Livingstone later investigated the complex drainage system between Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika and explored the headwaters of the Congo River. He refused to return to England with the British American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who was sent to his rescue in 1871, because he was still uncertain of the position of the watershed between the Nile and the Congo; however, he died at Lake Bangweulu in 1873.
The whereabouts of the source of the Nile had intrigued men since the days of the Egyptian pharaohs. A Scottish explorer, James Bruce, traveling in Ethiopia in 1770, visited the two fountains in Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, first discovered by the Spanish priest Paez in 1618. The English explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke discovered Lake Tanganyika in 1857. Speke then traveled north alone and reached the southern creek of a lake, which he named Victoria Nyanza. Without exploring farther, he returned to England, sure that he had found the source of the Nile. He was right—but he had not seen the outlet, and Burton did not believe him. In 1862 Speke, traveling with the Scottish explorer James Grant, found the Ripon Falls, in Uganda (which was submerged following the construction of the Owen Falls Dam [now the Nalubaale Dam] in 1954), and “saw without any doubt that Old Father Nile rises in Victoria Nyanza.” Stanley completed the puzzle in 1875, when he circumnavigated the lake and then followed the Congo to its mouth. The pattern made by the river systems of Africa was elucidated at last.
Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone (1813–73) studied theology and medicine in Glasgow before being ordained in 1840. He then decided to explore Africa to open up the interior for colonization, extend the Gospel, and abolish the slave trade. He set sail for South Africa in 1840 and arrived in Capetown on March 14, 1841.
For the next 15 years, Livingstone was constantly on the move into the African interior. He strengthened his missionary determination, responded wholeheartedly to the delights of geographic discovery, clashed with the Boers and the Portuguese, whose treatment of the Africans he came to detest, and built a remarkable reputation as a dedicated Christian, a courageous explorer, and a fervent antislavery advocate. So impassioned was his commitment to Africa, in fact, that he neglected his duties as husband and father.
From a mission at Kuruman on the Cape frontier, which Livingstone reached on July 31, 1841, he soon pushed his search for converts northward into untried country where the population was reputed to be more numerous. This suited his purpose of spreading the Gospel through “native agents.” By the summer of 1842, he had already gone farther north than any other European into the difficult Kalahari country and had familiarized himself with the local languages and cultures. His mettle was dramatically tested in 1844 when, during a journey to Mabotsa to establish a mission station, he was mauled by a lion. The resulting injury to his left arm was complicated by another accident, and he could never again support the barrel of a gun steadily with his left hand and thus was obliged to fire from his left shoulder and to take aim with his left eye.
By the early 1850s Livingstone had already achieved a small measure of fame as surveyor and scientist of a small expedition responsible for the first European sighting of Lake Ngami (Aug. 1, 1849), for which he was awarded a gold medal and monetary prize by the British Royal Geographical Society. This was the beginning of his lifelong association with the society, which continued to encourage his ambitions as an explorer and to champion his interests in Britain.
Livingstone was now ready to push Christianity, commerce, and civilization—the trinity that he believed was destined to open up Africa—northward beyond the frontiers of South Africa and into the heart of the continent. In a famous statement in 1853 he made his purpose clear: “I shall open up a path into the interior, or perish.” On Nov. 11, 1853, from Linyanti at the approaches to the Zambezi River and in the midst of the Makololo peoples whom he considered eminently suitable for missionary work, Livingstone set out northwestward with little equipment and only a small party of Africans. His intention was to find a route to the Atlantic coast that would permit legitimate commerce to undercut the slave trade. He also sought a route that would be more suitable for reaching the Makololo than the one through Boer territory. (In 1852 the Boers had destroyed his home at Kolobeng and attacked his African friends.) After an arduous journey that might have wrecked the constitution of a lesser man, Livingstone reached Luanda on the west coast on May 31, 1854. In order to take his Makololo followers back home and to carry out further explorations of the Zambezi, as soon as his health permitted—on Sept. 20, 1854—he began the return journey. He reached Linyanti nearly a year later on Sept. 11, 1855. Continuing eastward on November 3, Livingstone explored the Zambezi regions and reached Quelimane in Mozambique on May 20, 1856. His most spectacular visit on this last leg of his great journey was to the thundering, smokelike waters on the Zambezi at which he arrived on Nov. 17, 1855. With typical patriotism, he named those waters Victoria Falls for his queen.
Livingstone returned to England on Dec. 9, 1856, a national hero. News from and about him during the previous three years had stirred the imagination of English-speaking peoples everywhere to an unprecedented degree. He recorded his accomplishments modestly but effectively in his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), which quickly sold more than 70,000 copies and took its place in publishing history. Honours flowed in upon him, and he became financially independent.
Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River as seen from Zambia. G. Holton—Photo Researchers
After the completion of his book, Livingstone spent six months speaking all over the British Isles. In his Senate House address at Cambridge on Dec. 4, 1857, he foresaw that he would be unable to complete his work in Africa, and he called on young university men to take up the task that he had begun. The publication of Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures (1858) roused almost as much interest as his first book, and out of his Cambridge visit came the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in 1860, on which Livingstone set high hopes during his second expedition to Africa.
This time Livingstone was away from Britain from March 12, 1858, to July 23, 1864. This expedition was infinitely better organized than Livingstone’s previous solitary journeys. It had a paddle steamer, impressive stores, 10 Africans, and 6 Europeans (including his brother Charles and an Edinburgh doctor, John Kirk). But it was soon revealed that Livingstone’s legendary leadership skills had limitations. Quarrels broke out among the Europeans, and some were dismissed. Disillusionment with Livingstone set in among members both in his own expedition and of the abortive Universities’ Mission that followed it to central Africa. It proved impossible to navigate the Zambezi by ship, and Livingstone’s two attempts to find a route along the Ruvuma River bypassing Portuguese territory to districts around Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi) also proved impractical. On Sept. 17, 1859, Livingstone and his party became the first Britons to reach the districts that held out promise of colonization.
The British government recalled the expedition in 1863, when it was clear that Livingstone’s optimism about economic and political developments in the Zambezi regions was premature. Livingstone, however, showed something of his old fire when he took his little vessel, the Lady Nyassa, with a small untrained crew and little fuel, on a hazardous voyage of 2,500 miles (4,000 km) across the Indian Ocean to India and left it for sale in Bombay (now Mumbai). Furthermore, within the next three decades the Zambezi expedition proved to be anything but a disaster. It had amassed a valuable body of scientific knowledge. The association of the Lake Nyasa regions with Livingstone’s name and the prospects for colonization that he envisaged there were important factors for the creation in 1893 of the British Central Africa Protectorate, which in 1907 became Nyasaland and in 1966 the republic of Malawi.
Back in Britain in the summer of 1864, Livingstone, with his brother Charles, wrote his second book, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (1865). Livingstone was advised at this time to have a surgical operation for the hemorrhoids that had troubled him since his first great African journey. He refused, and it is probable that severe bleeding hemorrhoids were the cause of his death at the end of his third and greatest African journey.
Livingstone returned to Africa, after another short visit to Bombay, on Jan. 28, 1866, with support from private and public bodies and the status of a British consul at large. His aim, as usual, was the extension of the Gospel and the abolition of the slave trade on the East African coast, but a new objective was the exploration of the central African watershed and the possibility of finding the ultimate sources of the Nile. This time Livingstone went without European subordinates and took only African and Asian followers. Trouble, however, once more broke out among his staff, and Livingstone, prematurely aged from the hardships of his previous expeditions, found it difficult to cope. Striking out from Mikindani on the east coast, he was compelled by Ngoni raids to give up his original intention of avoiding Portuguese territory and reaching the country around Lake Tanganyika by passing north of Lake Nyasa. The expedition was instead forced south, and in September, some of Livingstone’s followers deserted him. To avoid punishment when they returned to Zanzibar, they concocted a story that the Ngoni had killed Livingstone. Although it was proved the following year that he was alive, a touch of drama was added to the reports circulating abroad about his expedition.
Drama mounted as Livingstone moved north again from the south end of Lake Nyasa. Early in 1867 a deserter carried off his medical chest, but Livingstone pressed on into central Africa. He was the first European to reach Lake Mweru (Nov. 8, 1867) and Lake Bangweulu (July 18, 1868). Assisted by Arab traders, Livingstone reached Lake Tanganyika in February 1869. Despite illness, he went on and arrived on March 29, 1871, at his ultimate northwesterly point, Nyangwe, on the Lualaba leading into the Congo River. This was farther west than any European had penetrated.
When he returned to Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika on Oct. 23, 1871, Livingstone was a sick and failing man. Search parties had been sent to look for him because he had not been heard from in several years, and Henry M. Stanley, a correspondent of the New York Herald newspaper, found the explorer, greeting him with the now famous quote, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” (The exact date of the encounter is unclear, as the two men wrote different dates in their journals; Livingstone’s journal suggests that the meeting took place sometime in Oct. 24–28, 1871, while Stanley reported November 10.) Stanley brought much-needed food and medicine, and Livingstone soon recovered. He joined Stanley in exploring the northern reaches of Lake Tanganyika and then accompanied him to Unyanyembe, 200 miles (320 km) eastward. But he refused all Stanley’s pleas to leave Africa with him, and on March 14, 1872, Stanley departed for England to add, with journalistic fervour, to the saga of David Livingstone.
Livingstone moved south again, obsessed by his quest for the Nile sources and his desire for the destruction of the slave trade, but his illness overcame him. In May 1873, at Chitambo in what is now northern Zambia, Livingstone’s African servants found him dead, kneeling by his bedside as if in prayer. In order to embalm Livingstone’s body, they removed his heart and viscera and buried them in African soil. In a difficult journey of nine months, they carried his body to the coast. It was taken to England and, in a great Victorian funeral, was buried in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874. The Last Journals of David Livingstone were published in the same year.
Unquestionably, Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), famous for his rescue of David Livingstone, was equally as renowned for his explorations of central Africa, especially his discoveries in and development of the Congo region.
Stanley was born John Rowlands to unmarried parents and grew up partly in the charge of reluctant relatives and partly in a workhouse. In 1859 he sailed from Liverpool as a cabin boy and landed at New Orleans, La., in 1859. There Rowlands was befriended by a merchant, Henry Hope Stanley, whose first and last names the boy adopted; the name “Morton” was added later. For some years Stanley led a roving life, as a soldier in the American Civil War, a seaman on merchant ships and in the U.S. Navy, and a journalist in the early days of frontier expansion; he even managed a trip to Turkey.
The Victoria Falls is a spectacular waterfall located about midway along the course of the Zambezi River, at the border between Zambia to the north and Zimbabwe to the south. Approximately twice as wide and twice as deep as Niagara Falls, the waterfall spans the entire breadth of the Zambezi River at one of its widest points (more than 5,500 feet [1,700 metres]). At the falls, the river plunges over a sheer precipice to a maximum drop of 355 feet (108 metres). The falls’ mean flow is almost 33,000 cubic feet (935 cubic metres) per second.
The Zambezi River does not gather speed as it nears the drop, the approach being signaled only by the mighty roar and characteristic veil of mist for which the Kalolo-Lozi people named the falls Mosi-oa-Tunya (“The Smoke That Thunders”). The lip of the falls’ precipice is split into several parts by various small islands, depressions, and promontories along its edge. The eastern portions of the falls are mostly dry during times of low river flow.
The waters of Victoria Falls do not drop into an open basin but rather into a chasm that varies in width from 80 to 240 feet (25 to 75 metres). This chasm is formed by the precipice of the falls and by an opposite rock wall of equal height. The chasm’s only outlet is a narrow channel cut in the barrier wall at a point about three-fifths of the way from the western end of the falls, and through this gorge, which is less than 210 feet (65 metres) wide and 390 feet (120 metres) long, flows the entire volume of the Zambezi River. At the gorge’s end is the Boiling Pot, a deep pool into which the waters churn and foam at flood time. Just below the Boiling Pot, the gorge is spanned by the Victoria Falls (Zambezi) Bridge, which carries rail, automobile, and pedestrian traffic between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The river’s waters then emerge into an enormous zigzag trough that forms the beginning of Batoka Gorge, which has been cut by the river to a depth of 400–800 feet (120–240 metres) through a basalt plateau for a distance of 60 miles (100 km).
In addition to the falls themselves, the surrounding Victoria Falls National Park (Zimbabwe) and Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park (Zambia) abound with large and small game and offer recreational facilities. Victoria Falls and the adjoining parklands were collectively designated a World Heritage site in 1989.
The Victoria Falls Bridge across the Zambezi River, connecting Zambia and Zimbabwe. © Brian A. Vikander/West Light
In 1867 Stanley offered his services to James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald as a special correspondent with the British expeditionary force in Ethiopia, and Stanley was the first to report the fall of Magdala in 1868. An assignment to report on the Spanish Civil War followed, and in 1869 he received instructions to undertake a roving commission in the Middle East, which was to include the relief of Livingstone, of whom little had been heard since his departure for Africa in 1866.
On Jan. 6, 1871, Stanley reached Zanzibar, the starting point for expeditions to the African interior, and, intent on a scoop, left on March 21 without disclosing his intentions. Leading a well-equipped caravan and backed by American money, Stanley forced his way through country disturbed by fighting and stricken by sickness to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone’s last known port of call. There he found the old hero, ill and short of supplies. A cordial friendship sprang up between the two men, and, when Stanley returned to the coast, he dispatched fresh supplies that enabled Livingstone to continue the search for the Nile that culminated in his death a year later in the swamps of Lake Bangweulu, a region that in fact gives rise to the Congo River.
How I Found Livingstone was published soon after Stanley’s arrival in England in the late summer of 1872, when the exploits of this hitherto unknown adventurer gave rise to controversy. Members of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) resented an American journalist having succeeded in relieving the famous traveler when they, his friends, had failed. Stanley did, however, receive the RGS Patron’s Gold Medal. In 1873 Stanley went to Asante (Ashanti; now in modern Ghana) as war correspondent for the New York Herald.
When Livingstone died in 1873, Stanley resolved to take up the exploration of Africa where he had left off. The problem of the Nile sources and the nature of the central African lakes had been only partly solved by earlier explorers. Stanley secured financial backing from the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph of London for an expedition to pursue the quest, and the caravan left Zanzibar on Nov. 12, 1874, heading for Lake Victoria. His visit to King Mutesa I of Buganda led to the admission of Christian missionaries to the area in 1877 and to the eventual establishment of a British protectorate in Uganda. Circumnavigating Lake Victoria, Stanley confirmed John Hanning Speke’s estimate of its size and importance. Skirmishes with suspicious tribespeople on the lakeshore, which resulted in a number of casualties, gave rise in England to criticism of this new kind of traveler with his journalist’s outlook and forceful methods. Lake Tanganyika was next explored and found to have no connection with the Nile system. Stanley and his men pressed on west to the Lualaba River (the very river that Livingstone had hoped was the Nile, but that proved to be the headstream of the Congo). There they joined forces with the Arab trader Tippu Tib, who accompanied them for a few laps downriver, then left Stanley to fight his way first to Stanley Pool (now Malebo Pool) and then (partly overland) down to the great cataracts he named Livingstone Falls. Stanley and his men reached the sea on Aug. 12, 1877, after an epic journey described in Through the Dark Continent (1878).
Failing to enlist British interests in the development of the Congo region, Stanley took service with the king of Belgium, Leopold II, whose secret ambition it was to annex the region for himself. From August 1879 to June 1884 Stanley was in the Congo basin, where he built a road from the lower Congo up to Stanley Pool and launched steamers on the upper river. (It is from this period, when Stanley persevered in the face of great difficulties, that he earned, from his men, the nickname of Bula Matari [“Breaker of Rocks”]). Originally under international auspices, Stanley’s work was to pave the way for the creation of the Congo Free State, under the sovereignty of King Leopold.
Stanley’s last expedition in Africa was for the relief of Mehmed Emin Paşa, governor of the Equatorial Province of Egypt, who had been cut off by the Mahdist revolt of 1882 in the environs of Lake Albert. Stanley was appointed to lead a relief expedition and decided to approach Lake Albert by way of the Congo River, counting on Tippu Tib to supply porters. Stanley left England in January 1887 and arrived at the mouth of the Congo in March. The expedition reached the navigable head of the river in June, and there, at Yambuya, Stanley left a rear column with orders to await Tippu Tib’s porters. The failure of the rear column to rejoin the main body later gave rise to controversy harmful to Stanley’s reputation. Eventually the expedition was assembled at Lake Albert, and, despite Emin’s initial reluctance to leave his province, some 1,500 persons set out for the east coast on April 10, 1889, and arrived at Bagamoyo on December 4. On the way, the Ruwenzori Range was revealed to explorers for the first time (identified as Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon), and the Semliki River was shown to link Lakes Edward and Albert; thus were cleared up the few doubtful geographic points regarding the Nile sources. In Darkest Africa (1890) is Stanley’s own account of his last adventure on the African continent. He received a Special Gold Medal from the RGS.
The Ituri Forest is a dense region of tropical rainforest lying on the northeastern lip of the Congo River basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Situated in Central Africa between latitudes 0° and 3° N and longitudes 27° and 30° E, the precise geographic limits of the Ituri are poorly defined, especially along its southern and western extensions. The forest owes its name to the Ituri River, which flows east-west across the forest into the Aruwimi River and thence to the Congo.
The Ituri, with its constant high humidity and dark interior, may seem oppressive to some. Certainly the novelist Joseph Conrad thought so when he referred to the forest as the “heart of darkness.” But the overwhelming impression for even the most squeamish visitor is not of darkness, nor of oppressive gloom but of life in its most vibrant and exciting form. The magnificence of the tropical rain forest of the Ituri cannot help but inspire the modern-day observer with the same poetic enthusiasm displayed by Henry Morton Stanley when he described his crossing of the area in 1887–88.
The trees of the forest range in size from small saplings just inches in diameter to gigantic hardwoods reaching to heights of 170 feet (52 metres). Like the pillars of a Gothic cathedral, these giant trees are buttressed; roots run down their sides and extend great distances across the forest floor, making the ground a labyrinth of roots that anchor the trees and grab scarce nutrients from the shallow forest soil. In places where the high canopy is nearly continuous, only small, elusive patches of sunlight reach the forest floor. The lack of light at lower levels is accentuated by the darkness of the foliage of the few shrubs and small trees that can grow under such shaded conditions. Where gaps occur in the upper canopy, herbaceous plants with long leaves resembling those of the banana plant take advantage of the available light and grow in dense stands. In many places the forest has been disturbed, either by human activity or by natural treefalls that cut large swathes through the canopy and open up the forest to the strong equatorial sun. There, the vegetation near the ground is a dense tangle of nettles, creepers, and competing species of fast-growing, short-lived trees, which make walking through the forest difficult if not impossible.
Everywhere on the ground there is a profusion of fallen nuts and fruits, some as large as basketballs and many partially eaten by monkeys, antelope (duikers), and rodents. During some seasons the air is filled with the nectar of numerous species of flower, including many epiphytes, which cling to the surface of other plants and draw their sustenance from the air. Always there is the sound of myriad insects. Cicadas perch on tree trunks and emit an irritating buzz that seems designed to drive any intruder to madness. Army ants advance in columns, audibly cracking the bodies of their insect prey. Seemingly endless lines of migrating butterflies flutter through the understory and sometimes congregate in colourful displays along streambeds. The buzzing of bees, busily plying the treetops in search of sweet nourishing nectar, is ever present
Efforts to preserve the fauna and flora are largely confined to the Maiko National Park on the southern edge of the Ituri and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996) to the northeast. Both offer some protection for such animals as the forest elephant, the okapi, the Congo peacock, the aardvark, and the chimpanzee, but poaching activities and destruction of forest habitat seriously threaten these and other species both outside and inside the park. Conservation efforts have also been disrupted by civil strife that began in the late 1990s.
Lombi tree (Dalbergia glandulosa) supported by buttress roots in the Ituri Forest, Congo (Kinshasa). © Alan Watson/Forest Light
Stanley was renaturalized a British subject in 1892. (He had become a U.S. citizen in 1885.) He was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1899, becoming Sir Henry Morton Stanley. The remaining years before his death were spent mainly at a small estate that he bought in Surrey in 1898.
The English scholar-explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) who is widely known as an Orientalist, also won renown for his role in the discovery of the source of the Nile River. In 1842 he went to India as a subaltern officer. There he disguised himself as a Muslim and wrote detailed reports of merchant bazaars and urban brothels. He then traveled to Arabia, again disguised as a Muslim, and became the first non-Muslim European to penetrate the forbidden holy cities. He recounted his adventures in Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855–56), a classic account of Muslim life.
By this time Burton had become fascinated by the idea of discovering the source of the White Nile and in 1855 planned an expedition with three officers of the British East India Company, including John Hanning Speke, intending to push across Somaliland. Africans attacked the party near Berbera, however, killing one member of the party and seriously wounding Speke. Burton himself had a javelin hurled through his jaw and was forced to return to England. After recovery, in July 1855, he volunteered for service in the Crimean War.
After the war, Burton turned again to the Nile search, leading an expedition inland from Zanzibar with John Speke in 1857–58. They suffered almost every kind of hardship Africa could inflict. When they finally arrived on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Burton was so ill from malaria he could not walk, and Speke was virtually blind. Ailing, and disappointed by native information that the Rusizi River to the north poured into rather than out of the lake, Burton wished to return and prepare a new expedition. Speke, however, who had recovered more quickly, pushed on alone to the northeast and discovered Lake Victoria, which he was convinced was the true Nile source. Burton’s unwillingness to accept this theory without further exploration led to quarrels with Speke and their eventual estrangement.
Speke was the first to return to London, where he was lionized and given funds to return to Africa. Burton, largely ignored and denied financing for a new exploration of his own, felt betrayed. His Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) attacked Speke’s claims and exacerbated their by then public feud.
Burton now entered the British Foreign Office as consul in Fernando Po, a Spanish island off the coast of West Africa. During his three years there, he made many short trips of exploration into West Africa, gathering enough material to fill five books. His explicit descriptions of tribal rituals concerning birth, marriage, and death, as well as fetishism, ritual murder, cannibalism, and bizarre sexual practices, though admired by modern anthropologists, won him no favour with the Foreign Office, which considered him eccentric if not dangerous.
Returning to London on leave in September 1864, Burton was invited to debate with Speke before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Speke, who with James Augustus Grant had made a memorable journey from Zanzibar to Lake Victoria and then down the whole length of the Nile, was expected to defend his conviction that Lake Victoria was the true Nile source. After the preliminary session on September 15, Speke went hunting, dying mysteriously, and the debate was never concluded.