Exploration

views updated

Exploration

Growth of Geographical Knowledge. Between 1750 and 1914 there was a rapid transformation in the scope and detail of geographical knowledge, largely as a result of European empire building and colonization. Imperial governments, trading companies (such as the East India Company), learned and missionary societies, colonial scientists, and solitary adventurers invested large amounts of capital and effort into exploration and cartography. These processes were central to the making of the modern industrialized world as they fixed the location of valuable natural resources (from whale-breeding grounds to mineral deposits), facilitated the creation of new trade routes and posts, and laid the foundations for military conquest, colonial expansion, and colonization by white settlers.

Pacific Ocean. In this period there were two major forms of exploration: oceanic exploration and the exploration of continental interiors. Oceanic exploration largely focused on the Pacific during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By this time the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were well known and accurately charted as a result of their incorporation into European trading networks and empires from the late fifteenth century. Europeans first entered the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth century, and Ferdinand Magellan was the first European to cross the vast ocean in 1520. During the remainder of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch explorers tentatively probed the region, but they assembled only a partial and frequently unreliable image of its geography. In the first half of the eighteenth century, British and French navigators explored the central Pacific, but the resulting additions to the map of the Pacific were

fragmentary, and most of the southern Pacific remained a mystery. The limitations of European knowledge of the Pacific are best seen in the notion of Terra Australis Incognita, “The Unknown Southern Land,” the great continent that supposedly dominated the South Pacific. This belief was widely supported by European geographers until the mid eighteenth century. The three Pacific voyages of British captain James Cook vanquished this myth. Between 1768 and 1779 Cook mapped much of the Pacific, constructing detailed maps of Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and the northwest coast of North America. His third voyage also disproved the notion that an easily navigable Northwest Passage linked the Pacific to the Atlantic (in 1906 the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen di complete a three-year journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canada’s Arctic islands and iceberg fields, but this dangerous route has never been commercially viable). Cook’s voyages were truly revolutionary, as they fixed the location of the major landmasses of the Pacific and opened up the region to European commercial and imperial activity. Most important, Cook opened the way for exploration of two of the three continental interiors that were extensively mapped for the first time in the nineteenth century: Australia and Antarctica.

Australia. From their arrival in Australia in 1788, European colonists rarely ventured far inland, preferring the rich resources of the coast and easily explored coastal plains. The rugged mountain chains and arid deserts that lay inland were a daunting barrier that slowed the spread of European settlement and protected the Aboriginal communities of Australia–s interior from immediate contact with the colonists. Not until 1813 did Gregory Blaxlan William C. Wentworth, and William Lawson first cross the Blue Mountains, which lie some fifty miles to the west of modern-day Sydney. This initial foray into the interior was not extended until 1829-1830, when Charles Sturt traversed the Great Dividing Range (of which the Blue Mountains are part), exploring the Murrumbidgee, Darling, and Murray Rivers before ending his journey at the confluence of the Murray at Encounter Bay on the southern coast. This journey confirmed that Australia’s interior was arid, disproving the popular theory that it contained a vast inland sea, and was pivotal in the selection of South Australia as a site for British colonization. In the 1840s, as a result of the epic journeys of Edward John Eyre and George Grey in southern Australia and the long journey of Robert Burke and William John Wills from Melbourne in the southeast to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the North, much of Australia’s interior was mapped and its land was opened up for pastoralism, mining, and white settlement.

Antarctica. The first tentative explorations of Antarctica occurred in the 1840s. James Ross, in command of the British navy’s Erebus and Terror, explored the coast of Antarctica’s Victoria Land. The body of knowledge he gathered as a result of his venture was not extended until the 1890s, when the Norwegian whaler Leonard Christensen

landed at Cape Adare. When he disembarked in 1894, he became the first human to set foot on the Antarctic continent. News of Christensen’s landing sparked great interest in Antarctica’s resources. In the first decade of the twentieth century British, German, and French explorers began mapping the continent’s coastline and interior. The quest for the South Pole became an intense battle for personal and national glory. The British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his party reached the pole on 17 January 1912, only to find that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had already reached the pole on 14 December 1911. Tragically, Scott’s entire party perished in a blizzard on their return journey.

Africa. While the exploration of Australia and Antarctica completed the cartographic revolution in the Pacific initiated by Cook, the prime focus of European continental exploration in the nineteenth century was Africa. Although there was a long history of contact between Europe and Africa, European knowledge of the continent in the late eighteenth century was largely restricted to its coastline: Europeans had only a sketchy understanding of the huge river systems that shaped the continent. Moreover, early attempts to push into the interior were hampered by exceptionally high rates of morbidity and mortality. Malaria remained the chief barrier to the fulfillment of the European desire to open up the interior of Africa in the early nineteenth century. Europeans in tropical Africa experienced mortality rates up to forty times higher than those who remained at home in London, Paris, or Berlin. Although it was not until 1897 that European scientists identified the Anopheles mosquito that spread malaria, white settlers in Africa started in the 1820s to experiment with quinine as a deterrent to the disease. Quinine is an alkaloid produced from the bark of the cinchona tree. David Livingstone, who took quinine daily during his great African expeditions, was convinced of the efficacy of this remedy, and his faith was borne out by a rapid decline in the rate of European mortality in Africa in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Probes in the Interior. Europeans attempted to map the interior of Africa and open up the continent to European commerce. Mungo Park, a young Scottish surgeon, was the first European to explore the interior of West Africa in the late 1790s, compiling the initial maps of the river Niger. The Englishman Richard Lander, who followed the river down to its mouth in 1830, extended Park’s pioneering work. Further south, the Zambezi, the great river of southern central Africa, remained unknown to Europeans until the epic journey undertaken by David Livingstone between 1853 and 1856. His last expedition, from 1865 to 1871, initiated at the behest of the president of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, explored the complex drainage system between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika and charted the Congo’s headwaters.

Nile River. Livingstone had hoped to discover the ultimate source of the Nile River, a quest that had enchanted Europeans and the people of North Africa for centuries, but he ultimately failed in this mission. In fact, the first step toward confirming the basic structure of the Nile was undertaken under the direction of the Ottoman Viceroy in Egypt, Muhammad ’Ali, who dispatched three expeditions up the Nile between 1839 and 1842. They ultimately reached Juba, only 250 miles from the Nile’s source. The exact nature and location of that source remained uncertain. The explorations of three German missionaries in the 1840s, Johann Ludwig Krapf, Johannes Rebmann, and Jacob Erhardt, located the mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, which they believed were potential sources of the river. In light of this intelligence the British explorers Richard Burton and John Speke followed the long-established Arab trade routes into the interior of East Africa, discovering Lake Tanganyika in 1857. From there, Speke pushed north to a lake that he believed was the Nile’s source, which he named Victoria Nyanza (Lake Victoria). In a subsequent expedition in 1862 Speke collected more evidence to support his contention, that it drained into and began the Nile, but it fell to Henry Morton Stanley to finally confirm this theory. In 1875 Stanley circumnavigated Lake Victoria, mappin the course of the Lualaba River to the Congo River. He then followed the Congo to its mouth. The journey produced a detailed image of the structure of the key African river systems and paved the way for a new age of European imperialism in the continent. This situation culminated in the partition of Africa among the European powers in the final two decades of the nineteenth century.