Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Africa, in particular, attracted a unique assortment of multi-national adventurers, who soon became objects of caricature: there was the obsessed, quinine-guzzling explorer, the yellow-fever-tinged conman, the big game hunter, the would-be farmer, the desperate prospector. Their paths crossed so frequently that one London publisher produced a guide to frontier etiquette: except in South Africa it was forbidden to touch a visitor’s horse; an American camp would expect travellers to stay for dinner; with Britons or Germans one should wait for an invitation; and so forth. Some of these men – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel Baker and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza – went to Africa to solve geographical conundrums such as the source of the Nile or the whereabouts of the River Congo. Others posed as scientists and the stereotypical photograph of a white man standing with rifle in hand on the carcase of a recently slain beast was not just a statement of sporting prowess but an accurate depiction of science at work: if you found a new species you shot it and, with a bit of luck, brought it home to the British Museum or the Smithsonian. Yet others came to Africa in search of wealth. Europeans were amazed at how big the continent was, how fertile its soil, how inexhaustible its mineral deposits. That it was not theirs for the taking bothered very few.

  Africa was perhaps the most glamorous destination for an explorer, but it was far from the only one. All over the world teams of Europeans were crossing deserts, climbing mountains, charting new lands, investigating the habits of those who lived in them and discovering new species of flora and fauna. Their journeys took them to Kamchatka, Mongolia, New Guinea, the Australian interior and many other destinations. They could also be found in lands that were generally considered ‘tamed’: Europe itself, for example, the United States and Canada. Wherever the smallest blank existed on a map, someone was trying to fill it.

  Explorers of the time described their adventures not only by charts and journals but by objects. This was an age of trophy, in which specimens and artefacts burgeoned throughout Western museums. Every traveller was an amateur curator and their collections – a rock, a buffalo head, a spear, a fetish, an album of photographs, a shrunken skull – were both a brag and a source of instruction. For those who had never encountered such things there was enlightenment, as well as vicarious excitement, to be had in seeing first-hand an Asanti stool, in touching a table made of hippo hide, in turning a Tibetan prayer-wheel, or gazing into the eyes of a stuffed tiger. Trophies also catered to the current fad for interior design: in Europe and America more homes were being built at a faster rate than ever before and their occupants needed to decorate them. As befitted the age, exoticism was the theme: Japanese-style furniture, Chinese carvings and Persian carpets were all the rage; so, in some circles, were zebra skins, a pair of gazelle horns, a walrus tusk and a cabinet of fossils.

  The mania for collecting extended to human beings. In the past, explorers had brought natives home and tried to assimilate them into Western society. The experiments had always failed, but this did not stop them trying again. Robert Peary provided the most extreme example in 1895 when he collected several Etah Inuit, who he hoped would raise funds for another polar expedition. Mistreated, housed in dank basements and hired out to Barnum’s Circus, they succumbed to Western diseases. Their skeletons were later exhibited in the Smithsonian Museum. Only two were returned to the Arctic, physically and psychologically scarred, with a profound detestation of their host nation.

  There were other, less notorious, instances of colonial acquisitiveness. Between 1891 and 1893 the 15-strong African Choir from Cape Colony were paraded through Britain and America before being abandoned by their white agents and returning, ill and in debt, to their homes. A similar gimmick occurred in 1868 when a team of Aborigine cricketers was brought over for a tour against English county elevens: playing barefoot, they were derided as ‘circus freaks’ until they beat the MCC at Lords by 154 runs. They won a further 14 matches before retiring on grounds of homesickness. When they left they were asked to give a display of boomerang throwing; no doubt by accident, but very satisfactorily, they clipped a spectator on the head.

  The concept of ‘noble savagery’, so much a part of Enlightenment thinking, was one of the first casualties of industrialism. To their credit, many explorers protested that the savages were best left alone, that the Western way of life was no better and often much worse than their own. But their words were frequently qualified by their actions. Livingstone, for example, admired Africans – if only they could be brought round to a Christian way of thinking. Likewise, Peary said the Inuit of northern Greenland had no need of the alcoholism, gambling and greed that would accrue from contact with Western civilization – he then stole two large meteorites that for centuries had been their only source of iron, and sold them to the Smithsonian (where they presently languish) on the grounds that the Inuit were now part of the Western trading system. Others saw nothing noble in any foreigner at all. British officer and journalist Colonel Frederick Burnaby, who spoke more than five languages but who was described as ‘opaque in intelligence’, travelled throughout Asia asking its Muslim inhabitants if the devil was the Grand Vizier of Allah. Despite standing six feet four inches in his socks, having a 45-inch chest and being able to carry a pony under one arm, he failed to impress his audience and was eventually killed in 1885.

  For all its seamier aspects, the period 1850 to 1918 was the golden age of exploration. Golden in that there was so much to be discovered, so many willing to do it, and so many glad to see it done (with the notable exception of those who were ‘discovered’). Golden, too, in that technology had not advanced sufficiently to obviate the need for personal endeavour. By the 1920S, however, everything had changed. The Poles had been taken, Africa was no longer dark, India had been triangulated to death, Asia, the Arctic and the Antarctic had been delimited if not yet fully investigated, and the world was no longer the limitless expanse it had been when Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition. There was less to be found, fewer people who wanted to find it, and fewer still who were willing to support their quest. The dark side of ‘we can do anything’ had become increasingly apparent during half a century of colonization, but not until the 1914–18 war did Europeans realize its true blackness. Against the horrors of Passchendaele and the Somme, explorers were seen as irrelevant, self-important triflers. When, for example, Ernest Shackleton returned in 1916 from a two-year sojourn in the Antarctic, public uninterest could not have been greater. It did not matter that three members of his expedition subsequently died in combat, nor that another five were injured, nor that he refused to accept royalties from his journal for the duration of the war. In 1913 he would have been a hero. In 1916 he was not.

  Exploration did not stop with World War I, but it took a new direction. Thanks to the combustion engine, human endeavour became increasingly irrelevant. By the 1920S discovery involved as much skilful juggling of the fuel throttle as physical endurance. Caterpillar-tracked machines crawled through the Sahara, triple-engined Dorniers scoured the Arctic and, in 1926, a Zeppelin crossed the North Pole. Mechanized exploration had its own perils – if the machine broke, as it always might and sometimes did, the operator was doomed – but its practitioners did not inspire people as their predecessors had done. Even in the sphere of mountaineering, purists grumbled darkly about ‘mechanization’ (by which they meant the use of pitons, karabiner clips and other dastardly devices) and it was in the mountains that the golden age of exploration died.

  Technology had already conquered the Alps, riddling them with funicular railways, one of which tunnelled through the very heart of the Eiger, peeping occasionally from the fabled North Face as if through the holes of a Swiss cheese, before emerging on the Jungfraujoch. The Himalayas, however, defied the combustion engine in all its forms. Higher than planes could fly, steeper than cars could climb, too rugged for locomotives, they and the associated ranges that curled over the top of India were nature’s final bastion against the might of industry. One did not approach th
ese hills at whim, with a sandwich and a flask of tea, as was possible in the Alps. One went, instead, with a full expedition of porters, support teams and supplies, as if on an Arctic voyage. Since the late 19th century teams from every nation had attacked the region, sometimes with success, sometimes to vanish beneath avalanches and rock slides. But whatever they achieved, they were always taunted by the presence of the highest mountain in the world: Everest, or the Third Pole as it was known. In 1924, after several unsuccessful attempts, Britain launched its most ambitious assault to date. On the morning of 8 June George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were seen less than 1,000 feet from the summit when the clouds covered them. They did not return. Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999, Irvine’s has yet to be found – as has the camera they took with them to capture their moment of triumph. Did they reach the summit? Most experts agree that they probably did not, but without proof it is impossible to say. It would be nice, if perhaps wishful, to think that they did. It would be the perfect culmination to an age that claimed so many other firsts.

  CROSSING THE AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT

  Robert Burke and William Wills (1860–1)

  Robert O’Hara Burke had a thick beard into which he dribbled copiously, was ‘of very ordinary physique’, and shambled about town in a low-slung pair of trousers with a slouch hat pulled over his eyes. Of an afternoon he might be found sitting in a pool in his garden, reading a book and wearing a pith helmet. When he had money he spent it liberally. At a loose end, he would ride 30 miles in order to infuriate a local magistrate by swinging on his gate. Acquaintances described him variously as ‘a careless dare-devil’, ‘kind and generous to a fault’, and ‘not quite sane’. He was, in 1857, inspector of police in the mining town of Castlemaine, State of Victoria, Australia.

  Beneath his tramp-like skin Burke was a man of many parts. He had travelled widely and seen many things: born in Ireland, educated in Belgium, he had served with an Austrian cavalry regiment – and had a duelling scar to prove it – had been a member of the Irish Constabulary and had earned distinction as one of the more humane police officers in Australia’s goldmines. He was a well-read and talented linguist who decorated his office walls with quotations, one of which (his own) read, ‘Do not read anything on the walls’. According to one person, ‘He had thorough discipline and no one dared to contradict him’. According to another, ‘Either he did not realise danger or his mind was so unhinged that he revelled in it’. He was frequently absent from his post, having a tendency to disappear for days on end, but nobody blamed him for it. Charming, eccentric, hot-headed and sentimental, Inspector Burke was a respected member of Castlemaine’s community, and if he was away now and then it was only because he had become lost. As everyone knew, and as one man stated, ‘He was the worst bushman I ever met.’

  Considering this well-meaning but shambolic character, it is a bit of a mystery why the Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria decided he should become the first man to cross the continent of Australia. Possibly it was because of his charm, his distinguished service record, and his official rank. Possibly (in fact, certainly) the Royal Society hoped his wayward nature would be tempered by the team of scientists they selected to accompany him. Possibly, too, it was because he had a measure of the come-what-may bravado on which Australians already prided themselves. But probably it was because, in a thinly populated province on the edge of a large and unexplored continent, there weren’t that many people to choose from. In 1858 the Committee voted ten to five in favour of Burke leading a mission into the interior. He accepted the post in the vague, optimistic spirit in which it was offered.

  The £9,000 that the Royal Society raised for Burke’s mission was ridiculously small by contemporary standards – far less than the French government allocated to Saharan exploration and a drop in the ocean compared with Britain’s Arctic budget in previous years – but it produced the largest and best funded expedition ever to have attempted a crossing of Australia. Twenty-five camels were purchased from India, along with three sepoys to handle them. There was a similar number of horses. Novel, amphibious wagons were constructed – minus the wheels they became punts – and a huge armoury was assembled in case Burke met opposition along the way: 19 revolvers, eight rifles, ten double-barrelled shotguns and 50 rockets. Burke was given fishing lines, tents, beds, boots, surgical equipment and 30 ‘cabbage-tree’ hats whose high crowns and wide brims looked somewhat comical but cooled the head wonderfully. Against scurvy in men there were eight demi-johns of lime juice, and against the same complaint in camels there were 60 gallons of rum. (It was believed that they responded favourably to alcohol.) Like Arctic explorers, they also took pemmican, biscuit and preserved vegetables. With these provisions, and a hefty baggage of trade goods, Burke’s cavalcade departed from Melbourne’s Royal Park on the afternoon of 20 August 1860.

  Burke’s orders were hazy. He was to travel north to Menindie, on the Darling River, then proceed to Cooper’s Creek, to the east of Lake Eyre, whose year-round supply of water and grazing made it a perfect base for future operations. What form these operations would take was left entirely up to Burke. He could travel to the west coast of Australia, he could travel to the Gulf of Carpentaria on the north coast, he could go to any point in between, and he could return to Melbourne by whatever route seemed best. The one thing the Committee did specifically request was that he blaze his trail ‘as permanently as possible, by leaving records, sowing seeds, building cairns, and marking trees’ – but even this was to be done only if ‘consistent with your various other duties’. What those other duties were the orders did not state. Fortunately for the Committee, Burke had a pretty fair idea of what he wanted to do: go north to the Gulf of Carpentaria. He also wanted to get there as swiftly as possible, because he had learned that a rival expedition, led by the experienced explorer John Stuart, was soon to depart from Adelaide.

  By the time they left Menindie on 19 October, Burke’s desire for speed was already causing friction. When his hired drays proved too slow he abandoned them and auctioned their contents. When the men protested at their rate of progress he fired them. When officers took umbrage at his dictatorial manner he accepted their resignations with equanimity. When the people of Menindie warned him that it would be dangerous to cross the 400, mostly waterless, miles to Cooper’s Creek with summer just beginning he carried on regardless. When the expedition doctor and most of the scientists said they were too exhausted to continue he told them to catch up later. Thus, the party that left Menindie for Cooper’s Creek comprised eight men, with 16 camels and 15 horses, the six other men to follow at leisure with the remainder of the animals and supplies.

  Among the advance party were four men who would play an important part in the expedition’s future. The first was a semi-literate but competent bushman named William Wright, whom Burke had hired as a guide. The second was the foreman, William Brahe, an educated German who had worked in the goldmines and on sheep stations and who had a smattering of surveying skills. The third was William Wills, a tough, serious-minded English scientist who had joined the expedition as surveyor and who had formed such a bond with Burke that he was appointed second-in-command. The fourth was John King, a mild-mannered Irishman of 21, who had recently discharged himself after several years in the army and had come from India with the camels.

  As Burke’s group pressed north for Cooper’s Creek it crossed desolate plains, ancient ravines and stark, rocky hills. Despite the landscape’s barren appearance, water was plentiful and they made good going, marking a tree at every campsite with a large B and allocating it a Roman numeral. Despite these route marks, Burke felt that the rest of the column would need assistance, so on 29 October, 200 miles into the journey, he sent Wright back to Menindie to escort the remaining men and camels. He was so impressed by Wright’s bushmanship that he gave him a letter, to be forwarded to Melbourne, in which he promoted him to third-in-command. He might even have promoted him to second-in-command, had not Wills proved such an ex
cellent man in the field. Wherever they went, Wills was always first to the next hill, first to spot the next waterhole, and first to record every discovery made. He was indispensable – as Burke wrote, ‘Mr. Wills ... is a capital officer, zealous and untiring in the performance of his duties and I trust he will remain my second as long as I am in charge of the expedition.’ In many ways, Wills was the expedition. It was he who kept a journal, Burke finding it either beneath or beyond himself to do so. It was he who turned their journey from a simple march over untrodden ground into a voyage of exploration. And it was he, following Wright’s departure, who led the advance party safely to Cooper’s Creek on 11 November. But he never once questioned Burke’s authority, always seeking his approval for journal entries and acquiescing to every whim of his commander. By any standards, he was the perfect adjutant.

  Cooper’s Creek had already been visited by the famous explorer Charles Sturt in 1844 and it had not changed when Burke’s entourage arrived in November 1860. Centuries ago it had been a river, flowing westwards into Lake Eyre; but now the rains came so infrequently that Lake Eyre had dried up and only once every decade did it and the Cooper revert to their original glory. For large stretches, however, the creek was never entirely dry, and at the point where Burke’s party struck it there were a series of deep waterholes, some of them more than a mile long. It was surrounded by vegetation and teemed with fish and fowl. Admittedly, there were flies, mosquitoes and rats, and the temperature reached 109° F in the shade, but apart from these irritations it was a perfect base. Burke set up camp (on the trunk of a nearby coolabah tree he carved the numerals LXV) and waited for Wright to catch up with the rest of the men and supplies. In Wills’s words the trip so far ‘[had] been but a picnic party’.