Change Everything No 20: What is a Victorian 'explorer', really?

Other than a bumbling, hubris-ridden fool and agent of imperial expansion

Change Everything book news

Enjoyed a lovely extensive book interview with BBC London’s Jamoke Fashola. I’ve saved it for posterity here.

I’ve also been looking into an audio version of Change Everything (the book) - due to popular demand (or at least quite a few people asking me about it on social media). I’m setting a process of producing one in chain, although it might take a couple of months.

What is a Victorian ‘explorer’ really? A bumbling imperial agent

Have you studied history recently, or do you teach it, at any level? I’m curious to know, in the UK and Australia particularly, if Victorian-era exploration is taught at all, and if so how.

That’s a question provoked by a rich little monograph, Dave Kennedy’s Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa. It builds on thoughts I had while reading a fascinating Rodent History of Australia (no really, it is worth reading for the human history as well as the ecology). The relevant bit here is how the explorers Burke and Wills could have survived had they eaten the rats that were a locals’ staple), which drove home to me how racist and ignorant the teaching I received at school was that these were brave men “discovering” the world.

The Briton of the book’s title, Mungo Park - pictured above - is far from a household name today, but was in the 1790s a celebrated figure, author of a bestselling book about his travels in West Africa that reached the Niger River. He disappeared, apparently without trace, with his entire expedition on that watercourse, on his second journey in 1805. That was the view from Britain, and the typically Victorian monument erected in his “glory” still stands in his Scottish birthplace, Selkirk.

In Africa of course, plenty of people knew about the fate of his expedition, which, driven by paranoia and illness, had constructed a strange vessel, two canoes linked with a deck, hoisted a Union Jack, packed it with provisions and weapons and set off down river, firing on any who dared approach. Many locals had the scars to prove it. As Kennedy writes:

Heinrich Barth … during his travels through the region in the early 1850s… came across a number of elderly men who still recalled their encounters with this British intruder many decades earlier. They remembered him because of the unusual size and shape of Park’s vessel, the strange clothes and complexions of Park and his companion, and, above all, the unprovoked violence he had unleashed on anyone who dared to approach his ship. Barth met a chief named Teni who had been wounded in the leg as a young man by Park or another member of his party; he had the scare to prove it. He also encountered a group of Tuaregs who …’kept at first their distance frome me, viewing me with rather a suspicous and malevolent eye. But when they ovserved I had entered into cheerful conversation with some of their party, they convinced themselves that I did not belong to the class of wild beasts, or ‘tawkasts’, for such, from the reception they had met with from Park, they supposed all Europeans to be.” (p. 29-30)

It was a view for which Africans had many reasons. Another was the story of the Medusa, part of a French expedition sent to reclaim Senegal from the British in 1816. The vessel ran aground on a sandbar off what is now Mauritania, and there were not enough lifeboats for everyone, so 147 people were packed on to a makeshift raft, which was supposed to be towed to shore by the liferafts, but the towropes were deliberately severed, leaving it adrift for 13 days until another French vessel stumbled on it, by which stage only 15 survivors remained, the rest having died of thirst, committed suicide, been thrown overboard or killed in fights over food and water. Cannabilism was practiced. (p. 60) The incident is remembered now mostly through a famous painting on display in the Louvre.

Despite the abject failure of Mungo Park’s expedition, in 1816, the British government sent two large expeditions to Africa, one to follow the Niger River to its outlet (led by Captain John Peddle, an army officer with no prior experience in Africa), the other to trace the Congo River to its source (led by Navy man James Tuckey, who had surveyed part of Port Phillip in Australia), seeking to complete the task on which Mungo Park had been set, to discover whether the two were joined. These are the expeditions on which Kennedy’s book is focused.

The cost was significant. Kennedy calculates that the Congo effort cost more than £25,000 (more than £1 million today) and the Niger, which involved two efforts over more than five years, more than £50,000 for the first and even more for the second, which was resupplied multiple times. And they got pretty well, exactly, nowhere.

Kennedy summarises: “If the physical environment of Africa - its daunting geography, its difficult climate , its deadly diseases - presented a passive barrier against British efforts to penetrate the continent, its peoples often built active barriers of their own against the exotic interlopers who attempted to pass through their territories. These man-made impediments proved in many instances more difficult for explorers to overcome than the natural ones. This was certainly the case for Campbell and Gray, whose missions were undermined by the rulers of Futa Jallon, Bunda and Kaarta.” (p. 181)

That’s without taking account of the sheer blinding stupidity and hubris, which led many innocent men, women, children, and animals to their deaths. British military standard practice was to try to carry enormous quantities of stores (and weapons) using pack animals, despite their virtual absence from local use. There was a reason for that - disease and dangerous animals (including bees!), lack of food and water, difficult trails, meant again and again the expeditions got almost nowhere. And in dealing with local rulers, the expedition leaders alternated between bombast, pleading and sheer incomprehension of local priorities.

Almost incidentally, accounts of the expeditions reflect how much interchange of populations had already occurred between Europe and Africa. Tuckey “picked up” a new expediiton member (never named) in Boma as boat crew, later promoted to the post of liaison/translator with local regimes “who, having been in England five years, spoke the language as well as Simmons [the previous princely holder of the post] and his own much better”. As Kennedy reflects, this showed the “surprising cosmopolitanism that could be found among the residents of a slave emporium … seems likely… an enslaved man who had made his way to Britian, where he likely obtained passage back to Africa.” (p 87)

There are many reminders of how Britain as an “anti-slavery” nation continued to profit from the trade. Sierra Leone, seized in 1808, was not only a base for Royal Navy antislavery patrols and a place to leave the more the “liberated” slaves, it compensated for the loss of Senegambia and the work helped justify the maintenance of the Navy and delivered work and prize money to otherwise surplus officers after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. As Kennedy writes:

“The navy and its officers had a financial incentive to carry out the patrols'; they received prize money from the autcioning of the seized ships and their cargoes, including the slaves themselves, who came to be known as ‘prize slaves’ or ‘prize negroes’. Although there were few if any white planters in West Africa to purchase these ‘prize slaves’ and put them to work as so-called apprentices in their fields (in contrast to the Caribbean and the Cape), the British government itself claimed more than 2,500 of them as involunetary enlistees in its military forces between 1808 and 1815. This was the shadowland of Britain’s campaign to end the slave trade, the murky space where liberation and coercion were often indistinguishable.” (p. 36)

Expedition leader Tuckey observed that there were two kinds of slavery in the Congo, “a relatively denign system of domestic slavery, whose subjects were rarely sold and often closely bound to families and communities, and the far more egregious institution of export slavery, which relied on war captives, victims of kidnapping, and criminals to feed its voracious appetite. He also recognised that Europeans were responsible for this export trade… but rather than concluding that Africans would be better off without the presence of Europeans, Tuckey drew the opposite conclusion… believed the best way to end the Europeans’ demand for slaves was to shut off the supply in Africa itself. This shifted the focus of the attention - and for that matter, the blame - from Europeans to Africans. Now the problem became the primitive character of African societies, and the solution became the British mission to civilise them.” He wrote in his diary “it can only be done by colonization, and certainly there could not be a better point to commence than the banks of the Zaire”. (p. 89)

And there was certainly no sign of real moral qualms from the expeditions. “At one point, Tickey purchased a slave, explaining that he ‘might be of use’. He insisted that ‘I gave him his liberty on the instant, and only considered him as a servant,’ though this must have been a distinction without a difference for the ‘liberated’ slave himself. … this slave-cum-servant receives no further mention in Tuckey’s journmal. We can only wonder about his fate.” (p. 88)

Kennedy recovers what he can of the rampant sex slavery that accompanied the arrival of the Europeans.

“The women are considered in the light of merchandise,” Smith observed about the conduct of his Boma hosts, being ‘offered for hire’ by their menfolk in the most ‘open and barefaced manner’. Tuckey reported that when he met with the king and his council, they repeatedly offered him women, using language that he found ‘most disgusting and obscene, being composed of the vilest words picked up from English, French and Portugese.’ This polygot use of lewd European words is telling in its own right… It was done to accommodate the desites of foreign traders rather than because it was a customary indigenous practice. Smith concdede that this was so, noting that the sex trade was ‘confined to those parts of the country where they have had communications with Europeans, who have encouraged such connections’. He also described several sobering incidents that revealed the traumatic impacts of this trade on the women themselves. In one instance, a naked young girl was brought to Tuckey as a present. ‘She was very much alarmed, and on being brought into the captain’s tent … she ran under the bedstead’. To his credit, ‘Tuckey seemed not much pleased with this obtruded civility, objecting to the gift’. In another instance, however, “a weeping girl” was smuddled on board the ship and she “was soon followed by another” (p. 80-81)

It is not that this is a view from the lens of the 21st century, applying our mores to other times. Contemporaries were “condeming the poor decisions made by the explorers themselves, questioning the need or value of their sacrificing, or, more broadly, warning that the West’s impact on Africa and Africans was inherently corrupting”. (p. 148)

So what lesson, finally, to draw from this book? We knew, at least in general terms, most of the reality of British 19th-century presence in Africa. We knew that having been the driving force of the international slave trade, Britain was not the genuine force for cleaning up the genocide it claimed. But more, for me, I was left thinking that the term “explorer” really needs to be abandoned. Most of the men of this era were travelling on routes well-known to others, certainly to the inhabitants of the region, and they were mostly ignorant, arrogant, hybristic agents of colonial power. They can’t really be called spies, since their blundering progress was far from secret, but “agents of imperial advance” seems to be the best term for them.

Picks of the week

Reading

I try not to read dystopian “civilisation has collapsed in the near-future” novels. To do so seems slightly hypocritical, since I keep telling creative people to instead produce positive pictures of a future that works out, since we need a lot more ideas about those. But a friend recommended I read Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, and I’m glad I did. For two reasons, one because the central child character, Agnes, is so brilliantly created, very much like I can imagine a pre-teen and early teen child growing up in a smaller hunter-gatherer band would be. Terribly grown-up and practical with daily activities, as good or better than an adult in learning necesssary skills, but still without emotional maturity and psychological insight. And secondly, because like most great u/dystopias it is much more a commentary on today than a prediction of the future. It reminds me of the (non-fiction) The Naked Don’t Fear the Water in its depiction of what it is like to flee your home with what you can carry, without information about the future, with constantly shifting incomprehensible rules controlling your movements. The New Wilderness could easily be read as a commentary on the UK’s hostile environment and the EU’s Fortress Europe, with a reminder that in this world of shocks, anyone can become a refugee.

Listening

I was on the other side of the world, and not focused on international affairs, during the Falklands War, but the horror of the sinking of the Belgrano was still something in my memory stores. But I now know a lot more - and have enjoyed a fascinating listen - with the London Review of Books Belgrano Diaries podcast. Very well worth a listen, and not just as a reminder not to believe everything you are told, including in parliamentary chambers. And of the importance of political and journalistic persistence.

Thinking

As I told Jamoke Fashola, I am broadly a technological optimist, or at least not a pessimist, but don’t believe in technological determinism. So I was taken with a report of “Phone Story, a videogame played on mobile phones involving “a series of events that highlight ecological impacts associated with mobile phones,” before the player is told: “Don't pretend you are not complicit”. In this certainly not easy reading, but thought-provoking, article in the journal Progress in Environmental Geography. Many of people’s interactions with nature will be digitally mediated, and non-human actors will also be interacting through digital media. Seeking to understand that is important.

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

Researching

Working with life to manage other life - that’s the foundational plan of a book I rate very highly, Jamie Lorimer’s The Probiotic Planet. I thought of it while reading a study looking at the levels of mould toxins in organically grown versus crops produced by chemical agriculture showed lower levels in the former. If growing crops are regularly drenched with fungicide, as far too many are, then it is going to be the tough, often the deadly, most likely to survive and thrive, whereas with a more natural balance, organisms will keep each other in check. Interestingly, the study also found, something that also seems obvious when you think of the likely comparative conditions of the soils, “organically grown fruit and vegetables have a more favorable content of antioxidants and micronutrients”.

Almost the end

Yes, you might have noticed there’s been a general election. I’m mostly keeping this an election-free zone, but check out my Twitter for a full flow of election material! (And yes, there has been a hiatus in Substacks - I’m hoping to get back to regular, but not promising.)

I’m a long-time fan of the History of England podcast by David Crowther, and he’s just released a particularly great episode on The Putney Debates, which seems deeply appropriate listening, hearing the words (recorded contemporaneously) about men debating what we’d now call human rights, the nature of democracy, how to reform a broken system of governance. Plus ca change is the inevitable thought, particularly in conjunction with this lovely constitutional read from David Allen Green about how the general election could have been called, then called off, which really would have been the icing on the cake of Tory chaos.

What did you think?

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