“A Dream as Frail as Those of Ancient Time”: The in-Credible Geographies of Timbuctoo

Abstract

The author considers the politics and poetics of belief and disbelief in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain and France, with particular reference to the mythologies and controversies about the location and nature of Timbuctoo, a city widely believed to be the hub of a fabulously wealthy African trading system. Like other episodes in the history of European exploration, from the quest for the North-West passage to the search for the source of the Nile and the races to the North and South Poles, the scramble to reach Timbuctoo was sustained by intense international rivalry and spawned a widespread speculative discourse involving politicians, scientists, scientific patrons, explorers, and journalists. Drawing on recent work on the social history of truth, the author considers how and why different geographical descriptions of Timbuctoo were deemed credible by the scientific communities of London and Paris. Judgments about ‘new’ geographical information were influenced, if not determined, by a complex and shifting rhetoric of adjudication in which moral assessments about the character and status of rival claimants loomed especially large. When the French explorer René Caillié claimed the prize of the Paris Geographical Society as the first explorer to reach and return from Timbuctoo in 1828, his achievements sparked an acrimonious debate between British and French geographers that raised fundamental questions about the purpose of African exploration and the nature of geographical truth. Of central concern were the legitimacy of disguise as an exploratory tactic, and the importance of physical courage and bodily comportment in assessing an explorer's scientific credibility and moral authority.

Making Mount Kilimanjaro German: Nation building and heroic masculinity in the colonial geographies of Hans Meyer

“…In the production of geographical knowledge about the mountain, there was little room for non‐German authors; to Meyer, Kilimanjaro was a German mountain from the outset. As Heffernan (, p. 209) points out in the context of geographical knowledge production about Timbuctoo, local people's rights and knowledge were also not of concern to Meyer, who seemed to be convinced that only European men could produce legitimate knowledge about Africa. Even though his life, work and academic success heavily depended on the knowledge and support of the local population, this was made invisible in his publications.…”

“…The paper draws on the rich literature on Geography, colonialism and exploration in late 19th‐century Africa (Driver, , ), on the production of the trustworthy (geographical) self (Bond, ; Heffernan, ; Jöns, ; Shapin, ; Withers, ) and especially on the production of white masculinity within this context (Myers, ; Reidy, ; Rose, ; Sundberg, ; Terrall, ). Further, it seeks to complement research interested in the material production and communication of geographical knowledge from a science studies perspective, which encompasses exploration of the role of instruments and technologies of recording (Ryan, ; Withers, ) and the transfer of knowledge from the field to printed text (Keighren et al., ), talks, and “geography's venues,” such as museums and geographical societies (Agnew & Livingstone, ; Barnett, ; Finnegan, ; Koivunen, ; MacDonald & Withers, ; Naylor, ; Ryan, ).…”

Alexander Scott: Constructing a Legitimate Geography of the Sahara from a Captivity Narrative, 1821

“…19 Consequently, there was a significant reliance on socially-constructed notions of gentlemanly honor, reflecting ideals that not only conflicted with the rationality of the time, but contributed additional qualifications that further limited the candidacy of men like Scott to act as reliable observers. 20 But what of the individuals themselves? Whilst there was an active move to classify an "explorer" as distinct from other forms of travellers in the early nineteenth century, their eligibility to the title was founded largely on social status and ethnicity, as well as their adherence to increasingly stringent literary models of spectacle.…”

Views in a Warm Climate: Reflections on Images of the Tropics

“…Roe's logbook sketches can thus be seen as performances, both of the methods of coastal survey and of Roe's own ambitions within his profession. Such claims were an important means for all kinds of travellers in this period, particularly in the dawning "culture of exploration" (Driver, 2001), to cultivate credibility, legitimate their journeys and boost their professional standing (see also Withers, 2000;Heffernan, 2001).…”