The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Read online

  John Keay is the author of about twenty books, all factual, mostly historical, and largely to do with Asia, exploration or Scotland. His first book stayed in print for thirty years; many others have become classics. A full-time author since 1973, he has also written and presented over 100 documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and has been a guest lecturer on tour groups. He travels extensively.

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  TRAVEL IN

  DANGEROUS PLACES

  Edited by

  John Keay

  With a Foreword by Wilfred Thesiger

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  Originally published as The Robinson Book of Exploration

  by Robinson Publishing, 1993

  This revised edition was first published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2010

  Copyright © John Keay 1993, 2010 (unless otherwise indicated)

  The right of John Keay to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition

  that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

  hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library.

  UK ISBN 978-1-84901-311-6

  1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2

  First published in the United States in 2010 by Running Press Book Publishers

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright

  Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  US Library of Congress number: 2009929934

  US ISBN 978-0-7624-3845-7

  Running Press Book Publishers

  2300 Chestnut Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

  Visit us on the web!

  www.runningpress.com

  Printed and bound in the EU

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Wilfred Thesiger

  Introduction

  Siberia and Alaska

  Georg Wilhelm Steller Stranded on Bering Island

  John Dundas Cochrane The Walk to Moscow

  Central and South Asia

  Alexander Burnes Alarms Amongst the Uzbeks

  John Wood On the Roof of the World

  Regis-Evariste Huc Lhasa Beckons

  Henri Mouhot Exploring Angkhor

  Francis Edward Younghusband Over the Karakorams

  Ekai Kawaguchi Trials in Tibet

  Sven Hedin At the Source of the Indus

  Edmund Hillary Everest by Storm

  Arabia

  William Gifford Palgrave Escape from Riyadh

  Charles Montagu Doughty Desert Days

  Harry St John Bridger Philby The Point of Return

  Wilfred Thesiger To the Empty Quarter for a Drink of Water

  West Africa

  Mungo Park Alone in Africa

  Hugh Clapperton The Road to Kano

  Richard Lander Down the Niger

  Heinrich Barth Arrival in Timbuktu

  Mary Kingsley My Ogowé Fans

  East and Central Africa

  James Bruce Among the Sudanese

  Richard Francis Burton Not the Source of the Nile

  John Hanning Speke A Glimpse of Lake Victoria

  Samuel White Baker The Reservoir of the Nile

  David Livingstone Last Days

  Henry Morton Stanley Encounters on the Upper Congo

  Joseph Thomson A Novice at Large

  Australia

  James Cook Landfall at Botany Bay

  Charles Sturt Escape from the Outback

  William John Wills Death at Coopers Creek

  John McDouall Stuart To See the Sea

  North America

  Alexander Mackenzie First Crossing of America

  Meriwether Lewis Meeting the Shoshonee

  South America

  Alexander von Humboldt Eating Dirt in Venezuela

  Henry Savage Landor Iron Rations in Amazonia

  Hiram Bingham The Discovery of Machu Picchu

  Arctic

  John Ross Four Years in the Ice

  John Franklin Living off Lichen and Leather

  Fridtjof Nansen Adrift on an Arctic Ice Floe

  Robert Edwin Peary The Pole is Mine

  Antarctic

  Ernest Henry Shackleton Farthest South

  Roald Amundsen The Pole at Last

  Robert Falcon Scott In Extremis

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  by Wilfred Thesiger

  The concept of exploration has alwa
ys meant the geographical discovery of areas of the earth previously unknown to the explorer himself and to the society to which he belonged. In the past, important exploration was carried out by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Polynesians, for example. In modern times, geographical exploration almost inevitably means exploration by Europeans, who have accomplished this on a vast scale, worldwide. The knowledge of their discoveries has been widely disseminated by modern techniques.

  Now, with virtually the whole surface of the world surveyed and mapped, journeys in this sense, however arduous, can no longer be described as exploration.

  Except for the South Pole, explorers have usually penetrated areas already inhabited or travelled over by other human beings; this has often constituted the greatest risk to themselves. Others with no previous connection with these regions and their inhabitants may well have been there, which means in a sense that the areas had already been explored.

  An example of this was when, in Western eyes, the source of the Nile was unknown and its discovery was regarded as the final challenge of exploration. Credit for this discovery was justifiably given to Speke, though in reality Arabs from a far-distant land had already penetrated there with the object of collecting slaves and ivory. Their knowledge of this land was invaluable to Speke, Burton, Grant and other contemporary explorers.

  Until recently, explorers travelled on foot with porters or with animal transport, or in sailing boats and canoes and, throughout their journeys, could only rely on themselves, their very whereabouts at any time unknown to their sponsors until they either returned or failed to do so. Today, such geographical exploration as is left has inevitably been carried out with mechanized transport; radio communication has also enabled the expedition members to keep in continuous contact with their base. In some cases they have even known that, in a crisis, an aircraft might come to their assistance.

  It has been my good fortune that, when I travelled in the Danakil country and in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, no other means of travel was possible than that employed by their inhabitants. In Arabia this resulted in the very close personal relationship with my Arab companions which gave me the five most memorable years of my life.

  Wilfred Thesiger

  INTRODUCTION

  It is as well to be wary of the word “exploration”. Today all manner of racial, colonial and Euro-centric conceits cling to it; even in its heyday it was used sparingly. Captain Cook, sometimes called the greatest of explorers, made “voyages of discovery”, not exploration; Bruce, Speke and Barth also made “discoveries”, others were mostly content with “travels”, “journeys”, or in the case of Doughty and Burton mere “wanderings”. Exploration was too big a word; “explorer” was not the sort of title a traveller had printed on his visiting card. It presumed too much; had the world really been so ignorant about the tract he claimed to have explored? Had he performed that exhaustive investigation which exploration implied? And what about the people who inhabited the place? Were they also totally ignorant of their surroundings and incapable of contributing to their topography?

  “Exploration” had in fact a greater currency amongst its armchair arbiters in the Geographical Societies of Europe than it did amongst their emissaries in the field. They needed a noun to describe and substantiate the activities of these emissaries and hence the word was adopted. Denoting the “action of exploring foreign lands”, it first appears in 1823 according to the Oxford English Dictionary; it was very much an English invention.

  By any reckoning the nineteenth-century British contribution – Scottish quite as much as English – to our knowledge of the world’s less accessible lands was commensurate with the universal and preponderant character of the British empire. The opportunities for filling in the blank spaces fell almost exclusively to the British in Australia, predominantly to the British in Africa, and generously to the British in North America, Arabia, Antarctica and Central Asia. All were explored during the period 1815–1914, the great age of what quickly became known as “exploration” and the main focus of this anthology. It began with the end of the Napoleonic Wars; demobilization released a host of young officers like Clapperton and Cochrane who, despairing of advancement and adventure in the services, looked elsewhere for a challenge; simultaneously the Admiralty, as it cast about for a peacetime role, hit on ideas like testing its ships and men in a renewed search for the North West Passage.

  So peace in Europe ushered in the age of exploration, and war in Europe abruptly ended it. By 1914 the main deserts had all been crossed, the great rivers traced to their sources, and the Poles conquered. Exploration had practically run its course and so had the typically officered and expeditionary nature of the British style of exploration. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s 1911 defeat of Captain Scott in the race for the South Pole was seen as demonstrating the triumph of single-minded professionals over excessively scrupulous all-rounders. Brute strength and a morality bordering on the sentimental (ponies could be eaten but not dogs) began to seem pig-headed and arrogant. In the unbearable fortitude with which Scott and his companions met their subsequent fate there may be detected a foretaste of the greater tragedy that was about to unfold as the gentlemanly ideals of a vanishing age were laid to rest in the fields of Normandy and Flanders.

  After both World Wars exploring activity did revive, although whether crossing that small corner of Arabia known as the Empty Quarter or conquering the conspicuous heights of Everest really counted is debatable. They were certainly worthy challenges, but exploration in the nineteenth-century sense reserved to itself an air of mystery which these new goals could scarcely boast. No one suspected more than sand in the Empty Quarter or snow and ice on Everest. Shackleton had been thwarted in his 1908–9 bid for the South Pole by the discovery that it lay across a plateau 10,000 feet above sea-level and so nearly as elevated as Tibet. He was defeated by the effects of altitude as much as latitude; it was a surprise to everyone. So was the discovery of an elevated “lake region” in the highlands of East Africa by Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Baker. This idea proved so exciting that soon lake regions were being predicted all over the place. Wood thought his Sir-i-kol source of the Oxus might be part of another and Hedin insisted on a Tibetan lake region beside his Transhimalaya range. An inland sea, if not a lake region, was also confidently predicted for the heart of Australia until Sturt, Burke and Stuart proved otherwise. But Everest held no such surprises; even its height was known to within a few feet. And no one suspected lakes or even forbidden cities in the howling wilderness of the Empty Quarter.

  There were no major discoveries left for the post-war explorer and there were, and still are, serious doubts about what exploration is now all about. In 1909 Commander Robert Peary’s claim to have been first to reach the North Pole occasioned bitter controversy. Some preferred the claim of a fellow American, Dr. Frederick Cook, to have got there first; others disputed whether Peary, who had insisted on making his polar dash alone but for his black servant and some mystified Eskimos, could possibly have reached the Pole in the time he indicated. Subsequently Cook was largely discredited and Peary, when his pre-arrangements were fully appreciated, vindicated. “It was not, however, exploration” declared a doyenne of the British Royal Geographical Society as recently as 1990. Peary’s dash was preceded by the establishment of a chain of elaborately equipped igloos reaching almost to his goal; like the post travellers of old, he could travel light being assured of food and shelter at each halt. Whether it was or was not exploration, it was certainly not cricket.

  Exploration assumed a high degree of hardship, risk and uncertainty as well as of mystery. And when, in the twentieth century, these ceased to be self-evident, they had to be contrived. Colonel Fawcett’s mysterious disappearance in South America could be seen as a fitting end for one who, insisting on the existence of a lost Eldorado, made a mystery out of his route as well as his goal. Similarly the traveller who elects to go on foot where he could perfectly well ride, or to cycle where there are no roads
, is merely contriving hardship. His experiences are only marginally more interesting than those of the adventurer who, failing to contrive a knife-edge situation, feels no compunction about inventing it. To such a rascal no indulgence was extended in the great age of exploration. Incident had to be credible and when it was not, as in the monumental narratives of Henry Savage Landor, the author’s bluff would be called, as indeed happened to Landor in both London and Paris.

  So to qualify as exploration a journey had to be credible, had to involve hardship and risk, and had to include the novelty of discovery. Thereafter, like cricket, it was somewhat hard to explain to the uninitiated. But one element was absolutely vital; indeed it was precisely that which distinguished the age of exploration from previous ages of discovery and which necessitated the adoption of the word “exploration”. It was, quite simply, a reverence for science. This might amount to no more than avowing a curiosity about the unknown and spattering one’s narrative with compass bearings and distances; or it might, as with some of the polar expeditions, result in a staff of distinguished researchers generating shelves of observations on everything from meteorology to bowel movements.

  The point was that science provided a rationale for travel, and elevated it from mere locomotion to something approaching an academic discipline; hence the need in English for that new noun, “exploration”. Science also broadened the scope of travel. Lands which travellers had hitherto found no good reason for visiting were of particular interest to scientists, while those from which political competition or religious bigotry had barred the traveller could now be assailed in the name of science. In Africa and America it would not be uncommon for scientific exploration to be used as a pretext for colonial and commercial expansion; British East Africa owed everything to the likes of Burton and Speke and the sea-to-sea configuration of the United States to Lewis and Clark. In Asia exploration was often a cover for political intrigue, as demonstrated by Alexander Burnes, or for military intelligence-gathering, Francis Younghusband’s speciality. But that in no way discredited the new priority accorded to scientific enquiry. It is what distinguishes the explorer from the merchant/navigator, and the age of exploration from the centuries of travel which preceded it.