Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Romanticism Off the Map
- 1 It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard
- 2 A Pirate or Anything
- 3 Coming Up From the Midst of the Sea
- 4 Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad
- 5 From Here to Timbuktu
- Conclusion: Land Pirates and Republican Ragamuffins
- Index
5 - From Here to Timbuktu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Romanticism Off the Map
- 1 It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard
- 2 A Pirate or Anything
- 3 Coming Up From the Midst of the Sea
- 4 Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad
- 5 From Here to Timbuktu
- Conclusion: Land Pirates and Republican Ragamuffins
- Index
Summary
So geographers, in Afric-maps,
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps,
And o'er unhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.
Jonathan Swift, ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’In 1815, a man named Robert Adams declared to Britain's African Company that he was the first white man ever to have been to Timbuktu. Neither part of that claim was true. But a story about something that did not happen and the person who did not do it might be the best way to talk about a city that is so persistently unreal to most people. Timbuktu has, for centuries now, been simultaneously the mythical city of wealth and learning, and a primitive town at the edge of the earth; in both cases, Timbuktu is wholly inscribed in a Western perspective that deems it, whether real or imaginary, a destination.
In the late eighteenth century, Timbuktu – and the interior of Africa more generally – was a destination still tantalisingly out of reach; maps of the region were a mixture of errors and empty space. As Henry Beaufoy described in 1790, ‘the map of its Interior is still but a wide extended blank, on which the Geographer … has traced, with a hesitating hand, a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations.’ Explorations to the interior were rare, in part because of their difficulty. Prominent African geographer James Rennell lamented:
Africa stands alone in a geographical view! Penetrated by no inland seas, like the Mediterranean, Baltic or Hudson's Bay; nor overspread with extensive lakes, like those of North America; nor having, in common with the other continents, rivers running from the centre to the extremities: but, on the contrary, its regions separated from each other by the least practicable of boundaries, arid deserts of such formidable extent, as to threaten those who traverse them, with the most horrible of all deaths, that arising from thirst! Placed in such circumstances, can we be surprised either at our ignorance of its interior parts, or of the tardy progress of civilization in it?
But it was in fact the hope of ‘rivers running from the centre to the extremities’ that drove Europeans towards Africa's interior.
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- Information
- Radical RomanticsProphets, Pirates, and the Space Beyond Nation, pp. 123 - 148Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016