Exploration: The Geographical Society

EXPLORATION: THE GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES:

 

At this juncture, the European exploratory impetus was still dependent on the
personal resources of the individuals involved. By the end of the eighteenth century,
however, new institutional structures began to emerge within and beyond
the agencies of the state dedicated to sponsoring exploration and geographical
discovery. In 1782, Jean-Nicolas Buache was appointed geographer to the court
of Louis XVI in France and attempted unsuccessfully to launch a geographical
society to co-ordinate French exploration (Lejeune, 1993: 21–2). Stung into action
by this failed initiative, a group of London scientists and businessmen, led by Sir
Joseph Banks (President of the Royal Society) and Major James Rennell (Chief
Surveyor of the East India Company) launched the Association for Promoting the
Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa in 1788. Over the next decades, the
African Association sponsored several pioneering expeditions, including those of
Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton and Alexander Gordon Laing (Heffernan, 2001;
Withers 2004).
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars brought a halt to the
best forms of Enlightenment geographical inquiry (Godlewska, 1999a) but gave a
fresh impetus to the strategically important sciences of cartography and land survey.
By 1815, affluent, educated and well-travelled former soldiers were to be
found in virtually every major European city, and these men were the natural
clientele for the first geographical societies, the building blocks of the modern
discipline. The earliest such society was the Société de Géographie de Paris
(SGP), which held its inaugural séance in July 1821. A fifth of the 217 founder
members were born outside France, including von Humboldt and Conrad Malte-
Brun, the Danish refugee who became the society’s first Secretary-General
(Fierro, 1983; Lejeune, 1993). A second, smaller geographical society was subsequently
established in Berlin, the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zuBerlin (GEB),
at the instigation of the cartographer Heinrich Berghaus in April 1828, with a
foundation membership of just 53, including von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, who
became the society’s inaugural president (Lenz, 1978).
The establishment in 1830 of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) of
London, under the patronage of William IV, marked a significant new departure.
Several London societies committed to fieldwork and overseas travel already
existed, including the Linnean Society for natural history (established in 1788),
the Palestine Association (1804), the Geological Society (1807), the Zoological Society (1826) and the Raleigh Club (1826), the last named being a dining club
whose members claimed collectively to have visited every part of the known
world. The RGS was to provide a clearer London focus for those with an interest
in travel and exploration. Even at its foundation, it was far larger than its
existing rivals in Paris and Berlin. The 460 original fellows included John Barrow,
the explorer and essayist, and Robert Brown, the pioneer student of Australian
flora. Within a year, the RGS had taken over the Raleigh Club, the African
Association and the Palestine Association to gain a virtual monopoly on British
exploration (Brown, 1980).
The pre-eminence of the RGS as the focal point of world exploration
increased over subsequent decades. By 1850, there were nearly 800 fellows
(twice the number in Berlin and eight times more than Paris, where the SGP
membership had slumped) and, by 1870, the fellowship stood at 2,400. Most fellows
were amateur scholars but a number of prominent scientists also joined the
society’s ranks, including the young Charles Darwin, who was elected after his
return from the voyage of the Beagle in 1838. The dominant figure in the RGS
during the middle years of the nineteenth century was Sir Roderick Murchison,
who was president on three separate occasions: 1843–5, 1851–3 and 1862–71.
A talented publicist and entrepreneur, Murchison advocated geographical exploration
as a precursor to British commercial and military expansion (Stafford,
1989). While other societies offered only post hoc awards and medals for successfully
completed voyages, the RGS used its substantial resources to sponsor
exploration in advance and on a large scale by providing money, setting precise
objectives, lending equipment and arbitrating on the ensuing disputes. It also
published general advice through its Hints to Travellers, which began in 1854
(Driver, 2001: 49–67), and developed what was probably the largest private map
collection in the world.

Origin Of Modern Geography

Origin Of Modern Geography:

The classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, Arabia, China and India provided
many of the geographical and cartographical practices that European
geographers would subsequently deploy (Harley and Woodward, 1987, 1992–4).
That said, the origins of modern geography can be dated back to western Europe
in the century after Columbus. The sixteenth century witnessed far-reaching
economic, social and political upheavals, linked directly to the expansion of
European power beyond the continent’s previously vulnerable limits. By c. 1600,
a new, mercantilist Atlantic trading system was firmly established, linking the
emerging, capitalist nation-states of western Europe with the seemingly unlimited
resources of the American ‘New World’. Whether this expansion proceeded
from internal changes associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalism
(as most historians of early-modern Europe have argued) or whether it preceded
and facilitated these larger transformations (as revisionist historians insist) is a
‘chicken-or-egg’ question that was extensively debated at the end of the twentieth
century (Blaut, 1993; Diamond, 1997). All we can say for certain is that early modern
innovations in shipbuilding, naval technology and navigation progressively
increased the range of European travel and trade, particularly around the
new Atlantic rim, and in so doing transformed European perceptions of the wider
world as well as the European self-image (Livingstone, 1992: 32–62).

Firmly rooted in the practical business of long-distance trade, early-modern
geography – ‘the haven-finding art’, as Eva Taylor (1956) memorably called it –
encompassed both the technical, mathematical skills of navigation and map making
as well as the literary and descriptive skills of those who wrote the
numerous accounts of the flora, fauna, landscapes, resources and peoples of distant
regions (see, for early accounts, Taylor, 1930, 1934). As Figure 1.1 suggests,
based on evidence from France, geographical descriptions of the non-European world became steadily more popular through the sixteenth century – the staple
fare of the expanding European libraries which were also the principal repositories
for the politically important archive of maps produced by Europe’s growing
army of cartographers (see, for example, Konvitz, 1987; Buisseret, 1992; Brotton,
1997). Equipped with this developing body of geographical fact (liberally sprinkled
though it was with speculative fiction), the larger European universities began to
offer specialized courses in geography and related pursuits, including chorography,
navigation and cartography (see, for example, Bowen, 1981; Cormack, 1997).

The epistemological foundations of modern science were established during
the seventeenth century, the era of the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’. This
‘revolution’ coincided with, and was partly explained by, widespread religious and
political upheaval in Europe and had its own geographies that have recently been
explored (Livingstone and Withers, 2005: 23–132). The inchoate science of geography,
although generally viewed in as a practical, navigational skill that merely
facilitated scientific discovery (Livingstone, 1988, 1990, 1992: 63–101), was gradually
implicated in, and ultimately transformed by, wider moral, philosophical
and political debates about the possibilities of human development within and
beyond Europe, the relative merits of the different societies, cultures and civilizations
around the world, and the geographical limits on supposedly universal
human rights and attributes (see, more generally, Broc, 1981; Livingstone, 1992:
102–38; Livingstone and Withers, 1999; Mayhew, 2000; Withers and Mayhew,
2002). By the eighteenth century – the era of the European Enlightenment – the
teaching of geography had become critically important in the creation of new, distinctively
modern forms of popular national and imperial identities (Withers,
2001, 2007). At the same time, an interest in travel as an educational activity, beneficial
in and of itself, spread from the European aristocracy into the ranks of the
newly enriched urban bourgeoisie. From this emerged the ‘Grand Tour’ of the
Mediterranean heartlands of the ancient world so beloved of wealthier and lettered
European men and women (Chard and Langdon, 1996; Chard, 1999).

Partly as a result of these developments, the simple idea of geography as
navigation gave way to a new formulation: geography as exploration. This was,
to be sure, a shift of emphasis rather than a fundamental transformation but it
reflected and engendered an entirely new geographical language and rationale.
While scientific discoveries might emerge as more or less fortunate by-products
of navigation, such discoveries were seen as the planned and considered objectives
of the kind of purposeful, self-consciously scientific exploration that
developed during the eighteenth century, backed up by new cartographic and
navigational techniques and by the substantial resources of modern nation-states
(see, for example, Sobel, 1996; Edney, 1997; Burnett, 2000): ‘[W]hat distinguishes
geography as an intellectual activity from … other branches of knowledge’,
claims David Stoddart (1986: 29), ‘is a set of attitudes, methods, techniques and
questions, all of them developed in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century.’
Elsewhere in the same text, Stoddart (1986: 33) is even more specific about
the point of departure for the new geography of exploration. The year 1769,
when James Cook first sailed into the Pacific, was a genuine turning point in the
development of modern geography, claims Stoddart, and not simply because
Cook’s journeys opened up the Australian landmass with its unique flora and
fauna to the inquisitive European gaze. Unlike earlier generations of navigators,
claims Stoddart, Cook’s explorations were specifically intended to achieve scientific
objectives, to be carried out by the illustrious international savants who
accompanied him.

The new Enlightenment geography was probably best exemplified by
Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian polymath who was born as Cook and his
fellow explorers were charting their way across the Pacific. An inveterate
explorer and a prolific author, von Humboldt was a complex figure: the archetypal
modern, rational and international scientist, his ideas were also shaped by
the late eighteenth-century flowering of European romanticism and German classicism.
His travels, notably in South America, were inspired by an insatiable
desire to uncover and categorize the inner workings of the natural world, and his
many published works, especially the multi-volume Cosmos, which appeared in
the mid-nineteenth century, sought to establish a systematic science of geography

that could analyse the natural and the human worlds together and aspire to
describe and explain all regions of the globe (Godlewska, 1999b; Buttimer, 2001).
His only rival in this ambitious discipline-building project was his German near
contemporary, Carl Ritter, a more sedentary writer of relatively humble origins
whose unfinished 19-volume Erdkunde, also published in the mid-nineteenth century,
reflected its author’s Christian worldview but was inspired by the same
objective of creating a generalized world geography, even though the analysis was
to advance no further than Africa and Asia.