Travels in Fiction: Baker, Stanley, Cameron and the Adventure of African Exploration

Abstract

Samuel White Baker, Henry Morton Stanley, and Verney Lovett Cameron are some of the most familiar names on the roster of African exploration. Together, they are associated with central and east Africa’s most important geographical questions as well as political developments in the run up to partition. While these figures are well known for their substantial expeditionary narratives, the fact that they also published works of fiction has been almost entirely overlooked. This article investigates the phenomenon, identifying the turn to fiction as an important feature of the Victorian culture of exploration. The ‘fiction of exploration’ was part of the period’s cult of celebrity, a means of reaching new audiences, and an important contribution to the adventure genre. These novels are read here as a means of reimagining the expeditionary experience, and as literary cartographies in which place and politics intersect on behalf of an imperial vision.

Keywords:

• Verney Lovett Cameron
• Samuel White Baker
• Henry Morton Stanley
• colonial fiction
• African exploration
• British imperialism

Acknowledgements

I thank the British Library for permission to quote the Macmillan letter books, and the Royal Museum for Central Africa for permitting me to cite the correspondence between Stanley and Marston. I am grateful to Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, curator of the Stanley Archive, for her advice while undertaking research in the collection. Thanks also to the anonymous readers for the Journal of Victorian Culture for their comments and thoughtful engagement with this article.

Notes

1. Samuel W. Baker, Cast up by the Sea [1868] (London: J. M. Dent, 1923), p. 173. Further references to Cast up by the Sea will be given as parenthetical citations.

2. James L. Newman, Imperial Footprints: Henry Morton Stanley’s African Journeys (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2004), pp. 335–36; B. A. Riffenburgh, ‘Cameron, Verney Lovett (1844–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)<www.oxforddnb.com>[accessed 16 Jan 2017].

3. In addition to his geographical achievements, Stanley was involved in imperial expansion, working directly for King Leopold of Belgium to establish stations in the Congo and contributing to the ‘opening’ of Buganda. See Newman, Imperial Footprints, pp. 337–38. Baker is best known for exploring the ‘Luta N’Zigé’, which he renamed the Albert N’yanza, and for later acting as governor-general of the equatorial Nile basin on the authority of the Ottoman Empire. Earlier in his career, he developed a ‘colonization scheme’ in Ceylon and acquired a reputation as a big game hunter. See Thomas Paul Ofcansky, ‘Baker, Sir Samuel White (1821–1893)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)<www.oxforddnb.com>[accessed 16 Jan 2017]. Cameron’s contributions to geography were less significant, but his travels extended contemporary understanding of eastern Africa’s interlacustrine region and the Congo basin. See James Casada, ‘Verney Lovett Cameron: A Centenary Appreciation’, The Geographical Journal, 141.2 (July 1975), 203–15 (pp. 209, 211).

4. Robert I. Rotberg, ‘Thomson, Joseph (1858–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)<www.oxforddnb.com>[accessed 16 Jan 2017].

5. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Race and the Victorian Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Deirdre David, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 129–47 (p. 137); Patrick Brantlinger, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Empire’, in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. by John Richetti (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 560–78 (p. 573). See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 189–91.

6. Henry M. Stanley, My Kalulu: Prince, King, and Slave: A Story of Central Africa (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1873); Verney Lovett Cameron, Jack Hooper: His Adventures at Sea and in South Africa [1886] (London: T. Nelson, 1887). Further references to My Kalulu, and Jack Hooper will be given as parenthetical citations.

7. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 179–83.

8. Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 8.

9. Charles W.J. Withers and Innes M. Keighren, ‘Travels into Print: Authoring, Editing and Narratives of Travel and Exploration c.1815–1857’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36.4 (October 2011), 560–73 (p. 562).

10. For examination of the mediating influence of the publishing industry on narratives of exploration, see Bill Bell, ‘Authors in an Industrial Economy: The Case of John Murray’s Travel Writers’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 21 (Winter 2013)<https://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt21_n01/>[accessed 16 Jan 2017]; David Finkelstein, ‘Unraveling Speke: The Unknown Revision of an African Exploration Classic’, History in Africa, 30 (January 2003), 117–32; Justin Livingstone, ‘The Meaning and Making of Missionary Travels: The Sedentary and Itinerant Discourses of a Victorian Bestseller’, Studies in Travel Writing, 15.3 (September 2011), 267–92; Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); I. S. Maclaren, ‘Explorers’ and Travelers’ Narratives: A Peregrination through Different Editions’, History in Africa, 30 (January 2003), 213–22.

11. Withers and Keighren, ‘Travels into Print’, p. 560; Roy Bridges, ‘Explorers’ Texts and the Problems of Reactions by Non-Literate Peoples: Some Nineteenth-Century East African Examples’, Studies in Travel Writing, 2.1 (February 1998), 65–84 (p. 72).

12. Adrian S. Wisnicki, ‘Rewriting Agency: Samuel Baker, Bunyoro-Kitara and the Egytpian Slave Trade’, Studies in Travel Writing, 14.1 (February 2010), 1–27 (p. 1).

13. Felix Driver, ‘Missionary Travels: Livingstone, Africa and the Book’, in Livingstone Studies: Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Justin D. Livingstone, spec. issue of Scottish Geographical Journal, 129.3–4 (September 2013), 164–78 (p. 166).

14. Louise C. Henderson, ‘David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels in Britain and America: Exploring the Wider Circulation of a Victorian Travel Narrative’, in Livingstone Studies: Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Justin D. Livingstone, spec. issue of Scottish Geographical Journal, 129.3–4 (September 2013), 179–93 (p. 180).

15. Clare Pettitt, ‘Exploration in Print: From the Miscellany to the Newspaper’, in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, ed. by Dane Kennedy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 80–108 (pp. 81, 83).

16. For discussion of the ‘elusive’ boundary between fact and fiction in travel writing, see Steve Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. by Steve Clark (London and New York, NY: Zed Books, 1999), pp.1–28 (p. 2). See also Jan Borm, ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology’, in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 13–26.

17. Pettitt, ‘Exploration in Print’, p. 85.

18. Bradley Deane, ‘Imperial Boyhood: Piracy and the Play Ethic’, Victorian Studies, 53.4 (July 2011), 689–714 (p. 689).

19. Pettitt, ‘Exploration in Print’, p. 86.

20. Max Jones, Berny Sèbe, John Strachan, Bertrand Taithe and Peter Yeandle, ‘Decolonising Imperial Heroes: Britain and France’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42.5 (December 2014), 787–825 (p. 793).

21. The study of the manifold interactions between celebrity and colonialism is an emerging area of scholarship. In the first volume devoted to the subject, Robert Clarke argues that European colonialism ‘provided contexts and opportunities … by which individuals could achieve fame’. This article follows his contention that ‘celebrity is not inherent to any given individual or group of individuals’, but rather is ‘produced through discourse, maintained through media institutions and audience reception’. See Robert Clarke, ‘The Idea of Celebrity Colonialism: An Introduction’, in Celebrity Colonialism: Fame, Power and Representation in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. by Robert Clarke (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 1–12 (pp. 1–2, 5).

22. Dane Kennedy devotes a chapter to explorers as ‘celebrities’ in his recent volume. See Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 232–60. It is worth noting, however, that some explorers, notably David Livingstone, achieved wider heroic stature than can be accounted for in terms of celebrity. Such individuals were monumentalized as exemplary figures of national and moral significance, and were endowed with political value that often had utility in the service of empire. Jones et al. identify the explorer as one of the major categories of ‘imperial hero’ in the period 1850–1914. See ‘Decolonising Imperial Heroes’, p. 798. See also Justin D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); and Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

23. Publishers could act as what Sèbe calls ‘hero-makers’, who exerted a powerful influence in shaping public reputations and had vested interests in promoting them. See his discussion of the Kitchener legend in chapter 7 of Heroic Imperialists in Africa.

24. British Library, London, Macmillan Archive, U. Letter Books, Add MS 55387 (2), Macmillan to Baker, 8 December 1867, p.740. The writing in Macmillan’s letter books has faded over time, so the legibility of much of the correspondence is limited.

25. British Library, London, Macmillan Archive, U. Letter Books, Add MS 55388 (1), Macmillan to Baker, 12 February 1868, p.6.

26. British Library, London, Macmillan Archive, U. Letter Books, Add MS 55388 (2), Macmillan to Baker, 12 August 1868, p.663.

27. British Library, London, Macmillan Archive, U. Letter Books, Add MS 55388 (2), Macmillan to Baker, 5 November 1868, p. 907.

28. British Library, London, Macmillan Archive, U. Letter Books, Add MS 55388 (2), Macmillan to Baker, 1 October 1868, p. 794.

29. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, H. M. Stanley Archives, 1505, Marston to Stanley, 1 May 1873.

30. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, H. M. Stanley Archives, 1507, Marston to Stanley, 21 July 1873. Stanley was in Spain for several months during the Third Carlist War (1872–76). Carlism was an ‘antimodernist protest movement of rural and small-town Catholic Spain against economic modernization and cultural change’, which had its origins in a succession quarrel between King Fernando VII and his brother. It was at its peak from the 1830s to 1870s, but remained influential until the 1930s. See Angel Smith, Historical Dictionary of Spain, 2nd edn (Plymouth: Scarecrow, 2009), pp. 131–34.

31. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, H. M. Stanley Archives, 1508, Marston to Stanley, 14 August. 1873. The ‘curious telegram’ read ‘KALULU VALFTHROUGH’, by which Stanley presumably meant ‘half through’.

32. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, H. M. Stanley Archives, 1604, Marston to Stanley, 14 March. 1890; Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 150.

33. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, H. M. Stanley Archives, 1506, Marston to Stanley, 21 May 1873.

34. See Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 117–45; and Berenson, Heroes of Empire, pp. 22–48.

35. Brantlinger, ‘Nineteenth-Century’, p. 573.

36. There are numerous references to Livingstone in Ballantyne’s Black Ivory (New York, Thomas Nelson, 1873). See pp. iii, 65, 134 and 371.

37. Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 44.

38. ‘Christmas Books’, Athenaeum, 4 December 1886, p. 742.

39. ‘Books of Adventure for Boys’, Pall Mall Gazette, 27 November 1886, p. 6.

40. ‘Cast up by the Sea; or, The Adventures of Ned Grey’, Dundee Courier, 4 January 1869, p. 4.

41. ‘Cast up by the Sea’, Saturday Review, 30 January 1869, pp. 156–57.

42. ‘Miscellaneous Literature’, Academy, 31 January 1874, p.114.

43. ‘Literature’, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 13 December 1873, p. 6; ‘Books of the Season’, Bradford Observer, 6 December 1873, p. 6.

44. ‘My Kalulu: Prince, King, and Slave’, Morning Post, 4 December 1873, p. 3.

45. ‘American and Other Travel’, Piccadilly Papers: By a Peripatetic, February 1869, 171–82 (p. 177).

46. ‘My Kalulu’, p. 3.

47. ‘Books of Travel and Adventure’, The Times, 13 December 1888, p. 12.

48. Galton includes a passage from Gordon Cumming, in which he identifies ‘“veldtschoens,” or home-made shoes’ as elements of a ‘Complete Bush-costume’. See Francis Galton, The Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, 4th edn (London: John Murray, 1867), p. 119.

49. Galton, Art of Travel, pp. 94, 173.

50. Galton, Art of Travel, pp. 302, 9.

51. Dane Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, pp. 6–7, 19.

52. For discussion of Roderick Murchison’s role in encouraging the exploration of Africa, see Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 153–88.

53. Felix Driver and Lowri Jones, Hidden Histories of Exploration (London: Royal Holloway, University of London, 2009), p. 5.

54. Stephen Rockel, ‘Decentering Exploration in East Africa’, in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, ed. by Dane Kennedy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 172–94 (p. 172).

55. Driver, Geography Militant, p. 123.

56. Donald Simpson began the process of examining the contributions of intermediaries, which had been ignored by standard histories, in Dark Companions: The African Contribution to the European Exploration of East Africa (London: Elek, 1975).

57. Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, p. 186.

58. In the later part of the nineteenth century, the scale was only getting larger. While the more extensive and militarised expedition party is generally associated with Stanley, Baker was himself involved in this transition; in the early 1870s, while in the employ of the Ottomans, he led what was described at the time as a ‘geographico-military’ expedition to the equatorial Nile Basin to exert Egyptian authority. See ‘Geographical Explorations and Discoveries in 1870’, in American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1870 (New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1871), pp. 317–30 (p. 318).

59. Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, p. 5.

60. Roy Bridges, ‘Europeans and East Africans in the Age of Exploration’, The Geographical Journal, 139.2 (June 1973), 220–32 (p. 223).

61. Roy Bridges, ‘The Historical Role of British Explorers in East Africa’, Terrae Incognitae: The Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries, 14 (1982), 1–21 (p. 4).

62. Ofcasnky, ‘Baker’.

63. Wisnicki, ‘Rewriting Agency’, p. 18.

64. Bridges, ‘Europeans and East Africans’, p. 221; Bridges, ‘Explorers’ Texts’, pp. 67, 76.

65. Wisnicki, ‘Rewriting Agency’, p. 18.

66. Finkelstein, for instance, discusses the editing of Speke’s publication. See Finkelstein, ‘Unraveling Speke’.

67. Credibility and authority has become an important topic in studies of travel writing and exploration. Since travellers reported from distant parts of the globe, the reliability of their witness was, to some extent, based on trust; in their narratives, explorers signalled the credentials (both moral and scientific) on which their authority rested. See Keighren, Withers and Bell, Travels into Print, pp. 11–14, 68–99; and Michael Heffernan, ‘‘A Dream as Frail as Those of Ancient Time’: The In-Credible Geographies of Timbuctoo’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19.2 (April 2001), pp. 203–25.

68. Kennedy, Reinterpreting Exploration, p. 9.

69. Berny Sèbe, ‘The Making of British and French Legends of Exploration, 1921–1914’, in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, ed. by Dane Kennedy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 109–31 (pp. 110, 112).

70. Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1979), p. 3.

71. John Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem Press, 2012), pp. 24–25.

72. Richard Phillips was among the first to focus on the geographical imagination of adventure writing, reading these texts as narrative maps that ‘naturalise constructions of geography and identity’. See Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), p. 14. Narratives of African exploration have also been read as imaginative textual maps. See, for instance, Adrian S. Wisicki, ‘Interstitial Cartographer: David Livingstone and the Invention of South Central Africa’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37.1 (March 2009), 255–71. For a discussion of ‘literary cartography’ more broadly, see Robert T. Tally Jr., ‘Introduction: Mapping Narratives’, in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, ed. by Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 1–11. Tally observes that interest in the relation between ‘space, place, or mapping and literature’ has escalated in the wake of the spatial turn (p. 3). For Tally, ‘mapmaking’ is a central impulse of fictional narrative; ‘although certain narratives may be more ostensibly cartographic than others, all may be said to constitute forms of literary cartography’ (p. 1). For an overview of ‘literary geography’ as an ‘emergent interdisciplinary field’, consisting of diverse critical perspectives, see Neal Alexander’s recent position paper, ‘On Literary Geography’, Literary Geographies, 1.1 (2015), pp. 3–6.

73. Phillips, Mapping Men, p. 3.

74. This use of the frontier is evident, for instance, in Buchan’s Prester John (London: Nelson, 1910) in which African terrain serves as a testing ground for the development of the protagonist, Davie Crawfurd. Similarly, confrontation with African ‘savagery’ provides opportunity for the reinvigoration of British masculinity in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, 1885).

75. Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 254. The phenomenon of ‘imperial masculinity’ has attracted considerable attention in recent decades. Graham Dawson’s important work, for instance, locates ‘exemplary imperial masculinity … at the heart of the British national imaginary right up to 1914’. Focusing on the emergence of the ‘soldier hero’, he explores the ways in which idealized masculinities were constructed and sustained by the popular press and a growing genre of heroic biography. See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 83. More recently, Bradley Deane has revisited the powerful ‘cultural synthesis’ of Empire and notions of manliness, as mediated through popular fiction. Arguing that such literature offers ‘the best chance to discern broad patterns of cultural assumptions’, he investigates the displacement of mid-century ideals by a new hegemonic masculinity constituted under the New Imperialism. See Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1, 18.

76. Tim Jeal, Livingstone, rev. edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 124.

77. Sappho Charney, ‘Bagamoyo (Pwani, Tanzania)’, in International Dictionary of Historic Places: Middle East and Africa, ed. by K. A. Berney, Trudy Ring, and Noelle Watson (Chicago, IL and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1996), pp. 111–15 (p.111).

78. Newman, Imperial Footprints, p. 80; Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1872), pp. 122–23, 244.

79. Richard J. Reid, Warfare in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 115, 112, 122.

80. Reid, Warfare, pp. 119, xi.

81. John Laband, The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War 1880–1881 [2005] (Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), p. 13.

82. Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa 1815–1854 [2001] (Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), p. 5.

83. Laband, Transvaal Rebellion, p. 12.

84. Broadly speaking, ‘moral geography’ refers to ‘the interrelationship of moral and geographical arguments’. See David Matless, ‘Moral Geographies’, in The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edn, ed. by Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts and Sarah Whatmore (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 478–79 (p. 478). Under this umbrella, there have been widely varied investigations of the connections between ethics, place and power. In this article, I use ‘moral geography’ to signal the way ‘narratives assign meaning to places and to relationships among places and peoples’. See Christa J. Olson, ‘‘Raices Americanas’: Indigenist Art, América, and Arguments for Ecuadorian Nationalism’, in Regional Rhetorics: Real and Imagined Spaces, ed. by Jenny Rice (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), pp. 33–50 (p. 38).

85. Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 32.

86. Parsons, King Khama, p. 31.

87. Harold E. Raugh, The Victorians at War, 1815–1914: An Encyclopedia of British Military History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), p. 49.

88. Peter Henshaw, ‘The Origins of the Boer War: The Periphery, the Centre and the ‘Man on the Spot’’, in The International Impact of the Boer War [2001], ed. by Keith Wilson (Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), pp. 8–24 (p. 8).

89. For instance, see G. A. Henty’s With Clive in India (London: Blackie, 1884) and St. George for England (London: Blackie, 1885).

90. Casada, ‘Verney Lovett Cameron’, pp. 212, 210.

91. Casada, ‘Verney Lovett Cameron’, p. 213.

92. Driver, Geography Militant, p. 2.

93. Max Jones, ‘Measuring the World: Exploration, Empire and the Reform of the Royal Geographical Society, c. 1874–93’, in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. by Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 313–36 (pp. 314, 318–30).

94. Harry H. Johnston’s The Man who Did the Right Thing: A Romance of East Africa (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921), is a notable exception.