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The European approach to The interior of Africa in the eighteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Robin Hallett
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Abstract

By the middle of the sixteenth century, Europeans had made themselves aware of the broad outlines of the Continents of Asia, Africa and America. Two hundred years later many of the most striking facts of the geography of the great land-masses had been revealed. In Asia, Siberia had been traversed, China mapped, and Tibet visited, while a vigorous trade was maintained with all the countries of the Eastern Seas. Most of the coast and many of the great lakes and rivers of the Americas had been charted, and flourishing European communities established from Lima to Quebec. Far more was known of Africa than its coastline: a large part of Ethiopia had been visited during the era of Portuguese influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century; Catholic missionaries had worked in the Eastern Sudan in the first decade of the eighteenth century; the Moorish geographers, Idrisi and Leo Africanus, both of whose works were constantly used by European cartographers, provided a succinct account of the citier and states of the Sahara and the Sudan; on the Upper Senegal the French had by 1750 successfully maintained for half a century a trading post over four hundred miles from the sea; in Southern Africa individual adventurers had penetrated deep into the hinterland of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and of the Dutch settlement at the Cape.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 1963 , pp. 191 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1963

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References

1 Proceedings of the African Association (London, 1810), 1, 211–12.Google ScholarFor a more modern version of the same view, Lucas, C. P., A Historical Geography of the British Colonies. III: West Africa (Oxford, 1913), 8–9. Lucas ascribed Europe's ignorance of Africa to ‘the geographical configuration and natural features of Africa which makes it singularly difficult of entry whether by land or by sea’.Google Scholar

2 It needs to be remembered that West Africa was not the only part of the tropical world where Europeans died in large numbers. Bengal, Bencoolen in Sumatra, Batavia in Java, some of the West Indian islands, part of the coast of Central America, where the Spaniards had named one of the rivers Rio de Morte, all had sinister reputations. But the West Coast of Africa surpassed them all in its tale of mortality. For this difference two reasons, as the leading English authority on tropical diseases, Dr James Lind, suggested, could be given: the lack of salubrious hill stations such as other tropical lands enjoyed, and the inferior living conditions of Europeans in their factories, forts or hulks along the coast.Google ScholarLind, James, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (London, 1771).Google Scholar

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4 Other Systems of Geography were compiled by Bowen (1747), Fenning (1765), Miller (1782) and Bankes (1787). Africa was well covered in all these works; thus in Bowen's 1800 folio-sized double-columned pages, 125 are given up to Africa, 245 to America, 317 to Asia and the rest to Europe.Google Scholar

5 The English poet, Leigh Hunt, while on a voyage to Italy about 1820, caught sight of the coastline of Africa. ‘The first sight of Africa is an achievement …; “Africa”, they [the passengers] look at it and repeat the words, till the whole burning and savage territory with its black inhabitants and its lions, seems put in their possession.’ Autobiography (London, 1850), II, 285.Google Scholar

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21 In the 1780's a young Frenchman, Golberry, went out to Senegal as A.D.C. to the Governor. Golberry became an ardent advocate of expansion in Africa, but found that the Government at Versailles had no interest in such a policy, an indifference that seemed to Golberry the more inexcusable, because, as he wrote later, 'our rivals the English had just gained a vast accession of glory from the last voyages of Captain Cook. His achievement should have excited the emulation of France to whom her establishments in Africa presented the most eligible opportunities of attaining considerable discoveries in the interior’.Google Scholarde Golberry, S. M. X., Travels in Africa (London, 1803), 1, 3.Google Scholar

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24 Blumenbach, J. F. (1752–1840) deserves to be remembered as one of the foremost advocates of a more rational approach to Africa. He spent most of his life at the University of Göttingen and contributed to many fields of science, being especially remembered as the founder of modern ethnology. He collected a small library of works by negro authors; a study of these works led him to express his conviction that ‘there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth as the Negro’.Google ScholarBlumenbach, J. F., Anthropological Treatises (London, 1865), 312.Blumenbach also possessed a detailed knowledge of African geography. In the 1790's he did much to publicize the work of the African Association in Germany; he introduced to Banks two young men, Frederick Hornemann and J. L. Burckhardt, who were to win fame in the Association's service. He stands indeed at the head of the German movement for the exploration of Africa.Google ScholarPlischke, H., Johann Frederich Blumenbachs Einfluss auf die Entdeckungsreisenden seltzer Zeit. Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, Dritte Folge, No. 20 (Göttingen, 1937).Google Scholar

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26 It is worth noting that more books with Africa as their subject were published in the years 1785–9 than in any previous decade. Apart from the writings of the Abolitionists, these years saw the appearance of accounts of travels in Egypt by Savary and Volney, in South Africa by Sparrman and Paterson, in Morocco by Chenier, and in West Africa by Brisson, Isert and Norris.Google Scholar

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32 Though Sir Joseph Banks rightly came to be regarded as the life and soul of the African Association, there is some evidence to suggest that the original idea of the Association first came from Beaufoy. Writing of Beaufoy after his death in 1795, Rennell, the Association's geographer, pointed out that ‘the researches in Africa’ were ‘a path of his own chosing: a path which, more than any other person, he had contributed to open and to render smoothe’. Proceedings of the African Association (London, 1810), 1, 441. The election of Beaufoy as secretary and the energy and enthusiasm which he put into the work would also tend to suggest that he played the most active part in founding the Association. Beaufoy was a Londoner, a Quaker and a Member of Parliament; it is possible that he was first led to turn his thoughts to Africa by his acquaintance with members of the Quaker Committee established in 2783 to work for ‘the discouragement of the Slave Trade’.Google Scholar

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35 Oliver, R. and Fage, J. D., A Short History of Africa, 141.Google Scholar

35 A detailed study of the membership of the African Association provides the most accurate impression of the quality of interest in African exploration. The Association was from the start a deliberately exclusive body; in the forty-three years of its existence less than two hundred and thirty individuals were admitted to membership. Of the ninety members enrolled in the first two years, the greater number were either aristocrats who could afford to patronize learning and research or wealthy professional men and scholars; the wealthiest Abolitionists also became members but they were always in a minority and none of them achieved a position of obvious influence in the councils of the Association. In a forthcoming work, The Records of the African Association, edited for the Royal Geographical Society, I have included a list of all the members of the Association with brief biographical notes.Google Scholar

36 On Banks's contacts with Africa before 1788: Boahen, op. cit.Google Scholar

37 Proceedings of the African Association, 1, 258.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 1, 205.

39 Ibid., 1, 252.

40 African Association, General Meetings Minute Book, 26 May 1792. The original minute books of the African Association are in the University Library, Cambridge, with photostat copies in the Library of the Royal Geographical Society, London.Google Scholar

41 The story of the abortive Bambuk consulate may be pieced together from the following sources. (1) Letters of Beaufoy to Banks: Sutro Papers, 225, 231, 314. (Photostat copies of these papers are in the Library of the Royal Geographical Society, London; the numbers are those on the photostat sheets). (2) P.R.O. C.O. 267/10. (3) African Association, Committee Minute Book: 6.3.1796, 24.3.1796, 22.4.1796. (The Minutes for these dates contain copies of much of the correspondence relating to the Consulate). Most of these documents will be printed in the Records of the African Association.Google Scholar

42 Banks' speech is given verbatim in the Association's General Meetings Minute Book, 25.5.1799 and in a slightly abridged form in the printed Proceedings, 11, 1–6.Google Scholar

43 C.O. 2/1. Banks to Liverpool, 8.9.1799.Google Scholar

44 A striking parallel to the ideas expressed by Banks is to be found in an essay written by the French geographer, Malte-Brun, : ‘Coup d'Oil sur les Découvertes Géographiques qui restent à faire’, Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (Paris, 1819), 1, 42–50. Malte-Brun considered that it would be possible to conquer Nigritia (i.e. the Western and Central Sudan) with an army of 2000 men in the space of four years.Google Scholar