The active life: the explorer as biographical subject

‘There can be no question’, wrote the geographer Clements Markham in 1896, ‘that a study of the heroic deeds of explorers, [and] the contemplation of their high qualities … excite a feeling of sympathy which is ennobling to those who are under its influence, and is an education in itself’. No question, that is, if you were convinced that exploration was a noble calling made yet more so by its associations with nation and empire. In this eminently Victorian view the explorer was worthy of a place in the pantheon of national heroes, in its various forms: a resting place in Westminster Abbey, a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

If Clements Markham himself is remembered today, it is not usually in heroic mode: his grandiose vision of a new age of imperial exploration died with Captain Scott in the Antarctic. But if there is any doubt as to the enduring appeal of the lives of explorers, just visit your local bookshop. Not long ago it was Ernest Shackleton season, then Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay took their turn, and now Sir John Franklin has rejoined captains Cook and Scott on the shelves. In truth, they never really went away: like that trusty pair Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone, the lives of celebrated explorers continue to offer an inexhaustible fund of material for authors and publishers, not to mention collectors of memorabilia from boots to biscuits.

There is something about explorers which makes them irresistible to biographers. That ‘something’ is often described in terms of character, especially qualities of resolve, resourcefulness, and charisma. These things certainly matter when it comes to accounting for the fortunes of exploring expeditions: but in themselves they don't explain the literary form and enduring popularity of the explorer's biography as a genre. More pertinent are the creative possibilities suggested by the theme of voyaging into the unknown: the life as a journey, an escape, a quest, a mission and—above all—a martyrdom. Many of the greatest British explorers—Livingstone, Scott, and Franklin—have been cast over and over again as martyrs to the cause, though which cause exactly is never quite certain.

Writing the active life

The contest between the worldly knowledge of the explorer and the theoretical knowledge of the philosopher is one of the great themes of the modern literature on exploration. In some respects it has a still more a venerable pedigree, recalling Aristotle's distinction between the active life and the contemplative life. With the advent of modern scientific exploration, the hardy navigator and the adventurous explorer became what Joseph Conrad once called ‘conquerors of truth’. In this view, the true shape of the world, beyond the reach of the mere scholar, was made visible only through the act of travelling into the unknown. In the age of Cook and Livingstone the figure of the ‘armchair geographer’, languidly discoursing on theoretical geography from the comfort of his salon or study, was thus the object of much derision. And reading the harrowing contemporary tales of hazardous voyages through ice-ridden seas or across uncharted deserts, it is not difficult to see why.

But this contrast between manly explorer and sedentary scholar, the active and the contemplative life, needs to be understood in rhetorical rather than literal terms. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the culture of exploration was thoroughly entangled with the business of writing, publishing, and image-making. A voyage of exploration only really counted as such when it was accompanied by a narrative of some sort—a diary, letter, newspaper report, or journal—preferably accompanied by maps or charts. In fact, the explorer's task was not so much to erase the vacant spaces on the map, but to re-imagine them. As the imaginative geographies of the north-west passage, the southern continent, and the interior African sea came and went, new ones were put in their place. The iconography of ‘darkest Africa’, for example, owed much to the writings of explorers, notably Livingstone, Stanley, John Hanning Speke, and Samuel Baker.

‘I do not wish well to discoveries, for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery’: so wrote Dr Johnson, on hearing news of Captain John Phipps's Arctic expedition in 1773. The business of discovery has always had its critics, who have unravelled the heroic narratives of exploration so carefully crafted by the spin-merchants of the day. The sensational publicity surrounding voyages in search of the north-west passage, the quest for the sources of the Nile, or the race for the south pole provided ample material for satire and burlesque. And criticism of a sterner kind, whether in the name of science, ethics, or politics, has frequently resulted in the character of the explorers themselves being subject to close scrutiny. While the cult of the explorer as hero has had a long life, ventures of exploration have always been contested, if not ridiculed.

In an essay originally published in 1854 Thomas Carlyle described a man's actions as ‘the most complete and indubitable stamp of him’ (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 1888). He went on to say, however, that without the guide of portraits and letters, actions ‘are in themselves so infinitely abstruse a stamp … as to be oftenest undecipherable with certainty’ (ibid.). And Carlyle's treatment of the ‘man of letters’ in his celebrated essay ‘Heroes and the heroic in history’ enthroned the act of writing itself as king: ‘whatever be the outward form of the thing (bits of paper, as we say, and black ink), is it not verily, at bottom, the highest act of a man's faculty that produces a Book?’

The British have long been avid readers of travel narratives, adventure fiction, and the lives of explorers. The burgeoning discourse of exploration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took a wide variety of forms. The Dictionary of National Biography had more than its fair share of explorers, and its editor, Leslie Stephen, drew particular attention to the inclusion of numerous unsung naval heroes. Many travel narratives presented the exploits of the explorer in precisely the way an exemplary biography might treat a life: the preparation for the journey (the childhood phase), the trials and tribulations of the expedition itself (the battle of life), and finally—in the happier versions—the experience of return (serene old age). Equally, the metaphor of the ‘battle of life’ could be conceived as itself a kind of expedition, or campaign, in which one's character was perpetually tested. Carlyle put it rather bluntly: ‘No man lives without jostling and being jostled … in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world’. If we are to believe what his biographers tell us about his determination and irascibility, Dr Livingstone was one of the biggest elbowers of them all. In the final years of his search for the source of the Nile, he is represented as being in almost perpetual motion, unless brought down by illness, in constant war with the elements. As one biography, entitled Livingstone the Pathfinder, puts it: ‘He revelled in the sheer joy of walking, that toned his body to splendid trim and strengthened his muscles till they were cable-like in their tireless strength’.

One of Leslie Stephen's own essays, ‘In praise of walking’, presents a warm-heartedly muscular defence of the art of pedestrianism, less as an alternative to contemplation than its necessary accompaniment. In his youth Stephen was an enthusiastic mountain climber; he served as president of the Alpine Club and made notable contributions to the mid-Victorian literature of mountaineering. In these writings he portrayed the act of climbing as a particular kind of exploration, enabling the immensity of nature to be experienced first hand: in the process the magnitude of a mountain was measured ‘in terms of muscular exertion instead of bare mathematical units’. In place of the distant observation from the comfort of the valleys, the mountaineer had a much more embodied sense of the landscape:

He can translate the 500 or 1,000 feet of snow-slope into a more tangible unit of measurement. To him, perhaps, they recall the memory of a toilsome ascent, the sum beating on his head for five or six hours, the snow returning the glare with still more parching effect; a stalwart guide toiling all the weary time, cutting steps in hard blue ice, the fragments hissing and spinning down the long straight grooves in the frozen snow till they lost themselves in the yawning chasm below; and step after step taken along the slippery staircase, till at length he triumphantly sprang upon the summit of the tremendous wall that no human foot had ever scaled before. (‘Regrets of a mountaineer’)

In this view, the physical exertion involved in exploration cultivated not only a different kind of knowledge of the world, but a different sense of self; and yet both could only be fully realized through the act of writing. The implications for the writing of explorers' biographies can be considered further by looking at the lives of two Victorian explorers of Africa: William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) and Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904).

Winwood Reade: the literary explorer

With Winwood Reade we begin at the end—his resting place in the churchyard at Ipsden, Oxfordshire. A huge cross, leaning precariously over an unkempt grave, bears the following inscription:

William Winwood, eldest son of William Barrington and Elizabeth Reade of this Parish. Born December 26 1838, died April 24 1875. Possessed of great abilities and indomitable energy he shortened his days by repeated journeys of exploration in West Africa and by excessive literary labors at home. He was the first white man who visited the cannibal tribe of Fans and the first to ascertain the source of the Niger. In the Ashantee campaign he was always in the front. He shared in the defence of ‘Abrakrampa’, fought in the ranks of the 42nd Highlanders at the great battle of ‘Amoaful’ and was the only civilian present at the capture of Comassie.

Tombstone inscriptions are not, in truth, the most reliable witnesses: and the story of Reade's life as told here casts a veil over, without entirely obscuring, his own sense of failure. The scale of the memorial seems almost designed to compensate for another more painful memory: that of Reade's estrangement from the conventional pieties of his upbringing, sealed by the blistering assault on orthodox Christianity in his best-known work, The Martyrdom of Man.

Biographies of marginal figures such as Winwood Reade can tell us something important about the worlds they negotiated and failed to win: and in the context of exploration, marginality—even failure—can actually be a virtue. Reade began his literary career as the author of romantic novels, embracing sensational fiction as a means of making his name; and when this failed, he tried much the same thing in the worlds of anthropology and geography. His contribution to the literature of exploration took the form of a series of books and essays devoted to his African travels, which meander between formal narrative and imaginative fiction. In The African Sketch-Book (1873) the act of writing itself is really the principal subject of the book. For Reade depicts himself as a writer first, a traveller second; his narrative is thus sub-titled ‘adventures of an author in search of a reputation’. At the climax of the most significant part of his wanderings in west Africa he finally reaches the banks of the Niger: ‘Henceforth’, he writes, ‘no one can say I am only a writer; for I have proved myself a man of action as well as a man of thought’. Reade's claim to be living the active life was too knowing to be taken literally. Having arrived at his destination, the first thing he looked for was his copy of Herodotus. Here exploration was primarily a literary event.

In narrating the story of African exploration Reade was constantly drawn to the figure of martyrdom, which was of course fundamental to the heroic reputation of explorers from Mungo Park to Livingstone. It provided Reade with a way of making sense of his own experience, as both writer and explorer: this was equally the fate of the aspiring novelist bruised by reviewers, the would-be anthropologist condemned (along with his friend Richard Burton) for speaking the truth, the explorer vainly seeking to penetrate the mysteries of the dark continent and, not least, the freethinker whose martyrdom is the subject of his last novel, The Outcast. Reade's most famous work, a poetic evolutionary narrative of world history centred on Africa, cast The Martyrdom of Man on a much broader stage. Dismissed as ‘thoroughly worthless’ and ‘indecent’ when it first appeared in 1872, the book was later hailed as a masterpiece by readers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Cecil Rhodes, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

In itself Reade's disenchantment with orthodoxy was unremarkable: his understanding of evolutionary science was limited, and his agnosticism was expressed more cogently by Leslie Stephen, among others. But the manner and consequences of his attack on Christianity led later secularists to describe him as a martyr to the cause of freethought. Visitors to his spartan London lodgings in the spring of 1875 found him estranged from his family, weak, and depressed, until his final days spent in serene comfort in Wimbledon. It is surely not going too far to describe the manner of his end as an active death, at least in so far as it was interpreted by Reade and by his freethinking friends as the outcome of a choice, a necessary condition of martyrdom. When he signed the publisher's contract for his last work, The Outcast, he knew he was approaching the end of the story: as he wrote to a friend, ‘After all my African fevers and dysenteries safely got over I am to die of consumption like the heroine in a novel’.

Henry Morton Stanley: the travelling correspondent

Unlike Winwood Reade, Henry Morton Stanley lived to write his own memoirs—or rather the collection of writings which were published posthumously by his wife, Dorothy, as The Autobiography of Henry M. Stanley (1909). The book offered such a charitable picture of its subject that it is commonly regarded as more or less fictional; but then the same was often said, during Stanley's own lifetime, of much of his travel writing. Stanley never forgot his training as a newspaper reporter, a trade he first learned in America in the mid-1860s. The proprietor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, was a leading exponent of what later came to be known as ‘the new journalism’, associated at the time with sensational scoops. It seems that had Livingstone been found before Stanley had reached Zanzibar in 1871, he would have been ordered to turn round and head for the Himalayas, to ‘find’ the Dalai Lama. On his return from Africa in 1877, Gordon Bennett—not satisfied with having merely an African river and a mountain named after him—suggested Stanley now set off for the north pole. Stanley declined the request, and offered his services to the king of the Belgians instead: one wonders how things might have turned out otherwise.

Like Reade, Stanley found his way through his writing, at first as a journalist, later as an explorer and novelist; unlike his contemporary, he achieved fame and fortune in his lifetime. One obituarist described Stanley, astutely, as the ‘Napoleon of African travellers’. Of his second African expedition, Sidney Low wrote: ‘No single individual has revolutionized so large a tract of the earth's surface, with only a handful of armed men and a slender column of camp-followers’. But if Stanley was a man of action, he was also a master of the written word. His narrative style, as much as his methods of exploration, embodied the cultural style of the new imperialism—bold, brash, and sensational. The tone was set in How I Found Livingstone (1872), in which he styled himself as a ‘travelling correspondent’ in search of a scoop, an interloper among ‘gentlemen geographers’. In the process of exploring and colonizing Africa, the written word was an instrument to be harnessed, books were weapons of conquest rather than objects of contemplation. As The Times had it in its obituary notice, ‘his pen moved over the paper like an army across the battle field’.

What makes Stanley such an intriguing subject for the biographer, apart from his prodigious output as a writer, are his conscious efforts to re-fashion his own identity over the course of his life. Born John Rowlands, the illegitimate son of a Welsh pauper, he adopted the name Henry Morton Stanley following his emigration to America in 1858. Constantly re-inventing himself thereafter, he tried to suppress public knowledge of his true origins. Quizzed about rumours of his lowly upbringing at a famous British Association meeting in 1872, Stanley denied that he was anything but American. This denial incensed his critics, including Francis Galton, who plotted with the president of the British Association, the physiologist William Carpenter, to discredit Stanley in the eyes of the public. There was much more at stake here than mere personal jealousy. Galton's work on the principles of heredity provided a new basis for the defence of the scientific establishment. His argument that intellectual ability ran in families was altogether more convenient if you were a Galton rather than a Stanley—or a Rowlands.

Stanley's true identity, personally and professionally speaking, was to remain a matter of contention right up until his death. Although he insisted on his American roots, Stanley did not actually have the papers to prove it until 1885, when he quietly returned to America in order to become naturalized as a citizen (apparently in an effort to secure his rights as an author). Seven years later, having married into British society, Stanley was re-naturalized as a British citizen, this time—it seems—to enable him to stand for election to the House of Commons. If this suggests Stanley's political allegiances were pliable, the matter of his ethical and spiritual commitments was still more uncertain. His appropriation of any and every cause in the service of African exploration gave ready ammunition to his many critics, eager to exploit the gulf between rhetoric and reality.

Stanley's style as an author profoundly blurs the distinction between narratives of travel and narratives of the self. In How I Found Livingstone, for example, he unashamedly acknowledges that ‘Ego is first and foremost in this book’. This opened the way for both adulation and condemnation, as reflected in the wide spectrum of contemporary responses to his reputation as an explorer. From the moment news reached England of his famous encounter with Dr Livingstone in 1871, the greeting ‘Mr Stanley, I presume?’ was the question on everyone's lips. Thereafter the true identity and real character of the explorer provided much material for burlesque treatment, as reflected in the work of Francis Burnand, editor of Punch and author of A New Light Thrown Across Darkest Africa. In another Burnand production, How I Found Stanley, the narrator follows the logic of Stanley's quests to find Livingstone and Emin to an absurd conclusion: ‘Suppose Stanley should have the misfortune to lose himself? I saw my road at once. I would go and find Stanley. And then somebody else could come out to find me. Then some one to find him, and so on. In the course of time, one-half of the world would be finding out the other half. This is the law of progress.’

Armchair geography

‘The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.’ So wrote Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception (1954). It's difficult to imagine a statement less likely to appeal to explorers, past or present. The explorer leads the active life and, as we are often told, actions speak louder than words. But the history of modern exploration is also a history of word-smithing and image-making, much of it done indoors, some of it probably from armchairs. Acts of exploration do not come to us unvarnished, as it were, spontaneously and directly: they are always mediated in some way, if not by the act of authorship itself, then through the labours of others—sponsors, patrons, reporters, publishers, and image-makers. And in the modern era, the personality of the explorer itself provides endless material for public consumption. To understand the lives of explorers we have also to understand the culture which produces them and which continues to sustain them.

Felix Driver