‘Mapping African Exploration’ at the Firestone Library’s gallery goes ‘To the Mountains of the Moon.’
By: Susan Van Dongen
Going back to the times of the Roman centurions, there was a burning desire to find the source of the Nile River. So elusive was this quest, that the very phrase "searching for the source of the Nile" became symbolic for something impractical or unimaginable.
"It was a metaphor for madness," says John Delaney, curator of the Historic Maps Collection at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. He’s put together an expansive, detailed and colorful collection of maps, illustrations, books, letters and photographs of famed European explorers who went into the wilds of Africa and brought back hungered-for information.
The notes and observations made by these men would comprise some of the most exquisite maps ever made. It’s all part of To the Mountains of the Moon: Mapping African Exploration, 1541-1880, on view at the Firestone Library’s main gallery through Oct. 21.
"I wanted to use this title because from Ptolemy’s day, the ‘mountains of the moon’ were thought to be one of the sources of the Nile," Mr. Delaney says. "Somewhere between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo there actually are snow-covered mountains. Presumably they could have been what were, way back in Ptolemy’s time, the mountains he was calling the ‘mountains of the moon.’ (These were) an iconic feature of a lot of early maps of Africa."
The very idea of the moon could have been romanticized and projected upon the dark continent by people of the 18th century, who were experimenting with their new favorite "toy" the telescope. Perhaps regions of Africa were thought to be as remote as the moon. Interestingly, the continent is still a mystery.
"With a land mass of 11.7 million square miles more than three times that of the United States, including Alaska Africa remains today pretty much the enigma it was in the Age of Exploration," Mr. Delaney writes in the catalog that accompanies the exhibit. "But not for cartographic reasons anymore. Initially, after Bartholomew Dias first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, the continent was something for sailors to pass by on their way to India and the Spice Islands of the East Indies.
"Unlike the New World, which Europeans were eagerly colonizing in the 18th century, Africa presented a dangerous and inhospitable landscape, less familiar than the moon, the image of which their telescopes were already beginning to sharpen," he writes.
Along the walls, the exhibit is arranged to show the evolution of the maps, as a continent as well as in sections. Mr. Delaney explains that all the maps were probably taken from atlases, over the centuries broken up by sellers or sold as sheets by the publisher before they were bound. People of means bought these elaborate maps and displayed them in their homes.
"But you need to know how this information was acquired," Mr. Delaney says. "You need people to go into the field, you need explorers."
The gallery’s center and alcove cases showcase the lives and work of some three dozen European explorers who delved into Africa and mapped it out.
"They found the major geographic features such as all the rivers," Mr. Delaney says. "They sought where Timbuktu was, they explored whether the Niger flowed to the Atlantic, they looked for where the Nile began all these kinds of myths and legends. I’ve collected 36 of the most significant explorers and travelers and you can almost vicariously go through every expedition (if you examine their notes and maps).
"Every explorer went home and wrote a book and some of these were best sellers," he adds. "For example, (David) Livingstone’s book (‘Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa’) was one of the best sellers of the Victorian age. Each book had a map, so you can watch them evolve and put the puzzle together."
Mr. Delaney describes the public’s curiosity for this knowledge as akin to our current fascination with exploration. We watch treks to remote places on The Discovery Channel the way our predecessors in previous centuries awaited new books and maps.
One of the loveliest maps in the exhibit is by the Dutch cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu, from 1644, during what Mr. Delaney calls the "golden age of Dutch map making." We see the detailed map of the African continent framed with depictions of native people the explorers encountered, all in vivid garb. The interior is decorated with lions, tigers, elephants and other exotic animals we think of when we think of Africa. Flying fish, sea serpents and other mythic creatures cavort in the oceans and eight magnificent vessels sail in the seas surrounding the continent, all bearing Dutch flags.
"The maps and atlases of the Blaeu family business… marked the epitome of fine engraving and coloring, elaborate cartography and pictorial detail and fine calligraphy the most magnificent work of its type ever produced," Mr. Delaney writes in the exhibit catalog.
What’s interesting from a cartographic point of view, is the way the map makers have identified specific large territories or kingdoms and have outlined these in color, including Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia.
"But these seem to reflect a European sense of nationhood something presumed and projected upon a virtually unexplored canvas more than the actual experience of traders and explorers, who would continue to report on hundreds of smaller ethnic enclaves and political fiefdoms during the next 250 years," Mr. Delaney writes.
Because of their fame, To the Mountains of the Moon focuses on missionary David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley, who found his fellow Brit uttering the famous line, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
One of the most rare items in the exhibit is a handwritten letter by Stanley, dated from Zanzibar, on the West Coast of Africa, Nov. 11, 1874, the night before he embarked on his transcontinental expedition more than 7,000 miles and three years in all. Addressed to Stanley’s New York publisher, J. Blair Scribner, the letter opens with the gushing paragraph, "I am almost choked with my emotions today for I must sit down and write to ever so many people my Farewell."
Stanley wrote about this extraordinary trip in his book Through the Dark Continent, published in 1878.
The bell from Livingstone’s small steamship Pioneer is in the collection. The explorer used the vessel to explore the navigable lower parts of the Rovuma, Zambezi and Shire rivers during his government-sponsored Zambezi Expedition.
Mr. Delaney has dedicated the exhibition to the "worthy, adventurous, devoted men" who went into the field and mapped out the massive continent of Africa. He borrows this phrase from Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), who, of course wrote Heart of Darkness but also wrote an extensive piece for the March 1924 edition of National Geographic magazine as well as the privately printed Geography and Some Explorers. Only 30 copies of the book were printed; and in the Firestone exhibit, Mr. Delaney is showing "number 10" of those 30 editions, signed by the author.
"He ruminates about geography and explorers as well as his interest in Africa," Mr. Delaney says.
Conrad is supposedly thinking about an African map of the 18th century, and the "white spaces" where the environs and people are still unknown.
"And it was Africa, the continent of which Romans used to say, ‘Some new thing was always coming,’ that got cleared of the dull, imaginary wonders of the dark ages, which were replaced by exciting spaces of white paper. Regions unknown!," Conrad writes. "My imagination could depict to itself there, worthy adventurous, devoted men nibbling at the edges, attacking from the north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling."
"These are the men who did just that," Mr. Delaney says. "They attacked from north and south, east and west. And they converged on the continent over the period covered by the exhibition to create the maps, to fill in the white spaces with the truth, rather than what was imagined."
To the Mountains of the Moon: Mapping African Exploration, 1541-1880 is on view in the main gallery at the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University, 1 Washington Road, Princeton. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-5 p.m. Curatorial tours July 1 and Sept. 9, 4 p.m. (609) 258-3184; http://www.princeton.edu/rbsc/department/maps/