The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places
Read The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places Online
Authors: John Keay
John Keay
is the author of about twenty books, all factual, mostly historical, and largely to do with Asia, exploration or Scotland. His first
book stayed in print for thirty years; many others have become classics. A full-time author since 1973, he has also written and presented over 100 documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and has been
a guest lecturer on tour groups. He travels extensively.
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DANGEROUS PLACES
Edited by
John Keay
With a Foreword by Wilfred Thesiger
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
Originally published as
The Robinson Book of Exploration
by Robinson Publishing, 1993
This revised edition was first published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2010
Copyright © John Keay 1993, 2010 (unless otherwise indicated)
The right of John Keay to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library.
UK ISBN 978-1-84901-311-6
1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2
First published in the United States in 2010 by Running Press Book Publishers
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright
Conventions
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
US Library of Congress number: 2009929934
US ISBN 978-0-7624-3845-7
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Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371
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Printed and bound in the EU
Siberia and Alaska
Georg Wilhelm Steller
Stranded on Bering Island
John Dundas Cochrane
The Walk to Moscow
Central and South Asia
Alexander Burnes
Alarms Amongst the Uzbeks
John Wood
On the Roof of the World
Regis-Evariste Huc
Lhasa Beckons
Francis Edward Younghusband
Over the Karakorams
Sven Hedin
At the Source of the Indus
Edmund Hillary
Everest by Storm
Arabia
William Gifford Palgrave
Escape from Riyadh
Charles Montagu Doughty
Desert Days
Harry St John Bridger Philby
The Point of Return
Wilfred Thesiger
To the Empty Quarter for a Drink of Water
West Africa
Hugh Clapperton
The Road to Kano
Heinrich Barth
Arrival in Timbuktu
East and Central Africa
Richard Francis Burton
Not the Source of the Nile
John Hanning Speke
A Glimpse of Lake Victoria
Samuel White Baker
The Reservoir of the Nile
Henry Morton Stanley
Encounters on the Upper Congo
Joseph Thomson
A Novice at Large
Australia
James Cook
Landfall at Botany Bay
Charles Sturt
Escape from the Outback
William John Wills
Death at Coopers Creek
John McDouall Stuart
To See the Sea
North America
Alexander Mackenzie
First Crossing of America
Meriwether Lewis
Meeting the Shoshonee
South America
Alexander von Humboldt
Eating Dirt in Venezuela
Henry Savage Landor
Iron Rations in Amazonia
Hiram Bingham
The Discovery of Machu Picchu
Arctic
John Ross
Four Years in the Ice
John Franklin
Living off Lichen and Leather
Fridtjof Nansen
Adrift on an Arctic Ice Floe
Robert Edwin Peary
The Pole is Mine
Antarctic
Ernest Henry Shackleton
Farthest South
Roald Amundsen
The Pole at Last
Robert Falcon Scott
In Extremis
by Wilfred Thesiger
The concept of exploration has always meant the geographical discovery of areas of the earth previously unknown to the explorer himself and to the society to which he belonged.
In the past, important exploration was carried out by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Polynesians, for example. In modern times, geographical exploration almost inevitably means exploration by
Europeans, who have accomplished this on a vast scale, worldwide. The knowledge of their discoveries has been widely disseminated by modern techniques.
Now, with virtually the whole surface of the world surveyed and mapped, journeys in this sense, however arduous, can no longer be described as exploration.
Except for the South Pole, explorers have usually penetrated areas already inhabited or travelled over by other human beings; this has often constituted the greatest risk to themselves. Others
with no previous connection with these regions and their inhabitants may well have been there, which means in a sense that the areas had already been explored.
An example of this was when, in Western eyes, the source of the Nile was unknown and its discovery was regarded as the final challenge of exploration. Credit for this discovery was justifiably
given to Speke, though in reality Arabs from a far-distant land had already penetrated there with the object of collecting slaves and ivory. Their knowledge of this land was invaluable to Speke,
Burton, Grant and other contemporary explorers.
Until recently, explorers travelled on foot with porters or with animal transport, or in sailing boats and canoes and, throughout their journeys, could only rely on themselves, their very
whereabouts at any time unknown to their sponsors until they either returned or failed to do so. Today, such geographical exploration as is left has inevitably been carried out with mechanized
transport; radio communication has also enabled the expedition members to keep in continuous contact with their base. In some cases they have even known that, in a crisis, an aircraft might come to
their assistance.
It has been my good fortune that, when I travelled in the Danakil country and in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, no other means of travel was possible than that employed by their inhabitants. In
Arabia this resulted in the very close personal relationship with my Arab companions which gave me the five most memorable years of my life.
Wilfred Thesiger
It is as well to be wary of the word “exploration”. Today all manner of racial, colonial and Euro-centric conceits cling to it; even in its heyday it was used
sparingly. Captain Cook, sometimes called the greatest of explorers, made “voyages of discovery”, not exploration; Bruce, Speke and Barth also made “discoveries”, others
were mostly content with “travels”, “journeys”, or in the case of Doughty and Burton mere “wanderings”. Exploration was too big a word; “explorer”
was not the sort of title a traveller had printed on his visiting card. It presumed too much; had the world really been so ignorant about the tract he claimed to have explored? Had he performed
that exhaustive investigation which exploration implied? And what about the people who inhabited the place? Were they also totally ignorant of their surroundings and incapable of contributing to
their topography?
“Exploration” had in fact a greater currency amongst its armchair arbiters in the Geographical Societies of Europe than it did amongst their emissaries in the field. They needed a
noun to describe and substantiate the activities of these emissaries and hence the word was adopted. Denoting the “action of exploring foreign lands”, it first appears in 1823 according
to the Oxford English Dictionary; it was very much an English invention.
By any reckoning the nineteenth-century British contribution – Scottish quite as much as English – to our knowledge of the world’s less accessible lands was commensurate with
the universal and preponderant character of the British empire. The opportunities for filling in the blank spaces fell almost exclusively to the British in Australia, predominantly to the British
in Africa, and generously to the British in North America, Arabia, Antarctica and Central Asia. All were explored during the period 1815–1914, the great age of what quickly became known as
“exploration” and the main focus of this anthology. It began with the end of the Napoleonic Wars; demobilization released a host of young officers like Clapperton and Cochrane who,
despairing of advancement and adventure in the services, looked elsewhere for a challenge; simultaneously the Admiralty, as it cast about for a peacetime role, hit on ideas like testing its ships
and men in a renewed search for the North West Passage.