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

³ Middleton, C. T., A New and Complete System of Geography (London, 1779), 11, 241.Google Scholar

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

⁶ Murray, H., Historical Account of Travels and Discoveries in Africa (London, 1818), 1, 29.Google Scholar

⁷ Golding, A., The Excellent and Pleasant work of Julius Solinus Polyhistor (London, 1587, c4.Google Scholar

⁸ Holland, P., The Historic of the World (London, 1601, II, 68. Holland's is the earliest English translation of Pliny's Natural History.Google Scholar

⁹ Barbot, J., ‘A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea’ in Churchill's Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1732), V, 187.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Bowdich, T. E., Mission from Cape Coast Costle to Ashantee (London, 1819). Describing his first impression of the forest, Bowdich wrote: ‘We entered a large forest impervious to the sun; the risings were frequent but gentle, the path, crooked and overgrown… the only inconvenience was the troops of large black ants’. Later, however, the path became ‘a labyrinth of the most capricious wanderings’, frequently blocked by the ‘immense trunks of fallen trees’. ‘The greatest fear of the people [the mission's carriers] was of the spirits of the woods… and the discordant yells in which they rivalled each other to keep up their courage mingled with the howls and screeches from the forest, imposed a degree of horror on this dismal scene, which associated it with the imagination of Dante’.Google Scholar (Bowdich, op. cit., 19–22).Google Scholar

¹¹ Denham, D., Clapperton, H. and Oudney, W., Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, in the years 2822, 1823 and 1824 (London, 1826). In a letter, written at Bilma, to Warrington, the Consul at Tripoli, Denham, who was on very bad terms with his companions, wrote: ‘I want nothing but something like a companion to make this journey with all its necessary disagreeables one of a pleasure’. P.R.O. F.O. 76/27. Denham to Warrington. 14.1.1823.Google Scholar

¹² P.R.O. C.O. 267/6. Board of Trade to Pitt, 23.1.1758. Pitt had received a suggestion that the English should buy up all the land containing gold on the Gold Coast; the Board of Trade's reply emphasized the weakness of the English position: ‘the British interest…depends chiefly, if not entirely, on the good will and Friendship of the Natives’.Google Scholar

¹³ For an account of this mission derived from a manuscript in the Convent of the Propaganda Fide in Tripoli: Quarterly Review, January 1818 (London), xviii, 375.Google Scholar

¹⁴ In 1619 the English company given the exclusive right to trade in Guinea and ‘Binney’ (Benin) sent a succession of ships up the Gambia, the last of which had Captain Richard Jobson as supercargo. In 1660 another English company was formed and another expedition, led by Colonel Vermuyden, was sent up the Gambia. The last attempt to reach the gold mines of Bambuk by way of the Gambia was organized by the Royal African Company in 1720. The Gambia in its upper reaches is too shallow to be navigable; none of these expeditions penetrated more than 300 miles into the interior.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Macpherson, D., Annals of Commerce (London, 1805), IV, 153.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Bankes, T., A New, Royal, Authentic and Complete System of Universal Geography (London, 1787), Preface.Google Scholar

¹⁷ D'Anville's two essays on African geography— ‘Dissertation sur les sources du NiL’and ‘Mémoire concernant les rivières de l'intérieur de I'Afrique’—were printed in Mémoires de Litterature de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, XXVI (Paris, 1759).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Johnson, G. W., A History of English Gardening (London, 1829), 147.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Bruce, J., Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1805), v, 269.Google Scholar

²⁰ Bruce, J.,Google ScholarIbid., I, 70.

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

²² Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to his Son, Letter XC.Google Scholar

²³ The ‘noble savage’ of eighteenth-century fiction was usually of American stock; Defoe went to some pains to point Out that Man Friday was not a negro. But by the middle of the century, some writers were finding in Africans images of pristine virtue. Thus Thomas Day in his poem The Dying Negro, the third edition of which was significantly dedicated to Rousseau, could rhapsodize What though no rosy tints adorn their face, No silken tresses shine with flowing grace Yet of ethereal temper are their souls And in their veins the tide of honour rolls.Google ScholarThe Dying Negro (London, 1775), 7.Google ScholarOn the cult of the Noble Savage: Fairchild, H. N., The Noble Savage (New York, 1928).Google Scholar

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

²⁵ The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (London, 1782), 1, xvi. The works both of Sancho and of Equiano achieved a remarkable measure of success; Sancho's Letters was reckoned to have obtained a subscription list of a length unprecedented since the first appearance of the Spectator over half a century earlier, while Equiano's Life, first published in 1789, had reached its eighth edition five years later. A detailed analysis of the names appearing on the subscription lists of eighteenth century works on Africa would provide a fairly accurate gauge of the degree of interest in Africa to be found in English society.Google Scholar

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

²⁷ One Christian sect, the Swedenborgians, had a direct interest in Africa; according to Swedenborg, Africans possessed a strange capacity to receive the heavenly doctrine, those living in the centre of the Continent having been taught by angels the doctrine of the New Jerusalem.Google ScholarOn Swedenborgians in Sierra Leone: Lindroth, S. ‘Adam Afzelius’, Sierra Leone Studies (Freetown, 1955).Google Scholar

²⁸ Thomson, T., History of the Royal Society (London, 1812), 351.Google Scholar

²⁹ The Society of Dilettanti had been founded in 1734 by a group of rich young men with an interest in Italy and the arts. Cust, L., History of the Society of Dilettanti (London, 1898).Google Scholar

³⁰ Dawson, W. R., The Banks Letters (London, 1958), 151, 220.Google Scholar

³¹ On the scientific interests of members of the Saturday's Club: Boahen, A. A., ‘The African Association, 1788–1805’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, v (Legon, 1961).Google Scholar

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

³³ Proceedings of the African Association, 1, 8.Google Scholar

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