Debates raged within the Society over the course of rivers and mountains, the boundaries of cities and towns, and the size of the oceans. No less intense were the disputes over who deserved recognition, and the subsequent fame and fortune, for making a discovery. And the discussions often involved the most fundamental questions of morality and human existence: Were newly discovered tribes savages or civilized? Should they be converted to Christianity? Did all of humanity stem from one ancient civilization or from many? The struggle to answer such questions frequently pitted the so-called “armchair” geographers and theoreticians, who pored over incoming data, against the rough-and-tumble explorers, who worked in the field. One official of the Society reprimanded an African explorer for his suppositions, telling him, “What you can do, is state accurately what you saw, leaving it to stay-at-home men of science to collate the data of very many travelers, in order to form a theory.” The explorer Speke, in turn, denounced those geographers “who sit in carpet slippers, and criti cise those who labour in the field.”
Perhaps the most vicious feud was over the source of the Nile. After Speke claimed in 1858 that he had discovered the river's origin, at a lake he christened Victoria, many of the Society's members, led by his former traveling companion Burton, refused to believe him. Speke said of Burton, “B is one of those men who never can be wrong, and will never acknowledge an error.” In September of 1864, the two men, who had once nursed each other back from death on an expedition, were supposed to square off in a public meeting. The London Times called it a “gladiatorial exhibition.” But, as the meeting was about to begin, the gatherers were informed that Speke would not be coming: he had gone hunting the previous day, and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “By God, he's killed himself!” Burton reportedly exclaimed, staggering on the stage; later, Burton was seen in tears, reciting his onetime companion's name over and over. Although it was never known for certain if the shooting was intentional, many suspected, like Burton, that the protracted feud had caused the man who had conquered the desert to take his own life. A decade later, Speke's claim to having discovered the Nile's source would be proved correct.
During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during end less study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns-“sprained brain,” as he called it-he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience). Notoriously, Galton, who like so many of his colleagues was a profound racist, tried to measure levels of intelligence in people and later became known as the father of eugenics.
In another age, Galton's monomania with quantification might have made him a freak. But, as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once observed, “no man expressed his era's fascination with numbers so well as Darwin's celebrated cousin.” And there was no place that shared his fascination more than the Royal Geographical Society. In the 1850s, Galton, who had inherited enough money to enable him to avoid the burden of a conventional career, became a member of the Society and, with its endorsement and guidance, explored southern Africa. “A passion for travel seized me,” he wrote, “as if I had been a migratory bird.” He mapped and documented everything that he could: latitudes and longitudes, topography, animals, climate, tribes. Returning to great fanfare, he received the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal, the field's most prestigious honor. In 1854, Galton was elected to the Society's governing body, on which, for the next four decades, he served in varying capacities, including honorary secretary and vice president. Together, Galton and this collection of men-they were all men until a divisive vote at the end of the nineteenth century admitted twenty-one women-began to attack, as Joseph Conrad put it of such militant geographers, “from 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 persis tently set on unveiling.”
“WHAT MATERIALS are you looking for?” one of the archivists asked me.
I had gone down into the small reading room in the basement.
Bookshelves, illuminated under fluorescent lights, were crammed with travel guides, atlases, and bound copies of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Most of the Society's collection of more than two million maps, artifacts, photographs, and expedition reports had been moved in recent years from what had been called “Dickensian conditions” to climate-controlled catacombs, and I could see staff flitting in and out of them through a side door.
When I told the archivist that I was looking for Fawcett's papers, she gave me a quizzical look. “What is it?” I asked.
“Well, let's just say many people who are interested in Fawcett are a little…” Her voice trailed off as she disappeared into the catacombs. While I was waiting, I skimmed through several accounts of expeditions backed by the Society. One described an 1844 expedition led by Charles Sturt and his second-in-command, James Poole, which searched the Australian desert for a legendary inland sea. “So great is the heat that… our hair has ceased to grow, our nails have become brittle as glass,” Sturt wrote in his diary. “The scurvy shows itself upon us all. We are attacked by violent headaches, pains in the limbs, swollen and ulcerated gums. Mr. Poole became worse and worse: ultimately the skin over his muscles became black, and he lost the use of his lower extremities. On the 14th he suddenly expired.” The inland sea never existed, and these accounts made me aware of how much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success-on tactical errors and pipe dreams. The Society may have conquered the world, but not before the world had conquered its members. Among the Society's long list of those who were sacrificed, Fawcett filled a distinct category: neither alive nor dead-or, as one writer dubbed him, “the living dead.”
The archivist soon emerged from the stacks carrying a half-dozen mottled folders. As she placed them on the table, they released purplish dust. “You'll have to put these on,” she said, handing me a pair of white gloves. After I slipped them over my fingers, I opened the first folder: yellowed, crumbling letters spilled out. On many of the pages were impossibly small, slanting words that ran together, as if written in code. It was Fawcett's handwriting. I took one of the pages and spread it in front of me. The letter was dated 1915 and began “Dear Reeves.” The name was familiar, and I opened one of the books on the Royal Geographical Society and scanned its index. Edward Ayearst Reeves had been the map curator of the institution from 1900 to 1933.