Cartographical Quandaries: the Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton's and Speke's Search for the Source of the Nile
Cartographical Quandaries: the Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton's and Speke's Search for the Source of the Nile
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制图困境：伯顿和斯皮克寻找尼罗河源头时知识生产的局限性
DOI：
10.1353/hia.0.0001
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发表时间：
2008
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Adrian S. Wisnicki
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Adrian S. Wisnicki
1858年8月3日，当约翰·汉宁·斯皮克（John Hanning Speke, 1859b:397）看到维多利亚湖的南端时，他意识到他已经发现了白尼罗河的“源头”，白尼罗河是尼罗河最重要的支流，因此“如果不是完全解决，也几乎解决了这个问题，这个问题是几千年来第一个需要确定的地理问题，也是世界上第一批君主想要解开的野心。”斯皮克是一位不知名的探险家，而且他的发现是在1856年至1859年东非探险队的一次单人“飞行之旅”中完成的，那次探险在著名探险家理查德·弗朗西斯·伯顿的指挥下，已经发现了坦噶尼喀湖，这使得斯皮克的成就更加引人注目。正如同时代的人很快断言的那样，斯皮克的发现使历史上对非洲内陆的一系列真实和想象的短途旅行达到了顶峰，并使斯皮克成为从希罗多德、朱利叶斯·凯撒和托勒密到近代的詹姆斯·布鲁斯（1770年“发现”尼罗河第二重要支流青尼罗河源头的苏格兰人）这一系列探险家和地理学家中的佼佼者。德国传教士路德维希·克拉夫特和约翰内斯·雷布曼（他们分别于1848年和1849年“发现”了乞力马扎罗山和肯尼亚的雪山），以及著名的“纸上谈的地理学家”，如W.D.库利、查尔斯·贝克和詹姆斯·M·奎恩。
When he sighted the southern end of Lake Victoria on 3 August 1858, John Hanning Speke (1859b:397) realized that he had discovered the “source” of the White Nile, the most important tributary of the Nile proper, and so had “almost, if not entirely, solved a problem which it has been the first geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the ambition of the first monarchs of the world to unravel.” That Speke was an unknown explorer and that he had made his discovery on a solo “flying trip” during the East African Expedition of 1856-59, which, under the command of the renowned explorer Richard Francis Burton, had already also discovered Lake Tanganyika, made Speke's accomplishment all the more remarkable. As contemporaries soon asserted, Speke's discovery culminated a historical series of excursions, real and imagined, into the interior of Africa and placed Speke at the pinnacle of a line of explorers and geographers that ran from Herodotus, Julius Caesar, and Ptolemy to, in more recent times, James Bruce (the Scotsman who “discovered” the source of the Blue Nile, the second most important tributary of the Nile, in 1770), the German missionaries Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann (who “discovered,” respectively, the snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro in 1848 and Kenya in 1849), and noted “armchair geographers” like W.D. Cooley, Charles Beke, and James M'Queen.