Please show me a detailed map of Explorer Mary Kingsley's travels?

Answer 1

Plz find map for this at:

http://www.loe.org/series/discovery_women/kingsley.php



Very good data available at following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Henrietta_Kingsley

http://www.royalafricansociety.org/history/history/mary_kingsley

http://africanhistory.about.com/library/biographies/blbio-marykingsley.htm



For others who do not want to go to links and want to read here only:

In 1897 Mary Kingsley had completed her two momentous journeys to West Africa and spoke of the need for an African society that would bring together the disparate interests - academics, friends, political alliances and traders - she had 'collected' since her first visit to Africa in 1892. She envisaged the society as a place where men from all areas of commitment and interest could meet, exchange opinions and formulate alternatives to government policy, which she saw as harmful to traditional African custom and culture. It would also be a forum which would inspire serious ethnological study. Kingsley never organised a meeting; indeed the society would not be formed until a year after her death in 1900 at the age of 38. Granted a Royal Charter in 1968 it would later become known as The Royal African Society.

Mary Henrietta Kingsley was a contradictory character. Born in Highbury, London in 1862, only four days after her parents were married, she grew up as the emotional mainstay of her small family whilst from a young age fostering a deep desire for escape and exploration. Dr George Kingsley, Mary's father, was the subject of both Mary's anger and admiration. He was rarely in England but his books and passion for travel deeply influenced Mary. She devoured books in his library particularly those about 'hostile savages' and 'exotic lands' and took her inspiration from daring male travellers like de Brazza and Du Chaillu. She wrote of her childhood in her first book 'Travels in West Africa', "I had a great amusing world of my own other people did not know or care about - that was the books in my father's library".
Mary Kingsley

In many ways Kingsley was a typically dutiful Victorian woman. She never had a formal education and until she was 30 she dedicated her life to nursing her sick mother and steering her feckless brother Charley through endless difficulties. However, five weeks after her mother died in 1892 (her father had unexpectedly died six weeks earlier) she sailed to Las Palmas in the Canaries and then onto Sierra Leone determined to experience the adventure she craved whilst growing up. It is difficult to get a sense of the real Mary Kingsley from her books alone as she expressed very different motivations in her public writing to those in her private letters and conversations. It is often presumed she went to West Africa to finish her father's book on religious fetish (a book which was, in fact, never started), yet in a private letter a more confidential account was aired. She confessed that she had gone to West Africa "to die" but instead found that "West Africa amused and was kind to me, scientifically interesting and did not want to kill me just then".

This was to mark the beginning of a new era for Kingsley. The actual identity she would choose to inhabit, however, would remain as uncertain as before. She would, all at once assume, a male persona, become an asexual "aunty" to her trader friends, an ethnological bush-worker to those in academic circles and a fierce Victorian lady who despised being cast as a "New Woman" on return from her travels. She adamantly denied wearing trousers as some alleged. "As for encasing the more earthward extremities of my anatomy in trousers", she asserted with mock primness in Travels in West Africa, "I would rather have perished on a scaffold".
Mary Kingsley

Mary Kingsley plunged into West Africa seemingly drawing strength and inspiration from its energy. "Why did I come to Africa?" she wrote, "Why? Who would not come to its twin brother hell itself for all the beauty and charm of it!" She sailed along the coast and walked inland into what is now Nigeria. One of her tasks was to collect specimens for the British Museum, including fresh water fish and plants but she engaged in some slightly more unusual activities whilst she was there and her observations still make for entertaining reading. Her observations on African insects for example: "Undoubtedly one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxis on a Gnostic gem do not pay it the least attention - just keep quiet and hope it will go away - for that is your best chance; you have none in a stand up fight with a good thorough-going African insect".

Or this anecdote recounted at a lecture given at Cheltenham Ladies College: "Once a hippopotamus and I were on an island together, and I wanted one of us to leave. I preferred it should be myself, but the hippo was close to my canoe, and looked like staying, so I made cautious and timorous advances to him and finally scratched him behind the ear with my umbrella and we parted on good terms. But with the crocodile it was different". It was anecdotes like these that made her famous on her return to London.


In December 1894 Mary Kingsley made a second trip to West Africa. She revisited Sierra Leone, went on to Gabon and then up the Ogowe River by steamboat and canoe into the regions that she had read so avidly about, all the time challenging the acceptable limits for female behaviour. It was here she spent time with the Fang people and taught herself to steer an Ogowe canoe. "I got into the slack water again, by some very showy high-class steering. Still steering is not all you hanker after. You want pace and pace I had not so far attained". She was the first woman, or in her words "third Englishman", to ascend the peak of Mount Cameroon.

Knowing that previous explorers puzzled Africans who did not understand why anyone should travel just for sake of it, she travelled as a trader carrying cloth which she sold for rubber and ivory. In this way she financed her journeys and, as a consequence she spent a lot of time with other traders and developed a great respect for them. Later she would defend their reputations against accusations of drunkenness and laziness from press and government alike. "I have no hesitation in saying that in the whole of West Africa, in one week, you would not see one quarter of the amount of drunkenness that you can see on any one Saturday night, say, in the Vauxhall Road in a couple of hours".

These men would become a catalyst to her politicisation and a key to her vision of future British Control in Africa (a subject that would form the focus of her second book West African Studies). In this book she would also air her views on colonial administrators and missionaries, writing disapprovingly of their "White Man's Burden" approach to the African continent. She renamed the colonial enterprise "the Black Man's Burden" and was quickly renamed herself by the Colonial Office, "the most dangerous woman on the other side". This was not surprising considering her comments accusing the authorities of not recognising anthropological approaches, "officialdom says it won't have anything but it's old toys - missionaries, stockbrokers, good intentions, ignorance and maxim guns. We shall see," she threatened in her second book. Her friend the Liverpool trader John Holt said after her death, "Mary Kingsley discovered me and made me think". He became firm allies with Morel, of the Congo Reform Association, and grew increasingly pro-African. They continued the work that Kingsley had begun, behind the scenes politicking and agitating for change in colonial policy.

Mary Kingsley's love of Africa is plainly evident with descriptions of the continent's people and landscape that fill the pages of both her books. "We belonged to the same section of the human race" she wrote of the Fang, "with whom it is better to drink than to fight". Of forest life she concluded, "If you do fall under its spell, it takes all the colour out of other kinds of living". Craving this Africa, whose spell she had certainly fallen under, she recreated a tropical environment in her Kensington home and walked around town with a monkey perched on her shoulder. The next time she would go back to her beloved Africa would be her last. With plans to travel up to West Africa to visit friends and collect more information, she left England in 1899 to nurse Boer prisoners of war in South Africa. She died of enteric fever on June 3rd 1900 in Simonstown, caught whilst nursing typhoid victims in appalling medical conditions.

Who was Mary Kingsley? Intrepid lady traveller, naturalist, nurse, pro-African political campaigner, witty author, dutiful sister and daughter; she was a complex and contradictory personality who achieved remarkable things. A missionary, Mary Slessor, whom Mary Kingsley had met and shared many experiences with on her second trip to Africa, summed up the essence of this 'Victorian woman' when asked to give an account of her. "You may as well tell me to catch the clouds with their ever varying forms, or catch the perfume of our forest jessamine; or the flashes of sunlight on the river. Miss Kingsley cannot be portrayed (she was) a series of surprises, each one tenderer and more surprising than the foregoing. No! There was only one Mary Kingsley".

After her death Alice Stopford-Green, her friend and long time correspondent, revived Mary's idea of the African Society. An initial meeting was held in her parlour in Kensington on the 26th July 1900 with the aim of publicising the "laws and customs of the Africans" in order to promote better understanding.

Answer 2

Likely, but with caution. Old "texts" can prove useful provided one realizes the information contained within them often needs updating, correcting and modernizing in order to reflect newer things that have come to light since publication. There are, however, stagnant resource documents which I would never use without guarding myself against tomfoolery such as a road map circa 1800 or, spiritually speaking, that bible thingy.