The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia by Dane Kennedy (review)

Like many of the explorers about whom he writes, Kennedy does not open entirely unknown vistas in his study of nineteenth-century British exploration in Africa and Australia. Others have been there before. Although Kennedy’s comparative approach is novel, and several of the insights that he presents are fresh and revealing, what makes his book particularly important is its engagement with two developments in contemporary historical treatments of exploration.

One of these developments is a recent tendency to rehabilitate the reputations of nineteenth-century explorers in something like the heroic terms in which they portrayed themselves. Kennedy counters this tendency in part by noting, as others have, the links between exploration and aggressive imperialism and by emphasizing the brutal use of force by such later figures as Henry Morton Stanley. Much more interestingly, he describes his subjects’ private awareness of their own weakness within the physical and human environments that they faced, and he demonstrates their comprehensive dependence on indigenous peoples. Until late in the century, European explorers in Africa avoided violent conflict and sought accommodation with African authorities because they had no other choice. Even after the revolution in firepower that made violence more feasible, dependence on Africans for voluntary labor, local knowledge, political protection, and sustenance continued. Australia was significantly different in many respects, but explorers clearly depended on Aboriginal peoples for specialized knowledge and skills. Moreover, they could readily be stopped in their tracks by a hostile local population.

The other development to which Kennedy responds is the current academic interest in the history of public geographical imaginaries. He argues that, in the nineteenth century, exploration was consciously organized and presented to the public as a “modern” and “scientific” activity, modeled on the maritime mapping of the previous century. Explorers and their sponsors conceptually deconstructed previous geographical and ethnographic knowledge on the grounds that it was unscientific, thereby essentially creating many of the blank spaces on the map to which the book’s title refers. The importance of presenting a scientific image often caused explorers to bring with them more instruments than they could use or safely transport. When they published their narratives, they disguised their incorporation of information obtained from local people. This self-presentation often belied a reality in which local knowledge was essential to the success, and often the survival, of even the most “scientific” of explorers.

Kennedy’s decision to focus exclusively on British exploration is puzzling, since many of the factors that he emphasizes were clearly transnational. He acknowledges the frequent presence of Germans among the “British” explorers whom he discusses, but he limits his consideration of the phenomenon to a brief, conventional explanation of why they were there: The Germans had better training in technical fields but more opportunities under British auspices. He pays little attention to the growing centrality of Germany in geographical publishing and the manufacture of instruments and that of France and Germany in academic geography. He does not use (or even note) the scholarship that has been available since the work of Essner about the backgrounds and careers of German explorers.¹ Comparisons based on such work might have allowed him to distinguish what was peculiarly British about the aspects of exploration that he analyzes from traits that were more general or more characteristic of certain other nations.