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Mapping Henry Morton Stanley's Expedition Through Central Africa
This separately published two-sheet map of the central part of Africa was published to accompany the first edition of Henry Morton Stanley's monumental work Thought The Dark Continent of Africa. Compiled by Edward Weller and first published in London, this is the identical map, re-issued with a German title but otherwise entirely in English.
A bold red overprint records Henry Morton Stanley’s 1874-77 east-to-west traverse: from Zanzibar, round Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, down the Lualaba–Congo, and onward to the Atlantic. Camps are dated, rapids named, and marginal notes from Stanley’s six field notebooks appear in situ. While the maps give the first reasonably accurate outline of the whole Congo River, they still retain a few conjectural features, including the sketchy northern lakes, that signal how incomplete Central-African cartography remained in 1878.
Stanley’s Anglo-American expedition (financed by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph) left Zanzibar on 12 November 1874 with some 230 porters. Over the next three years he circumnavigated Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, then spent nearly twelve months forcing a way down the uncharted Lualaba to demonstrate that it debouched into, rather than arose from, the Nile. When the party emerged at Boma in August 1877—reduced to 115 survivors, three of them children born en route—Stanley had fixed more than 7 000 miles of previously uncertain geography and preserved a unique record of indigenous place-names, settlements and armed communities along the river.
Stanley's cartographic data, faithfully compiled here by London lithographer Edward Weller, provided the first printed map to show the entire course of the Congo and, by extension, a template for all subsequent colonial mapping of the basin.
This example was separately issued, but was also issued with the German edition of Stanley’s narrative Durch den dunkeln Welttheil (Through the Dark Continent), the map was issued in 1878 in exactly the same format as the English original apart from its translated title. The two sheets were sold loose, to be pasted together—or, as here, joined, dissected and linen-backed—for field or library use.
Rarity
Separately published examples of the map are scarce.
According to OCLC, complete paired examples survive in only four institutional collections (University of Bern; St. Gallen Library; Zentralbibliothek Zürich; Museumgesellschaft Zürich).
