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[Illustration: “A Missionary looking over the edge of the world at the
point where Heaven and Earth meet.”
(_From an old print._)]
HISTORY OF
GEOGRAPHY
BY
J. SCOTT KELTIE, LL.D.,
SECRETARY OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY,
AND
O. J. R. HOWARTH, M.A.,
ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR
THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1913
PREFACE
This is not a history of geographical exploration, though the leading
episodes in the advance of our knowledge of the face of the Earth are
necessarily referred to in tracing the evolution of geography as a
department of science. That is the object of this volume as one of a
series dealing succinctly with the history of the various sciences.
We are not concerned to discuss whether Geography is entitled to be
considered as a science or not. It is hoped that in the attempt to tell
the story of its evolution up to the present day it will be evident
that it is as amenable to scientific methods as any other department
of human knowledge, and that it performs important functions which are
untouched by any other lines of research. I use the first person plural
because I am greatly indebted to Mr. O. J. R. Howarth in coming to my
help after I had accumulated much of the material, but was seriously
delayed owing to a great increase in my official duties. The greater
share of whatever merits the book may possess ought to be awarded to
Mr. Howarth.
I am indebted to Mr. E. A. Reeves’s interesting little book on _Maps
and Map-making_ for many of the illustrations.
J. SCOTT KELTIE.
_July 2, 1913._
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
BEGINNINGS 1
CHAPTER II.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS 8
CHAPTER III.
THE DARK AGE 33
CHAPTER IV.
THE MEDIÆVAL RENASCENCE 42
CHAPTER V.
PORTUGUESE EXPANSION AND THE REVIVAL OF PTOLEMY 51
CHAPTER VI.
THE NEW WORLD 59
CHAPTER VII.
THE FAR EAST AND THE DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA 68
CHAPTER VIII.
POLAR EXPLORATION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 74
CHAPTER IX.
JAMES COOK AND HIS SUCCESSORS 87
CHAPTER X.
MEASUREMENT, CARTOGRAPHY, AND THEORY, 1500–1800 90
CHAPTER XI.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AFRICAN RESEARCH 107
CHAPTER XII.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER: ASIA AND AUSTRALIA 115
CHAPTER XIII.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER: THE POLES 122
CHAPTER XIV.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER: EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS OF
GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE 135
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GEOGRAPHY 147
INDEX 149
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A MISSIONARY LOOKING OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD _Frontispiece_
FIG. PAGE
1.--TAHITIAN MAP 2
2.--THE WORLD AS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN CONCEIVED BY HECATÆUS 11
3.--THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HERODOTUS B.C. 450 15
4.--THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY 28–29
5.--THE WORLD ACCORDING TO COSMAS INDICOPLEUSTES 35
6.--BEATUS’S MAP 38
7.--THE HEREFORD MAP 47
8.--CHART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN, 1500, BY JUAN DE LA COSA 49
9.--SCAPH 91
10.--ASTROLABE 91
11.--QUADRANT 92
12.--CROSS-STAFF 94
13.--DAVIS’S BACK-STAFF 95
14.--PRETORIUS’S PLANE-TABLE 96
15.--RAMSDEN’S THEODOLITE 97
16.--MODERN FIVE INCH TRANSIT THEODOLITE 98
17.--THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MERCATOR (1587) 100
CHAPTER I.
BEGINNINGS
We need not attempt any elaborate definition of Geography at this
stage; it is hoped that a fairly clear idea of its field and functions
may arise during the following brief summary of its history and
evolution. The old-fashioned definition, “A description of the earth,”
is serviceable enough if accepted in its widest sense. Geography may
be regarded as the mother of the sciences. Whatever was the origin
of man, whether single or multiple, and wherever he emerged into
manhood, he was a wanderer, an explorer, from the first. Necessity
compelled him to make himself familiar with his environment and its
resources, and as the race multiplied emigration became compulsory.
The more that relics of primitive humanity are brought to light, the
further back must man’s earliest wanderings be dated. The five thousand
years of the old Biblical chronology must be multiplied a hundred
times, and still we find that half a million years ago our primitive
forefathers must have travelled far from the cradle of the race. They
were unconscious geographers. Their conceptions of the earth and of
its place in the universe are unknown to us; it is not impossible to
infer something of them by analogy of ideas existing to-day among
more or less primitive peoples, though to do so is beyond our present
scope. Yet it may be said that certain root-ideas of geographical
theory and practice must surely date from the earliest period of
man’s capacity for observation. Thus the necessity for describing or
following a particular direction presupposes the establishment of a
definite standard--the face would be turned towards the position of
some familiar object; then in that direction and the opposite, and to
the right hand and the left, four such standards would be found, and
would become the “cardinal points.” The value, for this purpose, of
so patent a phenomenon as the rising and setting of the sun must have
been impressed upon human intelligence at an elementary stage. Again,
map-making is not very far removed from a primitive instinct. Modern
travellers have described attempts at cartography by the North American
Indians, the Eskimo, and the Maori and other less advanced inhabitants
of the Pacific Islands.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.--Tahitian map.]
It is again beyond the scope of the present summary of the development
of geographical knowledge among European peoples to attempt to give
any detailed history of exploration; it is only possible to deal
with the salient episodes, and these mainly in so far as they have
influenced man’s general conception of the earth. Nevertheless, ages
before the existence of any documentary evidence of its development
geographical knowledge must have advanced far in other lands. America
was “discovered” probably thousands of years before Columbus stumbled
against the New World, or even the Norsemen had set foot in “Vineland”;
it had time, before the Spaniards swarmed over it, to become the seat
of civilizations whose origin is far beyond knowledge. It is worth
noticing for our particular purpose that the European conquerors found
evidence of highly developed geographical methods both in Central
America and in Peru; the native maps were intelligible to them, and
the Peruvian Incas had even evolved the idea of relief maps. China,
again, a great power in early ages, possessed knowledge of much of
central Asia; India was the seat of powerful States and of a certain
civilization; Babylonia and Egypt were working out their destinies, and
had their own conceptions of the earth and the universe, long before
the starting-point of the detailed investigation within our present
view.
But the names of Babylonia and Egypt bring us nearer to that
starting-point. The history of Europe dawns in the eastern
Mediterranean, and so does the history of geography. It has, however,
to be premised that connection existed, in very early times, between
the eastern Mediterranean circle and the lands far beyond. When princes
of Iranian stock (to cite a single illustration) are found established
on the confines of the Levant as early as the fifteenth century B.C.,
it may be realized that the known radius from the Mediterranean centre
was no short one. Much earlier than this--even in the fourth millennium
B.C.--astronomy, a science of the closest affinity to geography, was
well organized in Babylonia, and there is evidence for a cadastral
survey there. Clay tablets dating from more than two thousand years
B.C. show the work of the Babylonian surveyors.
The Egyptians worked along similar lines. Examples of their map-work
include a plan, in the museum at Cairo, showing the basin of the
lake Mœris, with its canal and the position of towns on its borders,
together with notes giving information about these places; and, in
Turin, a map of the Wadi Alaiki, where the Nubian goldmines were
situated; and this map may date from the earlier half of the fourteenth
century B.C.
Meanwhile, in the Ægean lands and from Sicily to Cyprus, at points
principally but not invariably insular or coastal, and especially
in Crete, communities grew up that developed a high standard of
civilization, to which the general name of Ægean is given. It appears
that a central power became established in Crete about the middle
of the third millennium B.C., and that an active oversea trade was
developed in the Ægean and the eastern Mediterranean during the ensuing
thousand years. As for the knowledge of the mainland which came to
be called Europe, it is suggested that the Ægean civilization was
assailed, about the fifteenth century B.C., by invaders from the north,
and was practically submerged, probably by a similar movement, five
hundred years later; and invasion presupposes intercourse.
The Phœnicians, next taking the lead in Mediterranean maritime trade,
must have extended knowledge of the inhabited world, even though they
left the reputation of secretiveness in respect of their excursions
(a natural and not uncommon characteristic of pioneer traders). A
Semitic people, they seem to have emigrated from the Persian Gulf in
detachments, and established independent settlements on the Levantine
littoral. Tyre was their chief trading city. They provided the
commercial link between east and west. Their penetration of the western
Mediterranean and even of the Straits of Gibraltar is assigned to the
earliest period of their activities. They established relations not
only with the Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples, but also with
central European traders; they are said, for example, to have dealt in
amber brought from the Baltic overland to the Adriatic and to the mouth
of the Rhone. They founded colonies in Cyprus, Sicily, and elsewhere as
far as the west of Spain, where Gades (Cadiz) was established perhaps
about 1100 B.C. Thence they carried their enterprises far to the north.
If they did not actually exploit the tin of Cornwall, they probably
knew of Britain. One of the greatest enterprises of antiquity, if we
may trust Herodotus, who was, however, sceptical, was conducted by
Phœnician navigators under the auspices of Necho, king of Egypt, about
600 B.C. Even before this they brought from distant lands, it may be
the Malay peninsula or it may be what is now Rhodesia, gold and other
presents for King Solomon. If the Phœnicians had really found their
way as far as the Zambezi and the country on the south, they may well
have conjectured that it would be possible to sail round Africa. At any
rate, if the story as told by Herodotus is true, Necho was convinced
that Africa could be circumnavigated. The Phœnician navigators sailed
down the Red Sea, and in autumn landed on the coast and sowed a crop
of wheat; when this was reaped, they started again and made their way
south round the Cape of Good Hope, and so northward, entering the
Mediterranean in the third year. At one part of their course they
had the sun on their right, which would be natural, though Herodotus
regarded this as evidence of the incredibility of the narrative. There
is no inherent impossibility in such an expedition, but it led to no
direct results; no further effort was made to round the continent for
twenty centuries.
The Phœnicians founded Carthage about 850 B.C. (though an earlier
trading post occupied the site), and the Carthaginians carried out
trading enterprises on their own account from their central point of
vantage on the North African coast. Some time after Necho’s expedition
(probably about 500 B.C.) they sent out two distant expeditions. One
of these, under Hanno, appears to have consisted of a very large
fleet, and to have been intended to establish trading posts along the
west coast of Africa, which was already known to the Carthaginians.
Certain details are furnished which serve to identify points at which
he touched, and it is generally agreed that he got as far south as the
neighbourhood of the Bight of Benin. Almost simultaneously Himilco
made a voyage north along the west coast of Europe. He appears to have
visited Britain, and mentions the foggy and limitless sea to the west.
Information obtained by such means as this cannot have become in any
sense the common property of the period. But there would be no mean
supply of geographical data at the disposal of traders on the one hand,
and at least of a few philosophers and generally well-informed persons
on the other, at a period long anterior to that at which it is possible
to begin our detailed history. Whatever tendency there may have been
on the part of the Phœnicians, and no doubt their predecessors, to
preserve their commercial secrets, there is no necessity to suppose
that traders in distant lands did not describe these lands to those
with whom they immediately dealt. The links in the commercial chain
would then become links in a chain of geographical knowledge. This
supposition granted, geographers may be prepared to risk the charge of
temerity if they recognize and enjoy, as an exquisite description of
the unbroken summer daylight on some northern fjord-coast, the picture
of the Læstrygons’ land in _Odyssey_, X.: “Where herdsman hails
herdsman as he drives in his flock, and the other who drives forth
answers the call. There might a sleepless man have earned a double
wage, the one as neatherd, the other shepherding white flocks: so near
are the outgoings of the night and of the day.” And again, “the fair
haven, whereabout on both sides goes one steep cliff unbroken, and
jutting headlands over against each other stretch forth at the mouth of
the harbour, and strait is the entrance ... no wave ever swelled within
it, great or small, but there was a bright calm all around.”[1] Here
are words which on their face indicate hearsay in the Mediterranean
concerning Scandinavia in the Homeric age. Again, the gloomy home of
the Cimmerians, at the uttermost limit of the earth, suggests hearsay
of the arctic night. As to Homeric geography generally, it may be
said briefly that the lands immediately neighbouring to the Ægean
are well known, though there is little evidence of knowledge of the
inhospitable interior of Asia Minor; something is understood of the
tribes of the interior of Europe to the north; the riches of Egypt and
Sidon are known; mention is made of black men, and even of pygmies, in
the further parts of Africa; the western limit of anything approaching
exact knowledge is Sicily. The earth is flat and circular, girt about
by the river of Ocean, whose stream sweeps all round it.
[1] _Trans._ S. H. Butcher and A. Lang.
Thus we have found geographical knowledge, so far as it is possible
to trace its acquisition at all, to have been acquired for purely
commercial purposes, and it remained for the Greeks to seek for such
knowledge for its own sake. It has been well said that the science of
geography was the invention of the Greeks.