Complete your Collections.--When your journey draws near its close,
resist restless feelings; make every effort before it is too late to
supplement deficiencies in your various collections; take stock of what
you have gathered together, and think how the things will serve in
England to illustrate your journey or your book. Keep whatever is pretty
in itself, or is illustrative of your every-day life, or that of the
savages, in the way of arms, utensils, and dresses. Make careful drawings
of your encampment, your retinue, and whatever else you may in indolence
have omitted to sketch, that will possess an after-interest. Look over
your vocabularies for the last time, and complete them as far as
possible. Make presents of all your travelling gear and old guns to your
native attendants, for they will be mere litter in England, costly to
house and attractive to moth and rust; while in the country where you
have been travelling, they are of acknowledged value, and would be
additionally acceptable as keepsakes.
Memoranda, to arrange.--Paste all loose slips of MSS. into the pages of a
blank book; and stitch your memoranda books where they are torn; give
them to a bookbinder, at the first opportunity, to re-bind and page them,
adding an abundance of blank leaves. Write an index to the whole of your
MSS.; put plenty of cross-references, insert necessary explanations, and
supplement imperfect descriptions, while your memory of the events
remains fresh. It appears impossible to a traveller, at the close of his
journey, to believe he will ever forget its events, however trivial; for
after long brooding on few facts, they will seem to be fairly branded
into his memory. But this is not the case; for the crowds of new
impressions, during a few months or years of civilised life, will efface
the sharpness of the old ones. I have conversed with men of low mental
power, servants and others, the greater part of whose experiences in
savagedom had passed out of their memories like the events of a dream.
Alphabetical Lists.--Every explorer has frequent occasion to draw up long
catalogues in alphabetical order, whether of words for vocabularies, or
of things that he has in store: now, there is a right and a wrong way of
setting to work to make them. The wrong way is to divide the paper into
equal parts, and to assign one of them to each letter in order. The right
way is to divide the paper into parts of a size proportionate to the
number of words in the English language which begin with each particular
letter. In the first case the paper will be overcrowded in some parts and
utterly blank in others, in the second it will be equally overspread with
writing; and an ordinary-sized sheet of paper, if closely and clearly
written, will be sufficient for the drawing up of a very extended
catalogue. A convenient way of carrying out the principle I have
indicated is to take an English dictionary, and after having divided the
paper into as many equal parts as there are leaves in the dictionary, to
adopt the first word of each leaf as headings to them. It may save
trouble to my reader if I give a list of headings appropriate to a small
catalogue. We will suppose the paper to be divided into fifty-two
spaces--that is to say, into four columns and thirteen spaces in each
column--then the headings of these spaces, in order, will be as
follows:--
A dul pal son
adv eve per sta
app fin ple sir
bal gin pre sur
bil hee pro tem
bre imp que tos
cap int rec tur
chi k reg umb
col lan ria une
com mac sab ven
cra mil sca wea
dec nap sha wor
dis off siz x y a
Verification of Instruments.--On arriving at the sea-level, make daily
observations with your boiling-point thermometer, barometer, and aneroid,
as they are all subject to changes in their index-errors. As soon as you
have an opportunity, compare them with a standard barometer, compare also
your ordinary thermometer and azimuth-compass with standard instruments,
and finally, have them carefully re-verified at the Kew observatory on
your return to England. A vast deal of labour has been wholly thrown away
by travellers owing to their neglecting to ascertain the index-errors of
these instruments at the close of their journey. A careful observer ought
to have eliminated the effects of instrumental errors from his sextant
observations; nevertheless it will be satisfactory to him, and it may
clear up some apparent anomalies, to have his entire instrumental outfit
re-verified at Kew.
Observations, to recalculate.--Send by post to England a complete copy
(always preserve the originals) of all your astronomical observations,
that they may be carefully recalculated before your return, otherwise a
long period may elapse before the longitudes are finally settled, and
your book may be delayed through the consequent impossibility of
preparing a correct map. The Royal Geographical Society has frequently
procured the re-calculation of observations made on important journeys,
at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and elsewhere. I presume that a
well-known traveller would never find a difficulty in obtaining the
calculations he might desire, through the medium of that Society, if it
was distinctly understood that they were to be made at his own cost.
Lithograph Maps.--It may add greatly to the interest which a traveller
will take in drawing up a large and graphic route-map of his journey, if
he knows the extreme ease and cheapness with which copies of such a map
may be multiplied to any extent by a well-known process in lithography:
for these being distributed among persons interested in the country where
he has travelled, will prevent his painstaking from being lost to the
world. Sketches and bird'[S-eye views may be multiplied in the same
manner. The method to which I refer is the so-called Anastatic process;
the materials can be obtained, with full instructions, at any
lithographer's shop, and consist of autographic ink and paper. The paper
has been prepared by being glazed over with a composition, and the ink is
in appearance something like Indian ink, and used in much the same way.
With an ordinary pen, with this ink, and upon this paper, the traveller
draws his map; they are neither more nor less difficult to employ than
common stationery, and he may avail himself of tracing-paper without
danger. He has one single precaution to guard against, which is, not to
touch the paper overmuch with his bare and, but to keep a bit of loose
paper between it and the map as he draws. As soon as it is finished, the
map is taken to a lithographer, who puts it face downwards on a stone,
and passes it under his press, when every particle of ink leaves the
surface of the paper and attaches itself to the surface of the stone,
precisely as though it had originally been written there; the glaze on
the paper, which prevents the ink from soaking into it, makes this
transference more easy and complete. The stone can now be worked with,
just as a stone that has been regularly lithographed in the usual manner;
that is to say, printing ink may be rubbed over it and impressions may be
taken off in any number. It will be observed that the writing on the
paper is reversed upon the stone, and is re-reversed, or set right again,
in the impressions that are taken from it. The lithographer's charges for
furnishing autographic ink and paper, working the stone, striking off
fifty copies of a folio size, and supplying the paper (common white
paper) for the copies--in fact every expense included--need not exceed
ten shillings, and may be much less. If before drawing his map the
traveller were to go to some working lithographer and witness the
process, and make two or three experiments in a small way, he would
naturally succeed all the better. A map drawn on a large scale, though
without any pretension to artistic skill, with abundance of profile views
of prominent landmarks, and copious information upon the routes that were
explored, written along their sides, would be of the utmost value to
future travellers, and to geographers at home.