Anthony Sattin on exploration in the Age of Enlightenment

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Anthony Sattin on exploration in the Age of Enlightenment

28 Oct 2010

Speakers: Anthony Sattin

Anthony Sattin starts by stressing that the Age on Enlightenment was a time when people felt ‘they could do anything, they could know anything’. The explorations funded by Sir Joseph Banks and his fellow members of the world’s first geographical society were inspired by their sense that it was ‘a slur on the Age of the Enlightenment’ that the Greeks – Herodotus in particular – knew more about the interior of Africa than they did. Banks and his associates were determined to map the centre of Africa, and sent men on what now sound like cruelly absurd missions: one man was sent to Tripoli and told to ‘head South until he hit water’.

One of the more successful explorers they sent out was Mungo Park, who, unperturbed by a three-month internment on the southern edge of the Sahara and the stressful nature of his endeavours (to which his considerable loss of hair is testament), became the first ‘geographical missionary’ to reach the Niger River - but failed to reach his ultimate destination, the supposedly gold-filled city of Timbuktu.