traveled around the globe; he enlisted in the Bengal Corps of Engineers and gave a good account of himself in several skirmishes; but this life of soldiering didn’t agree with him; he had little interest in commanding, so he wasn’t keen on obeying. He submitted his resignation and set out for the northern regions of India’s peninsula, crossing it from Calcutta to Surat, surviving as both hunter and gatherer. A mere pleasure trip.
From Surat we see him traveling to Australia and in 1845 taking part in Captain Charles Sturt’s expedition, whose mission was to push inland and find that second Caspian Sea thought to exist deep in that continent then known as New Holland.
Samuel Fergusson went back to England around 1850; the demon of discovery possessed him more than ever, and until 1853 he accom panied Captain McClure on an expedition that skirted the American continent from Bering Strait to Cape Farewell in Greenland.
Despite exertions of every kind and in every climate, Fergusson’s sturdy constitution held up marvelously; he was at home with the most hopeless hardships; he was the very model of your ideal traveler whose belly contracts or expands at will, whose legs grow longer or shorter depending on the bed improvised for the occasion, who can fall asleep at any hour of the day and wake up at any hour of the night.
After that, from 1855 to 1857, nothing could be less surprising than to find our tireless traveler visiting all of western Tibet along with the Schlagintweit brothers, then bringing back some intriguing cultural data from their investigations.
During these various journeys, Samuel Fergusson was the liveliest and most interesting correspondent on the Daily Telegraph, that one-penny newspaper whose daily circulation runs as high as 140,000 copies, barely enough for its several million readers. Accordingly, he was well known, this doctor, although he wasn’t a member of any scholarly organization, neither the royal geographical societies of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or St. Petersburg, nor the Travelers Club, nor even the Royal Polytechnic Institute, lorded over by his friend Cockburn the statistician.4
This sage actually proposed one day, as a friendly gesture, to solve the following problem for him: given the number of miles the doctor had covered in his journeys around the world, how many more miles had his head traveled than his feet, due to its greater radius? Or rather, supplied with the different mileages for the doctor’s head and feet, what was his exact height to the nearest twelfth of an inch?
But Fergusson gave scholarly bodies a wide berth, being a member of the church of doers rather than talkers; his time was better spent in discovering than discussing, seeking than squabbling.
The story goes that an Englishman once visited Geneva intending to see the lake; they put him aboard one of those old-time carriages where the seats are mounted sideways and face out, as they do on the roof of an omnibus: now then, by chance our Englishman ended up in a seat that looked away from the lake; the carriage serenely circled it without the fellow thinking to turn around one single time, and he went back to London speechless over Lake Geneva.5
Dr. Fergusson, however, had turned around, and more than once during his travels, with the result that he had seen plenty. In this, moreover, he was just doing what came naturally, and we have grounds for thinking that he was a bit of a fatalist, but it was a very conservative sort of fatalism where he relied on himself and even on Providence; in his journeys he saw himself as pushed rather than pulled, as traveling the world like a railroad engine, which isn’t steered but goes where the tracks do.
“I don’t look for my path,” he often said. “My path looks for me.”
So nobody will be surprised by his composure as he received the Royal Society’s applause; he was above such petty concerns, had no pride and even less vanity; he saw the proposal he had presented to Sir Francis M——as perfectly simple and didn’t even notice the immense effect it produced.
After the meeting, they took the doctor to the Travelers Club on Pall Mall; there he found a superb feast laid out for him; the dimensions of the dishes served were commensurate with the honoree’s importance, and the sturgeon that figured in this splendid meal wasn’t three inches shorter than Samuel Fergusson himself.
The diners lifted their glasses of French wine and proposed many toasts to the famous travelers who had earned renown in the land of Africa.6 They drank to their health or memory in alphabetical order, being veddy British: to Abbadie, Adams, Adanson, Anderson, Arnaud, Avanchers, Baikie, Baldwin, Barth, Battuta, Beke, Beltrame, Belzoni, Bimbachi, Bonnemain, Bou Derba, Bowdich, Brisson, Browne, Bruce, Brun-Rollet, Burchell, Burckhardt, Burton, Cailliaud, Caillié, Campbell, Castel-Bolognesi, Chaillu, Chapman, Clapperton, Clot Bey, Colonieu, Courval, Cuny, Debono, Decken, Denham, Dickinson, Dickson, Dochard, Duncan, Durand, Duroulé, Duveyrier, El-Tounsy, Erhardt, Escayrac de Lauture, Ferret, Fresnel, Galinier, Galton, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Golbéry, Gordon-Cumming, Hahn, Halm, Harnier, Hecquard, Heuglin, Hornemann, Houghton, Imbert, Kaufmann, Knoblecher, Krapf, Kummer, Lafargue, Laing, La Jaille, Lambert, Lamiral, John Lander, Richard Lander, Lefebvre, Lejean, Lemprière, Levaillant, Livingstone, MacCarthy, Magyar, Maizan, Malzac, Moffat, Mollien, Monteiro, Morrisson, Neimans, Overweg, Panet, Park, Partarrieu, Pascal, Pearce, Peddie, Peney, Petherick, Poncet, Prax, Raffenel, Rath, Rebmann, Richardson, Riley, Ritchie, Rochet d’Héricourt, Roscher, Roungawi, Rüppell, Saugnier, Speke, Steudner, Thibaut, Thompson, Thornton, Toole, Trotter, Tuckey, Tyrwhitt, Vaudey, Vayssière, Vincent, Vinco, Vogel, Wahlberg, Warrington, Washington, Werne, Wild,7 and finally Dr. Samuel Fergusson, whose incredible endeavor aimed to link up the achievements of all these travelers and complete this series of African discoveries.
Pall Mall feast
* Monetary authority in London.
chapter 2
An article in the Daily Telegraph—scholarly journals at war—Herr Petermann stands by his friend Dr. Fergusson—response from the learned Koner—sporting wagers—various propositions made to the doctor.
The next day, in its January 15 issue, the Daily Telegraph published an article that read as follows:
At last Africa is going to turn over the secrets of her vast, lonely wastes: a modern-day Oedipus will be giving us the key to a riddle that the scholars of sixty centuries haven’t managed to decipher. Formerly, to search for the source of the Nile—or, in the old Latin wording, fontes Nili quærere—was viewed as an insane endeavor, a fantasy that could never become reality.
Dr. Barth followed the route plotted by Denham and Clapperton as far as Sudan; Dr. Livingstone conducted many courageous investigations from the Cape of Good Hope to the Zambezi basin; Captains Burton and Speke discovered the great inland lakes. They blazed three trails for modern civilization; the spot where they intersect—which travelers still haven’t managed to reach—lies in Africa’s very heart. It’s in this region that every effort needs to be made.
Now the deeds of those bold scientific pioneers will be tied together in this daring endeavor by Dr. Samuel Fergusson, whose splendid feats of exploration our readers have often relished.
This courageous discoverer1 proposes to cross all Africa from east to west by balloon. If our sources are correct, the starting point of this astounding journey will be the island of Zanzibar off Africa’s east coast. As for its endpoint, God only knows.
Yesterday the Royal Geographical Society heard a formal proposal for this piece of scientific exploration; they approved the sum of £2500
