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M A G A Z I N E O F T H E R O Y A L G E O G R A P H I C A L S O C I E T Y ( W I T H I B G )

Geographical

Geographical is the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and was founded by Michael Huxley in 1935.

Informative, authoritative and educational, it covers a wide range of subject areas, including geography, culture, wildlife and exploration, illustrated with superb photography.

Archive is a regular feature in Geographical Magazine, documenting geographical photography of people and places throughout history, with powerful images supplied by the Royal Geographical Society.

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The Royal Geographical Society Picture Library is an unrivalled resource, containing more than

half a million images of peoples and landscapes from all over the world. The collection holds photographs and works of art from the 1830s onwards and includes images of exploration, indigenous peoples and remote locations. For further information on image licensing and limited-edition prints, or to search our online collection of more than 7,000 images, visit www.rgs.org/images. Rolex kindly supports public access to the Society’s collection of photographs, books, documents and maps.

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FJ Jackson, Dr MacKinnon and James Martin with Chief Kamiri making a treaty with the Kikuyu, 1889

This image illustrates a pivotal moment in the history of the Kikuyu tribe in what is today Kenya and the start of a sickening story that still resonates today. After the major European powers agreed among themselves the rights to pursue legal ownership of land in Africa in the Berlin Treaty of 1885–86, the Imperial British East Africa Company took steps to occupy land in what is now Kenya in 1886. Although this photograph gives the impression of an amicable agreement, many historians believe that the Kikuyu and other tribes signed under duress. The Kikuyu engaged in violent resistance from the start, including burning down a British fort in 1890. In response, the British Army carried out punitive expeditions. In one episode in 1903, the King’s African Rifles, equipped with machine guns, took more than 11,000 livestock and killed around 1,500 Kikuyu and Embu, sustaining only three casualties in the process. Subsequent years saw the British appropriate a large proportion of fertile Kikuyu land, much of it for white settlers. The Kikuyu’s continued unease with colonial rule, which brought increasing economic deprivation, ultimately led to the notorious Mau Mau Uprising of 1952–60, in which British military personnel tortured Kikuyu and other Kenyans. Former Mau Mau members have started proceedings to sue the British government for compensation.

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Ngoma, Lake Kivu, Belgian Congo, 1916–17

This image was taken by one Dr Mattelet, who travelled to East Africa in 1916, when British and Belgian troops invaded German East Africa during the First World War – what became known as the East Africa Campaign. Little is known about this image in particular, other than that which can be gleaned from the short caption. And this may, in fact, be misleading: today there is no ‘Ngoma’ on the Congolese side of Lake Kivu, but it’s possible that the name refers to today’s Goma, a city of a million or so people that lies at the northern end of the lake. Some of Mattelet’s other images in the Royal Geographical Society’s archive give an idea of his journey through East Africa. He began in Kibati, near Goma, where the Belgian–Congolese troops were stationed before the offensive into Ruanda-Urundi began on 18 April 1916. After Kigali fell on 6 May, Mattelet documented the railway at Kigoma in today’s western Tanzania, which was occupied on 5 August. It isn’t clear, however, whether he continued to follow the Force Publique when it took Tabora on 19 September and then moved on to Mahenge.

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Sorting carpets in the bazaar, Elizavetopol, Russia, 1910

This image was taken by MP Price during an expedition to Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Russian Turkestan, Armenia and the Trans-Caucasus between April 1910 and March 1911. Elizavetopol, or Elisabethpol, is the name given by the Russian Empire to the city today known as Ganja, in Azerbaijan. Although Arabic sources document the founding of a city on the site of Ganja in the ninth century, scholars now believe that the derivation of the name Ganja from the New Persian ganj (‘treasure’) suggests that a settlement was started there in pre-Islamic times, possibly as early as the fifth century. The Caucasus region has long been associated with carpets, and archaeological excavations have found evidence of carpet weaving in Azerbaijan as far back as the second millennium BC. Today, the practice remains a family business, with men raising and shearing sheep and women collecting dyestuffs, spinning the wool, and weaving the carpets. In 2010, Azerbaijani carpet weaving was recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Intangeable Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

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Camp at 3,350 metres, just below the summit of Niitakayama, Formosa, 1912

This image was taken by William Robert Price, an English botanist who visited Formosa (now Taiwan) in 1912 with the renowned lepidopterist Henry John Elwes, with whom he had worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens since 1909. After four months documenting the island’s forests and collecting plant specimens, Elwes left for Japan, and Price mounted an expedition to the island’s highest peak (3,952 metres) – which he called Mount Morrison, but which is known today by its Taiwanese name, Yushan (‘Jade Mountain’). At the time, Formosa was under Japanese control, and Price’s team comprised both Japanese officers and Taiwanese tribesmen. Indeed, Japanese influence is apparent both from Price’s use of the mountain’s Japanese name, Niitakayama (‘New High Mountain’) and his preference for wearing traditional Japanese gaiters and sandals in the field. From a letter he wrote to Kew’s director before his trip to Yushan, it’s clear that Price savoured the sense of adventure as much as the botanical side of his work: ‘I go off to the east coast where savages, malaria and plague are rampant! So I am in for a fine time.’

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Liso natives in fighting dress, China, 1905–06

This image was taken by EC Young during a journey he made on foot from southwest China to northeast India. His account of the expedition, A Journey from Yun-nan to Assam, was published by the Royal Geographical Society in 1907. An expat working in China, Young took six months’ leave to fulfil ‘a long-cherished design’ to investigate ‘the country that lies between the empires of India and China south of the Tibetan frontier’. He travelled with two Chinese servants and lived as much as possible on local produce. His equipment and stores ‘were limited to some five hundredweight [250 kilograms] of baggage’ and included surveying equipment. The Lisu (to use the more common spelling) have historically lived across the mountainous regions of Burma, southwest China, Thailand and Arunachal Pradesh in India. Young describes meeting them in the Salween valley in Yunnan. Although they were reputed to be fierce and warlike, he found them ‘timid and nervous among strange surroundings and lacking in what we call pluck’. On the other hand, he adds, they were ‘courteous and hospitable’ and had ‘something of the Chinese respect for rank.’

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Chilzina or the 40 steps, Afghanistan, 1881

This image was taken by Benjamin Simpson, a doctor in the Indian colonial administration who moonlighted as a professional photographer. Simpson held various positions in the Indian medical service between 1853 and his retirement in 1890, including surgeon general of Bengal and India. From the 1860s to the 1880s, he photographed the people, monuments and landscapes of north and east India and Afghanistan, visiting the latter in the wake of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. His portraits of Kandahar include this image of a monument on the old city’s western boundary built by Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, in the 16th century. It consists of a staircase cut into the rock leading to a small niche guarded by two lions, also carved from the rock. A Persian inscription in the niche describes Babur’s victories across Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Simpson was clearly interested in the art of photography as much as in documentation, and it’s possible that he asked the two merchants to pose for him in what might otherwise have been a rather unstructured image.

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Bedouin at al-Hinnah, near Thaj, Arabia, 1911

This image was taken by William Henry Irvine Shakespear, a remarkable Indian-born diplomat who played a pivotal role in Middle Eastern politics while serving as the British political agent in Kuwait between 1909 and 1914. During this period, he mounted several expeditions into the Arabian interior, often in an eight-horsepower, single-cylinder Rover that he had bought for £250 in Karachi in 1907 to drive through Persia, Turkey and Europe to England. Using a camera that required the glass plates to be developed on site – often in a white tent with an annexed bathroom-cum-darkroom – he took some of the earliest photographs of the Arabian Peninsula, including this shot of Bedouin at a watering hole. Shakespear greatly admired the Bedouin and spent time with them learning to ride camels, to hunt with falcons and other kinds of desert craft. However, he’s best known for facilitating an alliance between Britain and Ibn Sa’ud, the Emir of Njad, against Ibn Rashid and the Ottoman Empire. With British support, Sa’ud went on to defeat Rashid, as well as the Sharif of Mecca, which ultimately enabled him to found and become king of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Shakespear would likely be held in the same regard as TE Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger if it wasn’t for his death, alongside Sa’ud, at the Battle of Jarrab in 1915 aged 35.

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The Hayden Geological Survey at Mirror Lake, Wyoming, USA, 1871

This image was taken by WH Jackson during an expedition to survey an area of northwestern Wyoming that was soon to become part of Yellowstone National Park. Led by Ferdinand V Hayden, a professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania, the survey was one of four commissioned by the US Congress in 1867 to study the geology and natural resources of the Midwest. As well as searching for deposits of oil, coal, clay marl and other minerals, Hayden was charged with gathering samples of geology, mineralogy and palaeontology, and to make a note of soil types in relation to their suitability for agriculture. Despite this brief, the expedition’s most significant legacy was its influence in the creation of Yellowstone National Park. On his return, Hayden began to lobby for the foundation of a reserve and circulated his report, as well as photos, sketches and paintings produced during the expedition, to politicians and his superiors at the Department of the Interior. Early in 1872, Congress approved a bill that proposed ‘the withdrawal from settlement, occupancy, or sale… a tract of land fifty-five by sixty-five miles, about the sources of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, and dedicates and sets apart as a great national park or pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people’.

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Kavirondo headdress, British East Africa, 1899–1901

This image was taken by HH Johnston, a British colonial administrator who was serving as special commissioner to Uganda at the time. The British used ‘Kavirondo’ to refer to a region surrounding northeastern Lake Victoria that approximates to today’s Nyanza Province in Kenya. They also used it for the people there, distinguishing the Bantu and Nilotic groups among them. Today, we know that the Bantu living there at the time were the Luhya and the Kisii, and the Nilotic people the Luo. It isn’t clear who is pictured here, although the Luo certainly used to wear metal jewellery and ceremonial hats adorned with ostrich feathers. However, other images from around this time consistently show Luo wearing strings of wooden beads and cowrie shells and feathers in an erect, sometimes spectacular display. Johnston was the archetypal Victorian imperialist, leading expeditions, climbing mountains, collecting specimens, signing treaties and governing. He was a prolific writer, photographer and painter, and his book The Backwards Peoples and Our Relations with Them outlined his belief in white racial superiority. But Johnston also saw the value of traditional cultures and the potential of Africans to work for the colonial administration, which set him at loggerheads with others at the time who favoured a more brutal approach.

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Timur Shah’s mausoleum, Afghanistan, 1880

This image was taken by John Burke, an Irish commercial photographer who took the first photographs of Afghanistan, during the late 1870s. Accounts of Burke’s life vary, but he appears to have moved as an apothecary with the Royal Engineers to India, where he became assistant to the photographer William Baker. Upon the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1878, Burke attempted to find work as an official photographer with the British Army, but was refused. He decided to go anyway and subsequently accompanied the Peshawar Field Force column on its advance from Attock to Jellalabad. He photographed the signatories of the inconclusive Treaty of Gandamak on 26 May 1879, including Muhammad Yakub Khan, emir of Afghanistan. After the end of the war, in 1880, Burke remained in the country, documenting its landscapes, inhabitants and monuments. This impressive Mughal-style mausoleum was built in Kabul in 1816 in memory of the second ruler of the Durrani Empire, who reigned from 1772 to his death in 1793. Following damage during the various recent conflicts in Afghanistan, it was restored to its full glory in 2012 with aid from the Aga Khan Development Network.

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Dr Alfred Percival Maudslay, Chichen Itza, Mexico, 1889

‘An arid desert’ and ‘a barren tree’ was Harrow School’s verdict on Alfred Maudslay. After a desultory university career, Maudslay set out for the West Indies, Panama, Guatemala, the United States and Iceland. He then set his mind on growing tobacco in Jamaica, but a quarantine on the island forced him to become a cacao planter in Trinidad. A chance meeting with the island’s new governor saw him become the chief’s private secretary. Maudslay’s career as a colonial bureaucrat endured and he was sent to Australia and then on to run Fiji.

Archaeology was less a career than a holiday pastime for Maudslay. As he put it, ‘The principal object of my first journey [to Central America] was not geographical, but a desire to pass the winter in a warmer climate.’ Maudslay produced a four-volume work from seven trips almost as an afterthought.

Maudslay pioneered archaeology in the region, often outpacing professionals. Upon beating a French explorer to a Mayan ruin, Maudslay attributed his own success to chance, and reassured the Frenchman that as an amateur he would publish nothing. ‘You can name the town, claim to have discovered it, in fact do what you please... even dispense with mentioning my name if you please.’

By 1889, Maudslay had left Mexican fieldwork. He returned to the country for six-month periods until 1907 to run an inherited gold mine, continuing to work on archaeology until his death in 1931.

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animal hunting party in Southern rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 1905–1911

‘i admire him, i frankly confess it; and when his times comes i shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake,’ said Mark Twain after surveying cecil rhodes’ South african diamond mines. rhodes escaped the noose, but left behind a country named in his honour, Southern rhodesia.

percy M clark documented the colony’s early years. From livingstone – a frontier settlement also known as ‘Dead rock’ or ‘The old Drift’ – he served as shopkeeper, photographer and local chemist for around 1,500 ‘drifters’.

Slaughter was a popular pastime in The old Drift. in his memoir, Autobiography of an Old Drifter, clark reports a zoologically comprehensive tally: half a dozen wild duck felled with one bullet, and a mule mistaken for a lion. Bigger game were scheduled for destruction too, as clark’s photograph of various animal skins shows.

clark became the colony’s first roving photographer, always with an eye for the morbid. a newspaper reviewer noted of the photographs in clark’s autobiography, ‘There is one, by the way, that we could spare: a “close-up” of black spies being hanged at the time of the Matabele rebellion. if it was pardonable to photograph the execution, the reproduction of the print seems regrettable, and may give some readers a false idea of the writer’s attitude towards the natives.’

clark had less luck with live subjects; he never managed to get more than a snapshot of cecil rhodes.

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