Patrick Brantlinger argues that the late nineteenth century experienced an
‘eclipse’ of the British hero, alongside numerous attempts to revitalise him, which ‘became increasingly militant in the era of the New Imperialism’.43 The resurgence of heroism and hero-worship was precipi-tated by the ‘burgeoning new industry of Boy’s adventure tales’, itself inspired by the great explorers of the mid-century and the heavily stylised travel narratives that they published. Such narratives were often informed by ideals of historical masculine endurance, as is made plain by a review of Henry Morton Stanley’s travel narrative In Darkest Africa (1890), which was claimed by a writer for the Edinburgh Review to have been read ‘more universally and with deeper interest than any other publication’ that year.44 The reviewer characterised Stanley’s trip through the Congo to the Egyptian Soudan as ‘one of the severest trials of endurance which ever attended the exploits of such heroes of antiquity or of modern history as Alexander, Caesar, and Bonaparte’.45
Readers are thus invited to perceive Stanley’s narrative using ‘one of the most durable and powerful forms of idealised masculinity’—the soldier
42 Mégroz, Ronald Ross, p. 21.
43 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 36.
44 ‘In Darkest Africa: Being the Official Record of the Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria. By H. M. Stanley, M.R.G.S. Two Volumes, 8vo. London: 1890’
Edinburgh Review 172.352 (October 1890) 372–88 (p. 372).
45 ‘In Darkest Africa: Being the Official Record of the Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria. By H. M. Stanley. London: Sampson Low. 1890’ Speaker 2 (5 July 1890) 20–21 (p. 20).
hero.46 By demonstrating military virtues of endurance, Stanley could explore new lands in a feat tantamount to the wars waged by past emper-ors. Here, and in many similar narratives (including those of medicine) the myth of the Dark Continent prevails as a guiding framework for character-ising the colonial encounter as one of heroism versus savagery. However, as Brantlinger demonstrates, this binary was disrupted by increasingly complex and pessimistic depictions of empire as the century waned.47 As the glamour of exploration was displaced by ‘mere travel’—a ‘sordid spec-tacle of tourism and commercial exploitation’—opportunities for heroism seemed vanishingly slight.48
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World (which makes reference to Stanley’s book as well as to explorer and anthropologist Richard Burton), a newspaper editor tells the protagonist Edward Malone that ‘the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere […] The day for this sort of thing is rather past’.49 Nevertheless, Conan Doyle gives us a ‘wild romance’ of dinosaurs and savages, which Brantlinger reads as ‘in defiance of this fact of modern life’.50 When Professor Challenger shows Malone a pterodactyl wing, Malone is amazed. Referring to both the size of the specimen and to the size of the achievement, he declares ‘it’s just the very biggest thing that I ever heard of! […] it is colossal’. Professor Challenger is ‘a Columbus of science who has discovered a lost world’.51 Whilst these words prompt us to recognise the wonder to be found in ‘bigness’, the early pages also
46 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 1.
47 The 1890s, in particular, were beset by stories in which the capacity of Britons to tri-umph in imperial space was questioned: ‘not only do stereotypes of natives and savages degenerate toward the ignoble and the bestial in late Victorian thinking […] so do the seem-ingly contrasting images of European explorers, traders, and colonizers […] late Victorian literature is filled with backsliders like Conrad’s Kurtz who themselves become white sav-ages’. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 39; Linda Dryden has explored how Joseph Conrad manipulated the form of romance to undercut ‘adventure [and] heroism […] with their reactionary values of empire and all the school-boy loyalty they entail’ (163). Whilst for the heroes of Henty and Haggard empire provides an opportunity to prove their moral worth and racial superiority, Conradian heroes, she argues, find only ‘the truth of [their] own inad-equacy, the hollowness of their selfish dreams, and the fact of their own mortality’ (148).
Linda Dryden, ‘“An Outcast of The Islands”: Echoes of Romance and Adventure’ The Conradian 20.1/2 (1995) 139–68.
48 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 37–38.
49 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (1912; London: The Folio Society, 2010) p. 14.
50 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 38.
51 Conan Doyle, The Lost World, p. 38.
point us towards another avenue for adventure and heroism when Malone meets bacteriologist Henry Tarp. Tarp, who ‘lives in a nine-hundred- diameter microscope’, is a self-confessed ‘frontiersman from the extreme edge of the Knowable’.52
Such a characterisation not only illustrates how the frontiers of science and empire were simultaneously imagined in macro and microscopic scales, but also how opportunities for romance and adventure were rou-tinely located in the distant realms of inaccessible time (the evolutionary and historical past) or inaccessible space (the microscopic present)—
worlds lost to history or vision. Kathleen E. Hames goes as far as to read the plateau that they travel to in The Lost World as itself suggestive of a biological cell. She argues that whilst critics have considered Conan Doyle’s indebtedness to Everard Im Thurn’s descriptions of Mt Roraima in constructing the geographical and geological details of his lost world,
‘the biological symbolism of the region is more suggestive of Doyle’s [sic]
experience as a physician and his fascination with laboratory science’.53 She reads the battle between man and ape-man in South America as a drama-tisation of the relationship between host body and the tropical microbe.
The imagined interchangeability of ‘savage natives’ and ‘savage microbes’ enabled proponents of tropical medicine to identify the micro-scopic fields of empire as frontiers that offered new opportunities for hero-ism. By rewriting the colonial encounter as microbiological, parasitologists could emerge as modern heroes traversing treacherous lands in pursuit of deadly foe. When Lionel expresses his desire to find out about the life cycle of the trypanosome parasite in Multitude and Solitude, for example, Roger responds: ‘But I think it’s heroic of you […] it’s a heroic thing to do […] Heroic’ (145–46). He conceives of the pathogen as an imperial enemy and those researching it as scientists and soldiers dying on behalf of their fellows:
[Roger] thought of [sleeping sickness] no longer as an abstract intellectual question, but as man’s enemy, an almost human thing, a pestilence walking in the noonday. Out in Africa that horror walked in the noonday stifling the brains of men […] he thought of the little lonely stations of scientists and soldiers, far away in the wilds, in the midst of disease […] they were giving
52 Conan Doyle, The Lost World, p. 17.
53 Kathleen E. Hames, ‘Imperial Fever: Tropical Medicine, British Literature, and the Return to South America, 1880–1930’ (Unpublished PhD, Cornell University, 2013) pp. 54–55.
up their lives cheerily and unconcernedly in the hope of saving the lives of others. (154–55)
The characterisation of the disease as a ‘horror’ that ‘walks in the noonday […] out in Africa’ offers pathology as a form that structures the colonial encounter, reinforcing the pivotal defensive role—not to mention brav-ery—of tropical pathologists. And whilst they didn’t give their lives ‘cheer-ily and unconcernedly’ many scientists did indeed perish in the service of tropical medicine. Dr Walter Myers died from yellow fever whilst on a Liverpool-funded expedition to investigate the disease in Brazil in 1901 (aged 28), Dr Joseph Everett Dutton died from relapsing fever in Africa on a Liverpool-funded expedition in 1905 (aged 29), and Lt Dr Forbes Mason Grant Tulloch died after contracting sleeping sickness whilst on a Royal Society-funded commission in 1906 (aged just 27).
Masefield’s rhetorical techniques were shared by other writers who employed the language of battle and sacrifice to communicate the stakes of tropical medical research. A writer eulogising British special commis-sioner to East Africa, Sir Gerald Portal, for instance, asserted that his death from malaria in the prime of his life was ‘a tragic reminder of the tribute which Africa extracts from its white conquerors’. The writer went on to describe Africa as a ‘malarial frontier’, quoting Rev Prof Henry Drummond in lamenting, ‘how capricious and yet how remorseless, how constant and yet how unaccountable the extraction of this tribute is’.54 Such language frames Africa as a ruler and tropical illness as a tax—or, as the OED notes of ‘tribute’: ‘the price of peace, security, and protection’.55 This was a commonly invoked trope in discussions of the political context of tropical medical research. In 1905, Joseph Chamberlain framed the study of tropi-cal illness as part of Britain’s ‘duty to reduce this blood tribute that we paid to the Empire’.56 When speaking about the risks of studying malaria in 1897, the British Medical Journal had positioned tropical research in a similar light, reporting on Ross’s recent illness as a ‘reward’ for the ‘devo-tion which he has shown in the cause of medical science and humanity’.57 Likewise, in a lecture to medical students in Glasgow, Governor of Lagos,
54 ‘Sir General Portal’ The Anti-Slavery Reporter 14.1 (January 1894) pp. 57–58 (p. 57).
55 ‘tribute, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entr y/205768?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=UIsLDC& (accessed 10 January 2019).
56 ‘London School’ Aberdeen Press and Journal, Thursday 11 May 1905, p. 6.
57 ‘The Risks of Studying Malaria’ British Medical Journal 2.1907 (17 July 1897) 162.
Sir William MacGregor, had spoken of the ‘heavy national imperial respon-sibility’ of Britain to carry out malaria research owing to their possession of ‘the Lion’s share of the malarial areas of the earth’:
We hold those vast territories subject to the tyranny of the destructive giant Malaria, who bestrides the globe, and exacts his yearly tribute of scores and scores of thousands of human lives from white and black indiscriminately.58 Writers often invoked dragon slaying and giant killing as a way to meet the representational challenges of tropical medicine. By employing the adven-ture mode—a mode of gallant battles, perilous quests, and treasure- seeking adventurers—parasitologists were able to chart a new conceptual domain: that of tropical disease.
In 1933, a writer for the Cornish Guardian identified Ross as part of a list of ‘modern adventurers’, arguing that, contrary to popular belief, the
‘age of adventure is not past’. ‘It is perhaps because adventures that are worth calling adventures are the experience of a privileged few of mankind that we love to read about them’, they remark, ‘indeed we probably love better to read of other people’s adventures than to go out and court death in adventures ourselves’.59 Going on to write of anonymous sailors and pilots; Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851); First World War pilot and adventure writer Captain W. E. Johns; English explorer Bertram Thomas; colonial office intelligence officer St John Philby; high-altitude balloonist August Piccard, ‘who ascended by balloon ten miles into the stratosphere to report his scientific findings’; the adven-ture stories of Captain Marryat and R. M. Ballantyne; Homer’s Odyssey;
and ‘the late Sir Ronald Ross’, the author demonstrates what Felix Driver describes as the ‘unsettled frontier’ between discourses of adventure travel and of scientific exploration.
This ‘frontier’ was a site for the struggle of professional identities and methodologies, where common ideas, vocabularies, and narrative patterns circulated between ill-bounded genres. Travel writings, imperial adven-ture stories, newspaper articles, obituaries, speeches, and medical texts shared in the same kind of imaginative work. Like the aforementioned
58 ‘A Lecture on Malaria’ British Medical Journal 2 (20 December 1902) 1889–94 (p. 1889).
59 H. J. W., ‘Pages from a Notebook. The Odyssey of a Mariner. Living Dangerously Adds Zest to Life (By “Haitch-Jay”)’ Cornish Guardian, Thursday 13 July 1933, p. 9.
article, many of these texts lionised exploration in colonial space and per-petuated a view of Western medical knowledge as—in Masefield’s words—
‘cleanly and fearless’. In these texts, imperial exploration was a dangerous but morally laudable duty; when tropical illness afflicted white bodies it was often characterised as a toll, as a price for civilisation, and a testament to the bravery of those working to build a better world. This is an exten-sion of the narrative work of parasitologists discussed in my first chapter and part of a larger type of depiction of the colonial world characterised by what Joseph Conrad described as ‘Geography Militant’.
Writing in 1924, Conrad described three epochs in the history of geo-graphical knowledge: Geography Fabulous, Geography Militant, and Geography Triumphant. The middle of these was prevalent from the late eighteenth century through to the ‘scramble for Africa’ and involved the empirical mapping of the world by military and imperial powers—the cre-ation of the globe through discovery and explorcre-ation. For Conrad, this was a transitional stage between a time when maps were speculative and bounded by dragons, and a time when ‘white spaces had succumbed to the domination of science’ and there was nothing left to discover.60 As Driver notes, Geography Militant represented a ‘spirit of heroic exploration’
built on ideas about explorers as missionaries of science ‘extending the frontiers of (European) geographical knowledge’.61 Conrad laments the loss of genuine heroic exploration with the onset of Geography Triumphant, which he associates with the mundane, and with imperial opportunism and corruption. The slow reveal of modernity’s corrupting influence on idealistic exploration is reflected in what Driver calls the
‘murky impressionism’ of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).
Conrad’s perception of Geography Militant is an idealisation, reflecting a zeitgeist fuelled by imperial fervour and nostalgia for a Britain that never really existed. Thus, we might view these imagined geographies, not as sequential historical epochs, but as the expression of ‘inescapable tension[s]
within projects of European exploration’—between idealism and political reality, between discovery and conquest, between philanthropy and exploi-tation.62 As I explore in the following section, linguistic and structural exchanges between narratives of medicine and narratives of imperial
60 Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) p. 3.
61 Driver, Geography Militant, p. 4.
62 Driver, p. 6.
romance reveal writers’ attempts to ‘resolve imaginatively what could not be resolved in other ways’.63