Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era: A Supplementary Volume, by Recent Writers, as Set Forth in the Preface and Table of ContentsLord, John
Philosophy
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era: A Supplementary Volume, by Recent Writers, as Set Forth in the Preface and Table of Contents
Lord, John
History
Most African explorers have been painstaking, conscientious workers,
eager in their quest for the truth, desirous to report nothing but the
truth, and treating the lowly and ignorant they have met as men, with
sensibilities like their own, capable of gratitude for a kindness and
keenly sensitive to an outrage. The world has recognized and applauded
such heroes of discovery,--the men who faced hardship and peril,
enduring and sacrificing much that knowledge might grow; who had to
conquer not only unkind Nature, but to overcome the ignorant violence of
man. And not a few of the leaders in this work have carried it out with
a degree of tactfulness, humanity, gentleness, and kindliness of spirit
amounting to genius. Some of them spent months in disguise, collecting
facts of the highest scientific value among fanatical Mohammedans who
would have killed them if they had known their secret. Such men were
Burton in Harrar, Dr. Lenz in Timbuctoo, and De Foucauld and Harris in
Morocco, who, in stained skins and borrowed costumes, personated
merchants and devotees and doctors and Jews; and most of whom have
enriched the literature of discovery with valuable books. Men also such
as Dr. Junker, who, rich as he was, left his home to spend eight years
alone among the savages of the Welle Makua basin in Central Africa,
living on their food and in their huts that he might minutely study the
people in their country; or Grenfell, who has travelled far more widely
in the Congo basin than Stanley or any of his followers except
Delcommune, and revealed to the world more river systems and unknown
peoples than they, and who, in his long career as an explorer, never
fired a shot upon a native, though his life was often threatened. These
men, and others like them, have exemplified the manysidedness of human
resources against a great variety of peril and obstacle, as no other
explorers in any other part of the world have had an opportunity to do
in equal measure. Their work, with its environment of almost
overwhelming difficulty, should be known to our youth as most forceful
illustrations of what good men may dare and do in good causes and in a
worthy manner.
There have been some exceptions to this rule. A few men have been less
anxious to perform useful service than to figure in the newspapers and
pose before their public. One day a man stood on the north shore of
Victoria Nyanza, and looking south he saw land. When he returned to
London he published a sensational book, in which he said it was
ridiculous for Speke to assert that he had discovered a lake as large as
Scotland, one of the greatest lakes in the world. "Why," said the
writer, "I have stood on the north shore of the Victoria Nyanza and
looked south and seen the southern shore. Lake Victoria is only an
insignificant sheet of water, after all the talk of its being second
only to Lake Superior."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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