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This chapter examines the conflicts in method of mid-nineteenth century expeditionary science in England, focusing on the geographical discovery of the Central African Lakes. It highlights the tensions between those who had direct experience of foreign lands and the claims of those engaged in the so-called critical geography. This chapter also suggests that different routes to scientific knowledge could be employed and that different reputations for authority could be made or broken in relation to which methods had been practiced in securing what knowledge.

We know very little of actual experiences of geographical discovery achieved by the Greeks, or conveyed in some way to them by the real protagonists, during the Archaic period. Most of the fragmentary scraps available to us are of uncertain origin and have ended up being incorporated as mere allusions in Herodotus's work, such as the travel of the Samian merchant Colaeus (or Colaios) to Tartessos, the exploration of the Carian mariner Scylax and other unnamed travelers through the coastal lands of the Indian Ocean, or the voyage undertaken by an African tribe (the Nasamonians) from the vicinity of Cyrene to the hitherto unknown hinterland of that continent. This chapter undertakes an extensive textual analysis of ancient Greek perceptions of geography in order to understand the experience of early colonial traders and explorers who ventured to the shores of Iberia. It shows how, before the age of Strabo, Iberia was perceived through a cultural filter shaped by the combination of a hodological tradition of envisioning and navigating space and an imagined mythological landscape.

This chapter presents an account of British explorer Captain James Cook’s discovery of Australia as recorded the memory of Hobbles Danaiyarri, an Aboriginal cultural custodian and cattle-station stockman. According to Indigenous oral traditions, the discovery of Australia is depicted as a recurring cycle of destruction, violence, and dispossession where Cook himself reappears across space and time as the mythological symbol of the insensitivity and greed of England. Danaiyarri’s account suggests that history itself is part of Australia’s imperial legacy.

This chapter examines V. S. Naipaul's attitude towards Joseph Conrad by focusing on the complex manner in which colonial societies and colonial identity are revisioned in the novel The Enigma of Arrival. It considers how Naipaul destroys the colonial fantasy of ‘security’ in the novel — that is, the notion of ‘a fixed world’ where England is of timeless perfection and the disorder of ‘half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made’. It demonstrates how the dynamics of The Enigma of Arrival are sustained upon a series of translations and self-translations whereby Naipaul constructs himself as colonised subject, migrant, and postcolonial writer. Drawing on examples from the late essay ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, the chapter shows how Conrad ‘meditated’ on his world and draws geographical discovery into the province of romance. It also analyses Conrad's progressivist reading of geography, his place in the history of exploration, and his fanciful mapmaking in relation to the deeds of adventurous explorers.