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Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain sustained a programme of scientific exploration linked directly with her Imperial and trading interests. It played an important role both in shaping and expressing her culture. Although official commitment to exploration remained sporadic and efforts were rarely systematic, the continuity of British exploration is striking, and its purpose and style remained remarkably consistent. A discussion on the organization of exploration is offered. It also examines the styles, methods, and impacts of the explorers. Exploration and the British Empire sprang from the same motives and mutually supported each other in defining, exploiting, and acquiring territory. Yet during the Victorian heyday of British expansion, science and Empire reached their most perfect congruence in the activity of exploration, an acquisitive quest for knowledge that conferred power over new territories while sculpting metropolitan culture to support its use.

The late eighteenth century was an exciting time for the colonizers, who wanted to gather the maximum possible information about India as well as its people and resources. A number of travelogues and tracts appeared, including those of John Capper, F. Buchanan, Hugh Murray, G. R. Wallace, M. Martin, R. Heber, J.M. Honigberger, and M. Jacquemont. These writers faithfully reported not only what was best in India's natural resources and technological traditions, but also what could be the most advantageous to their employers. This chapter examines how colonial science began in India, and how it gradually matured with the help of surveys, educational bodies, scientific societies, and interlocutors (both indigenous and foreign). The Scots and the Danes formed a substantial body of the early botanists and zoologists, followed by a second group of ‘scientists’ that included the early meteorologists, geologists, and astronomers. The surveyors were the forerunners of scientific exploration.

To resolve a long-standing dispute in a geography recently opened to Enlightenment science, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland set out in 1800 to prove the existence of a canal that joined the Marañón (the Amazon) and the Orinoco Rivers. Adriana Méndez Rodenas, a professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures, studies two stages of Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s scientific exploration: their perilous passage through the labyrinthine waters of the Great Cataracts, narrated in his Personal Narrative.., and the cartographic impulse that produced the itinerant map of the region, the centerpiece of Humboldt’s Atlas géographique et physique. Whereas the narrative account of the journey reveals the demands placed on travel writing by the excesses of tropical nature, the feverish map-making activity that supports Humboldt’s scientific discovery introduces a dissonant note in European cartography. In both text and chart, the Orinoco appears as a transnational space criss-crossed by the texts of European explorers and their multiple imaginings, which includes not only spatial practices but also myth and legend.

Ernesto Capello, a professor of history and Latin American studies, explores how the development of new scientific understandings of a mountain range helped to reinvent a South American landscape. Traveling to the continent as part of an expedition to measure the length of a degree of latitude at the equator, the eighteenth-century French explorers Charles Marie de La Condamine and Pierre Bouguer spent some ten years in what is now Ecuador. Through their exploits, they broke through certain European anxieties about the equatorial climate and foreboding mountains. Obsessing about and achieving precision in their geodesic measurements, they utilized an innovative schematic map that deemphasized the altitude of an individual peak by alternatively offering a less intimidating horizontal view that depicted the Andes as a range.