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Published by Christie's, this book formed part of the first major exhibition held in London in August 1999 that focused on Thomas Baines' lifelong interest in the natural history of southern Africa. The exhibition was curated by Michael Stevenson from the extensive, but little-known collections of Baines' work held by the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Natural History Museum in London. The original works, presented to these institutions by Baines, have seldom been exhibited and are lavishly reproduced in this volume. Essays on Baines by specialist writers deal with the artist's passion for botany, astronomy, geology, ethnography, photography, cartography, zoology and ornithology. Extensive appendices with transcripts of the artist's letters, archived at the institutions, are included in this volume. The book is a worthy addition to any Africana collection and will be of interest especially to those who are fascinated by this talented artist and explorer.

Publishing details

Specifications:
Format:
300 x 240mm (portrait)
Binding:
Softcover
Extent:
212 pages
Illustrations:
7 maps, 179 illustrations, sketches and paintings
Contact:
Contact:
Fernwood Press (Pty) Limited
Tel: +27 21 683 3784; Fax: +27 21 671 8574
e-mail: ferpress@iafrica.com

Full Baines essay

In a recent recording of the programme ‘Desert Island Discs’, Sir David Attenborough chose Thomas Baines and W.B. Lord’s Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration as his book for the imaginary island. From this book you can learn how, amongst many other things, to build a bridge, transport an invalid through the bush, sew a jacket, use scientific instruments, incorporate perspective into painting, and even how to catch a whale or hippo. Attenborough’s choice of this most obscure book is surprising because Baines is now almost forgotten by the British public, although he was held in high esteem in scientific circles in Victorian Britain. Sir Henry Rawlinson, president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), in his annual address in 1876, the year after Baines’ death, remarked that ‘few men were so well endowed … for successful African travel, and perhaps none possessed greater courage and perseverance, or more untiring industry than Baines’. However, even in his own time, Baines was not a public figure and his life and work was overshadowed by that of the ‘heroic’ explorers, particularly Livingstone, who were the first Europeans to cross a continent or discover the source of the Nile. Baines seldom took part in such expeditions – and the publicity that accompanied them – and focused instead on recording all that he encountered on his more modest travels.

On all his travels Baines rigorously followed the advice that he offered to other travellers intending to visit ‘little-known regions’: to ‘sketch such objects or scenes as may be most interesting’ as well as ‘keep a diary for private gratification, if not for public use’. He recommended that such a journal ‘must be written while the events described are fresh on the memory, or there is neither life nor spirit in it. If the journal of to-day is put off, the events of tomorrow will confuse and dim the impressions that ought in all their pristine vigour to have been committed to paper; procrastination … will rob the journal … of all that freshness and vivacity which alone can make it interesting.’ As a result, he left a body of journals and pictures which is arguably more extensive than that produced by any other European explorer in Africa in the nineteenth century.

In this catalogue, contributors from a range of disciplines in art history, natural history and science critically examine his work in the historical, scientific and cultural contexts in which he laboured. The intent of this interdisciplinary approach is to acknowledge the full complexity of factors that influenced Baines’ life and work. In the past the latter, with a few exceptions, has tended to be considered only within the confines of formal art history.

The historiography of Baines studies is dominated by two publications: a comprehensive biography by J.P.R. Wallis, first published in 1941 and reprinted, with an introduction by Frank Bradlow, in 1976; and a revisionist study of his life and work by Marion Arnold and Jane Carruthers, published in 1995. Although his work has also been the subject of a host of journal and conference papers, the vast scope of the primary material ensures that there remain untold opportunities for further study, especially in the context of the scholarly debates in post-apartheid South Africa. A step in this direction is the essay in this catalogue by Desiree Lewis in which she offers some new perspectives on Baines’ life and work.

In this introductory essay, a few broad themes that recur in relation to Baines’ life and work are explored. At the outset, his travels are considered in the context of the exploration mania of Africa in the nineteenth century, and attention is given to the impact that Livingstone’s dismissal of him in 1859 made on his future opportunities as an explorer. Baines’ limited success as an explorer is also discussed in relation to his inadequate financial resources and his lack of a powerful support base within the scientific societies of Victorian London. Nevertheless, he sustained close links with imperialistic scientific societies such as the RGS and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and provided them with a stream of images, information and material from southern Africa. Thereafter his broad-ranging interest in the fields of natural sciences are explored in the context of the Victorian passion for natural history, and the accuracy of his representations is debated in relation to this amateur tradition. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the conditions under which Baines obsessively sketched and collected specimens of natural history, and the modest scientific recognition he ultimately received for all his endeavours in the fields of natural sciences.

An ever-present theme in Baines’ life and work is his aspirations and disappointments as an ‘explorer’. He was born in an era in which the cult of the explorer was at its zenith. As has been observed in relation to Livingstone, the ‘figure of the explorer seemed to draw together the most cherished national ideals in an age of supreme confidence about the virtues of the British: a fearless sense of adventure, selfless dedication, heroic valour and technological mastery’.1 When Baines first set out from King’s Lynn in Norfolk in 1842, at the age of 22, to seek employment as an ornamental coach painter at the Cape, his diaries do not suggest that he had any pronounced interest in exploration. Yet, if he did have latent ambitions as an explorer, Africa was the most appropriate destination. In Stafford’s opinion, explorers ‘acted out the European longing to be challenged by nature in a wild and exotic setting’ in Africa ‘more intensely than anywhere else’.2 And if one did desire to travel in Africa, the Cape was a most appropriate starting point. As Pratt has observed, ‘The Cape of Good Hope was one of the few places in Africa where Northern Europeans had access to the continental interior. It was a magnet both for settlers and for explorers eager to make their mark.’3 South Africa, even at that date, already had a rich history of travellers and explorers who had used both texts and images to convey back to Europe their observations about the landscape, people and natural history.

Traveller-artist George French Angas was the influence to which Baines ascribed the awakening of his interest in exploring the hinterland beyond the Cape. On a visit to Cape Town in 1846–1847, Angas had ‘revived the spirit of adventure that … for some time had slumbered within me, and after a short acquaintance we agreed to explore … the interior of Africa, and even indulged in anticipation of being the favoured instruments of bringing to the knowledge of the world the Great Lake since discovered by Messrs. Oswell and Murray and Dr Livingstone’.4 This ambitious plan, as well as a number of other schemes, did not materialise, but in 1850 Baines was asked by Joseph McCabe to join him on travelling to these recently discovered lakes. However, this trip did not reach its objective; the Boers refused the travellers permission to traverse their territories en route to the interior.

Baines’ further ambitions for exploration were limited by his role as a war artist in the Eighth Frontier War, but soon thereafter he sought to undertake a ‘journey into the interior pursuing a north eastern route towards the Nile for artistic and geographic purposes’.5He intended to fund this expedition through the sale of his paintings and prints thereof, but asked his father to write for further financial support to the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Edward Stanley,6 as well as to Sir Roderick Murchison of the RGS.7 This project to find the source of the Nile also did not materialise, but on a visit to England in mid-1853, after an absence of more than a decade, Baines made himself available for any other ventures that might arise.8 He was ultimately offered a position on the RGS-sponsored Gregory expedition to northern Australia in 1855 as an artist and storekeeper.9 His responsible and successful execution of his duties on this expedition then placed him in a strong position to approach Livingstone for a place on the government- and RGS-sponsored exploration of the Zambezi River.

The inclusion of Baines on this expedition was the pivotal event in his career as an explorer. In the late 1850s Livingstone was being fêted and celebrated after his journey across the subcontinent of southern Africa, and Baines undoubtedly viewed himself as greatly privileged to have been given the opportunity to travel with one of the most prominent personalities in Victorian Britain. However, when Livingstone controversially dismissed him from the position of artist and storekeeper for the expedition in 1859, Baines’ aspirations as an explorer were effectively capped. As John Kirk described Livingstone in a letter to his brother in January 1860, ‘He is a man who takes small intense hatreds and is therefore a more dangerous enemy than useful friend.’10 An individualistic and enterprising personality such as Baines was clearly seen as a threat by Livingstone who, as Stafford has observed, wished to be accompanied only by individuals who posed no challenge to his leadership and pre-eminence. 11 Baines was not sufficiently self-effacing. If he had been ‘a trifle more weak minded’ he might have, as he later wrote, ‘cut my throat’ in a fit of fever because ‘many men have done it for less than that, it would have been Saint Livingstone and that unfortunate reprobate Baines’.12

This is not the place to explore the intricacies of the dismissal, but it is generally acknowledged that Livingstone’s actions were unfair. Baines’ explanation six years later in a letter to an official of the RGS is a very convincing response to any accusations of mismanagement of stores:

with regard to the Expedition stores they were scattered over one or two hundred miles of country at Tete, Senna Shupanga & Expedition Island. Charles Livingstone himself set the example of taking stores without asking my consent or reporting the act to me and it is false that Mr Thornton13 was allowed to take what he liked in my presence… I asked the Doctor to settle a scale of rations or to let me draw up one for him to authorize. I asked him to order that every officer who opened a case in my absence should report it to me, but he refused both. Sometimes I was told twice over that another case of flour had been spoiled and sometimes I was never told at all. Then my illness ought to be taken into account, I have no hesitation in saying that the fever was brought on by my working harder in the expedition service than any man belonging to it. And that I continued striving to do my duty when most others would have sought to place themselves upon the sick list – that the books are irregular I know well enough. My head was in such a condition and my memory so confused that I could not add up a dozen figures twice with the same result. Just imagine yourself worn down in body and mind by constant fever and conscious that you were being exposed to constant persecution and misrepresentation while at the same time charges and accusations which were never made openly to your face were being conveyed against you to the Commander.14

The debate about how effectively Baines performed his role as a storekeeper has tended to overshadow any consideration of his work as a naturalist and artist on this expedition, because the repercussions of his dismissal were so far reaching.15 As Baines himself wrote: ‘[Livingstone] has done his utmost to ruin my character and he has ruined my prospects in life.’16 For the next sixteen years, until Baines’ death in 1875, this event haunted and influenced all he undertook as he relentlessly sought to vindicate his reputation and prove his innocence. He sent ‘the papers containing my correspondence with Livingstone to my friends in London and other parts of the world … hoping that the English press might take some notice of it – but it appeared to me that the affair was purposely kept quiet. I shall, if it is found advisable, still make the whole as public as possible.’17 A self-righteous, vindictive and formidable adversary, Livingstone did not respond. Nevertheless, Baines almost had the pleasure of leading an expedition initiated by the RGS in 1872 ‘to search for and assist or rescue if necessary Dr Livingstone’. His response to the RGS was surprisingly gracious: ‘I can only say that I most highly appreciate the compliment paid me in the proposal that I should be selected for such a service and assure you that if I am appointed I will use every effort in my power to discover and assist the Doctor – if as I hope he is still living or – if he is dead (which I do not believe) to obtain any record or relic that may remain of him.’18

Had this break with Livingstone not occurred, the path of Baines’ life would in all probability have been very different. He could have sought support from scientific bodies such as the RGS for exploration work; after his dismissal this was almost impossible because of the symbiotic relationship between the RGS and Livingstone. Murchison, as president of the RGS, chose to overlook Baines in favour of Livingstone because, in Stafford’s opinion, ‘By creating Livingstone’s renown, Murchison made possible the government aid, public subscriptions, and profits from book sales which freed him to prosecute further African explorations.’19 Stafford explains this ‘partnership’ as follows: ‘Livingstone provided Murchison with a series of breathtaking discoveries that catapulted the RGS to a pinnacle of fame and influence, while the President transformed the obscure missionary into one of Victorian Britain’s archetypal heroes.’20 Stafford also maintains that ‘Murchison’s unswerving support remained the explorer’s greatest asset throughout his later career’.21 Baines could never come to terms with the fact that Murchison would not consider supporting him in the dispute with Livingstone. Even six years after the break, Baines wrote to an official at the RGS: ‘I saw Sir R Murchison the other day and he told me he had written a strong letter to Dr Livingstone but he had not sent my letter as it contained expressions that were too strong and might irritate the Doctor who is a hot tempered man.’ 22

Baines never again embarked on a government-sanctioned scientific trip, and his later travels in southern Africa until his death were all associated with traders and commercial ventures. He accompanied James Chapman, a trader in cattle and ivory who desired to ‘establish a line of commercial stations across Southern Africa from sea to sea’,23 for two years in Namibia and to Lake Ngami and the Victoria Falls. He stayed with John Charles Andersson, another trader, in central Namibia for almost two years; and his two expeditions to the Tati goldfields in Zimbabwe were undertaken for the South African Goldfields Exploration Company. He sought to join other expeditions but none materialised. For instance, in October 1865 he was hopeful of being included in an RGS-sponsored expedition to explore the sources of the Congo and Zambezi rivers.24 Then in January 1866 the artist Thomas Valentine Robins, returning from the attempt to rescue Dr Baikie on the Niger, proposed that Baines should accompany him on a second trip to that region. Baines approached Murchison for support for his share of the expenses, without success.25 And in 1867, Francis Galton proposed ‘a sketching tour round the Coast of Africa by short voyages and residences at the intermediate stations for the purpose of obtaining authentic portraits of the tribes residing there or coming down from the interior to trade’.26 This period, the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was the climax of the exploration frenzy of Africa because there were still large parts of the continent which had not yet been mapped out by European explorers. The fact that Baines, with his skills and experience, was marginalised in this era of exploration can be attributed primarily to the lingering repercussions of the break between him and Livingstone.27

Another hindrance in the path of Baines’ aspirations as an explorer was his limited financial resources. He had no private income and came from a lower-middle class family, unlike prominent personalities in the world of British exploration such as Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, the Hookers and Murchison, who utilised their often substantial private incomes to fund their careers. Consequently, throughout his life he depended primarily on the sale of his paintings to finance his desire for travel and exploration. As early as 1852 his father explained this issue in his request to the RGS for funding for his son’s proposed trip to seek the source of the Nile: ‘For the expenses of this journey he trusts to the copyright of the present book and a series of military views not yet submitted to the publishers. [This income] will be inadequate.’28 General George Cathcart, in a letter of introduction to Murchison, also elaborated on this predicament: ‘Mr Baines is as a painter an artist of no ordinary merit and has derived some profit from his indefatigable exertions in that profession and I believe his intention was to devote his whole profits to his favourite object [which is] to explore the interior of South Africa but the sale of his pictures has not produced the requisite means to enable him to make the attempt entirely at his own cost.’29 In 1864 Baines himself wrote from Namibia to Captain George at the RGS that his return to the Zambezi ‘will depend upon the sale my pictures … in Cape Town¼. If Chapman makes another attempt and we go in company probably my equipment may be under £300 … if I have to go alone it will considerably exceed it. I have earned nothing as yet since I returned but must now go to work with a will.’30

A passion for travel without the means necessary to indulge it resulted in Baines agreeing to lead expeditions seeking gold in Zimbabwe on behalf of the South African Gold Fields Exploration. (SAGFE) Co. From these unscrupulous mining promoters he received, as he later explained, ‘no pay’. In addition, he contributed his own machinery, on the understanding that he would take his ‘reward in a share of the profit if I make the affair successful’.31 All these trips were financial disasters, and the fact that they ever materialised was due only to Baines’ naïve determination to keep the operations solvent. He painted frantically in a personal effort to reduce the company’s outstanding debts and to overcome the humiliation caused by the failure of its under-capitalised and ill-conceived ventures. A characteristic example of his naïvety on these journeys occurred when they stopped over at a mission on the return of the first journey. Henry Hartley and a Mr Sykes of the mission wished him to paint pictures for them, ‘but they both wish to pay me, and I do not intend to receive payment while I am in the service of the Company, not that I think the Directors would suspect me of wrong, but I do not wish to break what I believe to be a most proper understanding, i.e. that on such a service as we are engaged in all the results belong to the Company. I may, probably, if I have time, paint a picture … and ask him to apply the price of it as the Company’s contribution to the mission, and from Mr Hartley I can receive meal or other produce useful to us.’32 Baines’ view of the Company seems ironic because on the second journey he had to resort to painting pictures, signs, flags and wagons to meet its debts and to be swapped for provisions.33 Towards the end of the second journey he admits in his journal that he has ‘no means of maintaining Jewell and Gee and the kaffirs except by my work’.34

Baines also did not have a powerful support base in the metropolitan networks in the fields of science and exploration. If he had secured the patronage of an individual such as Murchison, for instance, he would have been certain of widespread support because he managed to maintain prominence simultaneously in several leading scientific societies of his time, in particular the Geological Society and the RGS. One of Baines’ few supporters was Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892), author of The Naturalist on the Amazons (1863) who, after travelling in Brazil for a decade and documenting an astonishing 14,712 species of animals, was chosen in 1864 as the assistant secretary to the RGS. Although he was not supremely powerful like Murchison, he was always willing to assist Baines in his requests for information and advice.35 It was perhaps Baines’ lack of urban social skills that ensured that he never became prominent in the circles that accorded support. As his friend Henry Hall remarked about his lack of social graces, ‘In the ball-room … he might have been a failure.’36

His most loyal promoter was his mother who, until her death in 1870, relentlessly and unwaveringly sought to advance the career of her son.37 She displayed his canvases in her small sitting-room window in King’s Lynn and as early as 1850 she organised the first public exhibition of his work in the town. Later, under mayoral patronage, she organised a larger show entitled ‘Panoramic views and paintings of southern Africa’ which was supplemented, according to the poster, by ‘a collection of natural history, birds, beasts, insects and vegetables … and also costumes and implements, including the complete dress of a Caffer Chief’.38 Her promotion of her son’s work knew no social limits: towards the end of 1851 she even sent two parcels of his Eastern Cape pictures to Queen Victoria. They were acknowledged with a letter that the paintings had been viewed ‘with much gratification’.39 She initiated the publication of the folio of lithographs based on his paintings, Scenery and Events in South Africa by Ackermann in 1852, and obtained the patronage of His Royal Highness Prince Albert for the project. In the early 1860s she exhibited in King’s Lynn a large collection of his sketches and watercolours relating to the Livingstone and Chapman expeditions,40 and at the suggestion of Capt. George of the RGS she submitted a selection to the Prince of Wales at Sandringham in November 1863.41

Mrs Baines slightly overstepped the mark when she arranged the publication of her son’s Explorations in South-West Africa in 18644218 because Baines had promised Chapman that he would not publish an account of the journey until Chapman had published his. A minor public row raged over this in 1865–1866, but by the end of the decade Chapman had forgiven Baines for his mother’s overzealous advancement of him.43 Mother and son periodically had their differences,44 but Thomas was the object of his mother’s whole existence, as a letter from her to the RGS in July 1859 (while he was on the Zambezi expedition) indicates: ‘A report has just reached me that Mr Baines has had an attack of sunstroke and also stung by insects as I have not had a letter I shall be greatly obliged if you can give me any information on the subject as I was greatly distressed about it.’45

One role that Baines did fulfil energetically was that of intermediary between the ‘contact zones’46 in which he travelled and metropolitan centres at the Cape and in Britain. For example, in King’s Lynn in August 1854 he was ‘fully occupied by day and night in preparing my share of the exhibition for the opening of our new Athenaeum that I have hardly had a moment to call my own’.47 He constructed ‘an African glen with rocks and plants, an appropriate back landscape, and the patrol tent I used in the Kafir war with gun, saddle, blanket and other appurtenances so as to give an idea of frontier life’. 48 In later years, after the Zambezi expedition and the denigrating tussle with Livingstone, the underlying tone of his exhibitions and lectures at the Cape and in Britain noticeably changed from one of providing new information to proving his self worth and significance as an artist and explorer. He published numerous articles in journals and magazines (those for Leisure Hour and Sunday at Home formed the basis of his contribution to Shifts and expedients…) and, most impressively, the folio of ten lithographs of the Victoria Falls in 1865–1866. He also took every opportunity to exhibit his paintings in Cape Town49 and later at the Crystal Palace, Dublin Exhibition and at the Alexandra Palace, 50 as well as in his home town, King’s Lynn. In addition, Baines lectured extensively, especially at the regional meetings of the British Association whose Geological and Ethnographic sections solicited his contributions. In 1866 he borrowed some of his oils from the RGS for a meeting at Nottingham,51 and he attended the Society’s meetings the following year at Hull and Birmingham. In Dundee he read a paper on Walvis Bay,52 and at the London Polytechnic he even lectured on Abyssinia, where he had never been.53

Although Baines had limited success in securing funding from the London scientific societies and institutions, he maintained close contact with them, in particular with the RGS and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. His first contact with the RGS was in 1852 through the letter already quoted, in which his father enquired about support for his son’s proposed trip to establish the source of the Nile. At the time of his death, Baines was still in close contact with the Society, in spite of Murchison’s continued support of Livingstone. The RGS had been founded in 1830 and, under the leadership of Murchison, had evolved into one of the most prominent, fashionable and popular societies in Victorian Britain. Baines retained his close connections with it because it was the leading centre for learning and debate about geography and exploration and, more specifically, because in the European exploration of Africa it assisted, sponsored and honoured almost all the British explorers of the continent between 1850 and 1875.54 The senior Fellows of the RGS exercised considerable influence in government and society; Murchison ‘frequently appeared to have succeeded in making the RGS an independent source of national policy’ towards Africa.55 Baines contributed papers to the RGS journal; when in London, he attended and presented papers at meetings;56 and he was elected Fellow of the RGS for ‘services to Geography’ on 23 November 1857. His relationship with the RGS will be further considered in Jeffery Stone’s essay on Baines and cartography.

Baines’ first correspondence with Sir William J. Hooker of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was in 1854 and they remained in contact until the latter’s death in 1865, after which Baines wrote regularly to his son and successor, Sir Joseph Hooker. When William Hooker was appointed director of the Gardens in 1841, he set about rejuvenating the collection of foreign plants by encouraging informed amateurs, who were either travellers or in colonial service, to send specimens to Kew. He co-ordinated colonial botany by establishing gardens throughout the world and developing the field of economic botany, and by the middle of the nineteenth century had succeeded in establishing Kew as the focal point of the imperial colonial botanical enterprise. Both Hookers maintained a warm relationship with Baines, and in turn he regularly went out of his way to send them specimens,57 and presented Kew with sketches and paintings of the plants.58 Baines’ links with Kew and the Hookers will be explored in more detail in Marion Arnold’s chapter on Baines and botany.

There are also references to Baines’ contacts with other societies such as the Royal Zoological Society, the Linnean Society, the British Association, and the Ethnography Society. The last-mentioned wrote to Baines’ brother, Henry, in 1851 thanking him ‘for the opportunity that you kindly gave to the fellows of our society to inspect those very excellent and spirited sketches of Scenes and Events in South Africa … made by your brother’.59 Because these institutions served as the venues for the dissemination of colonial scientists’ discoveries through publications, lectures and debates, Baines continually conveyed to them his observations of the landscape and natural history that he encountered. Consequently, as this exhibition demonstrates, there are extensive collections of his paintings and correspondence with these scientific bodies that document his consuming interest in natural history and science. Such collections, for the greater part, have never been exhibited or published.

Richard Owen, in his address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1858, remarked with patriotic pride on the integral role of imperialism in developing the British collections of natural history: ‘Our colonies include parts of the earth where the forms of plants and animals are the most strange. No empire in the world had ever so wide a range for the collection of the various forms of animal life as Great Britain. Never was there so much energy and intelligence displayed in the capture and transmission of exotic animals by the enterprising traveller in unknown lands and by the hardy settler in remote colonies as those who start from their native shores of Britain.’60 His view of the central ideological role of imperialism in Victorian Britain is no longer received with such enthusiasm. Stafford considers that British natural science’s ‘importation of overseas data into the libraries and museums of the metropolis constituted in one sense a gigantic looting operation which helped maintain British ascendancy’.61 He also succinctly expresses our present-day more critical perspective when he observes that in ‘the formal and informal empires of Victorian Britain, natural scientists played a primary role in reconnoitring natural resources, stimulating their exploitation, and advising government policy makers on related issues. Geology and botany led the other sciences in support received and research accomplished because of the immediate economic usefulness of their results.’62 Pratt takes this revisionist view further when she states that ‘natural history asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole of the planet; it elaborated a rationalising, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants and animals’.63

Thomas Baines subscribed to the imperialistic doctrine of his day that we now view so differently. His role in the exploration of southern African and northern Australia and his collection of information and specimens of natural history were a small, but significant, contribution to advancing British ascendancy over these territories. The Gregory and Livingstone expeditions were both officially sanctioned expeditions with scientific briefs that thinly disguised the economic and colonial aspirations of Britain. There are also occasions later in Baines’ life when his observations about a territory in which he had undertaken a primarily scientific journey are unabashedly imperialistic. In his address to the British Association in 1867 on the potential of Walvis Bay harbour and the interior, he ‘advocated the establishment of a commissioner in the port, authorised to hoist the British flag, regulate the commerce of the place, and settle questions that arise between the traders and the natives. The country abounds with cattle, which might become objects of a large export trade. The copper found is a rich heavy ore.’64 And, writing to Bates at the RGS in 1874, after his two journeys to Zimbabwe, he states: ‘I have made up my mind to finish the work I have begun if possible and to open up that country.’65

There is a tension throughout Baines’ texts and images between the demands of science and the Victorian conventions of natural history. Merrill draws the distinction between science which is ‘more detached, objective, and seeks to understand objects of nature in their relation to one another; its tone is neutral’, and natural history which ‘is more personal, evocative, and seeks to enjoy the distinction between one natural object and any other; [and] its tone is emotional’.66 Baines made a concerted effort to provide specific measurements and observations and as a matter of course, especially in his later journals, there are almost daily notes on the latitude, altitude, temperature and weather, and the geological features in the landscape. Yet once he had satisfied these expectations of science, he invariably engaged the reader with a narrative and anecdotes of travel and specimen collecting. A characteristic example is his journal entry on 22 April 1861 when ‘the thermometer in the open room stood at 67°’. He ‘saw the sharp dorsal fins of several large sharks gliding swiftly through the calm water’67 and continued by describing in a lengthy narrative of how he caught and measured them, and then recorded the details of the skin, the contents of stomach, etc.68 Baines’ journals concur exactly with Merrill’s observation that most of natural history writing focused on describing the visual externals of the objects. ‘The ambitious natural historian might proceed from such descriptions to the classification of items by type, paying particular attention to the naming of the species, as determined by comparison of minute features between one specimen and the next.’69

In the tradition of nineteenth-century natural history, Baines’ approach was not that of a professional scientist but rather that of an amateur.70 Unlike science, natural history remained accessible to amateurs because it was not the sole preserve of professional scientists who understood the mathematical complexities of astronomy, physics and chemistry. As Merrill observes, natural history ‘remained encyclopaedic and amateur, something that ordinary people could enjoy’.71 Any interested individual could, through self-instruction, engage with the developments in natural history, and on occasion even contribute to a natural history debate, as Baines often did. Even if Baines had wished to pursue a career as a professional natural scientist concerned with taxonomy in a specialist field, he would have had little hope of success because he did not have formal training, and very few such posts existed. But Baines had no desire to be anything other than an amateur, and his journals are full of remarks referring to his amateur status and his desire to be only a field collector and a facilitator. An example of this approach is an occasion in 1870 when, after he had made a sketch of a dead female waterbuck and had preserved the little foetus, a fellow traveller wanted to know what he could learn from it. Baines replied: ‘If I supply the specimen with sketch and best description I am able to give, I have done my part. Scientific investigators can do theirs.’72 Similarly, when he was uncertain if a ‘gigantic flowering aloe’ was new to science, Baines absolved himself from the debate and remarked, ‘All I pretend to, is to represent faithfully what I have seen.’73 And again, because ‘the dentition of the African elephant is a subject on which information is desired at home, I thought it worth while to attempt the preservation of the skin and skull-bone. After no end of trouble, I succeeded in getting off the hide not greatly mutilated, [and] preserved the skull from being broken … I sawed the skull in two, and set a couple of women to clean off the flesh … and, if possible, forward half to the Lynn Museum, and half to Professor Owen.’74 What further confirms his amateur status is that he never collected specimens to sell to scientific institutions. There is no indication in his journals of him ever considering this option, even though his financial position was perennially precarious.

Other factors that suggest that Baines was an amateur are the sheer breadth of his interests and his infinite curiosity about all the natural sciences. In almost all of them he was more informed and accomplished than most amateurs. In Henry Hall’s opinion, Baines as ‘a botanist, ethnologist, and natural historian … was equal, if not superior to many of his contemporaries’; and he ‘was well acquainted with all the native names of the botanical and natural history kingdoms’.75 The brief given to Baines outlining his duties as an artist on the Zambezi expedition illustrates the extent of his interests and skills in the fields of natural history and ethnography. According to Livingstone’s instructions, Baines was ‘required to make faithful representations of the general features of the country through which we shall pass in sketches of those points which you may consider characteristic of the scenery’. He was also to ‘endeavour to make drawings of wild animals and birds copying as closely as you can the natural attitudes’ and ‘delineate for the general collection of the expedition the specimens of useful and rare plants, fossils and reptiles that may be submitted to you as a means of preserving pictorial records of things which through the influence of the climate may otherwise be lost’. Furthermore, he was ‘required to draw average specimens of the different tribes we may meet with, for the purposes of ethnology and should it be possible to measure the dimensions of the heads of the individuals you may select, the measurements will be highly prized. The comelier countenances should be selected rather than the uglier as the former are always taken as the types of European race.’

His sketches and journals illustrate this astonishingly broad-ranging interest in the tradition of Buffon’s philosophy that ‘Natural history embraces all the objects the universe presents to us. This prodigious multitude of quadrupeds, birds, fish, insects, plants, minerals, etc., offers to the curiosity of the human mind a vast spectacle, of which the whole is so great that the details are inexhaustible.’76 There are countless passages in Baines’ journals which illustrate his absorbing interest in living organisms large and small: ‘He drew my attention to a small creeping plant, the seed of which is the celebrated haak-doorn … and among the mimosas we caught a number of brilliant-winged beetles and butterflies.’77 Another describes what happened after he had caught a lizard of the ‘laughing death’ species: ‘I found my guide regarded it merely as a harmless animal, and had no particular fear of it. I never like either to contradict or disbelieve any tale, however marvellous or incredible it may sound at first, but simply withhold my belief till I hear more.’ He expands: ‘When I was first told the story of the summer plant and winterworm – i.e. of a tree that bears an insect which passes through all the usual changes for the greater part of the year and then sticks its head in the ground, and he becomes a tree again – I confess I was slightly incredulous, yet anyone who will take the trouble to look over the Royal Museum at Kew may soon be convinced that the story is not without foundation.’78 These themes are explored further in essays in this catalogue written by specialists in their respective fields. Patricia Lorber will discuss his work on birds and Ann Datta his interest in zoology; Patricia Davison and Sandra Klopper will explore his engagement with ethnography; and Marion Arnold will consider his fascination with botany.