Hidden Histories of Exploration

I have read a lot about exploration and travel for my research so was interested to see this photo gallery at the Guardian website looking at the role of the local populations in exploration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The majority of explorers were not alone on their journey into the ‘unknown’, local knowledge and support was vital but for the most part unrecognised in the popular idea of the explorer.

"Local muscle employed on an 1836 journey down the River Amazon, captured in a lithograph in W. Smyth and F. Lowe's Narrative of a Journey from Lima to Para, Across the Andes and Down the Amazon."

"The navigation of rivers in British Guiana required overland transport of boats to bypass cataracts. This photograph was taken in 1878."

The research project is called Hidden Histories of Exploration from the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Holloway, University of London, funded by the AHRC.

Source: The Guardian