The end of a much-applauded speech—Introduction of Dr Samuel Fergusson—'Excelsior!'—Full-length portrait of the doctor—A convinced fatalist—Dinner at the Travellers' Club—A long toast list

THERE WAS a large audience at the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 3 Waterloo Place, on the 14th of January, 1862. The President, Sir Francis M—, made an important announcement to his honourable colleagues in a speech frequently interrupted by applause. This rare piece of eloquence was at last brought to an end in a few sonorous sentences into which patriotism was poured with a lavish hand:

'England has always marched at the head of the nations' (for it is noticeable that the nations invariably march at each other's heads), 'through the intrepidity of her travellers in the sphere of geographical discovery.( Hear, hear. ) Dr Samuel Fergusson, one of her famous sons, will not fail the land of his birth. ( Hear, hear, from all sides. ) This venture, if it succeeds ( It will succeed !), will link together and complete the present scattered knowledge of African cartography, and—( vehement applause ), and if it fails ( No ! No ! ) it will at least live as one of the most audacious conceptions of the human mind!' ( Frenzied cheers .)

'Hurrah! hurrah!' shouted the assembly, electrified by these stirring words.

'Three cheers for brave Fergusson!' cried one of the more exuberant members of the audience, and there was an outburst of enthusiastic cheering. The name of Fergusson was on all lips, and we are justified in thinking that it gained considerably from its passage through English throats. The Session Hall was shaken with it.

Yet this was a gathering of bold explorers, aged and worn, whom their restless temperaments had dragged through the four quarters of the world. Physically or morally, they had practically all escaped from shipwreck, fire, the tomahawk of the Indian, the club of the savage, the torture-stake, and Polynesian stomachs! But nothing could restrain the leaping of their hearts during Sir Francis M—'s speech, and this was certainly the greatest oratorical success within the memory of the society.

In England, however, enthusiasm does not confine itself to mere words. It coins money faster than the engines of the Royal Mint. A sum of money voted on the spot for the encouragement of Dr Fergusson reached the figure of two thousand five hundred pounds. The importance of the sum was in proportion to the importance of the enterprise.

A member of the society questioned the President as to whether Dr Fergusson would not be officially presented.

'The doctor holds himself at the disposal of the meeting,' replied Sir Francis M—.

'Have him in!' they shouted. 'Have him in! We should like to see a man of such extraordinary audacity with our own eyes!'

'Perhaps this incredible scheme is only intended to hoax us,' said an apoplectic old commodore.

'What if Dr Fergusson didn't exist?' cried a malicious voice.

'He'd have to be invented,' replied a waggish member of this solemn society.

'Show Dr Fergusson in,' said Sir Francis simply.

And the doctor entered amid a thunder of applause, and without the least show of emotion. He was a man of about forty, of average height and build. His full-blooded temperament betrayed itself in the florid colouring of his face. His expression was cold, his features regular, with a prominent nose, the figure-head nose of the man predestined for discovery. His eyes, very gentle and intelligent rather than bold, gave great charm to his face. His arms were long, and he placed his feet on the ground in the confident manner of the great walker. The whole person of the doctor exhaled calm gravity, and it would never have occurred to anyone that he could be the instrument of the most innocent hoax.

And so the cheers and applause did not cease until the moment when the doctor, with a good-humoured gesture, called for silence. He made his way towards the chair prepared for his presentation, and then, upright, rigid, his eye radiating energy, he raised his right forefinger towards heaven, opened his mouth and uttered the single word: 'Excelsior!'

Never did an unexpected interpellation by Messrs Bright and Cobden, never a demand by Lord Palmerston for extraordinary funds for armouring the cliffs of England, meet with such a success. Sir Francis M—'s speech was thrown into the shade, and that easily. The doctor was at once sublime, great, self-controlled and restrained. He had struck the keynote of the situation: 'Excelsior!'

The old commodore, completely won over to this strange man, called for the insertion, verbatim, of Dr Fergusson's speech in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London .

What, then, was this doctor, and to what exploit was he about to devote himself?

Young Fergusson's father, a worthy captain of the British Navy, had from his son's earliest youth associated the latter with himself in the dangers and adventures of his profession. This estimable boy, who never appears to have known fear, quickly displayed a bright intelligence, an inquiring mind, a remarkable propensity for scientific work. In addition, he displayed unusual skill in getting out of difficulties. Nothing ever perplexed him, not even the handling of his first fork, with which children are not as a rule very successful.

Soon his imagination was kindled by the reading of bold enterprises and exploration by sea. He followed passionately the discoveries which signalised the early part of the nineteenth century. He dreamed of fame like that of Mungo Park, Bruce, the Caillies, Levaillant, and even to some extent, I believe, that of Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe, whom he placed on no less high a level. What absorbing hours he spent with him on his island of Juan Fernandez! The ideas of the solitary sailor frequently met with his approval, but at times he disputed his plans and schemes. He himself would have acted differently, perhaps better, certainly as well. But one thing is sure; he would never have left that joyous island, where he was as happy as a king without subjects, not even to become First Lord of the Admiralty.

I leave you to imagine how these tendencies developed during his adventurous youth, when he was tossed about between the four corners of the earth. His father, as an educated man, lost no opportunity of consolidating this alert mind by serious study of hydrography, physics and mechanics, with a dash of botany, medicine and astronomy.

After the death of the worthy captain, Samuel Fergusson, now twentytwo years of age, had already travelled round the world. He joined the Bengal Engineers and distinguished himself on several occasions. But a soldier's life did not suit him and, with little ambition to command, he was reluctant to obey. He resigned and, partly for purposes of hunting, partly botanising, he made his way towards the north of the Indian Peninsula, which he crossed from Calcutta to Surat: a mere jaunt.

From Surat we see him cross to Australia and take part, in 1845, in Captain Stuart's expedition to discover that Caspian Sea which was supposed to lie in the centre of New Holland.

Samuel Fergusson returned to England about 1850 and, more than ever possessed by the demon of discovery, passed his time until 1853 accompanying Captain MacClure on the expedition which traversed the American continent from the Behring Straits to Cape Farewell.

In spite of every form of fatigue, and in every kind of climate, Fergusson's constitution stood the test wonderfully. He lived cheerfully amid the most complete privations. He was the type of the ideal traveller whose stomach contracts or distends at will, whose legs grow longer or shorter to match the improvised couch, can go to sleep at any hour of the day and wake at any hour of the night.

Nothing is less surprising than to find our indefatigable traveller from 1855 to 1857 exploring the whole of western Tibet, in the company of the Schlagintweit brothers, and bringing back from this expedition curious ethnographical observations.

During these various journeys he was the most active and interesting correspondent of the Daily Telegraph , a penny paper whose circulation reaches 140,000 copies daily, which is hardly enough to satisfy several millions of readers. He was therefore well known, this doctor, in spite of the fact that he was not a member of any learned institution nor of any of the Royal Geographical Societies of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna or St Petersburg, nor of the Travellers' Club, nor even of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, where his friend Cockburn, the statistician, was supreme.

This learned man, in fact, with the idea of making himself agreeable, one day asked him to solve the following problem: Given the number of miles traversed by the doctor in going round the world, how many more would his head have covered than his feet as a result of the difference between the radii? Or, given the number of miles covered by the feet and head of the doctor, respectively, calculate his height to one place of decimals.

But Fergusson always held aloof from learned societies, as talking was not his strong point. He thought his time better employed in seeking subjects for discussion and discovery than in making speeches.

It is said that an Englishman one day went to Geneva with the idea of inspecting the lake. He was put into one of those old-fashioned carriages in which the passengers sit sideways to the horse, as in an omnibus. Now it happened that our Englishman was seated with his back to the lake. The carriage quietly completed its circular trip without its having occurred to him to turn round, and he went back to London delighted with the Lake of Geneva.

Dr Fergusson, however, was in the habit of turning round more than once during his travels, and to such good effect that he had seen much. In this, moreover, he was obeying his nature, and we have good reason to believe that he was a bit of a fatalist, though a very orthodox fatalist, relying on himself and even on Providence. He regarded himself as driven rather than drawn on in his travels, and traversed the world like a railway engine which does not guide itself but is steered by the track.

'I don't follow my path,' he would often say; 'it is my path that follows me.' There is therefore no cause for surprise in the coolness with which he received the applause of the Royal Society; he was above such trivialities, having no pride and still less vanity. The proposal he had made to the President, Sir Francis M—, seemed to him quite simple, and he was not even conscious of the tremendous effect it produced.

After the meeting the doctor was conducted to the Travellers' Club in Pall Mall, where a superb banquet had been prepared in his honour. The size of the dishes served was in keeping with the importance of the guest, and the sturgeon which figured in this sumptuous meal was not more than three inches shorter than Samuel Fergusson himself.

Numerous toasts were drunk, in French wines, to the celebrated travellers who had made themselves illustrious on the soil of Africa. Their healths or memories were toasted in alphabetical order, which is very English: Abbadie, Adams, Adamson, Anderson, Arnaud, Baikie, Baldwin, Barth, Batouda, Beke, Beltrame, du Berba, Bimbachi, Bolognesi, Bolwik, Bolzoni, Bonnemain, Brisson, Browne, Bruce, Brun-Rollet, Burchell, Burckhardt, Burton, Cailliaud, Caillie, Campbell, Chapman, Clapperton, Clot-bey, Colomien, Courval, dimming, Cuny, Debono, Decken, Denham, Desavanchers, Dicksen, Dickson, Dochard, Duchaillu, Duncan, Durand, Duroule, Duveyrier, Erhardt, d'Escayrac de Lauture, Ferret, Fresnel, Galinier, Galton, Geoffrey, Golberry, Hahn, Halm, Harnier, Hecquart, Heuglin, Hornemann, Houghton, Imbert, Kaufmann, Knoblecher, Krapf, Kummer, Lafargue, Laing, Lajaille, Lambert, Lamiral, Lampriere, John Lander, Richard Lander, Lefebvre, Lejean, Levaillant, Livingstone, Maccarthie, Maggiar, Maizan, Malzac, Moffat, Mollien, Monteiro, Morrison, Mungo Park, Neimans, Overweg, Panet, Partarrieau, Pascal, Pearse, Peddie, Peney, Petherick, Pomcet, Prax, Raffenel, Rath, Rebmann, Richardson, Riley, Ritchie, Rochet d'Hericourt, Rongawi, Roscher, Roppel, Saugnier, Speke, Steidner, Thibaud, Thompson, Thornton, Toole, Tousny, Trotter, Tuckey, Tyrwhitt, Vaudey, Veyssiere, Vincent, Vinco, Vogel, Wahlberg, Warrington, Washington, Werne, Wild, and finally, Dr Samuel Fergusson who, by his incredible exploit, was to link up the work of these travellers and complete the chain of African discovery. s/pfMpMVNqeM/hF9FETMMuQ7jwmaMNv6KNIBesKjdBwDrK+gR8mCp66RbEC2dJ7Z