Royal Geographical Society
On graduating in 1878, he was appointed geologist and naturalist to Alexander Keith Johnston's Royal Geographical Society expedition to establish a route from Dar es Salaam to Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika. Johnston perished during the trip and it was left to Thomson to take over the leadership. Thomson successfully led the expedition over 3000 miles in 14 months, collecting many specimens and making sundry observations.
In 1883, he embarked on a further Royal Geographical Society expedition to explore a route from the eastern coast of Africa to the northern shores of Lake Victoria. British Empire traders were demanding a route that would avoid the fearsome Maasai and the hostile Germans who were competing for trade in the area. The expedition set out a few months behind the rival German expedition of Gustav A. Fischer. The expedition was again a success demonstrating the feasibility of the route and making many important biological, geological and ethnographic observations, though Thomson's attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in a day failed. However, on the return journey, Thomson was gored by a buffalo and subsequently suffered from malaria and dysentery.
He recovered in time to give a sensational account of his experiences at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in November 1884. His book Through Masai Land followed in January 1885 and was a best-seller. One of the first to read it was the young Henry Rider Haggard. Imagination fired by Thomson's expedition, Haggard promptly wrote a book of his own, King Solomon's Mines. Thomson was outraged. He had provided the first credible reports of snow-capped mountains on the Equator and had terrified the Maasai warriors by removing his false teeth and claiming to be a magician. Captain Good did the same in King Solomon's Mines, encountering snow on the mountains and then frightening the Kukuana tribe by removing his teeth. Thomson wrote a novel of his own: Ulu - an African romance, but it failed to sell.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Thomson (explorer)
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