The Golden Age of the Gentleman Explorer

From the 18th century until the dawn of the 20th, the natural ­wonders of the New World drew the attentions of some remarkable explorers.

In his new book, Bown gives us a wonderful gallery of these ­mavericks and eccentrics, ­‘gentlemen-naturalists’ both American and European, who set out to ­discover and catalogue the infinite variety of the Americas.

Native Americans harvesting corn 

It’s hard not to feel nostalgic for what they saw: the Great Plains then an unfenced grassland 1,000 miles across, filled with bison and ­antelope, deer and wolves, more like the Serengeti. Today those plains are ‘primarily fertiliser and pesticide- dependent cropland’, says Bown, domesticated to feed a population that has risen from 1.6 billion to more than 8 billion in 100 years.

One also feels nostalgia for the ­cultures these men encountered.

One, Maximilian of Wied, was near death’s door with scurvy when local Native Americans brought him wild onions for their vitamin C, and saved his life. Another, Scotsman John Richardson, was rather taken with the girls, ‘their raven hair dripping with unguents . . . twin rows of ivory teeth, gracefully ­contrasting with their lovely bronze features.’ He wrote this in a letter to his wife. I hope she didn’t mind.

They were outstandingly tough, setting off with none of the modern conveniences like GPS or antibiotics.

Their only real medication was opium. Yet most made it to old age, with the exception of poor David Douglas, who named the mighty Douglas fir. In Hawaii in 1834 he ‘tumbled into a pit containing a wild bull and was gored to death’.

The Noble Quest is available now

The great eccentric here is Charles Waterton, a wealthy Englishman (of course), who still climbed trees in old age, and would astonish his dinner guests with his trick of scratching his head with his big toe.

A keen explorer of Guyana and the Amazon, he always went barefoot there despite ­frequent infestation of ­chegoes, ‘a small flea-like creature that burrowed under the toenail and laid eggs in a flesh nest.’ Yuck.

And he was definitely a bit pre-David Attenborough in his eating habits, feasting enthusiastically on both ‘boiled ­ant-bear and red monkey’.

After wandering the wilderness for months, or even years, these men often found returning to ‘civilisation’ almost intolerable. And who can blame them when you read of William Bartram, early traveller in Florida, frying the fish that he caught in the rich and pristine rivers, then adding a squeeze of juice from the wild oranges that he plucked from the branches overhead?

In time, the methods of these gentlemanly amateurs would be superseded by the more ­rigorous academic disciplines of biology and zoology.

Yet their antiquated and ­haphazard approach and ­endless curiosity were all part of their charm, and make this a delightful book for any ­armchair explorer.