Kennedy explains at the outset that the land explorer applied to continents a template developed over three centuries of seaborne navigation from the time of Columbus to the Pacific voyages of Cook. The objective was to move across great swathes of territory, revealing places and people hitherto unknown to Europeans while making observations accurate enough to enable subsequent voyagers to repeat the experience through the careful use of charts and maps. The pretence to scientific accuracy differentiated the explorers’ expeditions from mere journeys like those undertaken by the medieval travellers Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. A land not yet traversed by the scientific explorer did not count as known. When applied to Africa, the effect of this new doctrine of exploring was to turn a crowded map into a blank one. Since the time of the Greek traveller Herodotus, Africa had been conceived as a land full of marvels and peoples. Late medieval and Renaissance maps of Africa were packed with busy detail. The continental map to aid exploration devised by Aaron Arrowsmith in 1802 scoured clean most of sub-Saharan Africa. As Kennedy observes, the explorers conceptualised continents as the terrestrial equivalent of oceans: trackless emptiness that awaited its navigators.

Without the navigators there would have been no continents to explore. The previously unknown outlines of the Americas, Africa, and Australia emerged from the patient work of seamen like Baudin and Flinders, who had crawled along extended coastlines with their sounding lines, sketchbooks, chronometers, and sextants. Once the continental shapes had been delineated, the explorer’s task was to find out what went on in the blank interiors. As luck would have it, Africa proved to be full of interest but hard to penetrate, while Australia offered easy access to endless vistas of emptiness. Thus no Australian explorer attained the international celebrity accorded to African adventurers like David Livingstone, Richard Burton, or Henry Morton Stanley. Kennedy’s interest lies less in the romance of exploration than in the process, so this obvious contrast in outcomes does not put him off his comparative enterprise. The pay-off is a series of insights missed by previous writers on exploration, who mainly focus on the triumphs and tragedies of individuals.

One insight is that social class mattered a great deal in determining who counted as an explorer for the self-appointed élite that funded expeditions and disseminated knowledge about discoveries. Most expeditions involved a number of persons apart from the designated leader. In West Africa, where armed resistance could be formidable, columns of common soldiers and porters marched alongside the commander. Benjamin Babbage’s ponderous foray into the northern lakes region of South Australia required a support party of ten men, only two of whom – a surveyor and a botanist – counted in the eyes of the scientific establishment as proper explorers. Patrons of exploration in Britain such as Joseph Banks and Roderick Murchison saw to it that class distinctions were maintained. It was more than a little embarrassing that the best-qualified person to lead the successful push to the Niger River from the Gulf of Guinea turned out to be John Lander, a lowly manservant who had emerged as the sole survivor of Hugh Clapperton’s second West African expedition. Unless a man possessed the right educational and social qualifications, his presence on an expedition went unnoticed. Even in Australia, social position counted. One reason why the failure of Burke and Wills all but eclipsed the success of John McDouall Stuart in the great race to reach the northern coast by land is that Stuart existed on the extreme margins of respectable society.

A second insight is that British exploration was not the centrally orchestrated imperial enterprise that many have imagined it to be. Both in Africa and Australia, it flowed through certain gateways because it suited local interests. The search for the headwaters of the Nile had as much to do with the ambitions of the rulers of Egypt and Zanzibar as with any British drive to command the destinies of central Africa. The Khedive of Egypt’s ambition to emulate the industrialising rulers of Europe hinged on his ability to marshal the human resources of the Upper Nile. His guarantees of safe conduct made Cairo a favoured jumping-off point for trans-Saharan expeditions, and many noted explorers found salaried employment in the Egyptian service. The sultan of Oman transferred his principal residence to Zanzibar when the access it afforded to tropical products and slaves proved more profitable than all his other domains. All the parties despatched to ‘find Livingstone’ in the 1870s chose Zanzibar as their starting point because of the pathways to the interior previously blazed by Zanzibari traders.

In Australia, inter-colonial rivalries spurred governments and private citizens to compete for the honour of discovery and the expected material fruits of opening new lands to agriculture and mining. There was consequently no need for imperial sponsorship. The Gregory expedition to Northern Australia in 1857–58 was the last to be funded by the British government. Competition grew so intense in the 1860s that Kennedy feels justified in discerning a Scramble for Australia comparable to the later Scramble for Africa. In Australia, however, the players were not European Powers but the fractious colonies.

Kennedy is less original in pointing to the explorers’ dependence on indigenous guides and local knowledge, a prominent theme in North American writing about cartography over the last thirty years. However, he offers an exceptionally clear-headed analysis of the paradox involved in hailing as discoveries the labelling of places like Lake Albert, Ayers Rock, and the Congo River Basin, which had been well known under different names to indigenous inhabitants since time immemorial. The pretence to scientific mapping alone justified the nineteenth-century claim to novelty. Kennedy shows that much of the expensive equipment used for taking bearings, plotting longitude, and measuring altitude broke down or proved otherwise useless in the field. The point of the instrumentation was the theatre as much as the reality of science.

Kennedy also draws a telling contrast between the public image of the all-powerful European explorer and the feelings of isolation and weakness that plunged so many into depression or despair. The conflicted relations between Ludwig Leichhardt and his Aboriginal guide, Charley Fisher, illustrate the point with brutal physicality. When Leichhardt felt it necessary to remind Fisher of the deference he must show to a white superior, the guide responded by striking him in the jaw with power sufficient to dislodge several teeth, rendering the great man unable to chew his food for some days. In other circumstances he might have dismissed or killed Fisher. But such was his perilous situation in unknown territory that Leichhardt had little choice but to let the storm blow over.

With fewer than 300 pages of text at his disposal, Kennedy keeps the supply of such colourful anecdotes to a minimum. For blood-and-guts accounts, readers will need to turn to older books such as Robin Hallett’s The Penetration of Africa (1965). Kennedy’s achievement is to supply a sturdy framework for future comparative research on the topic. It is possible that he goes too far in attempting to disentangle the enterprise of exploring from its British Imperial context. His bibliography lists Colonial Office documents in the British National Archives, but not Foreign Office or War Office records. Yet in many instances military and diplomatic objectives were pursued under the cover of science. Kennedy’s discussion of Andrew Smith’s mission to the South African interior neglects to mention that it aimed to gather military intelligence as well as geographical knowledge. When I was researching the career of Africa explorer Frederic Elton, my most revealing information came from the Foreign Office files and John Kirk’s consular reports from Zanzibar. Foreign Office censors removed from Elton’s biography all mention of his fundamental mission, which was to curb Portuguese claims in East Africa.

Thanks to its lucidity and logic, I finished the book in a day and came away with a far better understanding of why exploring has disappeared as an occupation. Antarctica was the last continent to be delineated by navigation and penetrated by intrepid explorers. Nowadays Google Earth will transport me from my desk to practically any spot on earth, giving me an instant readout of longitude and latitude. Within a few decades of Amundsen’s advance to the South Pole, the explorer had become a figure of fun, his celebrity mocked by the capture of King Kong and Groucho Marx’s all-singing, all-dancing rendition of Captain Spaulding, the African explorer, in Animal Crackers.