ABSTRACT
No one was better at the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene than the string of British explorers who spent the 1860s looking for the source of the Nile. As the Linnaeans had their labeling system, and the Humboldtians their poetics of science, the Victorians opted for a brand of verbal painting whose highest calling was to produce for the home audience the peak moments at which geographical “discoveries” were “won” for England. Ironized and modernized, their vivid imperial rhetoric endures today in the writings of their postcolonial heirs, for whom there is little left on the planet to pretend to conquer.
