ABSTRACT
The above lengthy quotation from Edward James Glave’s debut travelogue Six Years of Adventure in Congo-Land (1893) may well give the presentday reader feelings of déjà vu. This is because the scene that it portrays of a young boy staring with wanderlust at the “vast unnamed blank spaces” on the nineteenth-century European map of Africa is repeated in a more famous text, Heart of Darkness, which was serialised in 1899. Early in Joseph Conrad’s novella, the traveller Marlow tells his listeners on the Nellie:
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in the all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my fi nger on it and say: When I grow up I will go there. The North Pole was one of these places I remember . . . But there was one yet-the biggest-the most blank, so to speak-that I had a hankering after.1
