Bright paradise : Victorian scientific travellers /Peter Raby.

This book details the expeditions of some of the greatest Victorian scientific travellers and considers how their journeys, discoveries and writing helped to reshape the Victorian view of the world. The great burst of scientific exploration in the 19th century saw naturalists and travellers launching expeditions across the globe - often lasting years - in a bid to discover, collect and catalogue the world's flora and fauna and to solve questions about unexplored parts of the earth: Where was the source of the Nile?; Did the Niger flow eastwards or westwards? What lay at the centre of Australia? Was there a North-West Passage? Among others, there are accounts of the expeditions up the Amazon by the naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Bates, and Richard Spruce; the plant-hunting trips to the Himalayas of the geo-botanist Joseph Hooker; and the travels in West Africa of the naturalist and travel writer, Mary Kingsley. Their experiences and scientific discoveries are situated in the context of the prevailing issues of the time: the growth of knowledge; the reach of Empire; the image of the "wild"; and the great Victorian debate surrounding the creation of man brought about by Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species.