Samuel Baker Research Articles

An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850. Siobhan Carroll. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 290.

<i>An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850</i>. Siobhan Carroll. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 290.

Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic ed. by Dale Townshend, Angela Wright (review)

Reviewed by: Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic ed. by Dale Townshend, Angela Wright James P. Carson Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, eds. Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Pp. xv + 257. $95.00. This collection, published to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Ann Radcliffe’s birth, is especially valuable at a time when her novels are widely available and frequently taught. The impressive international group of contributors that Townshend and Wright have assembled provides a comprehensive picture of the state of scholarship on Radcliffe and the Gothic. Once-dominant psychoanalytic and feminist interpretations have given way to critical work drawing on political and religious history, print culture studies, theories of media and remediation, and new formalism. The volume is nicely produced, with a sixteen-page bibliography, four illustrations, and a table enumerating the sources of Radcliffe’s chapter epigraphs. In the first of the thirteen chapters, on Radcliffe’s early critical reception, the editors explain how the authorship of popular fiction was shaped by the Romantic reviewing establishment: “Radcliffe studiously read the reviews” of her works and attempted to “answer their criticisms in her subsequent publications” (7). Other mechanisms of Romantic print culture such as “republication and anthologisation” (25) established her high cultural reputation and her position in “a national canon” in the first half of the nineteenth century (31). Radcliffe came to be seen as an original genius who established “a new literary movement or school” (19). [End Page 127] Edward Jacobs substantiates her role in establishing a new discursive mode: Radcliffe’s “reproducible set of generic conventions” (52) cooperated with the cataloging practices of circulating libraries to form a readership inclined “to approach books less as unique texts than as members of genres” (50). At a time when important critical work on Romanticism has focused on reading practices, Jacobs claims in his informative chapter that Radcliffe’s inclusion of poetry in her novels staged an opposition between two modes of reading: the “‘deep’, contemplative, repetitive reading” of “high” literary texts, and the superficial consumption of plot-driven entertainments associated with a “popular” and feminized media market (49). The contributors assess Radcliffe’s modernity, in part by reinterpreting the opposition between the Gothic and Romanticism. Jerrold E. Hogle demonstrates the author’s indebtedness, on the level of literary form, to Horace Walpole’s synthesis of ancient and modern romance, while in the analogous sphere of social content Radcliffe hesitates between “fading and emergent ideologies” (154). “The radical implications,” according to Sue Chaplin, of “the female Gothic mode are limited by [the] commitment to a bourgeois modernity that anchors itself in the nation’s past” (208). Jane Stabler assesses Radcliffe’s verse “from the perspective of canonical Romantic poetry” (186), and—alluding to Wordsworth’s 1815 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface”—writes the cleverest sentence in the book: “She created the taste by which she was depreciated” (201). Samuel Baker asserts that Gaston de Blondeville and “its attendant texts” in the 1826 edition “demonstrate how Romanticism and the Radcliffian Gothic might be understood as coeval media systems” (171). Dismissing the Gothic–Romantic binary as a “hangover from the Victorians,” Robert Miles develops the concept of a “popular Romanticism” (117), in which Radcliffe leaves unresolved the opposition between a disciplined, secular, and Enlightened modern subjectivity located in linear time and a porous premodern subjectivity “embedded in nature, which is animated, alive with spirits that effortlessly cross spatial and temporal boundaries” (126). In her chapter on how the ruined abbey in The Romance of the Forest represents “the historical and religious past that a modern, secularising culture was trying to bury” (100), Diane Long Hoeveler demonstrates her impressively extensive reading by citing parallels from obscure Gothic novels for the discovered manuscript topos, the villain who dies by poisoning himself, and the Gothic abbey as setting. In one of the best chapters, James Watt responds to revisionary views of Radcliffe as a radical Dissenter, political reformer, and “unsex’d” revolutionary (67). While her works need to be situated “in relation to the conjectural history of the Scottish Enlightenment as much as to the ‘war of ideas’ of the 1790s” (70), Radcliffe’s novels are not schematically structured...

The Double Face of Sir Samuel Baker’s Anti – Slave Trade Campaigns in the Upper Nile Valley, 1869 to 1874

No account of the history of anti-slave trade campaigns in the River Nile valley can be complete without the mention of Sir Samuel Baker. On 1 st April 1869, Baker commenced a campaign at Cairo to the Upper Nile Valley to suppress slave trade and introduce legitimate commerce in what is now South Sudan and Northern Uganda. My paper analyzes this expedition, which lasted four years, with the view to unearth Samuel Baker’s true motivation in undertaking it. Using interviews conducted in northern Uganda and basing on published information concerning slave trade abolition movements in Africa during the nineteenth century, I established that Samuel Baker exhibited double character; on one hand, he was a philanthropist, the other, a racist. Although Baker’s legacy in northern Uganda and South Sudan is so strong that schools, roads, hospitals and even children are named after him, it is only because his brutal conduct and denigration of Africans was no measure to that of the slave hunters whom he defeated. Even though Baker did not capture and banish Africans into slavery, he despised, taxed and killed them.

Samuel Baker, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. xvii + 320. $49.40 hardback. 9780813927954.

<scp>Samuel</scp> <scp>Baker</scp>, <i>Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture</i> (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. xvii + 320. $49.40 hardback. 9780813927954.

Egypt’s African Empire: Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon and the Creation of Equatoria

Book Review| October 01 2011 Egypt’s African Empire: Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon and the Creation of Equatoria Egypt’s African Empire: Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon and the Creation of Equatoria, Alice Moore-Harell Robert S. Kramer Robert S. Kramer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Northeast African Studies (2011) 11 (2): 145–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/41932056 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert S. Kramer; Egypt’s African Empire: Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon and the Creation of Equatoria. Northeast African Studies 1 October 2011; 11 (2): 145–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41932056 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressNortheast African Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. Samuel Baker.

<i>Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture</i>. Samuel Baker.

SAMUEL BAKER. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture.

SAMUEL BAKER. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture.

Written on the water: British Romanticism and the maritime empire of culture

The very word 'culture' has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea's beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea's development. For the Romantics, figures of the island, the deluge, and the sundering tide often convey the insularity of cultures understood to stand apart from the whole; yet, Baker writes, the sea also stands in their poetry of culture as a reminder of the broader sphere of circulation in which the poet's work, if not the poet's subject, inheres. Although other books treat the history of the idea of culture, none synthesizes that history with the literary history of maritime empire. Written on the Water tracks an uncanny interrelationship between ocean imagery and culturalist rhetoric of culture forward from the late Augustans to the mid-Victorians. In so doing, it analyzes Wordsworth's pronounced ambivalence toward the sea, Coleridge's sojourn as an imperial functionary in Malta, Byron's cosmopolitan seafaring tales, and Arnold's dual identity as 'poet of water' and prose arbiter of 'culture'. It also considers Romanticism's classical inheritance, arguing that the Lake Poets dissolved into the idea of culture the Virgilian system of pastoral, georgic, and epic modes of literature and life. This compelling new study will engage any reader interested in the intellectual and literary history of Britain and the lived experience of British Romanticism.

Egypt's African Empire: Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon, and the Creation of Equatoria – By Alice Moore‐Harell

Egypt's African Empire: Samuel Baker, Charles Gordon, and the Creation of Equatoria – By Alice Moore‐Harell

Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture by Samuel Baker

BOOK REVIEWS 543 the project of which TIE is a part asks us to think about using media to be more collaborative across greater distances. As Renaissance Humanism and the Enlightenment demonstrated, humanities scholarship has always been inherently a collective and collaborative activity, dependent as much upon the mastery of available media as upon ideas. The current ways in which we go about the business ofliterary and cultural study, via conferences and through the single-authored monographs, articles, and reviews, does not take full advantage of the new forms of organizing knowledge currently available to us. Whether or not this review forum is successful, like This is Enlightenment, it seeks to point toward a future of humanities scholarship that may be very different from the one that we currently inhabit. The two most important research fields ofthe past two decades—history ofthe book and digital humanities—have shown ways in which thinking about media profoundly changes how we think about knowledge. Although the ulti­ mate horizon ofthis activity may not be clearly visible, the fact that future scholarship will change in radical ways as we adapt to new technologies of communicating knowledge is not in question. Alan Bewell Jon Klancher University of Toronto Carnegie MellonUniversity Christina Lupton Ted Underwood University of Michigan University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Samuel Baker. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 344. $49.50. In our contemporary age ofjet travel and bullet trains—to say nothing of email and Skype—it is easy to forget that, less than two centuries ago, when Britons wanted to travel beyond their country’s borders, voyage by sea was inevitable. Fortunately, we now have Samuel Baker’s Written on the Water to remind us. With its strong (but not exclusive) focus on the poetry and prose of the Lake Poets, Baker’s dense but readable study brilliantly re­ constructs the central roles of maritime and nautical cultures in Romanticera British literature. In the process, Baker not only puts forward new ideas about the relations between genre, mode, and politics in the period, but also points toward a new critical paradigm for understanding British Ro­ manticism that should nuance and complicate, if not entirely displace, the influential “Romantic imperialism” thesis popularized in the late 1990s. As Written on the Water persuasively demonstrates, the sea plays a variety SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) 544 BOOK REVIEWS ofroles in Romantic poetry and culture. One of its greatest strengths is the way it repeatedly manages to schematize large patterns of thought without oversimplifying them. Early in the book, for example, Baker establishes that “the sea” operated for the Romantics in at least two spheres simulta­ neously: the worldly (the domain of commerce and imperial expansion) and the allegorical (the domain of life and death, fate, and uncertainty). Thus, the sea was alternately “the avenue ofBritish geopolitical power, the ultimate arena ofcommerce and war and thus ofmodern social transforma­ tion, and the medium of any possible universal society” (41). The final phrase of this last clause, moreover, is important: as opposed to the para­ digm of “universal empire” (and here I refer of course to the subtitle of Saree Makdisi’s now-classic 1998 study), which polemically claimed that most outward-looking Romantic-era literature tacitly or explicitly sup­ ported Britain’s imperial ambitions in the period, Baker’s phrase “universal society” stakes a new—and, to my mind, ultimately more persuasive— claim: what the Romantics were truly interested in establishing was an em­ pire, neither of territory nor of peoples, but of culture. To this end, and drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s terminology in The Literary Absolute, Baker posits a catachrestical duality that alternately inspired and vexed the Lake Poets and their contemporaries: absolute cul­ ture (“culture intellectualized as a complete hierarchy of kinds of human life”) and the cultural absolute (“culture experienced ... as a nonhierarchical multiplicity ofincommensurate kinds”) (72). In other words, for every attempt to establish or discover a uniquely British “culture”—especially one based on Britain’s geopolitical situation as an island nation embodying an ideal combination of trade, liberty, and Protestantism—that could...

The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory

DUSTIN D. STEWART The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory L amenting his enjoyment of Walter scott’s heart of Midlothian, William Wilberforce expresses a common enough Evangelical insecu­ rity about secular literature. Wilberforce could hardly put the book down, but upon doing so he couldn’t forbear chiding Scott’s novels for having “so little moral or religious object.” “They remind me,” he grieves, “ofa giant spending his strength in cracking nuts.” The complaint continues with a counterexample: “I would rather go to render up my account at the last day, carrying with me The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, than bearing the load of all these volumes, full as they are of genius.”' Wilberforce commends a work by his friend Hannah More, singling out More’s Salisbury Plain, a Cheap Repository Tract, as a light and enlightening alternative to Scott’s weighty yet worldly corpus. Somewhat bizarrely, given that the reformist is generalizing from what might be Scott’s most forcefully Christian work, his contrast seems to claim for the didactic tract a religious propriety lack­ ing in the novel form. But Wilberforce’s heaven-minded recanonizing re­ lies on the same line drawn by secularization narratives that place earlynineteenth -century writers like More on the wrong side of history, as against authors like Scott who are taken to promulgate a modern secular romanticism. Wilberforce keeps the divide but reverses the sides. Because such lines need new scrutiny,2 I will trace in this essay a few continuities My warm thanks to Samuel Baker, in conversations with whom, principally in the sum­ mer of 2009, this essay found its impetus and took its shape. 1. Quoted in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols. (London: Murray, 1838), 5:254. 2. Vincent P. Pecora explains this concern in Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): “as students of Foucault, we learned how to rethink the Enlightenment’s idea ofprogress, but not necessarily the story SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 591 592 DUSTIN D. STEWART between the two writers sharply separated by Wilberforce. Notwithstand­ ing his suggestion that the novel wastes its work on earthbound nuts, I will consider how both Scott and More rely on a vehicle that nudges literary form toward political theology: the Pauline letter. Saint Paul’s legacy is by no means settled or univocal. Competing un­ derstandings of Paul and of his literary mode arise in the epistolary texts of More and Scott, understandings that, as it happens, also extend to present-day disagreements about the apostle in critical theory. Both earlynineteenth -century writers invoke Paul as they test the possibilities of epistolarity , including its potential for universality. In a Napoleonic context, Paul the letter-writer can stand as the harbinger of a totalizing Christian empire. As he contends throughout the Mediterranean for a nascent but globalizing Judeo-Christiamty, he emblematizes the persuasiveness and the eventual triumph, the relentless translatability, of an initially fringe sect. The apparent appeal of an empire-enabling Paul is the allure of an authen­ tic universality, one that might trump those aspirations to the universal that only export self-absorbed particularity. Seemingly frustrated with the particularist outcomes of identity politics, philosopher Alain Badiou has lately developed and defended such an idea of Paul. My shorthand term for this conception of the apostle, for the stakes of Saint Paul in Badiou, More, and Scott, is mission. The works ofMore and Scott also disclose another version of Paul, however. What I will name remnant, this alternative set of associa­ tions highlights the apostle’s local specificity to explain his worldwide ap­ peal. Such a Paul is a late-comer, an oft-arrested dissident who sits uneasily between the rigorous Judaism with which he once identified and the new covenant, spirit over letter, which he comes to preach. By no means easily securing new standards, his theology sparks controversy and conflict. Situ­ ated in his waywardness, this outlaw apostle writes charged letters to spe­ cific communities about new forms ofembodied practice, and he advocates for the powerless, the residue of Rome.3 Paul’s own broken...

Rewriting agency: Samuel Baker, Bunyoro-Kitara and the Egyptian slave trade

This article combines colonial history/discourse analysis and postcolonial theory to explore how non-Western forces and agents can predetermine and even derail the discursive production of the narrative of the West. Drawing on the work of the Victorian explorer Samuel White Baker, I pursue two lines of analysis. First, I develop a genealogy of the key intercultural encounters documented by Baker during his 1863–5 travels in southern Sudan and Bunyoro. Second, by reading Baker's unpublished diary alongside his published narratives, I trace the discursive impact of these encounters on Baker's texts. Ultimately, by using the example of Baker, I suggest that the influence of non-Western populations, cultures and political circumstances on Western discourse production can be considerable and that by reading the ‘raw’ records of exploration alongside both published accounts and African cultural history, critics can construct a more multilayered model of imperial narrative production than has previously been developed by scholars working just in colonial or postcolonial studies.

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from ‘more-than-human’ and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these ‘seeing men’ of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies.

Guy Yeoman. The Quest for the Secret Nile: Victorian Exploration in Equatorial Africa 1857–1900. London: Chaucer Press, 2004. 192 pp. Photographs. Maps. Index. £20. Cloth. - Monty Brown. R. J. Richard John Cuninghame 1871–1925: Naturalist, Hunter, Gentleman. London: MJB, 2004. 398 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75. Cloth.

Guy Yeoman. The Quest for the Secret Nile: Victorian Exploration in Equatorial Africa 1857–1900. London: Chaucer Press, 2004. 192 pp. Photographs. Maps. Index. £20. Cloth. - Monty Brown. R. J. Richard John Cuninghame 1871–1925: Naturalist, Hunter, Gentleman. London: MJB, 2004. 398 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75. Cloth. - Volume 48 Issue 2

Reading for Pleasure: "The Albert N'Yanza" by Sir Samuel Baker

Reading for Pleasure: "The Albert N'Yanza" by Sir Samuel Baker

'Rionga's Island': A Note on Samuel Baker's Second Expedition to Central Africa

lake comes within the productive weeded zone. There is plenty of food, and spawning is confined to the shallows where the stream enters and possibly other suitable places in the lake itself. The trout are fairly numerous, certainly not to excess, and are of a good size. It is impossible to foresee how the recently stocked lake at Taipichaca will turn out. It is shallow and weeded, and the trout should grow fast and multiply. This process could continue to the point where their numbers and size can no longer be supported by a diminishing food supply. A severe and steady decline would then set in; this is the situation at present in the lower Hichucota Lake. In a lake where there are no natural predators, a healthy stock of decent-sized trout may under certain conditions be best maintained by fishing them hard?out of season or even with nets if necessary. In this way one ensures that Man redresses the balance in respect of a fish which he and not Nature has put there in the first place.

Samuel Baker's Route to the Albert Nyanza

(1) Baker's original manuscript diary. This was kindly lent to me by my cousin, Mr. Robin Baily. It has never been published. (2) Baker's publications on the subject; namely, his report to the Royal Geo? graphical Society (1866a) and his book, The Albert Nyanza (18666). (3) Modern maps of Uganda. (4) Aerial photographs of Uganda, in the possession of the Directorate of Over? seas Surveys. (5) Notes in pencil by an anonymous author, preserved in the Government Office at Hoima, Uganda. (6) A carbon copy of a letter, written at Hoima on 30 March 1932 by Mr. E. Dauncey Tongue to Mr. H. B. Thomas, also preserved in the Government Office at Hoima. The Mukama (King) of Bunyoro was able to give Mr. Tongue valuable information about Baker's route, because he had discussed it in detail with a widow of Kamurasi (who was Mukama during Baker's visit). The Mukama also supplied the equivalents, in modern phonetic spelling, of the place-names used by Baker. (Baker's original spellings are indicated in the present paper by the use of italics.) (7) A map (about 4 miles to the inch) preserved in the Government Office at Hoima, with pencilled names of places indicating the supposed route of Samuel Baker. The map appears to summarize the Mukama's information. (I examined nos. (5), (6) and (7) during my visit to Uganda in 1957.) (8) Observations made by myself during my visit to Uganda in 1957. (9) Observations made during the visit to Uganda of my wife (Mrs. Helen Baker), my daughter (Mrs. Venice Barry), my son (Mr. Gilbert Samuel Baker) and myself in 1964. We went to Uganda primarily to be present at Vacovia (Bakobya) on March 14, the exact centenary day of the discovery of the Albert Nyanza by Samuel and Florence Baker. During the course of this visit I made observations, in particular parts ofthe route, by the use of compass, carefully calibrated pedometers and pocket aneroid barometer. The sketch-maps resulting from these observa? tions were fitted into the framework provided by aerial photographs and published maps. (See Figs. 1 (inset) and 2.) (10) Information given to us in 1964 by an African named Rwamanokole, who

Sir Samuel Baker: a Memoir North Africa Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel

A SUMMARY of our present knowledge of Northern Africa, and a memoir of the late Sir Samuel Baker, may be appropriately considered together, for Baker's main title to fame rests on the work he did in that region; and had his experience been properly utilised, the most interesting part of it might not have been lost to civilisation and closed to scientific inquiry. Sir Samuel Baker: a Memoir. By T. Douglas Murray A. Silva White. 8vo. Pp. xii. 447, with six illustrations and nine maps. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895.) North Africa. Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel. (New series). Africa. Vol. i. By A. H. Keane. 8vo. Pp. xvi. 639, with seventy-seven illustrations and nine maps. (London: E. Stanford, 1895.)

Life of Sir Samuel Baker. Review

Life of Sir Samuel Baker. Review

The Geology of Mount Ruwenzori and some Adjoining Regions of Equatorial Africa

I. I ntroduction . R uwenzori is a mountain-ridge on the right bank of the Semliki branch of the Nile, between the two lakes Mwutan and Lutan Nzige (the Albert and Albert Edward Nyanzas). It ranks as the third snow-capped mountain in Africa, both in height and date of discovery. Kilimanjaro was first seen in 1848 and Kenya in 1849, and Ruwenzori only narrowly escaped detection a few years later. Speke and Grant passed near it in 1862, but its existence was not reported to them, though the natives whom they met must have known of it. Sir Samuel Baker, in 1864, approached it from the north, and reached a locality from which the mountain ought to have been visible; but he did not see the snow, and though his ‘Blue Mountain’ seems to have been Ruwenzori, he covered the whole site of the mountain with a lake. Gessi Pasha circumnavigated the Albert Nyanza in 1876 and went nearer to the mountain than the point from which it was subsequently discovered; but he also missed it. Mason Bey, in 1877, followed the same course, and though he stayed for some time for astronomical purposes within sight of Ruwenzori, he never saw it. It was reserved for Mr. Stanley, in 1888, to recognize that the white patches that appeared among the clouds for brief and at distant intervals were a snow-capped ridge. The late Capt. W. G. Stairs made an effort to ascend the mountain in 1889, and reached a level determined by aneroid