1882 | Exploration, Colonization
Exploration, Colonization
Arctic explorer Adolphus W. Greely reaches 83° 24' north in May (see 1881). He has discovered Lake Hazen and what will be called Greely Fjord on the western coast of Ellesmere Island, but supply and relief ships will not be able to reach him and by the time help arrives in June 1884 he will have lost all but six of his men, and one of them will die shortly thereafter. The journal of the late George W. De Long is discovered in Siberia (it will be published next year under the title The Voyage of the Jeanette), and wreckage from the Jeanette will be found next year on an ice floe off the southwest coast of Greenland, supporting his theory of trans-Arctic drift (see Nansen, 1893).
The Royal Geographical Society mounts a new expedition to East Africa, this time under the command of geologist-naturalist Joseph Thomson (see 1878). Instructed to find the shortest route between Zanzibar and Uganda, the party travels unarmed from Mombasa to Lake Victoria and reaches the lake December 10, having come by way of Mount Kilimanjaro, crossing twice through the previously hostile Masai people, and being the first Europeans to sight Lake Baringo. Thomson's gazelle (Gazella thomsoni) will be named for the expedition's leader.