1893 - Exploration, Colonization

Exploration, Colonization

Explorer Sven Anders Hedin sets out on a 5-year expedition that will take him across the Urals, through the Pamir range, Lop Nor (Lop Lake) in western China, and to Beijing (Peking) (see 1891; 1899).

Arctic explorer John Rae dies at London July 22 at age 79.

Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, 32, sets out in August with an expedition to reach the North Pole, operating on the theory that if wreckage can drift across the Arctic Ocean then so can a ship (see De Long, 1881; Greeley, 1882). Nansen led the first expedition to cross Greenland in 1888; his ship the Fram has been designed to withstand the crushing lateral pressure of the icepack, his party reaches the New Siberian Islands in September, and he then deliberately drives the Fram into the pack near where the late George W. De Long's ship the Jeanette was crushed in 1881, allowing the ship to become icebound as he tries deliberately to drift across the polar basin (see 1895).

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" by Wisconsin-born University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, 31, observes that the frontier has been the source of the individualism, self-reliance, inventiveness, and restless energy so characteristic of Americans but that it is now ending. He delivers his paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association held at Chicago during the Columbian Exposition.

A vast section of northern Oklahoma Territory opens to land-hungry settlers September 16 (see 1892). Thousands of "Boomers" jump at a signal from federal marshals and rush in by foot, on horseback, in buggies and wagons, and on bicycles to stake and claim quarter-section farms, but as in 1889 they find that "Sooners" have sneaked across the line earlier by cover of night and started building houses on the 165- by 58-mile Cherokee Strip—6 million acres purchased from the Cherokee in 1891 for $8.5 million.

English naturalist (botanist, entomologist, ichthyologist, ethnographer, linguist, and geographer Mary (Henrietta) Kingsley, 30, explores West Africa on the first of two journeys, spanning 17 months, in which she will go with Fang tribesmen down the Ogowe (or Ogooué) River through cannibal country that has been called "the white man's grave," photographing wildlife, and collecting for the British Museum beetles never before cataloged plus 18 species of reptiles and 65 fish. A niece of the late novelist-poet Charles Kingsley, she nursed her parents until they died within 6 weeks of each other last year and felt useless afterwards (her father, a footloose physician, married her mother, his cook, 4 days before Mary was born, and Mary, like her late mother, tends to drop her g's and h's when she speaks). Kingsley wears long black Victorian skirts at all times, remarking that "one would never want to go about in Africa in a way that would embarrass one to be seen in Piccadilly."

African explorer Sir Samuel W. Baker dies at Sanford Oreleigh, Devon, December 30 at age 72.