FAMOUS EXPLORER DEAD

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 112, 2 August 1927, Page 14

FAMOUS EXPLORER DEAD

SIR HARRY JOHNSTON GREAT WORK FOR BRITAIN A NOTED AUTHOR By Cable .— Press Association.—Copyright LONDON, Sunday. The death has occurred of Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, G.C.M.G., the noted British colonial pioneer, explorer, and author, aged 69.—A. and N.Z.-Sun. PEW men have crammed into their lives more varied experiences and more distinctively valuable work than Sir Harry Johnston. The bulk of it is admirably documented in his numerous books on African policy, history, peoples, and languages, as well as in the rich contributions to fiction that marked his later years. FIRST THOUGHTS OF AFRICA He is found, as a boy, not overstrong, with a bent for drawing and a fondness for animal study which took him often to the zoological gardens. Poor health coupled with an interest in Saracenic art led to a stay in Tunis in 1880, when he was 22. That visit, he once said, altered the trend of his life. It turned his thoughts toward the politics of Africa, toward diplomacy, the enlargement of the British Empire, the possibilities of exploration. Europe was poising for a great attack on Africa. France was about to snap up Tunis. Italy would be bound to intervene in Tripoli. The future of Egypt and of Syria could be foreseen. But what was to happen south of the Sahara? Zanzibar? West Africa? The Congo Basin? South Central Africa? PASSION FOR LANGUAGES These questions fired him when he could have had little expectation that he would ever contribute so notably as he did to their answering. Yet, without direct intent, he had been prepared for the work of a diplomatist, explorer, and administrator. At 22 he knew French, Italian, Spanish, some Portuguese and German, and a considerable amount of Arabic. The passion for languages that was to give birth later to his great work on the Bantu and semi-Bantu tongues was already aflame. His training as an artist was of course of immense value to him later in recording his new impressions of new lands and peoples, and his enthusiasm for zoology when put to practical test in the wilds immensely widened the field of knowledge. The apparently unrelated bents of his youth came jointly to full fruition in his life work as though he had been trained from the start for this express end. He did great work for Britain in Africa. AMAZING CHAPTER OF HISTORY He wrote modestly of the important part he played in the opening up of Africa in the ’Bo’s, but he made that amazing chapter of world history live as no other writer could. The great figures in it, Stanley, Leopold 11. of Belgium, Rhodes, Joseph ChfiTTTberlain, and the rest, flit lifelike across his pages. One gets on a broad canvas the picture of consuls and viceconsuls, naturalists and adventurers accredited and unaccredited, British, Belgian, German, French, and Portuguese, scurrying up unexplored rivers and over unnamed mountain ranges with their pockets full of coloured beads and blank treaty forms, while their Governments said uncommonly little about them, but hoped they would get there first. A VERSATILE WRITER His works included “British Central Africa,” “The Colonisation of Africa,” ‘‘The Uganda Protectorate,” “Liberia,” “George Grenfell and the Congo,” “History of the British Empire in Africa,” “The Negro and the New World” (which caused some resentment in the United States), “The History of a Slave,” and six volumes on colonial pioneers. In 1919 he came forward as a novelist with “The Gay Dombeys,” a sequel to Dickens’s “Dombey and Son,” while “Mrs. Warren’s Daughter” was intended as a continuation of G. B. Shaw’s play. Another novel was “The Veneerings.” In 1903 and 1906 he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal.