William George Browne

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William George Browne (born July 25, 1768 in Great Tower Hill, London , † 1813 east of Tabriz ) was an English traveler to Africa and Asia. His fame is based primarily on his stay in Darfur (modern West Sudan) in the years 1793–1796.

biography

The son of a wine merchant in London, who came from a Cumberland family, WG Browne enjoyed an excellent education from a private tutor ( Peter Whalley , 1722-1791) and the opportunity to study at Oriel College , Oxford , which Browne took up at 17 . After studying law , he was supposed to take up a public office, but the era of the French Revolution made him a free thinker . With that, the chances of his desired career disappeared. When his father died in 1791, the 23-year-old inherited a small but substantial fortune, then decided not to graduate and followed his inclination to explore.

In the course of his life he made three multi-year trips to Africa, western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. He was not to return from his third trip. The main source for his biography is the Biographical Memoir of Mr. Browne, reprinted in R. Walpoles Travels in Various Countries of the East (1820) .

Egypt, Darfur and Syria (1791–1798)

In 1791, in London, James Bruce's report on his expedition to the Nile springs had just appeared and was controversial. Among other things because Bruce in Khartoum , neglecting an important tributary of the river, had declared the eastern course of the river to be the main stream. According to the knowledge at the time, its origin was possibly related to the current on which Timbuktu was supposed to lie. So excited, Browne came up with the idea of ​​unraveling the secret of the source of the Nile. Without further ado, he booked a passage to Egypt. He impatiently gave up trying to speak to the President of the African Association , Sir Joseph Banks , about such an undertaking when he was not at home. Browne boarded a merchant ship in December 1791 that took him to Alexandria .

Just a few weeks after his arrival, on February 2, 1792, he joined a caravan to look for the so-called Ammon oasis. There he hoped to find evidence of the attacks by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. To find the oracle site visited and the remains of the Jupiter -Ammon temple. Siwa is the region in question, so the assumption. Browne explored the area of ​​the oasis and actually found ruins of an Egyptian temple in Umm Ubaida 400 meters south of Aghurmi , which he mistakenly believed to be the oracle temple, and laid the groundwork for a verification of the identity of the Ammon oasis and Siwa oasis. It is particularly noteworthy that the legally trained traveler was able to determine geographic coordinates on his own initiative. For Umm Ubaida in the Siwa oasis he found 29 ° 12 'N and 44 ° 54' E (based on the prime meridian of Ferro, the Canary island of Hierro ). This was surprisingly accurate with regard to the extremely complex determination of the longitude measurement at the time .

"Map of the route of the Soudan Caravan from Assiut to Darfur", from Browne's travel report (1799)

Plagued by fever and dysentery , Browne returned from Siwa to Alexandria on April 2, 1792, exhausted. After only a month he continued his journey, riding on horseback to Rosette , the area of ​​which he praised as beautiful and fertile, to Abukir , on to Terené and from there by boat to Bulaq , a place on the eastern bank of the Nile , then north of Cairo . Arrived in mid-May, he stayed there mainly during the summer months. On extensive excursions he got to know the Fayyum and Suez , among other things . He sailed up the Nile as far as Aswan and returned along the Red Sea coast after continuing to Nubia seemed temporarily too dangerous.

In a renewed attempt to explore his stated goal, the western headwaters of the Nile, Browne was sailed from Cairo to Asyut . There he joined a trade caravan in May 1793, which brought him to Darfur (now in Western Sudan) via Wahat Selima and Malha . He was held there for more than two years by a ruling sheikh, but Browne was finally allowed to return to Egypt in 1796. He stayed in Syria in 1797 and finally returned to Europe via Constantinople. From Turkey he took the route via Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam and, coming from Hamburg, returned to London on board a sailor - after an absence of almost seven years - in September 1798.

Just one year later, in 1799, the first edition of his famous travel book Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798 appeared . In the following year translations into German (printed several times), French and Dutch were published, the latter two in two volumes. After returning from his second voyage, Browne published a second, expanded edition (1806).

Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily (1800–1802)

Between 1800 and 1802 Browne toured Sicily, Greece (then Turkish) and the Levant ; he also stayed in the east of what is now Turkey . The texts of Browne, published in R. Walpoles Travels in Various Countries of the East , go back to his diary notes and concern v. a. his travels through Asia Minor and Cyprus in 1802.

Anatolia, Armenia, Iran (1812–1813)

Browne's destination for his third trip was Samarkand and Central Asia. For this purpose, he went to Western Turkey via Malta in 1812 and spent the winter in Smyrna (modern İzmir ). In the spring of 1813 he then traveled to eastern Anatolia and on to Armenia via Erzurum . He arrived in Tabriz on June 1, 1813 , and the last letter he received from the north-west Iranian city was July 16. Towards the end of the summer, accompanied by two local servants, he set out from Tabriz to the east, first to reach Tehran , but he was robbed on the way and killed at the hands of a murderer. However, the exact circumstances could never be cleared up, and bones later found and passed off as those of Browne found their final resting place in Tabriz. Most of the news about Browne's fate in Persia - his last weeks in Tabriz as well as his assassination - contain the notes of William Beloe from 1817, who in turn had several contemporary reports and writings (see literature).

Fonts

  • Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798 . London: T. Cadell junior & W. Davies 1799 ( archive )
    • First German edition: WG Brown's [!] Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria. Translated from English and annotated by MC Sprengel . Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir 1800 (= library of the latest travel descriptions, vol. 1) ( Google )
    • Second German edition: WG Browne's Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria, in the years 1792 to 1798. Translated from the English. With notes from the translator . Leipzig - Gera: Wilhelm Heinsius 1800 ( Google )
    • Third German edition: WG Brownes Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria, in the years 1792 to 1798. Translated from English and annotated by MC Sprengel . Berlin - Hamburg o.V. 1801 ( Google )
    • French edition: Nouveau voyage dans la haute et basse Égypte, la Syrie, le Dar-four, où aucun européen n'avoit pénétré; fait depuis les années 1792 jusqu'en 1798 . J. Castéra. 2 volumes. Paris: Dentu 1800 (Google: Volume I - Volume II )
    • Dutch edition: Nieuwe reize naar de binnenste Gedeelten van Afrika, door Egypte, Syrie en Le Dar-four, waar never te voren eenig europeaan heeft, - gedaan in the jaare 1792–1798. Naar het Engelsch . 2 parts. Amsterdam: Johannes Allart 1800–1801 (Google: Part I - Part II )
    • Second edition , Enlarged : Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798. Second Edition, Enlarged : London: T. Cadell junior & W. Davies 1806 ( Google )
  • Sections VIII to XII in Robert Walpoles (1781-1856) Travels in Various Countries of the East , (London 1820 - Google ), specifically:
    • VIII: "Journey from Constantinople through Asia Minor, in the Year 1802" (pp. 106–148)
    • IX: "Miscellaneous Remarks Written at Constantinople" (pp. 148–162)
    • X-XII: "Biographical Memoir of Mr. Browne" (pp. 162-184); also contains Browne's last known letter, written on July 16, 1813 in Tabriz .

literature

  • (Anonymous :) "William George Browne". In: Contemporaries. Biographies and characteristics . Volume VI. FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1821, pp. 107–128 (a free translation of the Biographical Memoir from Walpoles Travels in Various Countries in the East , see above).
  • William Beloe : Chapter XI. In: The Sexagenarian; or, the Recollections of a Literary Life . Volume II. Rivington, London 1817, S: 58-67 ( Google )
  • Rolf Schulte: Browne and Hornemann in the Siwa oasis . In: Hildesheimer Universitätsschriften , Vol. 11 (2002), pp. 149–161.
  • Edmund Wyatt: In the Paths of Dangerous Fame: The Life and Travels of the Explorer WG Browne. Self-published (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Biographical Memoir of Mr. Browne" (1820), p. 164.
  2. ^ R. Garnett: " Browne, William George (1768-1813) ", p. 77.
personal data
SURNAME Browne, William George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English traveler who explored Egypt and Darfur as a privateer
DATE OF BIRTH July 25, 1768
PLACE OF BIRTH Great Tower Hill, London
DATE OF DEATH 1813
Place of death Iran