Far from being deservedly neglected outliers, the Niger and Congo expeditions were in many respects emblematic of British efforts to explore Africa. The historical forces that did so much to shape the trajectories of the Niger and Congo expeditions—slavery and the slave trade, imperial rivalries with other European powers, and the roles of African states and communities—were a persistent feature of these efforts. Failure was a frequent outcome. The preoccupation with the Niger River and West Africa persisted through the first half of the century and the renewal of interest in the Congo River and Equatorial Africa toward the end of the century spurred the Scramble for Africa. The main throughline that runs from Mungo Park at the start of the century through the Niger and Congo expeditions to the many British explorers who trekked across Africa in the decades that followed was a shared sense of hubris.

The British decision to dispatch expeditions to trace the courses of the Niger and Congo rivers was driven by two major considerations—strategic worries that the French would displace the British as the dominant European power in the region after the war and abolitionist concerns that the only way to stop the slave trade was to pressure Africans in the interior to turn to ‘legitimate commerce’. Acting on Park’s suspicion that the Niger and the Congo were the same river, officials organized expeditions to explore both of them. The Niger expedition was an army operation, its caravan consisting mainly of soldiers. The Congo expedition was a more scientifically-oriented naval endeavor that initially intended to use a steamship to go upriver. Both expeditions were large, costly ventures, indicating that various British ideological, political, and commercial groups had an interest in their success.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which archival categorization frames the voices of the actors in a historian’s documents. It does so by reconstructing the journey of a young woman from Nagasaki to Thursday Island via Shanghai and Hong Kong, based both on the first-person testimony she gave soon after arriving in Australia and on similar testimonies from many other migrating women. But although the woman, Hashimoto Usa, speaks in the first person, her ‘I’ is also layered with the world views of her British interlocutor and his educated Japanese translators. These bind Hashimoto into a set of discursive assumptions – about labour, gender and ‘civilization’ – that will affect where and how her story is archivally preserved, both in Brisbane and in Tokyo. In a similar way, the author’s own first-person description of ‘finding’ her testimony bleeds into Hashimoto’s voice, once again shaping her storytelling strategies and those of every other man present in her narrative. In short, the question of how we read such archival traces depends very much on who ‘we’ are in the story.

This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.

This chapter addresses the relationship between knowledge claims and cartography. It begins by interpreting a world map published by the Nippon Yūsen Kaisha (NYK) company in the mid 1920s, a map which, among other things, depicts the new shipping line established by the NYK between Yokohama and Melbourne in 1896. The chapter traces the Yamashiro-maru’s journeys on this line in order to question the map’s carefully curated claims of peaceful commercial exchange between Japan and Australia. Yet even as the author critiques the map, his own archival itineraries in Australia serve to reinforce its basic worldview. Reflecting on this problem of ‘archival directionality’, the chapter closes by trying to imagine Australia’s historical relationship with Asia through a very different representational form, namely a bark painting from Yolŋu country. As with the NYK map, the chapter examines the cartographic claims made in the bark painting, and the archival basis of those claims, before reflecting on how such sources might reframe a historian’s understanding of the ‘global’ archive.

This chapter takes the earth to be its archive. It imagines the journey of a piece of coal from the mines of the Karatsu coalfield, in north-western Kyushu, to the Yamashiro-maru’s furnace. It asks how such a history brings into play new timelines, new spatial frameworks and above all new actors in nineteenth-century Japan’s engagement with the outside world. Narrating a range of timescales, from millions of years to the daily diary of a Yamashiro-maru passenger in March 1900, the chapter juxtaposes maps, memoirs, paintings, photographs, geological reports, diplomatic missives and a crew list partly to offer a new reading of the ‘opening’ of Japan in the 1850s. This account emphasizes as much the ‘geo-’ as the ‘-politics’ of Japan’s international relations, thereby reimagining Japanese agency in matters of coal – both in the Tokugawa shogunate’s mid-century encounter with Commodore Perry and in the Meiji state’s late-century relations with East Asia.

The chapter traces the transformation of Western travel narratives reporting about journeys to Eastern Mediterranean port cities from the beginning to the middle of the nineteenth century. It claims that the transformation from romantic immersing in the foreign landscape to supremacism was influenced by the technological and sensory revolution of the steamship.