Desert stories from Gonville & Caius

20 March to 14 August 2025

The collections of the Lower Library and College Archive bear witness to a scholarly interest in travel and exploration that abides over centuries. John Caius, the physician who refounded the College in 1557, possessed two of the ingenious early astronomical and navigational instruments called astrolabes. The twelfth-century manuscript Tractatus de quaternario, donated in 1659, brings the tides and the winds that governed sea voyages into a cosmology of fourfold divisions, while a 1652 printed book offers a ‘practical astronomie’ for sailors, in the form of tables, charts, and a paper machine, the volvelle.

In this exhibition we focus on travel in the Earth’s harsh desert environments, beginning with the Christian Desert Fathers, who withdrew from human society to seek a closer relationship with God, and whose lives are told in the anthology Vitae Patrum. In the sixteenth century Leo Africanus (an Andalusi raised in Morocco) described the Sahara in his Geographical Historie of Africa, which was translated into English by the Caian John Pory. The Library holds a panoramic engraving of the ruins of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert, and two diplomats’ accounts of desert travel: a Dane in the Gobi, and an Egyptian in the Sahara, 200 years apart.

We look closely at three historic Caian desert travellers: Charles M. Doughty in the Arabian Desert, who set out to study ruins, but continued wandering with a Bedouin tribe; Ralph A. Bagnold in the Sahara, a soldier who put his peacetime explorations to military use when he led a campaign of ‘piracy on the high desert’ in the Second World War; and Edward Wilson in Antarctica, gentle doctor and zoologist on Captain Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, who died bravely with Scott’s forward party.

In polar desert exploration the Library also holds the works of Sir John Ross and Sir F. Leopold M’Clintock, who advanced the long search for a ‘Northwest Passage’ between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; Fridtjof Nansen, who aimed to reach the North Pole by drifting with an ice floe; James Cook, frustrated to be unable to prove the existence of what was later called Antarctica; and Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton, alumnus of an earlier expedition of Scott’s, narrowly survived his attempt at a land crossing of Antarctica. An apocryphal newspaper advertisement supposedly recruiting for that expedition supplies our exhibition title, and a laconic motto for desert exploration.