63 Facts About Clements Markham

Later, Clements Markham served as a geographer to the India Office, and was responsible for the collection of cinchona plants from their native Peruvian forests, and their transplantation in India.

Clements Markham served as geographer to Sir Robert Napier's Abyssinian expeditionary force, and was present in 1868, at the fall of Magdala.

Clements Markham had strong and determined ideas about how the National Antarctic Expedition should be organised, and fought hard to ensure that it was run primarily as a naval enterprise, under Scott's command.

All his life Clements Markham was a constant traveller and a prolific writer, his works including histories, travel accounts and biographies.

Clements Markham authored many papers and reports for the RGS, and did much editing and translation work for the Hakluyt Society, of which he became president in 1890.

Clements Markham received public and academic honours, and was recognised as a major influence on the discipline of geography, although it was acknowledged that much of his work was based on enthusiasm rather than scholarship.

Clements Markham was born on 20 July 1830, at Stillingfleet, now in North Yorkshire, the second son of the Reverend David Frederick Clements Markham, then vicar of Stillingfleet.

In 1838, David Clements Markham was appointed rector of Great Horkesley, near Colchester, Essex.

In May 1844, Clements Markham was introduced by his aunt, the Countess of Mansfield, to Rear Admiral Sir George Seymour, a Lord of the Admiralty.

Towards the end of the voyage, Clements Markham experienced growing doubts about a conventional naval career; he now desired above all to be an explorer and a geographer.

Clements Markham did much reading, mainly Arctic history and classical literature, and thought about a possible return visit to Peru, a country which had captivated him during the Collingwood voyage.

Clements Markham played a full part in these activities, which produced no further evidence of Franklin, but led to the mapping of hundreds of miles of previously uncharted coast.

Immediately on his return to England, Clements Markham informed his father of his determination to leave the navy.

Clements Markham had been in trouble during his Collingwood service for attempting to prevent the flogging of a crewman.

Clements Markham had become disenchanted by the idleness that had occupied long periods of his service.

Clements Markham travelled by a roundabout route, proceeding first to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then overland to Boston and New York, before taking a steamer to Panama.

Clements Markham remained in the city for several weeks, researching Inca history, describing in his journal the many buildings and ruins that he visited.

The city is overlooked by the conical volcano Mount Misti, which Clements Markham likened to Mount Fuji in Japan.

Later Clements Markham overcame bureaucratic obstruction to obtain the necessary export licences.

Clements Markham returned briefly to England before sailing to India, to select suitable sites for cinchona plantations there and in Burma and Ceylon.

Clements Markham found the work tedious, but after six months was able to transfer to the forerunner of what became, in 1857, the India Office.

In 1867, Clements Markham was selected to accompany Sir Robert Napier's military expeditionary force to Abyssinia, as the expedition's geographer.

Clements Markham was attached to the force's headquarters staff, with responsibility for general survey work and in particular the selection of the route to Magdala, the king's mountain stronghold.

The British troops then departed, and Clements Markham was back in England in July 1868.

Clements Markham had, through his various activities, come to know many influential people, and during the early 1870s used these connections to make the case for a Royal Naval Arctic expedition.

Clements Markham was gone for three months, remaining with Alert as far as Disko Island in Baffin Bay.

Clements Markham's extended absence from his India Office duties, together with his increasing involvement in a range of other interests, caused his superiors to request his resignation.

In November 1854, Clements Markham had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Clements Markham made regular trips to Europe, and in 1885, went to America, where he met with President Grover Cleveland in the White House.

Clements Markham conducted the Geographical Magazine from 1872 to 1878, when it became merged in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society.

In parallel with his RGS duties Clements Markham served as secretary of the Hakluyt Society until 1886, subsequently becoming that society's president.

In 1873, Clements Markham had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in subsequent years received several overseas honours, including the Portuguese Order of Christ and the Order of the Rose of Brazil.

Clements Markham briefly considered, but did not pursue, the idea of a parliamentary career.

Clements Markham maintained his interest in the navy, particularly in the training of its officers.

In May 1888, Clements Markham resigned from his position as RGS Secretary, finding himself at odds with the Society's new policies which appeared to favour education over exploration.

In 1893, during the course of one of these journeys, Clements Markham was elected in absentia president of the society.

Clements Markham chose Antarctic exploration as the basis for this mission; there had been no significant Antarctic exploration by any country since Sir James Clark Ross's expedition fifty years previously.

Clements Markham faced further problems in securing funding for the expedition.

Clements Markham was furious, believing that funds were being diverted from his own project, and denounced Borchgrevink as "evasive, a liar and a fraud".

Clements Markham was equally hostile to William Speirs Bruce, the Scottish explorer who had written to Markham asking to join the National Antarctic Expedition.

The Scottish expedition duly sailed, but Clements Markham remained unforgiving towards it, and used his influence to ensure that its participants received no Polar Medals on their return.

Clements Markham was criticised in official quarters for privately sanctioning a second season in the Antarctic, contrary to the original plan, and then being unable to raise funds for the expedition's relief in 1904.

Clements Markham remained a member of the RGS Council, a vice-president, and he kept an active interest in Antarctic exploration, particularly in the two British expeditions which set out in the five years following his retirement.

Clements Markham had agreed to Shackleton's appointment as third officer on the Discovery following a recommendation from the expedition's principal private donor.

Clements Markham had given sympathy and support after Shackleton's early return from the expedition on grounds of ill health, and had backed the latter's unsuccessful application for a Royal Navy commission.

However, Clements Markham had second thoughts, and was writing to the current RGS president, Leonard Darwin, to express disbelief about Shackleton's claimed latitudes, repeating these doubts to Scott.

Whatever his reason, Clements Markham adopted a bitterness towards Shackleton which he retained for the rest of his life.

Clements Markham is said to have crossed out all favourable references to Shackleton in his own notes on the Discovery expedition, and to have virtually ignored Shackleton's achievements in a 1912 address to the British Association.

Clements Markham was equally dismissive in his history of Antarctic exploration, The Lands of Silence, published posthumously in 1921.

Clements Markham wrote biographies of the English kings Edward IV and Richard III, and of his old naval friend Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock; he kept up his editing and translating work.

Clements Markham continued to produce papers for the RGS, and remained president of the Hakluyt Society until 1910.

Clements Markham continued to travel extensively in Europe, and in 1906 cruised with the Mediterranean squadron, where Scott was acting as flag captain to Rear Admiral George Egerton.

When, in 1909, Scott announced his plans for a new Antarctic venture, the Terra Nova expedition, Clements Markham assisted with fundraising and served on the expedition's organising committee, arranging the deal which brought in Lieutenant "Teddy" Evans as second-in-command, in return for the abandonment of Evans's own expedition plans.

Clements Markham was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Cambridge and University of Leeds.

In 1912, when Roald Amundsen, conqueror of the South Pole, was invited by RGS president Leonard Darwin to dine with the Society, Clements Markham resigned his council seat in protest.

Clements Markham returned to England, and assisted with the preparation of Scott's journals for publication.

Scott's death was a heavy blow, but Clements Markham continued to lead a busy life of writing and travelling.

On 29 January 1916, while reading in bed by candlelight, Clements Markham set fire to the bedclothes and was overcome by smoke.

Hugh Robert Mill, Shackleton's first biographer and for many years the RGS librarian, referred to the dictatorial manner in which Clements Markham had run the Society.

Mill's measured opinion, that Clements Markham was "an enthusiast rather than a scholar", has been asserted as a fair summary of his strengths and weaknesses, and as the basis for his influence on the discipline of geography in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Clements Markham was survived by his wife Minna, to whom Albert Hastings Markham's 1917 biography of Sir Clements is dedicated.

Clements Markham was portrayed by the character actor Geoffrey Chater in the BBC TV miniseries Shackleton in 1983, and by Alexander Knox in the Central Television serial The Last Place on Earth in 1985.

Clements Markham was a prolific writer and diarist; his first published work, an account of his voyage with HMS Assistance in search of Franklin, had appeared in 1853.