Wulf Bodenstein is on Arte.tv: don’t miss it!

On 4 April 2020, the Franco-German TV channel Arte ran a documentary film entitled Abenteuer Äquator, Die Entdeckung der Tropen / À la recherche de l'équateur [Equator adventure, the discovery of the tropics]. This 90 minutes film takes us around the world, following the equinoctial line. Quite logically, it starts in Ecuador, where French scientist Charles Marie La Condamine spent six years, from 1736, to measure an arc of meridian and improve the knowledge of our planet (see Maps in History No 45, p. 10). La Condamine mapped this very difficult terrain and explored it, before exploring the Amazon basin on his way back to France. In the early 19th century, he was followed by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonplan.

The film then makes stops in the Galapagos, in the Kiribati islands, in Java (Franz Willem Junghuhn, the Humboldt of Java who produced a thorough scientific and topographic description of the country in 1865), Borneo, the Maldives, Kenya and Uganda, Congo (via Tervuren!), Brazzaville, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe and Brazil.

In Tervuren, it is Wulf Bodenstein who explains the story of the Congo exploration using the giant map of the Africamuseum (see Maps in History No 66, p. 16); Wulf then shows various maps in his office and in the adjacent reading room. His colleague Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, curator of the Stanley archives, continues with the story of the Stanley second expedition and of the take-over by Leopold II.

The documentary is certainly worth seeing, not only because of the remarkable performance of our friend Wulf! It has high historical and cartographic contents, and it also covers other interesting subjects related to the environment, local life, etc. It can be seen on www.arte.tv until 4 May 2020.
By Jean-Louis Renteux

Posted on 6 April 2020