Thread by @PaulMMCooper

One of the strangest stories of the discovery of an ancient ruin is that of the Victorian explorer and circus performer William Leonard Hunt.

He claimed to have discovered a lost, ruined city in Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert. But no one else has ever been able to find it.

Born in New York to strict disciplinarian parents, Hunt moved to Canada in the year 1843, at the age of 5.

One day, he snuck away from home and saw a troupe of traveling performers passing through his town. This began a lifelong infatuation with the circus.

Hunt began secretly practicing to become a performer himself, and trained to be a tightrope walker and strongman, finally taking on the stage name "The Great Farini".

Hunt took part in a number of famous tightrope walks, including over the Niagara Falls in 1860.

He even invented a device to propel a human being through the air from a cannon, creating one of the first ever "human cannonball" shows.

But in later life, Hunt tired of the bright lights of show business. At the age of 43, he decided he wanted to become an explorer.

He set his sights on doing something that no European had ever done before. He would cross the vast Kalahari desert of Southern Africa on foot.

His expedition set off into the enormous uncharted wastes in the year 1881, led by local guides.

(📷 UK National Archives)

The Kalahari Desert is a large sandy savanna, extending for 900,000 km², and which today covers much of Botswana, parts of Namibia and regions of South Africa.

Its name comes from the Tswana language, and means “great thirst”.

Hunt believed that he would find enormous diamonds lying in the sands here. And in that respect, he was disappointed.

But he did succeed in becoming the first known European ever to survive crossing the great desert on foot.

Hunt's adoptive son Lulu Farini was also travelling with him, and made a remarkable series of sketches and photographs of what they found along the way.

Upon returning to Great Britain, Hunt submitted the following map of the desert to the Royal Geographical Society. And it had one interesting detail on it.

That's this section, which says only "ruins".

Hunt now claimed that on his journey across the Kalahari, he had stumbled upon the vast stone ruins of a vanished civilization.

He provided the following sketch of his supposed find.

Hunt claimed that he had discovered "a huge walled enclosure, elliptical in form and about the 8th of a mile in length. The masonry was of a cyclopean character; here and there the gigantic square blocks still stood on each other..."

Cyclopean masonry is a type of stonework found in the architecture of the Mycenaean Greeks, a bronze age civilization that built with massive limestone boulders, fitted together so tightly that there was barely a gap between them.

(Cyclopean walls of Mycenae, Greece, pictured)

Hunt went on:

"In the middle was a kind of pavement of long narrow square blocks fitted neatly together, forming a cross, in the centre of which was what seemed to be a base for either a pedestal or monument. We unearthed a broken column... the four flat sides being fluted."

Hunt's findings at first met with little interest. The RGS even criticised him for not making better notes about the water supply in the area.

But in 1886, Hunt published his adventures in a book called "Through the Kalahari Desert"

Original manuscript: archive.org/stream/cihm_36…

And it's in this book that Hunt set out a more colorful description of his encounter with the ruins.

They were "a long line of stone which looked like the Chinese Wall after an earthquake."

But he would leave it to "others more learned on the subject" to discover their identity

Hunt even included this remarkable piece of poetry in his book, telling his experience of stumbling upon this desolate ruined place.

The poem draws heavily on the influence of other Romantic ruin poetry, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias, written nearly 70 years before.

It wasn't until 1923, with Hunt at the age of 85, that the story gained attention. A professor at Rhodes University rediscovered his manuscript, and began to investigate.

Articles were published, and the so-called "Lost City of the Kalahari" caught the public imagination.

Since then, there have been at least 26 missions into the Kalahari, with the aim of finding this lost city.

There was even an attempt in 2010 to use microlight aircraft to search the savannah by air.

All have proven unsuccessful.

Due to Hunt's background as a circus performer and illusionist, many have decried his discovery as a hoax.

Some pointed out that his son Lulu had conspicuously failed to take photographs of these supposed ruins.

But Hunt never made a great fanfare about his discovery.

In 1964, an explorer named AJ Clement attempted to trace Hunt's route. He found no traces of ancient human inhabitation, but he did stumble across one possible explanation for Hunt's claims.

He found these unique dolerite rock formations, standing out in the desert.

These dolerite dikes are formed when igneous rock pours into fissures in softer rock, which then erodes away.

Some have argued that these may have fooled the amateur archaeologist Hunt, reminding him of the Cyclopean architecture of ancient civilizations like the Mycenaeans.

So what do you think? Did Hunt find some mysterious ruins out there in the Kalahari? Was this an innocent mistake by an amateur archaeologist? Or was this the final grand illusion of the Great Farini?

Thanks for listening! If you're interested in reading more on this topic, here are my reading suggestions:

-Lost City of the Kalahari books.google.co.uk/books?id=pGp0A…

-Lost Cities & Ancient Mysteries of Africa & Arabia books.google.co.uk/books?id=prq6y…

-The Phantom Atlas books.google.co.uk/books/about/Th…

If you'd like to hear more stories about ancient ruins and lost societies, have a listen to my podcast Fall of Civilizations (@Fall_of_Civ_Pod).

Available on Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube and all other podcasting platforms.

m.youtube.com/c/fallofcivili…

If you like my work, and would like to help support me or the podcast, you can do so here: patreon.com/fallofciviliza…