Reinhard Maack and the Brandberg (Namibia).The long wait for the country's highest mountain to be cartographically recognized

This story has two unsung heroes: a mountain, and a cartographer. First, there was the mountain and its environment. All around the edges of southern Africa, the major relief features are coastal lowlands separated by the Great Escarpment from interior highlands. In southwestern Africa, however, erosion has formed a gap between 19° and 23°S, where the coastal desert Namib continually rises to the level of the interior highlands. This inclined plane is perforated by several huge volcanic intrusions such as the Erongo and Brandberg (Figures 1 and 2). The latter forms a dome-shaped granite massif of about 450 km (26×21 km) with steep and barren flanks, rising with its core plateau up to 1500 m above the 500–800 m high transitional gravel plains of the coastal Namib desert to the interior dry steppe, about 90 km inland. Although the setting makes the Brandberg or ‘burnt mountain’, as the Dutch translated the local name, visible from a great distance, its early notice by Europeans is opaque. The Portuguese had reached these shores in 1484, but found them a sandy desert, which later acquired the telling name Skeleton Coast. Only in the nineteenth century did recorded observations of the interior begin, with British navigational charts showing a prominent inland elevation in the area but placing it too close to the coast for it to be the Brandberg. This ‘Mount Messum’, named for a British captain, moved around in mid-century maps, but possibly originates from vessel sightings of the low rim of what now is called Messum Crater, about halfway between the coast and the Brandberg. Missionary Hugo Hahn was the first European to see the massif, in 1871, from as far as Okombahe, and to note it in his travel diary, too, which informed an 1878 route compilation map by August Petermann (Figure 3). In 1884, the Namib coast between the Kunene and Orange rivers with the hinterland was annexed by Germany, which until World War I held onto it as Schutzgebiet Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Protectorate German South West Africa). In 1888, German officer Friedrich von Steinäcker was the first to explore by wagon and on horseback the rumored mineral deposits in the vicinity of the Brandberg. In the following year, 1889, German geologist Georg Gürich, on reconnaissance on behalf of a gold prospecting syndicate, failed in his attempts to enter the Brandberg gorges. That scientist was also the culprit for a gross miss judgement carried on maps for the next decades. He estimated that the summit plateau of the Brandberg rises only about 500 m above the