A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London, of the , and of the American Geographical Society of New York, Chanler first visited Africa in 1889-1890 in the company of his friends George Galvin (then only 15 years old) and Royal Phelps Carroll. They traveled to Zanzibar and then to the coast of Kenya, going overland to Tsavo and then through lands inhabited by the Taveta people, where they encountered ornithologist William Louis Abbott and geologist Hans Meyer. They continued into Maasai territory to spend ten months near Mount Kilimanjaro. Chanler took with him a state-of-the-art Kodak camera designed to take four thousand photos without reloading, but upon his return it was discovered that the camera had not been properly loaded with film.