CHAPTER XII
GREAT EXPLORERS
The colonization of Africa in all its earlier stages is so closely akin to exploration, that in several of the preceding chapters I have seemed to deal rather with geographical discoveries than with political settlement. But as there is much exploring work which has not been directly connected with colonization (just as all missionary work has not resulted in the foundation of European states in Africa, nor have measures for the suppression of the slave trade invariably been followed by annexation) I think it better to devote a chapter to the enumeration of great explorers whose work has proved to be an indirect cause of the ultimate European control now established over nearly all Africa.
The first explorers known to history, though not, unfortunately, mentioned by name, were those Phoenicians despatched by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Niku II (son of Psammetik), about 600 (603-599) B.C. to circumnavigate Africa. We receive our knowledge of them through Herodotos, who derived his information from Egypt; but the account given of the voyage bears the stamp of veracity and probability, and seemed to be confirmed by some remarkable inscriptions on scarabs discovered by French explorers of Egyptian monuments. These, however, have been declared to be forgeries[163].
Cambyses, the Persian king who invaded Egypt in 525 B.C., is said to have lost his life in endeavouring to trace the course of the Nile, he and his army having disappeared in the deserts of Upper Nubia. About 520 B.C. Hanno the Carthaginian, as already related in Chapter II, conducted an expedition round the West coast of Africa, which penetrated about as far south as the confines of Liberia.
The Greek Herodotos journeyed in Egypt and in the Cyrenaica about 450 B.C. Eratosthenes, a Greek, born at Kurene in 276 B.C., became the librarian of one of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, and, although he derived much of his information about the valley of the Nile from other travellers, still he conducted a certain amount of exploration himself. Polybius, a Greek, born in 204 B.C., explored much of the North coast of Africa in the service of the Romans about 140 years before the Christian Era.
The celebrated Strabo flourished during the reign of Augustus Cæsar, and wrote a great work on geography about the year 19 A.C. He accompanied the Roman governor Ælius Gallus on a journey up the Nile as far as Philæ, though his knowledge of the Cyrenaica was limited to a voyage along the coast. Nero sent two centurions (according to Pliny) with orders to ascend the Nile and discover its course. Thanks to recommendations from the king of Ethiopia, they were passed on from tribe to tribe, and apparently ascended the Nile as far as its junction with the Sobat, where they were stopped by immense masses of floating vegetation (the sudd).
Though Pliny the Elder[164] does not appear to have visited Africa, or at any rate to have carried his explorations farther than a trip to Alexandria and visits to the ports along the Barbary coast, he nevertheless did much to collect and edit the geographical knowledge of the day; and has thus transmitted to our knowledge the slender information which the Romans possessed of interior Africa during the early years of the Empire. Pliny is remarkable for having handed down to us the first mention of the Niger, which he calls Nigir or Nigris and somewhat confounds with the humbler river Draa to the south of Morocco.
About the middle of the second century of the Christian Era there flourished in Egypt the famous geographer called Claudius Ptolemæus, better known to us as ‘Ptolemy.’ Though he also was mainly a compiler and owed much of his information to the works on geography published by his predecessor or contemporary, Marinus of Tyre, yet it seems probable that he travelled up the Nile for a certain distance, and visited the African coasts along the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. At any rate he published the most extended account of African geography given by any classical writer. His accounts of the Nile lakes, of the East African coast and of the Sahara Desert are the nearest approach to actuality of any geographer before the Muhammadan epoch.
With the decline of the Roman Empire came a cessation of geographical exploration, and there was no revival until the Muhammadan invaders of Africa had attained sufficient civilization to record their journeys and observations. Masudi and Ibn Haukal in the 10th century, and other Arab travellers whose wanderings have not been recorded, furnished from their journeys information embodied in the map of Idris or Edrisi drawn up by a Sicilian Muhammadan geographer for Count Robert of Sicily in the 12th century. By these journeys the first definite and reliable information about the geography of Africa south of the Sahara, and along the East coast to Zanzibar and Sofala was brought to European knowledge. Ibn Batuta, a native of Morocco, in the 14th century[165], and Leo Africanus (a Spanish Moor who afterwards turned Christian), in the 16th century, reached the Niger and the regions round Lake Chad. The geographical enterprise of the Moors communicated itself to their conquerors, the Portuguese. Besides their great navigators, the Portuguese sent out overland explorers, the first, named João Fernandez, having in 1445 explored the Sahara Desert inland from the Rio d’Ouro. It is stated that Pero d’Evora and Gonçalvez Eannes actually travelled overland in 1487 from Senegambia to Timbuktu; but doubt has been thrown on their having reached this distant city; they may possibly have got as far as Jenné. Much more real and important were the explorations of Pero de Covilhão; who travelled in Sofala and reached Abyssinia in 1490 on his return from India, and remained in that country for the rest of his life. Passing over Francisco Barreto, who explored Zambezia more for immediate political purposes in 1569 and subsequent years, we may next note the exploration of a Portuguese gentleman named Jaspar Bocarro, who in 1616 made a journey overland from the central Zambezi, across the river Shiré, near Lake Nyasa and the Ruvuma river, and thence to the east coast at Mikindani. From Mikindani he continued his journey to Malindi by sea. In 1613-18 two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Pedro Paez and Jeronimo Lobo, explored Abyssinia, even far to the south. Paez visited the source of the Blue Nile, and Lobo directed his travels to the quasi-Christian states to the south of Abyssinia. In 1622, Lobo and other Portuguese missionaries attempted to enter Abyssinia by way of Zeila (Somaliland). They met with great misfortunes and much cruelty at the hands of the Somalis and the Egyptian Turks. Six missionaries died or were murdered. Lobo found his way from Mombasa to India, and, nothing daunted, returned to the Danákil coast in 1625 and landed at Bailul, opposite Mokha. His clothes tattered and his feet bleeding, he passed through the rough Danákil country, climbed the Abyssinian mountains, and reached the Jesuit mission centre at Fremona, near Axum. He then made a really remarkable exploration of Abyssinia, and visited the source of the Blue Nile; but the jealous Abyssinians expelled him and the other Jesuits from Abyssinia in 1633 by handing them over as prisoners to the Turks at Masawa[166]. It was thanks to the travels of Paez and Lobo that Abyssinian geography became so well known in Europe when all the rest of interior Africa was a blank. Numbers of unnamed, unremembered Portuguese soldiers and missionaries must have plunged into the interior of Africa between 1445 and the end of the 17th century, bringing back jumbled information of lakes and rivers and negro states; but their information has perished—except in an indirect form—and their names are lost to history.
In 1588 Andrew Battel, a fisherman of Leigh in Essex, was wrecked on the coast of Brazil, seized by the Indians as a “pirate,” and handed over to the Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro. The Portuguese decided to deport him to Angola. The vessel in which he travelled reached Benguela at a time when it was being ravaged by the predatory “Jagas[167].” The Portuguese being obliged to leave a hostage with the Jagas, left Battel behind; and in the company of these wild people he seems to have traversed much of the Congo country behind Angola and Loango before he eventually reached the coast again (north of the Congo) near a Portuguese fort, where he was allowed by the Jagas to leave them and whence the Portuguese permitted him to return to England in 1607. He appears to have roamed over South-West Africa for nearly 18 years, and he brought back with him fairly truthful accounts of the pygmy races, the anthropoid apes, and some of the big game which penetrates the interior of Benguela from the south.
At the commencement of the 17th century, William Lithgow, a Scottish traveller, visited Tunis and Algeria. In 1618 the London Company of Adventurers despatched George Thompson, who had already travelled in Barbary, to explore the river Gambia. During his absence up the river the ship by which he had come from England was seized and the crew murdered by Portuguese and half-caste slave traders, who resented this invasion of their special domain. Thompson managed to send back word of his difficulties, and the Company of Adventurers despatched another small ship. After sending her back with letters, Thompson continued his journeys for a distance of about 80 miles above the mouth of the Gambia. Thompson, however, lost his head, became fantastic in his notions, and is supposed to have been killed by his own English seamen, who afterwards boldly walked to the Senegal coast and were sent home in a Dutch ship. A third vessel sailed from London, commanded by Richard Jobson, to enquire after Thompson’s fate. Jobson’s first voyage, though he reached the point where Thompson had disappeared, was not very successful. On his return from Gravesend with two ships in 1620, he sailed up the Gambia to a place called Kasson, where dwelt an influential Portuguese who had been the instigator of the destruction of his predecessor’s ship. This man fled at Jobson’s approach, and the latter continued on his way till he reached Tenda, where Thompson had disappeared. He then travelled in boats far above the Barrakonda Rapids[168].
Then followed the journey of Jannequin de Rochefort and his companions in Senegal, and the still more important explorations of Brüe and Campagnon in the same region, journeys which have been referred to in Chapter IX. During the reign of king Charles II a Dutch or Anglicized Dutch merchant, named Vermuyden, asserted that he had ascended the Gambia and reached a country beyond, full of gold, but the truth of this story is open to considerable suspicion. In 1723 Captain Bartholomew Stibbs, and later still a man named Harrison, repeated Jobson’s explorations of the Gambia. In 1720-30 Dr Shaw, an Englishman, travelled in Egypt, Algeria[169] and Tunis, and gave the first fairly accurate account of the Barbary States which had been received since they became Muhammadanized. A little later (1737-40) an English clergyman, Doctor of Laws and Fellow of the Royal Society, Richard Pococke, travelled in Egypt and explored the Nile as far as the first cataract. In about 1780, Sonnini, an Italian, born in Alsace, explored Egypt, and gave a really circumstantial account of that country which did much to incite the French Revolutionary Government to invade it. In 1768-73 James Bruce, a Scotchman of good family, who had been educated at Harrow, and had spent two-and-a-half years as Consul at Algiers, travelled first in Tunis, Tripoli, and Syria. He then entered Egypt, and, becoming interested in the Nile question, he voyaged down the Red Sea to Masawa, and journeyed to Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia. Having some knowledge of medicine, he found favour with the authorities, and was given a command in the Abyssinian cavalry. After many disappointments, his ardent wish was granted; and he arrived at what he believed to be the sources of the Nile, but which really were the head-waters of the Blue Nile, to the south of Abyssinia. He journeyed back by way of Sennār and the Nubian Desert to Cairo. In 1793 William George Browne, a Londoner, and a member of Oriel College, Oxford, attracted by the accounts of Bruce’s travels, entered Egypt, and crossed the Libyan Desert from Asiut to Darfur in 1793. There he was treated extremely badly by the sultan of the country, and practically endured a captivity of three years before he succeeded in returning to Egypt.
During the 18th century rumours had gradually been taking the shape of a belief that there was a great river in Western Africa on the banks of which stood the famous city of Timbuktu. This river was identified with Pliny’s Nigris or Nigir[170]. At first it was thought that the Niger was the Gambia or Senegal, but at last it was believed that the Niger must rise southward, beyond the sources of these rivers, and flow to the eastward. Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who had accompanied Cook on his journey round the world, joined with other persons of distinction, and formed the African Association on the 19th of June, 1788, with the special object of exploring the Niger. At first they resolved to try from the North coast of Africa or from Egypt; but these expeditions proving unsuccessful, an attempt was made to march into the unknown from Sierra Leone. Major Houghton, who had been Consul in Morocco, was employed amongst other travellers, and he succeeded in passing through Bambuk on his way to Timbuktu; but he was intercepted by the Moors of the Sahara, robbed, and left to die naked in the desert. From Egypt a German traveller named Friedrich Hornemann was despatched by the same association. He reached Fezzan, set out on a journey to Bornu, and was never heard of afterwards, though it is practically certain that he reached the Niger in the country of Nupe[171] about 1800. In 1795 the zealous Association accepted the services of a young Scotch surgeon named Mungo Park, and sent him out to discover the Niger from the West coast. Mungo Park started at the age of 24, having had a previous experience in scientific exploration as assistant surgeon on an East Indiaman, which had made a voyage to Sumatra. Park reached Pisania, a station high up the Gambia River, in 1795. He started at the end of that year, and after crossing the Senegal river and going through many adventures, he entered the Moorish countries of Kaarta and Ludamar to the north-east. Hence, after enduring captivity and great hardships, he escaped, and gradually found his way to the Niger at Sego, and struggled along the river bank for a short distance farther east. His return journey along the Niger was attended by such hardships that one marvels at the physical strength which brought him through alive. However, at last he reached Bamaku, and thence after almost incredible difficulties regained Pisania on the Gambia, about a year and a quarter after setting out thence to discover the Niger. Owing to his return voyage taking him to the West Indies, he did not reach England till the 22nd of December, 1797, after performing a journey which, even if he had not subsequently become the Stanley of the Niger, would have made him lastingly famous. London received him with enthusiasm, but after the first novelty had worn off a period of forgetfulness set in. Park married, and settled down in Peebles as a medical practitioner. But in process of time the influence of the African Association filtered even into the stony heart of a Government department; and it was resolved by the Colonial Office (then a branch of the War Office) to send Mungo Park back to continue his exploration of the Niger. He was given £5000 for his expenses, and an ample outfit of stores and arms and other equipment. He held a Captain’s commission, and was allowed to select soldiers from the garrison of Goree. He took his brother-in-law with him as second in command, a draughtsman named Scott, and several boatbuilders and carpenters. At Goree he selected one officer, 35 privates, and two seamen. The party left the Gambia in 1805. They were soon attacked with fever, and by the time they had reached the Niger only seven out of the 38 soldiers and seamen who had left Goree were living. Descending the Niger past Sego, Mungo Park built a rough and ready kind of boat at Sansanding, which he named the Joliba. By this time his party had been reduced to five, including himself. On the 12th of November, 1805, they set out from Sansanding (whence they sent back to the Gambia their letters and journals) to trace the Niger to its mouth. Mungo Park was never heard from any more. It was ascertained, by the information subsequently gathered from native traders and chiefs, that his party met with constant opposition from the natives in its descent of the river, with the result that he and his companions were continually fighting. After Mungo Park entered the Hausa-speaking countries of Sokoto the enmity of the natives increased, apparently because he was unable to pay his way with presents. At last, at Busa, where further navigation was obstructed by rocks, the natives closed in on him. Finding no way of escape, Park jumped into the river with Lieutenant Martyn (a Royal Artillery Officer), and was drowned. After Park’s death, Major Peddie, Captain Campbell, Major Gray, and Dr Dochard all strove to follow in Park’s footsteps from the direction of the Gambia, but all died untimely deaths from fever, though Dr Dochard succeeded in reaching Sego on the Niger.
The presence of the Dutch in South Africa did not lead to great explorations. Such journeys as were made were chiefly parallel to the coast. In 1685 Commander Van der Stel explored Namakwaland to within a very short distance of the Orange river; but it was some 60 years later before that river was actually discovered by a Boer elephant hunter. Its discovery was made known scientifically by an expedition under Captain Hop in 1761. This expedition obtained several giraffes, which were sent home by Governor Tulbagh, and were the first to reach Europe. In 1777 Captain Robert Jacob Gordon, a Scotchman in the service of the Dutch East India Company, discovered the Orange river at its junction with the Vaal. Subsequently Captain Gordon, with Lieutenant William Patterson, an Englishman, made a journey overland from the Namakwa country to the mouth of the Orange river, which they ascended for 30 or 40 miles. They christened what the Dutch had hitherto called the “Great (Groote) river” the “Orange river,” out of compliment to the Stadhouder. There is also a rumour that two Dutch commissioners, Truster and Sommervill, went on a cattle-purchasing expedition in 1801 beyond the Orange river, and penetrated through the Bechuana country to the vicinity of Lake Ngami.
Fired by the news of African discoveries, Portugal awoke from one of her secular slumbers in 1798—as she similarly awoke in 1877—and despatched a Brazilian, Dr Francisco José Maria de Lacerda, to the Zambezi, to attempt a journey across Africa from East to West. The results of this first scientific exploration of Central Africa have been touched on in Chapter IV. It may be sufficient to mention here that Dr de Lacerda travelled up the Zambezi to Tete, and from Tete north-westwards to the vicinity of Lake Mweru, near the shores of which he died. He had been preceded along this route by two Goanese of the name of Pereira. In the beginning of the 19th century two half-caste Portuguese named Baptista and Amaro José crossed Africa from the Kwango river, behind Angola, to Tete on the Zambezi. In 1831 Major Monteiro and Captain Gamitto repeated Dr de Lacerda’s journey from Tete to the Kazembe’s country, near Lake Mweru; and in 1846 a Portuguese merchant at Tete named Candido de Costa Cardoso, claimed to have sighted the southwest corner of Lake Maravi (Nyasa).
To return again to South Africa—British rule brought about a great development in exploration. Campbell, a Scotch missionary, in 1812 laid down the course of the Orange river on the map and discovered the source of the Limpopo. Captain (afterwards General Sir J. E.) Alexander made an interesting journey overland from Cape Town to Walfish Bay; Dr William Burchell and Captain William Cornwallis Harris[172] explored Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, and added much to our knowledge of the great African fauna. Robert Moffat and other missionaries extended our knowledge of Bechuanaland; Angas investigated Zululand; Major Vardon explored the Limpopo.
In the first decade of the 19th century Henry Salt (formerly British Consul-General in Egypt) explored Abyssinia and the Zanzibar Coast. In 1822 Captain (afterwards Admiral) W. F. W. Owen left England with two ships, and spent four years exploring the East and West coasts of Africa, and the island of Madagascar. He especially added to our knowledge of Delagoa Bay and its vicinity. He despatched vessels on the first voyage of discovery up the Zambezi, which unhappily ended in the death of all the British officers. The limit reached was Sena. The East and West coasts of Africa were charted by Captain Owen with the first approach to real accuracy. Although he was not an overland explorer, his voyage marks a most important epoch in African discovery, and many of his surveys are still in use.
Mungo Park and others having entertained the idea that the Niger might find its ultimate outlet to the sea in the river Congo, an expedition was sent out in 1816 to explore the lower Congo. It was a naval expedition, of course, and the command was given to Captain Tuckey. He surveyed the river to the Yelala Falls, and carried his expedition inland to above these rapids near the modern station of Isangila. Unfortunately, he and nearly all the officers of his expedition died of fever; but his journey, being conducted on scientific lines, resulted in considerable additions to our knowledge of Bantu Africa, its peoples, languages, and flora.
Major Laing, a Scotchman, who had already, in 1823, distinguished himself by exploring the source of the Rokel river of Sierra Leone (practically locating the source of the Niger and ascertaining its approximate altitude), determined in 1825 to strike out a new departure in the search for Timbuktu. He started from Tripoli, journeyed to Ghadames and the oasis of Twat, and thence rode across the desert to the Niger over a route which may some day be followed by a French trans-Saharan railway. He was attacked on the way by the detestable Tawareq, who left him for dead, bleeding from twenty-four wounds. Still, he recovered, and actually entered Timbuktu on the 18th of August, 1826. Being advised by the people to leave because of their dislike to the presence of a Christian, he started to return across the desert, but was killed at El Arwan, a few marches north of Timbuktu, at the instigation of the Fula king Ahmadu of Masina.
French names were scarce in the roll of explorers after the journeys of Brüe and Campagnon at the beginning of the 18th century; though Le Vaillant, as a naturalist, made small but very interesting explorations in South Africa. But in the early part of the 19th century, after the recovery of their Senegalese possessions, Frenchmen resumed the exploration of the Dark Continent. Already, in 1804, Rubault, an official of the Senegal Company, had explored the desert country between the Senegal and the Gambia, and the upper waters of the Senegal. In 1818 Gaspard Mollien discovered the source of the Gambia, and explored Portuguese Guinea. In 1824 and 1825 De Beaufort visited the country of Kaarta to the north-east of the Senegal. Then came René Caillé, who reached Timbuktu and returned thence to Morocco in 1827, a journey discussed for its political importance in Chapter IX.
In 1817 a British mission was sent to Ashanti, under the eventual leadership of Thomas Edward Bowdich. Bowdich, who made a treaty with the king of Ashanti, employed the opportunities of intercourse with Hausa, Mandingo, and Moorish merchants at the court of this monarch to collect a quantity of most valuable information as to the course of the Niger, the fate of Mungo Park, the geography, ethnology and languages of the heart of West Africa within the Niger bend. His book, published in 1820, is a valuable work in African anthropology and history.
The British Government, still pegging away at the Niger problem, was roused to fresh exertions by the information collected. Impressed by the success with which Laing had penetrated Central Africa from Tripoli, it resolved to try that Regency[173] as a basis of discovery. Mr Ritchie and Captain George Lyon started from Tripoli in 1818, and reached the country of Fezzan. Here Ritchie died, and Lyon did not get beyond the southernmost limit of Fezzan. On his return a second expedition was organized under Dr Walter Oudney (who was actually appointed Political Agent to Bornu before that country had been discovered by Europeans!), Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton, R.N., and Lieutenant Dixon Denham. Starting from Tripoli in the spring of 1822, they were compelled to halt there by the obstacles that were placed in their way. Denham, an impulsive, energetic man, rushed back to Tripoli to remonstrate with the Basha, and receiving nothing but empty verbal assurances, started for Marseilles with the intention of proceeding to England, but was recalled by the Basha of Tripoli, who henceforth placed no obstacles in his way. During his absence the expedition had visited the town of Ghat, far down in the Sahara. In 1823 this expedition reached the Sudan, and its members were the first Europeans to discover Lake Chad. They then visited Bornu and the Hausa state of Kano, where Dr Oudney died. After Oudney’s death, Clapperton proceeded to Sokoto, and very nearly reached the Niger, but was prevented from doing so by the jealousy of the Fula sultan of Sokoto. Whilst Major Denham was remaining behind in Bornu, there arrived with a supply of stores a young officer named Toole, who had traversed the long route from Tripoli to Bornu almost alone, and had made the journey from London in four months. Denham and Toole explored the eastern and southern shores of Lake Chad, and discovered the Shari river, after which the unfortunate Toole died.
Denham and Clapperton then returned to Tripoli[174]. The British Government sent Clapperton back to discover the outlet of the Niger. He landed at Badagri, in what is now the British colony of Lagos. He lost his companions one by one, with the exception of his invaluable servant Richard Lander. Clapperton passed through Yorubaland, and actually struck the Niger at the Busa Rapids, near where Park and his company perished. From Busa Clapperton and his party travelled through Nupe and the Hausa states of Kano and Sokoto; but he arrived at an unfortunate time, when Sokoto was at war with Bornu, and the Fula sultan was much too suspicious of Clapperton’s motives to help him in the exploration of the Niger. From fever and disappointment Clapperton died at Sokoto on the 13th of April, 1827. It was a great pity that he went there at all. What he should have done on reaching Busa was to work his way down from Busa to the sea. All his companions, except his servant Lander, had predeceased him. Lander now endeavoured to trace the Niger to the sea, but the Fula sultan still opposed him, and he was stripped of nearly all the property of the expedition before he could leave Sokoto. Eventually he made his way back to Badagri by much the same route that Clapperton had followed. Lander was a Cornishman, a man of short stature, but pleasing appearance and manners. He had had a slight education as a boy, but learned a good deal more in going out to service as page, footman, and valet. In this last-named capacity he had journeyed on the continent of Europe and in South Africa before accompanying Clapperton. When he returned to England his story did not arouse much interest, as Arctic explorations had replaced Africa in the mind of the public. Moreover, the ultimate course of the Niger had by a process of exhaustion almost come to be guessed aright.
So far back as 1808 Dr Reichardt of Weimar had suggested that the Niger reached the Atlantic in the Gulf of Guinea through the Oil rivers. Later, James McQueen, who as a West Indian planter had cross-examined many slaves on the subject of the Niger, not only showed that this river obviously entered the sea in the Bight of Benin, but predicted that this great stream would some day become a highway of British commerce. Somewhat grudgingly, the Government agreed to send Lander and his brother back to Africa, poorly endowed with funds. Not discouraged, however, the Landers arrived at Badagri in March, 1830, and reached the Niger at Busa after an overland journey of three months. Meeting with no opposition from the natives, they paddled down stream for two months in canoes. At length they reached the delta, but there unfortunately fell into the power of a large fleet of Ibo war canoes. By the Ibos they were likely to have been killed but for the remonstrances of some Muhammadan teachers, who, oddly enough, were found with this fleet. Moreover, a native trader of Brass, an Ijō settlement near the coast of the delta, happened to be visiting the Ibo chief, and agreed to ransom the Lander brothers on condition of receiving from them a ‘bill’ agreeing to repay to the ‘king’ of Brass the value of the goods which his son had furnished for their redemption. They reached the sea at the mouth of the Brass river, one of the outlets of the Niger, but not the main stream. An English merchant ship being anchored there, the Landers went delightedly on board, thinking the end of their troubles had come. They asked the captain to honour their bill, the amount of which the Government would repay him. To their amazement he refused, and altogether behaved in such a disgraceful manner that it is a pity his name has not been preserved for infamy. However, they managed on this ship to get a passage across to Fernando Pô, where they landed. The vessel by which they travelled, and the master of which treated them so badly, was afterwards captured by a pirate and never heard of again. It may be mentioned here that Richard Lander ultimately repaid the chief’s son of Brass the whole amount of the goods which he had spent in redeeming the two explorers from the Ibo king’s clutches.
No great fuss was made over the Landers when they returned in 1831. John Lander remained at home. Richard Lander afterwards joined the MacGregor Laird expedition for opening up the Niger. This commercial undertaking met with the most awful disasters from sickness, but James MacGregor Laird nevertheless succeeded in discovering the Benue, and ascended it for some distance. In 1833 Richard Lander and Dr Oldfield ascended the Niger from the Nun mouth as far as Rabba, and explored the Benue for 140 miles above its junction with the Niger. After returning from a third trip up the Niger Lander was attacked by savages in the delta, was severely wounded, and died from his wounds at Fernando Pô on the 6th of February, 1834.
In 1840-41 Mr John Beecroft, superintendent of Fernando Pô, and afterwards first consul for the Bights of Biafra and Benin, not only explored the Niger, but made known for the first time the Cross river, to the east, which he ascended from Old Calabar to the rapids. In 1841 the British Government sent out an important surveying expedition to the Niger under four naval officers. This expedition was despatched at the instigation of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the philanthropist, who had thrown himself heart and soul into the anti-slavery movement. At this period philanthropy reigned supreme in England, and a sense of humour was in abeyance, though it was beginning to bubble up in the pages of Dickens, who has so deliciously satirized this Niger expedition in “Bleak House” with its inimitable Mrs Jellyby and her industrial mission of Borriaboola-Gha. The ghastly unhealthiness of the lower Niger was ignored, and an item in the programme of the expedition was the establishment of a model farm at the junction of the Benue and the Niger. The other aims of the expedition were nicely balanced between the spreading of Christian civilization and the suppression of the slave trade on the one hand and the zealous pushing of Manchester goods on the other. Numerous treaties were made, but the results of the expedition were disappointment and disaster, occasioned by utter ignorance of the conditions under which some degree of health might be retained, and a muddle-headed indecision as to the practical results which were to be secured by the opening up of the Niger. The loss of life was enormous. Still, in spite of this check, British traders gradually crept into and up the Niger, with the results detailed in Chapter VIII.
In 1836 John Davidson, an Englishman of considerable attainments, started from the Atlantic coast of Morocco for Timbuktu, but was murdered at Tenduf, in the Sahara Desert.
In 1849 the British Government determined to make another effort to open up commercial relations with the Niger and Central Africa, but resolved again to try the overland route from Tripoli. After the Napoleonic wars were finished, the British Government had sent out various surveying parties to map the coasts of Africa; and a well-equipped expedition under Admiral Beechey made a thorough investigation of the coasts of Tripoli and Barka in 1821 and 1822, and sent back the first trustworthy accounts of the Greek ruins of the Cyrenaica. Since that time several consular representatives of Great Britain in Tripoli had carried on explorations in the interior. Among these was James Richardson, who had originally accompanied Admiral Beechey, and who further made most important explorations of the Tripolitan Sahara, discovering many interesting rock paintings and inscriptions. He was appointed to be the head of this overland expedition of 1849, and associated with him were two Germans, Barth and Overweg. Dr Heinrich Barth was born at Hamburg in the year 1821. He had travelled extensively in Asia Minor, in Mediterranean Africa, and up the Nile.
This expedition left Tripoli in the spring of 1850, and reached Bornu without any difficulty. Here its members separated. Richardson died soon afterwards and was buried near Lake Chad; Overweg died in 1852, having been the first European to navigate Lake Chad[175]. He was buried on the shores of that lake. For the next four years Barth carried on gigantic explorations on his own account. He journeyed from Lake Chad along the river Komadugu, and thence across northern Hausaland to the Niger at Say. From Say he cut across the bend of the Niger to Timbuktu, and descended the river back to Say, and thence to Sokoto, from which he made his way to Kukawa in Bornu, where he met Dr Eduard Vogel and two non-commissioned officers of the Royal Engineers, who had been sent by the British Government to reinforce his expedition. Barth had previously in 1851 made a journey due south, and had struck the river Benue very high up in its course. Vogel started to complete the discoveries in this direction, and eventually to make his way to the Nile. He was accompanied by Corporal MacGuire, but the two quarrelled and parted, and both were murdered in the vicinity of Wadai. Dr Barth and the other non-commissioned officer made their way back across the desert to Tripoli and England. Barth’s journey was productive of almost more solid information than that of any of the great African explorers, excepting Stanley, and possibly Nachtigal, Schweinfurth and Emin Pasha. Besides the geographical information given, Barth’s book in five volumes and his various linguistic works on the Central Sudan languages represent an amount of information that has not been sufficiently digested yet. Heinrich Barth stands in the first rank of the very great explorers, a class which should perhaps include Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and Grant, Burton, Baker, Schweinfurth, Nachtigal, Rohlfs, Grenfell, Binger and Joseph Thomson; men who have not only made great geographical discoveries but who have enriched us as well with that information which clothes the dry bones of the mere delineation of rivers, lakes, and mountains. Barth received a somewhat grudging reward for his services in England. After some delay he was created a C.B., and then his existence was ignored by the Government, to whom still, and for many years to come, an African explorer, laying bare to our knowledge hundreds of thousands of square miles of valuable territory, was less worthy of remembrance than a Chargé d’Affaires at the court of the Grand Duke of Pumpernickel.
In 1846 a Portuguese trader named Graça reached the court of the Mwata Yanvo in southern Congoland, from Angola; and between 1847 and 1851 the hinterland of Angola was thoroughly explored by a Hungarian, Ladislas Magyar. In 1853 a Portuguese trader, Silva Porto, actually crossed Africa, from Benguela to the mouth of the Ruvuma, passing to the south of Lake Nyasa, but not sighting it.
In 1858 a Moroccan Jew named Mordokhai[176] Abi-Serūr made a journey from the south of Morocco to Timbuktu and afterwards resided in that city till 1862, thenceforward repeating his journeys thither until 1869. In 1830 the Church Missionary Society had sent emissaries to Abyssinia, who included among them latterly such men as Dr Ludwig Krapf[177]. But these agents were expelled in 1842, and Krapf settled on the east coast of Africa two years afterwards. Here he was joined by Johann Rebmann, also in the service of the Church Missionary Society. Making Mombasa their head-quarters, Krapf and Rebmann executed some remarkable journeys into the interior of what was then an utterly unknown country. Rebmann in 1848 saw for the first time Kilima-njaro, the highest mountain in Africa, nearly 20,000 feet high. In 1849 Krapf not only sighted Kilima-njaro, but pushed his way much further north, and caught a glimpse of Mt Kenya. Besides these remarkable discoveries (the truth of which was strongly doubted by arm-chair geographers in England) they brought back with them such circumstantial accounts of the great Central African lakes as to lure others on to the exploration of these regions.
During the thirties Abyssinia and Shoa were explored by Dr E. Rüppel (a German traveller who added greatly to our knowledge of African natural history); during the forties and fifties by the Irish-French brothers, Antoine and Arnaud d’Abbadie (who made the most elaborate surveys), and by Sir W. Cornwallis Harris; and subsequently by Théophile Le Fébvre, Mansfield Parkyns, H. Dufton, and the geographer, Dr C. T. Beke. In 1856 Mr James Hamilton made a most interesting journey of exploration in the Cyrenaica, and thence travelled overland through the oasis of Siwa to Egypt.
Meantime, in South Africa Livingstone had arisen. He had settled in Bechuanaland in 1841, and had gradually extended his journeys further and further north, until, in company with William Oswell and Murray, two English sportsmen, he discovered Lake Ngami. Mr Francis Galton had attempted to reach this lake in 1851 by an interesting but very difficult journey through Damaraland; but he did not succeed in getting nearer to Ngami than the bed of a dried-up watercourse, the Omuramba. Andersson, a Swede, however, in 1851 left Walfish Bay, and travelling through Ovamboland, managed to arrive at the shores of Ngami. Green explored the lower course of the Okabango-Teoge in 1856. In 1851 Livingstone, accompanied by his wife and family, and by Mr Oswell, reached the Zambezi at Sesheke. Feeling himself on the threshold of vast discoveries, Livingstone despatched his wife and family to England, with the monetary help of Mr Oswell, and placed himself under the tuition of Sir Thomas McClear, the Astronomer Royal at Cape Town. Turning his face northward in June 1852, he reached the Zambezi again in that year, traced it along its upper course, near to its source, and then travelled across to Angola, which he reached in May 1854. Returning again from Angola to the Zambezi, he followed that river more or less closely to near its mouth, and then made his way to Quelimane by the route always followed until the recent discovery of the Chinde mouth of the Zambezi. From Quelimane he was conveyed by a British gunboat to Mauritius, and arrived in London on the 12th of December, 1856.
Somaliland had been explored in 1854 by Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke. Burton was an officer in the Indian army, and had previously made a remarkable journey to the holy places of the Hedjaz. In 1856 the Royal Geographical Society (which had developed from out of the African Association in 1830) despatched an expedition under the command of Burton, who chose Speke for his lieutenant, to search for the great lakes which the Württemberg missionaries reported to exist. As the result of this epoch-making exploration Burton discovered Tanganyika (though he only mapped out the northern half), and Speke discovered the south shore of the Victoria Nyanza. Hurrying home before Burton, Speke got the ear of the Geographical Society, and was at once sent back (with Captain J. A. Grant as his companion) to discover the sources of the Nile. Burton was rather hardly treated in the matter, but he was a man too clever for his times, and one who made many enemies amongst those who directed geographical exploration in the middle of the 19th century. Speke and Grant reached the northern end of the Victoria Nyanza and the outlet of the Victoria Nile at the Ripon Falls, journeyed northwards and missed the Albert Nyanza; then, met and relieved by Sir Samuel Baker, travelled down the Nile to Egypt. It was a most remarkable journey, but in some senses a blundering one, remarkable as much for what was missed as for what was gained in exploration. Through not having made any survey of the vast lake they had undoubtedly discovered and often seen, and not being able to give much idea of its shape or area, its very existence came afterwards to be doubted until it was conclusively established by Stanley in 1875. Speke and Grant had left England in April 1860, and reached Khartum on the 30th of March, 1864, and England soon afterwards. Speke died from a gun-accident in September 1864. Grant, afterwards made a Colonel and a C.B., accompanied the British expedition to Abyssinia, and lived till 1892.
Prior to the journey of Speke and Grant down the Nile, that river had been already made known up to the vicinity of the great lakes by explorers following in the footsteps of the military expeditions sent by Muhammad Ali to conquer the Sudan[178]. A Catholic mission had established itself on the Upper Nile in 1848, mainly supported by the Austrian Government. Amongst the missionaries was Dr Ignatius Knoblecher, who in 1849 explored the White Nile beyond Gondokoro to Mount Logwek. Other explorations were carried out by Giovanni Beltrame, another missionary. A Maltese ivory merchant named Andrea Debono and a Venetian named Giovanni Miani had also explored the White Nile; and the latter was the first European to visit the Nyam-nyam country. An English (or, rather, Welsh) ivory trader named John Petherick had started from Khartum in November 1853, and had ascended the Bahr-al-Ghazal River for some distance. He made other journeys into the unknown, more or less in the region of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the Nyam-nyam country. Petherick, who became British consul at Khartum, was entrusted with the mission of meeting and relieving Speke and Grant, but by some accident failed to do so. On one of his later journeys he was accompanied by Dr Murie, a naturalist, as far as Gondokoro. Theodor von Heuglin, Kiezelbach, Munzinger, and Dr Steudner were among the methodical German explorers who travelled in the Egyptian Sudan and in Abyssinia in 1861 and 1862. The greatest explorer of these regions, however, next to Speke and Grant, was Mr, afterwards Sir Samuel, Baker, who with his wife conducted an exploration of the Upper Nile on his own account with the intention of meeting and if possible succouring Speke and Grant. Baker had previously explored the Abyssinian tributaries of the Nile. After leaving Speke and Grant to continue their homeward journey, he started off for the south to fill up the blanks in their discoveries. The Nile was reached in the Bunyoro country; and after a long detention at the court of the scoundrelly Nyoro king, and enduring incredible sufferings, Baker and his wife discovered the Albert Nyanza, which from various causes he took to be much larger than it really is. The entrance and the exit of the Nile into and out from the Albert Nyanza were visited. The Bakers reached Gondokoro, and then returned homewards in March 1865. Their journey down the White Nile was blocked by the obstruction of a vegetable growth (the sudd). At last this was cut through, and Egypt was eventually reached. When Baker returned to London he was knighted for the discoveries he had made. The Albert Nyanza was afterwards circumnavigated by Gessi Pasha, a Levantine Italian in the service of the Egyptian Government, and by Colonel Mason Bey, neither of whom, curiously enough, noticed the Semliki flowing into the lake, nor did they catch sight of the snow-covered Ruwenzori.
A romantic figure in Nile and Sahara exploration was Alexandrine Tinne. “Young and beautiful (she was only 33 at the time of her death), remarkably accomplished, a daring horsewoman, a charming Diana; mistress of many tongues, including Arabic, and generous to a fault, it is little wonder that she lingered as a beautiful and gracious demi-goddess in the remembrance of such Arabs and Nile Negroes of the Egyptian Sudan as were not exterminated by the Mahdi’s revolt[179].” Alexandrine Tinne, between 1858 and 1864, devoted herself to the exploration of the Nile and the Bahr-al-Ghazal. She was accompanied on these journeys by her mother and aunt, both of whom died of blackwater fever. In 1868 Miss Tinne determined to cross the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad, and then travel from Chad to the Upper Nile; but on the way to Ghat, an ancient town inhabited by very fanatical Berbers, she was killed by the orders of a treacherous Tawareq chief, as also were her Dutch attendants.
Livingstone’s first great journey resulted in his being sent back with a strong expedition to pursue his discoveries in Zambezia. During these journeys between 1858 and 1864 the river Shiré was explored, and Lake Nyasa was discovered and partially mapped. Livingstone was accompanied by Dr (afterwards Sir John) Kirk, who made most valuable natural history collections, and whose subsequent long career as Political Agent at Zanzibar and many explorations along the East coast of Africa have caused his name to be imperishably connected with that part of the continent.
The French occupation of Algeria and their conquests in Senegambia had naturally produced considerable exploring work, though, as much of this was done piece by piece, it has not resulted in the handing down of notable names, with some few exceptions. Panet, a Frenchman, in 1850 travelled overland along the Sahara coast from St Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal, to Morocco. Vincent, another Frenchman, in 1860 explored the country from St Louis to the Adrar district of the Sahara, up to what is nowadays the Spanish Protectorate of the Rio de Oro. Paul Soleillet described the Algerian Sahara; and Duveyrier, a really scientific traveller, made important journeys from Algeria southward and south-eastward, adding much to our knowledge of the Northern Sahara. Duveyrier visited the interior of western Tripoli, and brought back considerable information about the Tawareq and their dialects.
In 1866 Livingstone resumed his explorations of East-Central Africa. He travelled overland south-westwards from the Ruvuma River to the south end of Lake Nyasa, then north-west and north to the south end of Tanganyika, thence from Tanganyika to Lake Mweru, to the mighty Luapula River, and to Bangweulu, which lakes and river he discovered in 1868. Again reaching Tanganyika, he joined some Arabs and crossed the Manyema country eastward to Nyangwe, on the Lualaba-Congo. From here he returned to Ujiji, where he was met by Mr H. M. Stanley, who had been sent out by the New York Herald to relieve the great explorer. After travelling with Stanley half-way back to Zanzibar, Livingstone returned to Lake Bangweulu, and died there in 1873. Various expeditions had been despatched to his relief. One under Lieutenant Grandy was sent out in 1873 to ascend the Congo, but the expedition was most unfortunate, and the explorer died near São Salvador[180]. After many changes and withdrawals, a great expedition, organized by the Royal Geographical Society, started from Zanzibar in 1873 to find and relieve Livingstone. It was under the leadership of Lieutenant (afterwards Commander) Verney Lovett Cameron. Cameron soon heard of Livingstone’s death, but pushed on to Tanganyika, and mapped that lake for the first time accurately. He then travelled across to the Lualaba, which his altitudes practically determined to be none other than the Upper Congo; but, deterred from descending it by the tremendous difficulties that offered themselves, he struck south-westwards across a country not very difficult to traverse—the slightly civilized Mwata Yanvo’s empire (impregnated with Portuguese influence), and reached Benguela in November 1875, the first Englishman to cross Africa.
At the beginning of the sixties Dr Gerhard Rohlfs, one of the greatest of African travellers, began to explore Morocco. He had enlisted in the Foreign Legion serving in Algeria, was a doctor of medicine, a renegade, and had a great knowledge of Arabic. He subsequently travelled about the southern part of Morocco, and penetrated to the oases of Twat and Ghadames in the Sahara (1864), and in 1865 reached Fezzan and Tibesti. In 1866 he started on a journey to Bornu, and eventually penetrated across the Niger to Lagos, on the Guinea coast, thus being the first European to make a complete journey from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea. In 1873 he explored the oases of the Libyan Desert; and in 1878 he conducted an expedition, despatched by the German Government, to Wadai, but got no further than the oasis of Kufra. Subsequently two Italians, Dr Pellegrino Matteucci and Lieutenant Alfonso Maria Massari, accompanied as far as Darfur by Prince Giovanni Borghese, travelled across Africa from east to west by way of Suakin, Kordofan, Wadai, Bornu, Kano, and Nupe to the Niger, whence they returned to England, where Matteucci unfortunately died (1882). They were the first Europeans to cross Africa from east to west north of the Equator, but their journey was not productive of much geographical knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge acquired and transmitted, one of the most remarkable journeys ever made in Africa was that of Dr Gustav Nachtigal, who, after having served as physician to the Bey of Tunis, was appointed in 1868 by the Prussian Government to take presents to the Sultan of Bornu. Leaving Tripoli in February 1869, Nachtigal halted at first in Fezzan, and from that country made a very interesting journey to Tibesti, a mountainous region in the very middle of the Sahara Desert. He was the first and only European who has really examined this remarkable mountainous region. Returning to Murzuk, he resumed his journey to Bornu, where he arrived in 1870. He thoroughly explored Lake Chad and much of the Shari River, and visited Bagirmi, Wadai (where an earlier German traveller, Moritz von Beurmann, had been murdered in 1863, when searching for Vogel), Somrai, Darfur, Dar Runga, and Kordofan, thence returning home through Egypt. He brought back with him an enormous mass of geographical and linguistic information. In his journey from Tripoli to Fezzan Nachtigal was accompanied for a portion of the way by Miss Tinne.
Sir Joseph Hooker, the great botanist, already famous for his botanical exploration of the Himalayas, of Australia and New Zealand, and Palestine, in 1871 set out with Mr John Ball on a journey to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. This resulted in a very great addition to our knowledge of the North African flora and fauna, and of that still imperfectly known and appreciated range of mountains, the highest summits of which may prove to be but little inferior in altitude to the loftiest African peaks. G. Schaudt, a German, explored the Moroccan Sahara in 1879-82.
On the West coast of Africa the most remarkable journeys made in the fifties and sixties were those of Paul du Chaillu, who travelled in the Gaboon country, and whose natural history collections almost surpass those of any other traveller for their richness and the remarkable forms they revealed. He will always be remembered as the man who practically discovered the gorilla. Winwood Reade, the first modern African traveller who was at the same time a literary man, visited the West coast of Africa in the sixties, and travelled inland to the source of the Niger. His exploring journeys were of small account, but his descriptions of West Africa are the most vivid, the most truthful, and will perhaps prove to be the most enduring, of any that we possess. (Sir) Richard Burton of Tanganyika fame, who had been appointed Consul at Fernando Pô, ascended the peak of the Cameroons, and visited Dahomé and the falls of the Congo between 1860 and 1864. The Marquis de Compiégne and Herr Oskar Lenz explored the Ogowé River, in French West Africa, in 1873; and later Mr George Grenfell, a member of the Baptist Mission who was afterwards to become still more famous, considerably increased our knowledge of the Cameroons.
In 1876, Mons. M. J. Bonnat, a French trader, travelled up the Volta River and reached the Muhammadan town of Salagá in the Gold Coast hinterland; thus for the first time, since the vaguely recorded Portuguese embassies to the king of Mosi in the 15th century, bringing Europeans into touch with the Muhammadan lands beyond the forest belt of Central Guinea.
Livingstone’s death and Cameron’s successful crossing of Africa did a great deal to arouse European interest in that continent. H. M. Stanley was despatched by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph to complete Livingstone’s explorations of the Unknown River. In 1875 he started on that journey which in its discoveries and its results is the greatest feat to be found in the annals of African exploration. He circumnavigated the Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, marched across to the Lualaba, and followed its course resolutely and in the teeth of fearful obstacles until he proved it to be the Congo, and emerged on the Atlantic Ocean in 1877.
Cameron’s journeys had aroused the Portuguese from their lethargy. Three explorers, Serpa Pinto, Brito Capello, and Roberto Ivens, were despatched to Angola. Leaving São Paulo de Loanda in 1877, Serpa Pinto journeyed in zigzags to the Zambezi, and descended that river to the Barotse country, whence he accompanied M. Coillard, the French missionary, across the Kalahari Desert to the Transvaal. Capello and Ivens explored the northern part of Angola and the River Kwango. Two or three years later they started on a journey remarkable for the importance of the geographical results obtained. They explored much of the Upper Zambezi, tracing that river to its source, travelled along the water-parting between the Zambezi and the Congo, and then turned southwards again to the Zambezi, and so out to the Indian Ocean.
In the Nile regions explorations were steadily continuing. One of the great African travellers, Georg August Schweinfurth, a native of German Russia (Riga), first visited the Nile valley as a botanist. In 1868 he started on a journey of exploration up the White Nile and the Bahr-al-Ghazal, accompanying Nubian ivory merchants. With these he penetrated far to the southwards through the Nyam-nyam country till he reached the Mañbettu country, and there he discovered the Wele River, flowing to the west, which ultimately turned out to be one of the principal feeders of the Mubangi, the great northern confluent of the Congo. Schweinfurth returned to Egypt in 1872, and for a long time devoted himself to the botanical exploration of Egypt, Arabia and Abyssinia. His journeys, from the enormous amount of material gathered together, were surpassed in importance by few African explorations. Sir Samuel Baker (1868-73) and later General Gordon became Governors-General of the Egyptian Sudan, a vast dependency of the half-European state of Egypt, which naturally, whether under European or Egyptian governors, employed large numbers of Europeans. Amongst those who added to our geographical knowledge were Colonel Purdy-Bey, Colonel Colston, the great General Gordon, and Marno (a Viennese); Colonel Chaillé Long (an American), who visited Uganda, discovered Lake Ibrahim, and actually proved that the Nile flowed out of the Victoria Nyanza, and then into the Albert Nyanza; and Linant de Bellefonds, a Belgian, who also visited Uganda whilst Stanley was there in 1875, Stanley giving him a famous letter to be posted in Egypt[181]. There were also Colonel Mason Bey and Gessi Pasha, who circumnavigated the Albert Nyanza; poor Lupton Bey, who explored the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Nyam-nyam country and died after long captivity in the Mahdi’s hands; and Slatin Pasha, once Governor of Darfur, who had a happier fate.
The establishment of missions in Nyasaland drew explorers thither. Captain Frederic Elton, who had been appointed Consul at Moçambique, journeyed to Lake Nyasa with several companions, explored the northern extremity of the lake, and started to return overland to Zanzibar, but died on the way. His successor as Consul, Lieutenant H. E. O’Neill, crossed backwards and forwards over utterly unknown ground between Moçambique and Nyasa, fixed many positions at the south end of the lake and in the Shiré Highlands, and explored many parts of Portuguese East Africa north of the Zambezi. Bishop Steere, Bishop Chauncey Maples, Bishop Smythies, and other missionaries of the Universities’ Mission also explored the country between Lake Nyasa and the River Ruvuma and the Moçambique coast. South of the Zambezi, explorations had been carried out by Baldwin, Baines, Andersson, Eriksson, and other sportsmen-travellers. Karl Mauch and Edward Mohr (Germans) had explored Mashonaland (1866-9); and Mauch had discovered gold in the stream valleys, and the remarkable ruins of Zimbabwe. In 1875 Dr Paul Pogge made a journey from Angola to the court of the Mwata Yanvo. Two other Germans, named Reichard and Böhm, had in the later seventies crossed Tanganyika from Zanzibar, and explored the country to the north of Lake Mweru.
In 1877, Dr Erwin von Bary, a German explorer, travelled far into the Sahara from Tripoli and Southern Tunis, discovering some remarkable recently extinct volcanoes in the country of Air. He was however killed by the fanatical people of Ghat. In 1877 also a notable journey was made into the Bahr-al-Ghazal province of the Egyptian Sudan by a Greek doctor in the Egyptian service, P. Potagos, who thus crossed into the Congo basin and reached the Mbomu affluent of the Wele-Mubangi.
A remarkable journey was made in 1878-9 by Dr R. W. Felkin, who with one or more missionary companions of the Church Missionary Society journeyed overland from Suakin up the Nile to Uganda. They came back again (with the Rev. C. T. Wilson) in 1881 from Uganda via the White Nile, Bahr-al-Ghazal and Darfur to Egypt.
Between 1880 and 1887, Professor J. Büttikofer, a Swiss (afterwards a naturalized Dutchman), conducted a very careful exploration of the coast-lands of Liberia, revealing much that was new and curious in the remarkable fauna of that still little-known part of West Africa.
The return of Cameron and the subsequent success of Stanley had caused the King of the Belgians to become intensely interested in the exploration of Africa; at first, no doubt, from a disinterested love of knowledge, but soon afterwards with the definite idea of creating in the unoccupied parts of that continent a huge native confederation or state which should become dependent on Belgium. The king summoned to Brussels distinguished ‘Africans’ from most European countries, with the desire of forming an International Committee which should bring about the complete exploration of Africa. But this international enterprise soon split up into national sections; and what the King of the Belgians had intended should be entirely disinterested geographical work ultimately developed into the “Scramble for Africa.” Still, it did lead considerably to the increase of geographical knowledge. The Royal Geographical Society sent out a well-equipped expedition to Zanzibar to explore the country between Tanganyika and Nyasa. It was under the orders of Keith Johnston, who died soon after starting, leaving his task to be fulfilled by Joseph Thomson. Mr Thomson was completely successful, and covered much new ground between Nyasa and Tanganyika to the west of Tanganyika, and to the south, where he discovered the north end of Lake Rukwa[182]. On the West coast the French Section despatched De Brazza to explore what is now French Congo. His geographical discoveries led to annexation. Antonelli and other Italians directed their efforts to the exploration of Shoa, to the south of Abyssinia. But the main outcome of this action on the part of the King of the Belgians was the founding of the Congo Free State.
H. M. Stanley was sent back to the Congo at the expense of a small committee—eventually at the sole charge of the King of the Belgians. While he was by degrees reascending the Congo and making many geographical discoveries, such as the Lakes Leopold and Mantumba, a Baptist missionary already referred to, the Rev. George Grenfell, made known the Mubangi River, the great northern affluent of the Congo, which Colonel A. Vangèle and other Belgian explorers afterwards determined to be the Wele. Lieutenant Hermann Wissmann[183] (afterwards Major von Wissmann) mapped out the course of the Kasai and other southern affluents of the Congo, and crossed and recrossed Africa, coming out the first time at Zanzibar and the second at the Zambezi. Dr Ludwig Wolf was the main agent in tracing the course of the great Sankuru affluent of the Kasai. Other companions of Wissmann were Major von François and Dr Hans Mueller. Together they discovered the leading southern affluents of the Congo between 1880 and 1886; but it must not be forgotten how much they were helped in this respect by the Rev. George Grenfell of the English Baptist mission and his mission steamer the Peace. Grenfell stands second only to Stanley as a Congo explorer. Besides his notable discovery of the Mubangi, he explored the Kwango (also mapped in the middle of its course in 1880 by the Austrian, Major von Mechow), the Kasai, Busira, Lulongo, Lomami, Aruwimi, and Ruki rivers. W. H. Stapleton, Thomas Comber, Dr Holman Bentley, and William Forfeitt, other members of the Baptist mission, and S. P. Verner, an American, also explored the Congo basin in the last quarter of the 19th century. J. R. Werner (an English engineer) contributed some surveys of the Mongalla and the Northern Congo; and Capt. Sidney Hinde (afterwards an English official in East Africa) explored the Lualaba in 1892-3. The Belgian explorers who cooperated with English and Germans in the great work of laying bare the intricate mysteries of the Congo basin were, besides the estimable Vangèle, Georges le Marinel, L. van Kerckhoven, A. Hodister, Paul le Marinel, Dr Cornet, Alexandre Delcommune, Captain Baert, and Baron Dhanis.
In 1879 Dr Oskar Lenz, an Austrian who had previously explored the Ogowé, journeyed from Morocco to Timbuktu, and from Timbuktu to Senegambia. Subsequently Dr Lenz ascended the Congo, and crossed over to Tanganyika, returning to Europe by the Zambezi, on a more or less futile attempt to discover the whereabouts of Emin Pasha. In the earlier eighties another Austrian explorer, Dr Holub, travelled in South Africa and made a journey into Central Zambezia. The celebrated hunter of big game, Mr F. C. Selous, not only added much to our knowledge of South-Central Africa (the Rhodesia of to-day), but penetrated north of the Zambezi into the valley of the Kafue river, his explorations in that direction having only been “caught up with” quite recently. Mr F. S. Arnot, a missionary, made a remarkable journey from South to Central Africa, exploring the southern part of the Congo basin (Katanga) and reaching the west coast at Benguela. In 1884 Lieutenant Giraud, a Frenchman, carried out an interesting exploration of the Tanganyika plateau and Lake Bangweulu, which he was the first European to map with any degree of accuracy. In 1882 the Earl of Mayo, accompanied by (Sir) Harry Johnston, explored the River Kunene, in South-West Africa. Subsequently Johnston travelled through Angola and up the River Congo, and on his return journey to England visited that little known part of Africa, Portuguese Guinea. He was subsequently sent on an expedition to Mt Kilima-njaro, in East Africa. Amongst other geographical work he visited little known parts of Tunis in 1880 and 1897; discovered (with Dr Cross) the southern end of Lake Rukwa, in East-Central Africa, in 1889; in 1886-88 explored the Cameroons and the Niger Delta; made numerous journeys in “British Central Africa” (Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia) in 1889-95; and added a little to geographical knowledge in East Africa, Uganda, and on Mt Ruwenzori in 1899-1901.
In 1883, Joseph Thomson, already famous as an African explorer, was sent on a most important mission by the Royal Geographical Society. He was to cross the nearly unknown country separating the Mombasa littoral from the east coast of the Victoria Nyanza, between the two great snow mountains of Kenya and Kilima-njaro (Kilima-njaro since Krapf’s and Rebmann’s reports had been thoroughly mapped by Baron von der Decken; it had also been ascended nearly to the snow level by Mr Charles New). Joseph Thomson practically rediscovered Kenya (Krapf’s account being so vague that it had become regarded as semi-mythical), and photographed this second loftiest snow mountain of Africa. After some difficulties he succeeded in penetrating the Masai country, and described the great Rift valley of Lake Naivasha (reached a year or so earlier by the German explorer, Fischer); discovered Lake Baringo and Mount Elgon, and finally reached the northeast coast of Victoria Nyanza—a most remarkable expedition, resulting in great additions to our geographical knowledge. Thomson subsequently made a journey from the mouth of the Niger to Sokoto, explored the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, mapped much fresh country in Central Zambezia, and died, still a young man and much regretted, in 1895. The Hungarian, Count Samuel Teleki, who followed in Thomson’s footsteps, discovered Lakes Rudolf and Stephanie. Lieutenant Höhnel, who went with him, conducted other expeditions in the same direction and accomplished admirable surveying work.
Then came the last epoch-making journey of Stanley—the search for Emin Pasha. After the British occupation of Egypt and the loss of the Sudan, Emin Pasha had retreated to the Equatorial Province. Through Dr William Junker (a Russian traveller, who had made journeys in the western watershed of the Nile, reached the Nepoko affluent of the Aruwimi, and brought back great additions to our geographical knowledge of the Nile-Congo water-parting) he managed to communicate with Europe by way of Uganda, making known his condition, and appealing for help. Stanley was placed at the head of a great British expedition which was to go to his relief. He travelled by way of the Congo, and at the junction of the Congo and the Aruwimi entered the unknown. He crossed that always difficult barrier, the Bantu borderland—in this case an almost impenetrable forest. After overcoming innumerable obstacles, Stanley met Emin Pasha on the Albert Nyanza, and eventually escorted him to the coast at Zanzibar. In the course of this journey Stanley discovered Ruwenzori, the third highest mountain in Africa, the Edward Nyanza (one of the ultimate lake sources of the Nile), and the Semliki River, which connects the Edward with the Albert Nyanza. Stanley’s explorations were much assisted in this journey by his excellent lieutenant, Captain Stairs, who was the first to attempt Ruwenzori and who subsequently explored Zambezia and Katanga.
In West Africa, which had for some time been neglected as a field for exploration, there still remained gaps to be filled up—in the great bend of the Niger and behind the Cameroons. In the last-named country German travellers—Dr Zintgraft, Lieutenants Morgen, Kund and Tappenbeck, Von Stettin, Uechtritz and Dr Passarge—explored the mountainous country between the Cameroons and the Benue watershed, or traced the course of the great and hitherto quite unknown rivers of Lom and Mbam, which unite and form the Sanagá, a river which enters the sea on the south side of the Cameroons estuary. Dr Oskar Baumann[184] also explored the neglected island of Fernando Pô. In the bend of the Niger various French explorers and one or two Germans and Englishmen filled up the blanks. Notable among these was Captain (afterwards Colonel) L. G. Binger, who was the first to make known much of the country between the Upper Niger and the Gold Coast; and Colonel P. Monteil, who travelled across from the Upper Niger to the Central Niger, and thence to Lake Chad and Tripoli (1890-1). Colonel Binger’s journeys may be placed in the first rank of African explorations. They were undertaken between 1886 and 1889, and the results were published in 1892 (Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée). Together with the work of Colonel Monteil, of Commandant Georges Toutée, and of the German G. A. Krause, the English Captains R. L. Lonsdale and Brandon Kirby, the Gold Coast native explorer G. E. Ferguson, and Colonel H. P. Northcott, Binger’s surveys showed the comparative narrowness of the Niger basin in the great bend of the Niger. Much of the enclosed land is drained southwards into the Gulf of Guinea by the Black and the White Volta, two streams uniting after very long courses to form the main Volta. This is an important river constituting the boundary (except at its estuary) between German Togoland and the British Gold Coast. Binger did for this region what Grenfell and Wissmann did for the secondary mysteries of the Congo basin. The eastern half of the Niger course, from its mouth upward to Sokoto, had been carefully explored in 1880-1 by the German E. R. Flegel; and this last most noteworthy explorer in 1882-4 traversed the unknown southern basin of the Benue, and traced that river to its ultimate source near Ngaundéré. The gap between the basin of the Congo and Lake Chad was filled up between 1890 and 1900 by the explorations of Paul Crampel, Dybowski, C. Maistre, E. Gentil, A. Bernard, F. J. Clozel and other French travellers.
Between 1889 and 1895, Sir Alfred Sharpe (afterwards Governor of Nyasaland) gradually mapped Lake Mweru, discovered the large salt marsh between that lake and Tanganyika, explored the Luapula and the Luangwa, and made other interesting additions to the map in South-Central Africa, discoveries supplemented by the survey of Lake Bangweulu by Mr Poulett Weatherley. Captain Hore, an agent of the London Missionary Society, made a survey of Lake Tanganyika between 1878 and 1889; and his discoveries in its water fauna were so remarkable that Mr J. E. Moore (a scientific zoologist) was sent out in 1896 to study the prawns, jelly-fish and water molluscs of Tanganyika, the remarkable character of which had first been noted by Böhm (1879) and Hore. Moore afterwards explored the snow-crowned volcanoes of Mfumbiro (Virunga) and thence proceeded to Ruwenzori (Mubuku valley) and Uganda. He had previously explored the water fauna of Lakes Shirwa and Nyasa. Count Goetzen explored the unknown country between Lake Edward Nyanza and Tanganyika, discovering the lofty volcanoes of Virunga and Lake Kivu; and Mr Scott Elliott journeyed from the east coast to Mt Ruwenzori, and thence to British Central Africa for botanical purposes.