three that had left the Coast were cobbled with goatskins, and were
bound with stout thongs. The hammocks, of which half had disappeared,
were patched and provided with the Nara, or Indian cotton-tape, which
in these climates is better than either reims or cord. To save my eyes
the spectacle of moribund fowls, suspended to a porter’s pole, two light
cages were made after the fashion of the country, with bent and bound
withes. The metal plates, pots, and pans were furbished, and a damaged
kettle was mended by a travelling tinker: the asses’ saddles and halters
were repaired, and, greatest luxury of all, a brace of jembe or iron
hoes was converted into two pairs of solid stirrups, under the vigilant
eye of Snay bin Amir. A party of slaves sent to Msene brought back
fifty-four jembe, useful as return-presents and blackmail on the
down-march: they paid, however, one cloth for two, instead of four.
Sallum bin Hamid, the “papa” of the Arabs, sold for the sum of forty
dollars a fine half-bred Zanzibar she-ass and foal--there is no surer
method of procuring a regular supply of milk on Eastern journeys. My
black and white beads being almost useless, he also parted with, as a
peculiar favour, seventeen or eighteen pounds of pink-porcelains for
forty dollars, and with a Frasibah of coffee, and a similar quantity of
sugar for eighty dollars, equal to sixteen pounds sterling. On the 14th
July the last Arab caravan of the season left Unyanyembe, under the
command of Sayf bin Said el Wardi. As he obligingly offered to convey
letters and any small articles which I wished to precede me, and knowing
that under his charge effects were far safer than with our own people, I
forwarded the useless and damaged surveying instruments, certain
manuscripts, and various enclosures of maps, field and sketch-books,
together with reports to the Royal Geographical Society.
This excitement over I began to weary of Kazeh. Snay bin Amir and most
of the Arabs had set out on an expedition to revenge the murder of old
Silim--an event alluded to in a former page, and the place had become
dull as a mess-dinner. Said bin Salim, who was ill, who coughed and
expectorated, and sincerely pitied himself because he had a cold, became
more than usually unsociable: he could enjoy nothing but the society of
Brahim, the bawling Baghdadi, and the crowd of ill-flavoured slavery
that flocked into the vestibule. My Goanese servant, who connected my
aspect with hard labour, avoided it like a pestilence. Already I was
preparing to organise a little expedition to K’hokoro and the southern
provinces, when unexpectedly,--in these lands a few cries and gun-shots
are the only credible precursors of a caravan,--on the morning of the
25th August reappeared my companion.
At length my companion had been successful, his “flying trip” had led
him to the northern water, and he had found its dimensions surpassing
our most sanguine expectations. We had scarcely, however, breakfasted,
before he announced to me the startling fact, that he had discovered the
sources of the White Nile. It was an inspiration perhaps: the moment he
sighted the Nyanza, he felt at once no doubt but that the “Lake at his
feet gave birth to that interesting river which has been the subject of
so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers.” The fortunate
discoverer’s conviction was strong; his reasons were weak--were of the
category alluded to by the damsel Lucetta, when justifying her penchant
in favour of the “lovely gentleman,” Sir Proteus:--
“I have no other but a woman’s reason.
I think him so because I think him so;”[11]
and probably his sources of the Nile grew in his mind as his Mountains
of the Moon had grown under his hand.
[11] The following extract from the Proceedings of the R. Geographical
Society, May 9, 1859, will best illustrate what I mean:--
MR. MACQUEEN, F.R.G.S., said the question of the sources of the Nile
had cost him much trouble and research, and he was sure there was no
material error either in longitude or latitude in the position he had
ascribed to them, namely, a little to the eastward of the meridian of
35°, and a little northward of the equator. That was the principal
source of the White Nile. The mountains there were exceedingly high,
from the equator north to Kaffa Enarea. All the authorities, from
east, west, north, or south, now perfectly competent to form judgments
upon such a matter, agreed with him; and among them were the officers
commanding the Egyptian commission. It was impossible they could all
be mistaken. Dr. Krapf had been within a very short distance of it; he
was more than 180 miles from Mombas, and he saw snow upon the
mountains. He conversed with the people who came from them, and who
told him of the snow and exceeding coldness of the temperature. The
line of perpetual congelation, it was well known, was 17,000 feet
above the sea. He had an account of the navigation of the White Nile
by the Egyptian expedition. It was then given as 3° 30′ N. lat. and
31° E. long. At this point the expedition turned back for want of a
sufficient depth of water. Here the river was 1370 feet broad, and the
velocity of the current _one-quarter_ of a mile per hour. The journals
also gave a specific and daily current, the depth and width of the
river, and every thing, indeed, connected with it. Surely, looking at
the current of the river, the height of the Cartoom above the level of
the sea, and the distance thence up to the equator, the sources of the
Nile must be 6000 or 8000 feet above the level of the sea, and still
much below the line of the snow, which was 6000 or 8000 feet farther
above them. He deeply regretted he was unable to complete the diagram
for the rest of the papers he had given to the Society, for it was
more important than any others he had previously given. It contained
the journey over Africa from sea to sea, second only to that of Dr.
Livingstone. But all the rivers coming down from the mountains in
question, and running south-eastward, had been clearly stated by Dr.
Krapf, who gave every particular concerning them. He should like to
know what the natives had said was to the northward of the large lake?
Did they say the rivers ran out from or into the lake? How could the
Egyptian officers be mistaken?
CAPTAIN SPEKE replied. They were not mistaken; and if they had pursued
their journey 50 miles farther, they would undoubtedly have found
themselves at the northern borders of this lake.
MR. MACQUEEN said that other travellers, Don Angelo for instance, had
been within one and a half degree of the Equator, and saw the mountain
of Kimborat under the Line, and persisted in the statement, adding,
that travellers had been up the river until they found it a mere
brook. He felt convinced that the large lake alluded to by Captain
Speke was not the source of the Nile: it was impossible it could be
so, for it was not at a sufficiently high altitude.
The paper presented to the Society, when fully read in conjunction
with the map, will clearly show that the Bahr-el-Abied has no
connection with Kilimanjaro, that it has no connection whatever with
any lake or river to the south of the Equator, and that the swelling
of the river Nile proceeds from the tropical rains of the northern
torrid zone, as was stated emphatically to Julius Cæsar by the chief
Egyptian priest Amoreis 2000 years ago.
In nearly 3° N. lat. there is a great cataract, which boats cannot
pass. It is called Gherba. About half-way (50 miles) above, and
between this cataract and Robego, the capital of Kuenda, the river
becomes so narrow as to be crossed by a bridge formed by a tree thrown
across it. Above Gherba no stream joins the river either from the
south or south-west.
The main argument in favour of the Lake representing the great reservoir
of the White River was, that the “principal men” at the southern
extremity ignored the extent northward. “On my inquiring about the
lake’s length the man (the greatest traveller in the place) faced to the
north, and began nodding his head to it; at the same time he kept
throwing forward his right hand, and making repeated snaps of his
fingers endeavoured to indicate something immeasurable; and added, that
nobody knew, but he thought it probably extended to the end of the
world.” Strongly impressed by this valuable statistical information, my
companion therefore placed the northern limit about 4°-5° north lat.,
whereas the Egyptian expedition sent by the late Mohammed Ali Pacha,
about twenty years ago, to explore the Coy Sources, reached 3° 22′ north
lat. It therefore ought to have sailed fifty miles upon the Nyanza lake.
On the contrary, from information derived on the spot, that expedition
placed the fountains at one month’s journey--300 to 350 miles--to the
south-east, or upon the northern counterslope of Mount Kenia. Whilst
marching to the coast, my companion--he tells us--was assured by a
“respectable Sowahili merchant, that when engaged in traffic some years
previously to the northward of the line, and the westward of this lake,
he had heard it commonly reported that large vessels frequented the
northern extremity of these waters, in which the officers engaged in
navigating them used sextants and kept a log, precisely similar to what
is found in vessels on the ocean. Query, could this be in allusion to
the expedition sent by Mohammed Ali up the Nile in former years?”
(Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society, May 9, 1859.) Clearly, if
Abdullah Bin Nasib, the Msawahili alluded to, had reported these words,
he merely erred; the Egyptian expedition, as has been shown, not only
did not find, they never even heard of a lake. But not being present at
the conversation I am tempted to assign further explanation. My
companion, wholly ignorant of Arabic, was reduced to depend upon
“Bombay,” who spoke an even more debased dialect than his master, and it
is easy to see how the blunder originated. The Arabic bahr and the
Kisawahili bahari are equally applicable in vulgar parlance to a river
or sea, a lake or a river. Traditions concerning a Western Sea--the to
them now unknown Atlantic--over which the white men voyage, are familiar
to many East Africans; I have heard at Harar precisely the same report
concerning the log and sextants. Either, then, Abdullah Bin Nasib
confounded, or my companion’s “interrupter” caused him to confound the
Atlantic and the Lake. In the maps forwarded from Kazeh by my companion,
the River Kivira was, after ample inquiry, made a western _influent_ of
the Nyanza Lake. In the map appended to the paper in Blackwood, before
alluded to, it has become an _effluent_, and the only minute concerning
so very important a modification is, “This river (although I must
confess at first I did not think so) is the Nile itself!”
Beyond the assertion, therefore, that no man had visited the north, and
the appearance of sextants and logs upon the waters, there is not a
shade of proof _pro._ Far graver considerations lie on the _con._ side:
the reports of the Egyptian expedition, and the dates of the several
inundations which--as will presently appear--alone suffice to disprove
the possibility of the Nyanza causing the flood of the Nile. It is
doubtless a satisfactory thing to disclose to an admiring public, of
“statesmen, churchmen, missionaries, merchants, and more particularly
geographers,” the “solution of a problem, which it has been the first
geographical desideratum of many thousand years to ascertain, and the
ambition of the first monarchs in the world to unravel.” (Blackwood’s
Magazine, October 1859.) But how many times since the days of a certain
Claudius Ptolemæius surnamed Pelusiota, have not the Fountains of the
White Nile been discovered and re-discovered after this fashion?
What tended at the time to make me the more sceptical was the
substantial incorrectness of the geographical and other details brought
back by my companion. This was natural enough. Bombay, after
misunderstanding his master’s ill-expressed Hindostani, probably
mistranslated the words into Kisawahili to some travelled African, who
in turn passed on the question in a wilder dialect to the barbarian or
barbarians under examination. During such a journey to and fro words
must be liable to severe accidents. The first thing reported to me was
the falsehood of the Arabs at Kazeh, who had calumniated the good Sultan
Muhayya, and had praised the bad Sultan Machunda: subsequent inquiries
proved their rigid correctness. My companion’s principal informant was
one Mansur Bin Salim, a half-caste Arab, who had been flogged out of
Kazeh by his compatriots; he pronounced Muhayya to be a “very excellent
and obliging person,” and of course he was believed. I then heard a
detailed account of how the caravan of Salim bin Rashid had been
attacked, beaten, captured, and detained at Ukerewe, by its sultan
Machunda. The Arabs received the intelligence with a smile of ridicule,
and in a few days Salim bin Rashid appeared in person to disprove the
report. These are but two cases of many. And what knowledge of Asiatic
customs can be expected from the writer of these lines? “The Arabs at
Unyanyembe had advised my donning their habit for the trip in order to
attract less attention; a vain precaution, which I believe they
suggested more to gratify their own vanity in _seeing an Englishman
lower himself to their position_, than for any benefit that I might
receive by doing so.” (Blackwood, loco cit.) This galimatias of the
Arabs!--the haughtiest and the most clannish of all Oriental peoples.
But difference of opinion was allowed to alter companionship. After a
few days it became evident to me that not a word could be uttered upon
the subject of the Lake, the Nile, and his _trouvaille_ generally
without offence. By a tacit agreement it was, therefore, avoided, and I
should never have resumed it had my companion not stultified the results
of the Expedition by putting forth a claim which no geographer can
admit, and which is at the same time so weak and flimsy, that no
geographer has yet taken the trouble to contradict it.
I will here offer to the reader a few details concerning the Lake in
question,--they are principally borrowed from my companion’s diary,
carefully corrected, however, by Snay bin Amir, Salim bin Rashid[12],
and other merchants at Kazeh.
[12] When my companion returned to Kazeh, he represented Ukerewe and
Mazita to be islands, and, although in sight of them, he had heard
nothing concerning their connection with the coast. This error was
corrected by Salim bin Rashid, and accepted by us. Yet I read in his
discovery of the supposed sources of the Nile: “Mansur, and a native,
the greatest traveller of the place, kindly accompanied and gave me
every obtainable information. This man had traversed the island, as he
called it, of Ukerewe from north to south. _But by his rough mode of
describing it, I am rather inclined to think that instead of its being
an actual island, it is a connected tongue of land, stretching
southwards from a promontory lying at right angles to the eastern
shore of the lake_, which being a wash, affords a passage to the
mainland during the fine season, but during the wet becomes submerged
and thus makes Ukerewe temporarily an island.” The information, I
repeat, was given, not by the “native,” but by Salim bin Rashid. When,
however, the latter proceeded to correct my companion’s confusion
between the well-known coffee mart Kitara and “the island of Kitiri
occupied by a tribe called Watiri,” he gave only offence--consequently
Kitiri has obtained a local habitation in Blackwood and Petermann.
This fresh-water sea is known throughout the African tribes as Nyanza,
and the similarity of the sound to “Nyassa,” the indigenous name of the
little Maravi or Kilwa Lake, may have caused in part the wild confusion
in which speculative geographers have involved the Lake Regions of
Central Africa. The Arabs, after their fashion of deriving comprehensive
names from local and minor features, call it Ukerewe, in the Kisukuma
dialect meaning the “place of Kerewe” (Kelewe), an islet. As has been
mentioned, they sometimes attempt to join by a river, a creek, or some
other theoretical creation, the Nyanza with the Tanganyika, the altitude
of the former being 3750 feet above sea-level, or 1900 feet above the
latter, and the mountain regions which divide the two having been
frequently travelled over by Arab and African caravans. Hence the name
Ukerewe has been transferred in the “Mombas Mission Map” to the northern
waters of the Tanganyika. The Nyanza, as regards name, position, and
even existence, has hitherto been unknown to European geographers; but,
as will presently appear, descriptions of this sea by native travellers
have been unconsciously transferred by our writers to the Tanganyika of
Ujiji, and even to the Nyassa of Kilwa.
M. Brun-Rollet (“Le Nil Blanc et le Soudan,” p. 209) heard that on the
west of the Padongo tribe,--whom he places to the S. of Mount Kambirah,
or below 1° S. lat.--lies a great lake, from whose northern extremity
issues a river whose course is unknown. In the map appended to his
volume this water is placed between 1° S. and 3° N. lat., and about 25°
50′ E. long. (Greenwich), and the déversoir is made an influent of the
White Nile.
Bowdich (“Discoveries of the Portuguese,” pp. 131, 132), when speaking
of the Maravi Lake (the Nyassa), mentions that the “negroes or the Moors
of Melinde” have mentioned a great water which is known to reach
Mombaca, which the Jesuit missionaries conjectured to communicate with
Abyssinia, and of which Father Lewis Marianna, who formerly resided at
Tete, recommended a discovery, in a letter addressed to the government
at Goa, which is still preserved among the public archives of that city.
Here the confusion of the Nyanza, to which there was of old a route from
Mombasah with the Nyassa, is apparent.
At the southern point, where the Muingwira River falls into the tortuous
creek, whose surface is a little archipelago of brown rocky islets
crowned with trees, and emerging from the blue waters, the observed
latitude of the Nyanza Lake, is 2° 24′ S.; the longitude by dead
reckoning from Kazeh is E. long. 33° and nearly due north, and the
altitude by B. P. thermometer 3750 feet above sea-level. Its extent to
the north is unknown to the people of the southern regions, which rather
denotes some difficulty in travelling than any great extent. They
informed my companion that from Mwanza to the southern frontier of
Karagwah is a land journey of one month, or a sea voyage of five days
towards the N. N. W. and then to the north. They also pointed out the
direction of Unyoro N. 20° W. The Arab merchants of Kazeh have seen the
Nyanza opposite Weranhanja, the capital district of Armanika, King of
Karagwah, and declare that it receives the Kitangure River, whose mouth
has been placed about the equator. Beyond that point all is doubtful.
The merchants have heard that Suna, the late despot of Uganda, built
matumbi, or undecked vessels, capable of containing forty or fifty men,
in order to attack his enemies, the Wasoga, upon the creeks which indent
the western shores of the Nyanza. This, if true, would protract the lake
to between 1° and 1° 30′ of N. lat., and give it a total length of about
4° or 250 miles. This point, however, is still involved in the deepest
obscurity. Its breadth was estimated as follows. A hill, about 200 feet
above the water-level, shows a conspicuous landmark on the eastern
shore, which was set down as forty miles distant. On the south-western
angle of the line from the same point ground appeared; it was not,
however, perceptible on the north-west. The total breadth, therefore,
has been assumed at eighty miles,--a figure which approaches the
traditions unconsciously chronicled by European geographers. In the
vicinity of Usoga the lake, according to the Arabs, broadens out: of
this, however, and in fact of all the formation north of the equator, it
is at present impossible to arrive at certainty.
The Nyanza is an elevated basin or reservoir, the recipient of the
surplus monsoon-rain which falls in the extensive regions of the Wamasai
and their kinsmen to the east, the Karagwah line of the Lunar Mountains
to the west, and to the south Usukuma or Northern Unyamwezi. Extending
to the equator in the central length of the African peninsula, and
elevated above the limits of the depression in the heart of the
continent, it appears to be a gap in the irregular chain which, running
from Usumbara and Kilima-ngao to Karagwah, represents the formation
anciently termed the Mountains of the Moon. The physical features, as
far as they were observed, suggest this view. The shores are low and
flat, dotted here and there with little hills; the smaller islands also
are hill-tops, and any part of the country immediately on the south
would, if inundated to the same extent, present a similar aspect. The
lake lies open and elevated, rather like the drainage and the temporary
deposit of extensive floods than a volcanic creation like the
Tanganyika, a long narrow mountain-girt basin. The waters are said to be
deep, and the extent of the inundation about the southern creek proves
that they receive during the season an important accession. The colour
was observed to be clear and blue, especially from afar in the early
morning; after 9 _a.m._, when the prevalent south-east wind arose, the
surface appeared greyish, or of a dull milky white, probably the effect
of atmospheric reflection. The tint, however, does not, according to
travellers, ever become red or green like the waters of the Nile. But
the produce of the lake resembles that of the river in its purity; the
people living on the shores prefer it, unlike that of the Tanganyika, to
the highest, and clearest springs; all visitors agree in commending its
lightness and sweetness, and declare that the taste is rather of river
or of rain-water than resembling the soft slimy produce of stagnant
muddy bottoms, or the rough harsh flavour of melted ice and snow.
From the southern creek of the Nyanza, and beyond the archipelago of
neighbouring islets, appear the two features which have given to this
lake the name of Ukerewe. The Arabs call them “Jezirah”--an ambiguous
term, meaning equally insula and peninsula--but they can scarcely be
called islands. The high and rocky Mazita to the east, and the
comparatively flat Ukerewe on the west, are described by the Arabs as
points terminating seawards in bluffs, and connected with the eastern
shore by a low neck of land, probably a continuous reef, flooded during
the rains, but never so deeply as to prevent cattle fording the isthmus.
The northern and western extremities front deep water, and a broad
channel separates them from the southern shore, Usukuma. The Arabs, when
visiting Ukerewe or its neighbour, prefer hiring the canoes of the
Wasukuma, and paddling round the south-eastern extremity of the Nyanza,
to exposing their property and lives by marching through the dangerous
tribes of the coast.
Mazita belongs to a people called Makwiya. Ukerewe is inhabited,
according to some informants, by Wasukuma; according to others, the
Wakerewe are marked by their language as ancient emigrants from the
highlands of Karagwah. In Ukerewe, which is exceedingly populous, are
two brother Sultans: the chief is “Machunda;” the second, “Ibanda,”
rules at Wiru, the headland on the western limit. The people collect
ivory from the races on the eastern mainland, and store it, awaiting an
Arab caravan. Beads are in most request; as in Usukuma generally, not
half a dozen cloths of native and foreign manufacture will be found upon
a hundred men. The women are especially badly clad; even the adult
maidens wear only the languti of India, or the Nubian apron of
aloe-fibre, strung with the pipe-stem bead called sofi, and blackened,
like India-rubber, by use; it is fastened round the waist, and depends
about one foot by six or seven inches in breadth.
The Arabs who traffic in these regions generally establish themselves
with Sultan Machunda, and send their slaves in canoes round the
south-east angle of the lake to trade with the coast people. These races
are successively from the south; the Washaki, at a distance of three
marches, and their inland neighbours the Wataturu; then the Warudi, a
wild tribe, rich in ivory, lying about a fortnight’s distance; and
beyond them the Wahumba, or Wamasai. Commercial transactions extend
along the eastern shore as far as T’hiri, or Ut’hiri, a district between
Ururu and Uhumba. This is possibly the origin of the island of Tiri or
Kittiri, placed in my companion’s map near the north-west extremity of
the Nyanza Lake, off the coast of Uganda, where there is a province
called Kittara, peculiarly rich in coffee. The explorer heard from the
untrustworthy country people that, after a long coasting voyage, they
arrived at an island where the inhabitants, a poor and naked race, live
on fish, and cultivate coffee for sale. The information appears
suspicious. The Arabs know of no islands upon the Nyanza which produce
coffee. Moreover, if the people had any traffic, they would not be
without clothing.