In British South Africa momentous events took place after the summer

of 1899. The trouble engendered between the British and Boers in

South Africa by the policy of Paul Kruger and the Jameson Raid

culminated in the great South African War of 1899-1902. As these

episodes recede into history it has become clear to most seekers

after truth that the Jameson Raid was brought about by the following

trend of circumstances. Ever since 1884 there had been a revulsion

of feeling on the part of even Liberal and liberal-minded

politicians in Great Britain against the Boers of South Africa. Mr

Gladstone’s restoration of their independence after the brief

struggle of 1881 was esteemed a generous act. It gave the Boers of

the Transvaal an opportunity to show what they could do in wise

self-government under but the slightest control of their foreign

relations by Great Britain. Three years afterwards the Boers of the

Transvaal, in spite of treaty and other obligations, were invading

Bechuanaland and attempting to cut off the British colonies to the

south from any advance towards the Zambezi. It then began to be

realized by the British public that the Boers, besides fighting very

legitimately for their own independence in the Transvaal territory

as well as in the Orange Free State, were aiming at something much

greater—a domination over the whole of Africa south of the Zambezi.

Both Liberal and Conservative administrations set themselves to

resist this movement. At the close of the eighties Cecil Rhodes

arose as an advocate for union between Boer and Briton in the common

interests of the white man in South Africa. For a time he secured

the suffrages of both; but the gold-mining industry became more and

more powerful in the Transvaal and found the rule of a Boer

Government irksome and obstructive. The mining industry set itself

to influence public opinion in Britain and to organize in South

Africa a movement against Boer independence. President Kruger played

into the hands of the mining magnates by occasional breaches of his

agreements with Britain. Among these was the famous “Drifts”

question, by which Kruger in the summer of 1895 attempted to close

access to the Transvaal from the rest of South Africa by any other

routes than those of the Netherlands Railway, which was a privileged

corporation. Mr Joseph Chamberlain, who had become Secretary of

State for the Colonies in 1895, took up this question with vigour

and found himself fully supported by the Dutch colonists in Cape

Colony and Natal. It seemed as though there was to be war with the

Transvaal, in which case, on this question of the Drifts, Great

Britain would have been thoroughly supported by her Dutch-speaking

subjects in South Africa. As part of the plan of campaign conceived

in the case of war, was a movement from the British South Africa

Company’s territory through Bechuanaland into the western and

northern parts of the Transvaal; this in fact was the germ of the

Jameson Raid.

Kruger gave way on the subject of the Drifts when he saw how united

was the rest of South Africa against him; and it seemed to persons

in authority in Great Britain as well as in South Africa that the

great opportunity for solving the Boer question in South Africa had

gone by. Insufficient measures were taken, or no measures at all

were taken, to restrain the preparations of Dr Jameson (the

Administrator of Rhodesia) for a descent on the Transvaal.

Consequently the Jameson Raid took place—a most unfortunate

occurrence, since it put Great Britain entirely in the wrong on a

question where otherwise she could plead legitimate griefs and

annoyances.

Sir Alfred (afterwards Viscount) Milner had been appointed in 1897

to succeed Lord Rosmead (Sir Hercules Robinson) as Governor of Cape

Colony and High Commissioner of South Africa. Attempts were made

between 1897 and the spring of 1899 to solve the South African

problem peacefully by inducing the Boer Government of the South

African Republic to grant the franchise to the “Outlanders”

(foreigners) after a term of residence of a few years’ duration; but

Kruger would accept no sufficiently short term to enfranchise those

most agitating for a voice in the Transvaal administration. But the

war that broke out in October 1899 was due immediately to an

ultimatum from the Transvaal Government requiring Great Britain to

cease any preparations for offence or defence on the Transvaal

frontiers. The Orange Free State immediately made common cause with

the Boers of the South African Republic, and a Boer invasion of

Natal took place, to be followed by similar invasions of the eastern

part of Cape Colony. The British were taken unprepared. Disaster

followed disaster. Had the Boer leaders been wider in their

knowledge and more daring, they might have taken possession of Natal

and have gone far to wreck the British Empire in South Africa. But

they delayed over the siege of Ladysmith, ably defended by Sir

George White. British reinforcements on a large scale were sent to

South Africa under the leadership of Lord (afterwards Earl) Roberts

and Lord Kitchener. The British marched through the Orange Free

State to Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and the Boers were finally

expelled from Natal and Bechuanaland. It seemed as though, by the

summer of 1900, the war was at an end; but after the flight of

President Kruger, Boer activities revived in such a marvellous way

that the world wondered at the tenacity of the struggle, and for

nearly two years longer the Boer forces held out against the

British, and made an effective occupation of the Orange Free State

and the Transvaal impossible. The Boers in their turn, however, were

worn out by the persistency of Viscount Kitchener and his ‘sweeping’

movements. In the summer of 1902 the Boer leaders asked for peace,

and obtained it on terms highly honourable to themselves.

Cecil John Rhodes, the promoter of so much that was adventurous and

history-making in British South Africa, died in March, 1902, the

immediate cause of his death being, not political heart-break

(though that was the cause of his weakened constitution), but

vexation resulting from a law-suit affecting his private affairs. Dr

Jameson, however, recovered from the check to his career which

followed his unsuccessful raid. He set himself in a spirit of

moderation and tolerance to grapple with the local questions and

general interests of Cape Colony, of which country he became Premier

in 1904, remaining for four years afterwards at the head of the Cape

Ministry. In 1908-9 he was one of the representatives who discussed

and settled the conditions of the South African Union. In 1911 he

was knighted as Sir Starr Jameson, and in 1912 he retired from South

African politics. President Kruger died in Holland in July 1904. In

the same year his political opponent, Lord Milner—whose seven years’

work in South Africa, though it inspired many fierce contentions,

yet cut through several Gordian knots—retired from the control of

South African affairs to enter political life at home.

But the prosperity of South Africa did not at once revive with the

conclusion of peace in 1902. It was found that the devastations of

the three years’ war had reduced much of the Orange Free State, the

eastern parts of Cape Colony, and above all, of the Transvaal to a

desert, and time was required to repair the ravages to crops and

agriculture and bring about the re-establishment of homes. So many

of the inhabitants—Boers and Britons alike—had drifted towards the

towns and there found it hard to maintain themselves under the

extravagant cost of living; which seems to be at present an

irremediable evil in South Africa, due to unwise fiscal laws,

shipping combines, and railway rates. It was hoped that prosperity

would return so soon as mining operations on the Rand could be

resumed. But the local supply of unskilled labour proved to be

insufficient for the enormous development of mining enterprise

projected by individuals and companies. The labour problem is not

yet completely solved. Some propose to meet it by drafts on the

abundant negro population north of the Zambezi, these labourers

being conveyed to and from South Africa under proper guarantees.

Others urge the throwing open of the land and the mines to white

labour, so as to increase the European population of temperate South

Africa. Many reasons have been put forward to combat the

practicability of each scheme, either the increase of the black

labour supply or the introduction of the white man in considerable

numbers. Those in power in the period 1904-6 preferred to redress

the balance by the importation under special restrictions of the

Chinaman. This step was adversely criticized by the Liberal party in

Great Britain, not because that party was inclined to deny that a

share of African development might be allowed to the Asiatic, but on

the ground that the conditions under which the indentured Chinamen

were to serve in the South African mines were not only opposed to

British ideas of freedom but were detrimental to health and

morality. Their anticipations of the bad results which might accrue

from the employment of Chinese labourers in compounds were

fulfilled; and in 1906-8 the Chinese were gradually repatriated from

the Rand (as the mining area of the Southern Transvaal is called).

The great question of the participation of the Asiatic in the

development of South Africa and East Africa depends on the

determination of the white man and the black man to be

self-sufficing for the development respectively of the tropical and

temperate districts of that continent. The black man must be less

lazy and the white man likewise, as well as less proud, if both

together are to be justified in denying to the yellow man a share of

the Dark Continent, either as a settler or a merchant. It is

interesting, however, to note that the white population of Cape

Colony showed a considerable increase between 1891 and 1904. In 1891

the population of European descent numbered 366,608. In 1904 it was

stated at 579,741. In the Transvaal the white population rose to

300,225; in Natal to 97,109; in the Orange Free State to 143,419; in

Rhodesia to 12,623; and in Basuto- and Bechuanaland to 1899. In

British South Africa the coloured (mainly negro) population was

nearly 5,500,000. In 1912, the total white population in British

Africa, south of the Zambezi, was about 1,306,400, and the negro and

negroid about 5,800,000. There were also about 192,000 Asiatics,

chiefly in Natal; and these Asiatics consisted mainly of natives of

Southern India (some 172,000), together with 15,000 Malays in Cape

Colony, a few Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, and Syrians. North of the

Zambezi, in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, there are about 2200

whites, 1000 Asiatics and nearly 2,000,000 negroes: a total

population of about 9,300,000. The area of all British South and

South Central Africa (including Walfish Bay and the islets off the

south-west coast) is 1,148,619 square miles, extending from the

frontiers of Angola and the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika and German

East Africa to the coasts of Cape Colony and Natal—an Empire which

is barely 100 years old, and which began in 1814[160] with an area

of 125,000 square miles, with a population of about 150,000, of whom

some 26,000 were whites and the remainder Negroes, Hottentots,

half-breeds, and Malays.

On May 31, 1902, the Peace of Vereeniging had brought the

fratricidal South African war to a conclusion. Only four years

afterwards the Liberal administration in Great Britain tried the

bold experiment of granting responsible government to the Transvaal

State by passing an act to that effect which came into force on

January 1st, 1907. In the following year similar powers of

self-government were bestowed on the Orange Free State (as it was

eventually re-named). These concessions to the sturdy nationalism of

the Boers were intended to pave the way for that long desired Union

of South Africa. Negotiations were conducted between the statesmen

of Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal,

which resulted in 1909 in an agreement and an Act of Union. This Act

was ratified by the British Parliament and received the sanction of

King Edward VII (who ever since his coming to the throne had striven

earnestly to bring about peace in South Africa) on September 21,

1909. The Union of South Africa includes under one, central, South

African Parliament at Pretoria, and one Governor-General, the states

of Cape Colony (with British Bechuanaland and Walfish Bay), Natal,

the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. The native states of

Basutoland, Swaziland, and Bechuanaland, and the territories of

Southern and Northern Rhodesia and the Nyasaland Protectorate remain

outside the Union for a variety of reasons most of which may not

have a permanent value. But one of these reasons is the distrust

which is felt in Great Britain as to the ability and fair-mindedness

of the white population to act as the governors of the states above

mentioned in which the negro population very greatly preponderates

over the white, or which, as in Basutoland, Bechuanaland and

Swaziland, have been more or less reserved for negro colonization

and expansion. Cape Colony, it is true, has a negro population of

nearly 1,700,000, contented and admirably governed for the most

part, possessing a large proportion of the good land, and holding

the franchise to the Cape Legislature on the same terms as white

men. But the liberal-minded Cape Colony, in which one scarcely ever

hears of native troubles or “Black perils,” is only one of the

states composing the Union; and the others, notably the Transvaal,

have shown themselves—the Transvaal still keeps up this evil

reputation—unfair and harsh in their treatment of the black man.

When the provisions of the Act of Union were laid before the British

Parliament they were found to exclude any man of colour from the

franchise[161]. British ministers expressed regret at this

illiberality, but passed the measure to end strife in other

directions. Nevertheless the “Native question” will long continue to

bar the way to a Greater South Africa, a vast confederation which

shall extend from the Belgian Congo to the Southern Ocean. It is a

question that is very complex, and one from which sentimentality,

rash legislation, arbitrary pronouncements, and race prejudice must

be carefully excluded. Had it been dealt with by far-sighted men

like Sir George Grey in earlier times when the foundations of

British South Africa were being laid, many causes of future trouble

might have been eliminated. For instance some other solution of the

Basuto claims might have been found than the handing over (fifty

years ago) to the Basuto negroes 11,000 square miles of the finest

mountain country of South Africa, a region intended by nature to

have been the Empire state of that region. Basutoland is a beautiful

mountain country, well watered, with fertile valleys and

snow-crowned peaks. Owing to its cold climate it was rather shunned

by the South African negroes until the ancestors of the Basuto were

driven thither in the early 19th century to take refuge from the

raiding Zulus. Had we offered the original ten to twenty thousand

Basutos good locations on fertile land at lower levels when we first

intervened to save them from Boer attacks (the Boers having

intervened earlier still to save them from the Zulu hordes) they

would have accepted. Now they are a well-armed people of nearly half

a-million, no longer grateful to the white man, but the possible

nucleus of a Black confederation. Their influence can only be stayed

by the fair treatment of the Black man outside Basutoland, by the

policy of Cape Town and not that of Johannesburg. The contentment of

and the hold which education is getting over the million and a half

of Kafirs in Cape Colony are valuable counter-agents to Basuto

presumption and ambition, and a proof that our oldest colony in

South Africa possesses statecraft.

After dealing with such striking events, such potent personages and

vast territories, it is rather an anti-climax to have to treat of

the little island of Mauritius, which is not as large as the county

of Surrey, and which, except under its first Governor, Sir Robert

Farquhar (who tried from this vantage ground to annex Madagascar),

has had no stirring connection with events of great importance.

Mauritius was taken by the British from the French in 1810. The

French had known it by the name of Île de France, but the British

revived the older Dutch name of Mauritius. The French had introduced

the sugar cane and other valuable plants; and these plantations were

half-heartedly cultivated by means of slave labour until the slave

trade was abolished. Then, in the fifties, Indian kuli labour was

introduced with great success; and now the inhabitants of Indian

descent in the colony number nearly 40,000, while Indian half-breeds

are also numerous. The total population in 1912 was about 370,500.

The negro, negroid and Malagasy element was important—over 50,000.

Deducting the Asiatics (20,000, mainly Indian, a few Chinese and

Arabs) there remain about 120,000 white and 160,000 half-castes and

Eurasians. The European population is almost entirely of French

descent; and the marked French sympathies of the white inhabitants

have sometimes caused a dissonance between the Governor and the

governed, though ample concessions have been made to the Mauritians

by the equal recognition afforded to French laws and the French

language. Nevertheless, in spite of these political questions, and

the occasional hurricanes which visit the island with disaster, it

is a prosperous colony in ordinary years (doing a trade with an

annual value of about £5,000,000), and only has to appeal to the

Treasury of Great Britain for assistance on such rare occasions as

when unusually great damage has been done by cyclones.

Numerous small islands in the Indian Ocean are dependent on the

Government of Mauritius. All had much the same history—discovered by

Portugal, they were eventually utilized by France, and finally

captured and annexed by England. The most important among these

Mauritian dependencies are the Island of Rodriguez, and the Oil

Islands Group (Diego Garcia). The Seychelles were formerly

associated with Mauritius, but since 1897 have been an independent

colony under a full Governor. They consist of 90 small islands in

the Seychelles group, the Almirante, Aldabra, Cosmoledo, and other

tiny archipelagoes; the total land area being only 160 square miles,

with a population white and coloured of 26,000. The Seychelles were

taken possession of by the French in 1743. Prior to that date they

were uninhabited, though there are on them the traces of ancient

habitation which may represent the halting places of Malagasy

sea-wanderers on their way from Sumatra to Madagascar. Their name of

Seychelles is a misspelling of “de Séchelles,” the surname of a

French minister of finance in 1756. The British fleet captured the

principal island (Mahé) in 1794, but allowed the French Governor to

continue to rule the islands until 1810, when they were taken

possession of definitely; partly for the reason that the French in

Mauritius and Réunion had abused the tolerance shown to them, by

directing constant privateering attacks on British shipping. It was

in Mauritius that one of the noblest heroes of British colonial

pioneering—Matthew Flinders, of the Royal Navy—was imprisoned for

six years, eating his heart out, losing all the advantages he might

have gained from his truly wonderful circumnavigating survey of the

Australian coasts[162]. To remove from the French all possible base

of operations in the Indian Ocean, Bourbon (Réunion), an island

slightly larger than Mauritius, and the most southern member of the

Mascarene group, was also occupied by the British, who on this

occupation and that of Mauritius, of Tamatave and other points on

the coast of Madagascar, founded claims to a protectorate over the

large island of Madagascar, as will be related in greater detail in

a later chapter. Bourbon, however, was restored to the French in

1816 and renamed at a later date Réunion.

-----

Footnote 141:

As against an area for all British South Africa up to the Congo

boundary of 1,152,619 square miles in 1912; all of which has grown

from the Cape Colony of 125,000 square miles annexed in 1806.

Footnote 142:

X̓osa is pronounced with a preliminary click of the tongue like a

cluck to encourage horses.

Footnote 143:

The Negro and Malay slaves then numbered in all about 39,000.

Footnote 144:

He was at that time Sir Charles Grant, and a member of the great

Reform ministry. His action in the matter was prompted by a

mischievous personality, a Dr Philip, representative of a

missionary society in South Africa, who conceived a great and

unjust hatred of the Boers, and an affection for the negro

invaders of Cape Colony, which was exaggerated and unreasonable.

Much may be learnt of his attitude towards public questions in my

_Life of Livingstone_ (1891).

Footnote 145:

“Grikwa” was the cant name (Gri-kwa) given to the half-castes

between Boers and Hottentots.

Footnote 146:

The Fingo—properly Amamfengu—Kafirs, were mostly fugitives into

Cape Colony from Natal, sent flying westward from the Zulu

slaughter-raids of Chaka and others.

Footnote 147:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1502, its existence was kept

secret by them until 1588, when Captain Cavendish returning from a

cruise round the world suddenly lighted on it. The Dutch twice

seized it and held it each time for a few months in 1665 and 1673.

In this last year it was definitely allotted to the East India

Company.

Footnote 148:

The largest of a little group of islets in the South Atlantic,

about 1260 miles west of the Cape of Good Hope. Tristan D’Acunha

has an area of about 45 square miles, and is extremely

mountainous, rising to 8264 feet.

Footnote 149:

Or “Land of the Abambo,” the name of one of the original Bantu

tribes of the country. The root _-mbo_ is very common as a tribal

name among the Bantu, and occurs repeatedly in Central Africa.

Footnote 150:

To which were added in later years tea (a great success) and

coffee—the latter subsequently destroyed by the Ceylon coffee

disease.

Footnote 151:

Nov, 1912, nearly 1,000,000.

Footnote 152:

Twelve years later the northern railway line had traversed British

Bechuanaland and had reached Buluwayo. It attained the Zambezi in

1903, and now enters the Belgian Congo in Katanga.

Footnote 153:

The Jews, as we have seen, played a considerable part in the

development of North Africa since the 1st century of the Christian

era. They have similarly had much to do with the progress of South

Africa. Between 1840 and 1860 important Jewish houses of business

were established in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Noteworthy

amongst these firms was that of the De Pass brothers. The De Pass

family specially concerned itself with the acquisition and

development of the guano islets off what is now the coast of

German South-West Africa. They developed the copper mining

industry of Port Nolloth, were the first to manufacture ice in

South Africa, and started the sugar planting in Natal. The firm of

Mosenthal, of the Eastern province of Cape Colony, did much to

promote agriculture and stock-rearing, the introduction of the

Angora Mohair goat, ostrich farming, sheep and cattle breeding.

Other South African Jews who have taken a prominent part in

science, in the legal profession, in political, philanthropic,

industrial, and mining affairs have been the Hon. Simeon Jacobs (a

Judge of the Supreme Court), the Mendelssohns, Rapaports,

Rabinowitzes, Solomons, Lilienfelds, Kisches, Neumanns, Moselys;

Alfred Beit, Sir David Harris, Sir Lionel Phillips, and Sir George

Albu.

Footnote 154:

To which was added later, over all Portuguese Africa south of the

Zambezi.

Footnote 155:

Damara is the Hottentot name applied to these black Bantu negroes,

who call themselves Ova-herero, Ova-mbo, etc.

Footnote 156:

Dingiswayo (the “Wanderer”), a Zulu of the Abatetwa clan, may

perhaps be regarded as the founder of Zulu power. All this portion

of South African history is described in some detail in my

_History and Description of the British Empire in Africa_.

Footnote 157:

Driven out of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal by the

action of Boers, British, and Basuto, a section of the Zulus

conquered much of Portuguese South-East Africa, with nearly all

modern Rhodesia, and carried their raids past Nyasa and Tanganyika

to the vicinity of the Victoria Nyanza.

Footnote 158:

A rebellious general of Chaka’s, often known by his Sesuto name,

“Moselekatse.”

Footnote 159:

The African Lakes Trading Corporation (as it is now called) was

founded mainly by the energies of the brothers John and Frederick

Moir (sons of an Edinburgh doctor) about 1878, as an adjunct to

the missionary enterprise in the Shire Highlands. In course of

time they established trading stations on Lake Nyasa, and cut a

track or rough road over mountains and forest from the north-west

corner of Lake Nyasa to the south end of Tanganyika, conveying

over this “Stevenson Road” (so called because a Mr James

Stevenson, a director of the Company, provided the cost of this

undertaking) a little steamer in sections for the London

Missionary Society. This steamer, the _Good News_, was the first

to navigate the waters of Tanganyika. The African Lakes Company,

being established at the north end of Lake Nyasa, inevitably came

into contact with the slave-trading Arabs who had settled there

about ten years before. In 1887 the agents of the Company

intervened to protect natives from being raided by the Arabs. The

Arabs retorted by attacking the white men. Volunteers hastened to

their relief from several quarters. Amongst these were two men

afterwards to become famous as African governors—Sir Frederick

Lugard and Sir Alfred Sharpe. But the Arab question was not

definitely settled until the Protectorate had been established for

four years (1895). The African Lakes Corporation certainly did the

pioneer work of British trade in South Central Africa.

Footnote 160:

The cession of Cape Colony from Holland to Britain took place on

August 13, 1814.

Footnote 161:

The franchise is limited to men of European race and descent only;

while women are not granted the parliamentary vote, as is the case

in Australia; New Zealand; California, Colorado, Wyoming, and

three other states of the American Union; the Isle of Man;

Finland; and Norway. In these points, the framers of the Act of

Union have shown the unprogressive spirit characteristic of the S.

African Dutch.

Footnote 162:

He reached England in 1811 but was treated there with a neglect

and ingratitude by the British Government which will long remain a

scandal in our Imperial History, and for which as yet no public

reparation has been made. His only descendant is Prof.

Flinders-Petrie, the Egyptologist.

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.

The great eastern horn of Africa, Somaliland and Galaland, was long

left unexplored after Burton and Speke’s journey to Harrar in the

fifties. At the beginning of the eighties its exploration was again

attempted. Messrs F. L. and W. D. James, with three companions,

penetrated Somaliland as far south as the Webbe Shebeili River. They

were succeeded in exploration by Révoil (a Frenchman), by Ruspoli,

Bricchetti-Robecchi and Bottego (Italians), and by Borelli (a

Frenchman). The last-named made a most important journey south from

Abyssinia, and discovered the Omo River. His account of his travels,

published by the French Government, is an almost perfect exemplar of

what such a work should be. Mr W. Astor Chanler, an American,

afterwards made an important rough survey of Galaland, north of the

Tana River. Dr J. W. Gregory, of the British Museum, travelled to

Lake Baringo and Kenya, which mountain he ascended higher than any

preceding explorer. Dr Gregory’s journey was productive of much

information regarding the geology of the countries traversed. Dr

Donaldson Smith (an American) travelled in 1894-5 over these

countries between Somaliland and Bantu East Africa, bringing back

much new material for geography. Captain (now Colonel) H. G. C.

Swayne explored the interior of Somaliland; Colonel Seymour

Vandeleur surveyed Uganda and Unyoro; Colonel Sir J. R. L. Macdonald

in 1897-9[185] conducted a most important expedition, which for the

first time traversed the mountainous country between Mt Elgon, Lake

Rudolf and the Mountain Nile, revealing much new geography and

ethnology; and Mr H. S. H. Cavendish in 1897-8 made a remarkable

journey across the eastern horn of Africa from the Gulf of Aden to

Lake Rudolf and Mombasa.

In 1899, Mr H. Mackinder ascended the snow peak of Kenya to its

highest summit. Nine years previously the great extinct volcano of

Elgon (Equatorial East Africa) had been climbed to its highest point

(14,000 ft.) by an expedition under Messrs F. J. Jackson and Ernest

Gedge. C. W. Hobley also added a great deal of detail to our

knowledge (geographical and ethnological) of inner East Africa, from

Elgon to the German frontier in the south, between 1896 and 1912.

The main features of German East Africa had already been discovered

before Germany took possession politically of the region between the

Zanzibar Coast and the great Lakes; but in 1889, Dr Hans Meyer

achieved the great feat of ascending the highest mountain in

Africa—Kilima-njaro—to its summit (19,321 feet). Oskar Baumann (a

Viennese) examined in some detail the northern parts of German East

Africa between 1888 and 1893, visiting the ultimate sources of the

Nile (the headwaters of the Kagera river) near the north-east coast

of Tanganyika and discovering or describing for the first time

tribes with puzzling linguistic affinities, such as the Sandawi. The

journeys of Dr Franz Stuhlmann both alone and with Emin Pasha,

especially in regard to the Tanganyika-Congo-Nile water-partings

were of great interest both to geography and ethnology. Honourable

mention must also be made of Captain Paul Kollmann, whose travels

round the south shores of the Victoria Nyanza and its islands

resulted in an admirable book on the people and languages of that

district.

Between 1884 and 1900, much important exploring work was done in

German South-west Africa by H. Schnitz, Dr von Passarge, Drs A.

Schenk and Stromer von Reichenbach. Togoland in West Africa was

explored during the early nineties by Dr R. Büttner (already known

for his journeys in West Congoland), by L. von Bunnon and N. Seidel.

Renewed interest in Morocco was shown during the last quarter of the

19th century. Besides the bold journey of Joseph Thomson to the

Atlas mountains in 1888, there was the really remarkable exploration

of nearly the whole Moorish empire in 1883-6 by Charles de Foucauld,

a Frenchman travelling in disguise. Walter B. Harris crossed the

Atlas into Tafilalt in 1895. In Central Africa Colonel J. B.

Marchand and his companions performed a wonderful journey in 1895-9.

Entering French Congo from the Loango coast, Marchand travelled up

the Congo and Mubangi Rivers till he paused for a further

organization of his mission near the Congo-Nile water-parting. Then

he transported his little steamer in sections to the Suë, a

confluent of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, and thence navigated the western

confluents of the Nile till he reached the main stream. Pursuing his

journey east and north, he reached the old Egyptian station of

Fashoda on the White Nile, where he established himself, and where

he defeated a small body of Dervishes sent against him by the

Khalifa of Omdurman. The advent of the British and Egyptians under

Lord Kitchener rendered the evacuation of Fashoda by Marchand

necessary. The gallant French explorer therefore continued his

journey eastward by following up the Sobat River as far as it was

navigable, and thence struck across hitherto unknown countries, and

travelled through Shoa and Somaliland to the French port of Jibuti,

on the Gulf of Aden. From the point of view of distance traversed,

without great loss of men or material, Marchand deserves to rank as

a hero of African adventure.

The only travellers in Madagascar who achieved important results in

geography and physical science were the English missionary, the Rev.

J. Sibree (1868-85), and above all Dr Alfred Grandidier (1875-1900),

E. F. Gautier (1892-9), and Dr G. Grandidier (1898-1902). To the

last-named is mainly due the recent discoveries of semi-fossil

extinct lemurs described in the publications of the Zoological

Society of London. To Alfred Grandidier we owe the magnificent work

in 28 volumes which completely describes this strange island.

At the close of the 19th century France began to take definite

possession of the Sahara; and several expeditions, scientific and

political, traversed this desolate region and revealed all its

leading physical characteristics. Prominent among French explorers

was Fernand Foureau, who concluded ten years of varied explorations

by a magnificent journey in 1898-9 from Algeria to Zinder and Lake

Chad by way of Ahaggar, Air and Damerghu. G. B. M. Flamand explored

the important oasis of Tuat in 1900. Much exploring work went on in

the Niger Bend and the Ivory Coast hinterland; and the expedition

(1898-1900) of M. Hostains and Captain d’Ollone revealed great

mountains and the courses of numerous rivers in north-east Liberia.

This record brings us down to the beginning of the 20th century. The

least-explored parts of Africa that then remained were: (1) the

interior of Liberia; (2) the region between the Benue and Cameroons

watersheds; (3) Lake Chad and the country between Lake Chad, the

Shari, and the Nile; (4) the Western Sahara; (5) the Libyan Desert

and Tibesti; (6) Wadai; (7) the region between the Shari, the Benue,

and the Mubangi; (8) that between the Cameroons, the Sanga river,

and the Mubangi; (9) South-west Congoland; (10) South-east Angola;

(11) the Moςambique hinterland, between Moςambique and Lake Nyasa;

(12) South-west Galaland and the region between the Sobat River and

Lake Rudolf.

In regard to the first-named area, a good deal has been added to our

knowledge by the Dutch survey officers, Naber and Moret, by Mr John

Parkinson and Messieurs A. Chevalier and Maurice Delafosse; the

last-named having accomplished a remarkable language survey of West

Africa. In No. (2), must be recorded the journeys of Captain E.

Lenfant (who proved the connection between the Upper Benue and the

Shari system by way of the Tuburi marshes); of Colonel L. Jackson;

of P. Amaury Talbot (Benue, Cross River, and Ekoi country); and of

the German explorers F. Hutter, F. Bauer, and O. Zimmermann. As

regards No. (3)—Lake Chad—this first-discovered of all African lakes

was never properly investigated and mapped until the beginning of

the 20th century, when this work was accomplished by the expeditions

of Captain Lenfant, Colonel Destenave, Mons. A. Chevalier, and

Captain Tilho. It was also examined with much minuteness by

Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, whose Niger-Benue-Mubangi-Nile journey in

1905 greatly added to our knowledge of the Chad region. In No. (4),

the Western Sahara and Southern Morocco, we have had the important

explorations of the French officers or civilians, La Perrone,

Arnaud, Paul Blanchet, Edmond Doutté, Cortier, Niéger, and Gautier

(this last specially studied the rock-engravings and archaeology);

and the noteworthy journey of the Englishman, Captain A. H. Haywood,

who travelled from Sierra Leone to Algiers. No. (5), still remains

one of the blankest parts of Africa, though the Eastern Sahara from

Tripoli to Bilma was crossed by Mr Hanns Vischer of British Nigeria

in 1906. The Libyan Desert is also being explored by W. Harding King

and other British explorers coming from Egypt. In Wadai, which was

traversed by Lieutenant Boyd Alexander in 1910 (he was killed on the

Darfur border), the French military occupation will soon produce a

detailed survey. In No. (7), there have been the detailed

explorations of Captain E. Lenfant, and Messrs E. F. Gautier and R.

Chudeau, on behalf of the French Government. The principal blanks in

No. (8) have been filled up by an English traveller, Mr G. L. Bates

(a remarkable field naturalist who has made very important

discoveries of new vertebrates in West Equatorial Africa), by O.

Zimmermann and other German explorers. In South-west Congoland a

great explorer and anthropologist has come to the front, Mr Emil

Torday, a Hungarian, whose admirable works on the Bushongo and the

tribes of the Kwango, Kwilu, Kasai, and Sankuru rivers, have been

published in English and French. Mention should also be made of the

journeys through central and northern Congoland of an Austrian,

Franz Thonner, which have been of great value in determining the

intricate distribution of language families in that region.

South-west Angola still remains very little known, though the work

of the Lobito Bay-Katanga railway is gradually casting a light on

the geography of this region; while in Barotseland and Northern

Rhodesia there have been the first-class surveys of Major A. St Hill

Gibbons, Frank Melland, and other officials of the British South

Africa Company. A good deal of accurate surveying and geological

investigation is needed in No. (11). In No. (12) (Southern Galaland

and the Sobat to Lake Rudolf), there have been since 1900 the

remarkable explorations and surveys of Oskar Neumann (a German),

Captain M. S. Wellby, Captain H. H. Austen and Captain P.

Maud—English officers travelling on their own behalf or on that of

the British Government.

Dr Richard Kandt, a German, between 1901 and 1906, made a thorough

and careful survey of Lake Kivu, of the plateaus at the northern end

of Tanganyika, and of the Kagera (the ultimate Nile source) and its

tributaries. Between 1900 and 1904, Commander B. Whitehouse mapped

the entire coastline of the Victoria Nyanza Lake, making many new

discoveries and remedying many old errors of delineation.

The long-talked-of journey from the Cape to Cairo was accomplished

first in 1900 by Mr Ewart Grogan, followed soon afterwards by Mons.

Lionel Décle. Many tourists and officials subsequently have repeated

this feat, rendered comparatively easy now by the development of

railways and river-steamboat navigation. A noteworthy journey

however was that in 1911 of Mr Frank Melland and a companion on

bicycles, from Rhodesia to Egypt. German officers have motored

across Africa, from German East to German South-west Africa.

Noteworthy feats in exploration, though they may not have revealed

much that was new in cartography, have been the journeys and

studies of Lieut. P. H. G. Powell Cotton (Abyssinia, East Africa,

Congoland and Portuguese Guinea—1900-11); Auguste Chevalier, the

French botanist (Central Sudan, Upper Niger, West Congoland and

Liberia—1898-1910); Alexander Whyte, a Scottish botanical

collector (British Central Africa, East Africa, Uganda, and

Liberia—1891-1904); Dr W. A. Cunnington (Tanganyika, 1904-5);

H.R.H. the Duke of the Abruzzi, who in 1906 made the first

complete survey of the Ruwenzori range and ascended all the

highest peaks; A. Savage Landor, who crossed Africa at its

broadest, mainly on foot, from Somaliland to Senegal (1906);

Theodore Roosevelt (East Africa and Egyptian Sudan, 1909-10); and

Sir David and Lady Bruce (Uganda, Nyasaland, and Northern

Rhodesia—1903-11).

The heroic stage of African exploration finished with the 19th

century; and it is impossible to record the names of all the

military and civil officials who have since been quietly,

painstakingly, and usefully filling in the details between the broad

outlines drawn (at the cost of terrible fatigue, severe ill-health,

and danger from savage natives) by the great explorers of the past.

There are still many high mountains to be ascended—in the Atlas, in

Tibesti, on the north Liberian border, on the south-eastern limits

of the Niger basin, in the Cameroons, south-west Moçambique,

south-east Angola and northern Galaland; there are lakes to be

plumbed, geological formations to be determined, zones of vegetation

and distribution of the rapidly-disappearing fauna to be defined.

Archaeology in South-east Africa, in the Sahara, in Morocco and

Somaliland, still has some surprises in store for us. The

palaeontological exploration of Africa is merely beginning; and

already in Algeria, Egypt, East and South Africa, and Madagascar

research has produced evidence of an amazing vanished fauna of giant

buffaloes, giant dinosaurs, giant birds, big horses, small

dinotheriums, of the remote ancestors of the elephants, whales,

sirenians, hippopotami, giraffes, monkeys, and anthropoid apes. A

more careful search after living types has already revealed since

1900 the okapi in the north-east Congo forests, the big black pig of

Equatorial Africa, and several new antelopes and monkeys. Botanical

research has, since 1900, shown the existence in Africa of some

thirty sources of good rubber, and of many valuable gums and

oil-nuts. Gold has been found in the north-east Congo basin, tin in

Nigeria, and diamonds in German South-west Africa, in south-west

Congoland, and in Liberia. Africa will probably remain in the

future, what it has seemed to the Caucasian since he began his

historical colonization—the most interesting and mysterious of the

continents, always producing something new.

-----

Footnote 163:

See the article of Professor Flinders-Petrie in the _Geographical

Journal_, November, 1908.

Footnote 164:

Caius Plinius Secundus: born at Verona or Como 23 A.C. His

geographical publication or _Natural History_ was published

(according to Sir E. Bunbury) in 77 A.C.

Footnote 165:

He visited the Upper Niger in 1352.

Footnote 166:

The subsequent adventures of this heroic man, Lobo, are summarized

in my book, _The Nile Quest_, 1903.

Footnote 167:

Probably identical with the Ba-jok or Va-kioko between the rivers

Kwango and Kasai.

Footnote 168:

See my _Pioneers in West Africa_, 1911.

Footnote 169:

Where he was British Chaplain.

Footnote 170:

Pliny and one or two succeeding classical geographers mention the

Ger or Gir and the Niger as rivers of Western Africa, the former

being possibly the river Draa. Both words may be derived from

Berber roots.

Footnote 171:

See my work, _Pioneers in West Africa_, for details of Hornemann’s

journey and the possible date and place of his death.

Footnote 172:

Afterwards Sir William C. Harris. He explored Shoa (South of

Abyssinia) in 1841-2, and was knighted for concluding a treaty on

behalf of the Government of India with the King of Shoa.

Footnote 173:

Then nearly independent of Turkey, and ruled by the Karamanli

dynasty of Turkish pashas.

Footnote 174:

Denham, who had really rendered great services in the cause of

exploration, was rewarded somewhat inadequately with the post of

Secretary to the colony of Sierra Leone and Superintendent of the

slave settlement at Fernando Pô, where he soon died.

Footnote 175:

In a patent collapsible boat.

Footnote 176:

His name is spelt by the French “Mardochée.”

Footnote 177:

Ludwig Krapf, like his colleagues in East Africa, Rebmann and

Erhardt, was a native of Württemberg, having been born near

Tübingen in that South-German kingdom.

Footnote 178:

These in order of achievements were: Frédéric Caillaud (French)

who explored the Nile as far as Khartum and the Blue Nile to

Fazogl (1819-23); Adolphe Linant (Belgian) who in 1827 penetrated

150 miles above Khartum; Thibaut (French consul at Khartum), who,

with one of Muhammad Ali’s expeditions reached as far south as Bôr

(6°, 30′ N. Lat.); and Ferdinand Werne (German) who got as high up

the Mountain Nile as Gondokoro (4°, 20′) and mapped the whole

course of the river from Khartum to Gondokoro in 1841.

Footnote 179:

For a detailed account of Miss Tinne’s work and terrible death,

see my book _The Nile Quest_ (1903).

Footnote 180:

Dr Bastian had explored the Lower Congo in 1858; and the region of

Loango was examined by a German scientific expedition in 1875-80,

by Bastian, Pechuel Loesche, Falkenstein, and other German

explorers.

Footnote 181:

This was the letter which Stanley wrote to England appealing to

missionaries to come out and settle at the court of the King of

Uganda. It was taken away by Linant de Bellefonds to be posted in

Egypt. After leaving Uganda, de Bellefonds was killed by the Bari

on the Upper Nile. Stanley’s letter was concealed in one of the

boots of the corpse when it was recovered. It was handed to

General Gordon, and transmitted by him to England.

Footnote 182:

Sir Harry Johnston and Dr Cross discovered the south end of this

lake in 1889.

Footnote 183:

Wissmann was a lieutenant in the Prussian army, born at

Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. He played subsequently a great part in

German East Africa.

Footnote 184:

Baumann made a careful examination of the mountainous country of

Usambara in East Africa, and mapped the lands due west of the

Victoria Nyanza.

Footnote 185:

Sir J. R. L. Macdonald (then Captain Macdonald, R.E.) had

conducted with Captain Pringle, R.E. a very remarkable railway

survey at the beginning of the nineties, from Mombasa to the

Victoria Nyanza, a survey which was really a geographical

exploration of the East Africa Protectorate.

CHAPTER XIII

BELGIAN AFRICA

It has been already related in the preceding chapter how the

geographical ardour of the King of the Belgians resulted in the

sending of Stanley with an important expedition to explore the

Congo. Previous to this enterprise, however, King Leopold II had

shown himself deeply interested in the fate of Central Africa.

Following on the successful crossing of the continent from the

Zanzibar to the Benguela coast by Commander V. L. Cameron, R.N., and

his revelation of the richly endowed territories of the Southern

Congo basin, King Leopold had summoned to Brussels under his own

presidency a conference of geographers, which created an

International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of

Central Africa and for the abolition of the Slave Trade which then

was really ravaging that region. This International Association soon

separated into a number of National Committees; that of Belgium was

founded in November, 1876, and in 1877-79 Belgian Expeditions were

sent out _via_ Zanzibar to Tanganyika. By August, 1879, Capitaine

Cambier (an excellent pioneer), had founded the station of Karema on

the south-east Coast of Tanganyika. Captain E. Storms established

himself here (together with the White Fathers’ Catholic Mission) in

1880, and set to work to unite the Tanganyika tribes in self-defence

against the Arab slave raiders. Storms became quite a hero after

beating off the Arab forces with merely native material, hastily

drilled as soldiers. By 1885, he had become recognized as the great

White Chief and Protector of southern Tanganyika.

In 1879 from out of the Belgian branch of the African International

Association there grew the Comité d’Études du Haut Congo, which

projected the idea of Stanley’s concluding in its name treaties with

the paramount chiefs of the Congo region, treaties by means of which

these chiefs should agree to join in a sort of confederation for

purposes of mutual support, while at the same time they admitted

into their territories the traders who would be sent out by the

Committee, which was in some sort to become the suzerain of this

Congo Federation. Mr Stanley appears to have been under the

impression that the final protectorate over the central Congo would

be a British one; until 1884 few people seemed to think that the

King of the Belgians would make himself the sovereign of the Congo.

In the early eighties a kind of Anglo-French duel had taken place on

the Congo, De Brazza representing the French cause and Stanley the

British. When it began to dawn on the British Government that the

King of the Belgians was working for purely Belgian interests, it

occurred to them that there was no reason why England and Portugal

might not come to terms, at any rate about the Lower Congo. So the

abortive treaty of 1884 was drawn up, but not ratified. Believing

that this was a preliminary to a British Protectorate of the Congo,

France and Germany joined hands; and a Conference on African affairs

was convened at Berlin, the first of a long series of actions taken

jointly by the other states of Europe to check the extension of

British influence.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 the Congo Independent State[186]

was recognized by all the leading powers of Europe as a sovereign

state with the King of the Belgians at its head. The boundaries were

not definitely fixed, but the west coast of Tanganyika was made the

eastern limit; and Captain Storms, to his great chagrin, was

recalled. Before giving her consent, however, France reserved to

herself the right of preemption over these Congo territories,

besides securing by an agreement with the King of the Belgians a

large portion of western Congoland. Mr (afterwards Sir Henry)

Stanley then ceased to administer the Congo State, and was succeeded

first by Sir Frederick Goldsmid, and then by Sir Francis De Winton,

who governed for the King of the Belgians, but gave a distinctly

English tone to the administration. Mons. Camille Janssen, however,

succeeded Sir Francis De Winton in 1886; the international character

of the state was dropped; and the British, French, Portuguese,

Swedish and German officials were gradually replaced by Belgians, so

that by 1891 the entire administration was Belgian. Stanley,

however, had once more intervened (in 1887) in the affairs of the

Free State, which had got into great difficulties owing to the

attacks of the Zanzibar Arabs on the Upper Congo. Stanley

temporized, seeking to gain time for the young state, and recognized

Tipu Tipu[187], the leading Arab, as Governor for the King of the

Belgians over the Upper Congo. Tipu Tipu withdrew about 1890, when

the Arab revolt against the Germans had caused grave tension between

the Arabs and Europeans in Central Africa. After his withdrawal, the

Arabs, who had now become extremely powerful on the Upper Congo,

attacked the Belgians in 1892, murdering a trader, Hodister, and the

unoffending Emin Pasha, and imprisoning and eventually killing the

Belgian resident and his assistant at the Arab capital (Kasongo),

besides massacring the men at several outposts. The forces of the

State—largely composed of Congo natives with a few Hausas from

Nigeria and one or two noteworthy Liberian negroes—were ably led by

nineteen Belgian and one English officers, and commanded by

Commandant (afterwards created Baron) Dhanis. The English officer

referred to was Captain (originally Surgeon) Sidney L. Hinde,

afterwards a British official in East Africa.

Dhanis commenced, in July 1892, a most noteworthy campaign from a

base—Lusambo—on the Sankuru river. His little army marched through

forest paths to the Lomami and thus took the Arabs in flank. From

the Lomami the Belgian force gained the banks of the great

Lualaba-Congo, and, victory succeeding victory, they captured

Nyangwe (the great Slave City of Livingstone’s day) on March 4,

1893, and carried Kasongo (the Arab stronghold) by assault on April

22, 1893. The story, as told by Captain Sidney Hinde[188], of the

capture of Nyangwe and Kasongo reads like episodes in an impossible

Rider Haggard romance. It was one of the greatest feats of arms, of

endurance and splendid courage that the history of Africa can show.

By the beginning of 1894, the Belgians had achieved the conquest of

the whole of the country up to the west shores of Tanganyika, and

the death or expulsion from Congoland of all the Arab leaders. This

brilliant episode in Belgian Congo history was however sullied by

the judicial murder, in September, 1893, of Gongo Lutete, the great

Manyema chief who at the commencement of the struggle with the Arabs

had come over to the Belgian side and whose alliance alone made

victory possible to the Belgian force. The execution of this warrior

chief—without respite or appeal, on no credible evidence of

treachery—following a drumhead court-martial presided over by a

young Belgian lieutenant, is as painful to read as the preceding

campaign of Baron Dhanis against the Arab slave-traders is a source

of satisfaction to all interested in the welfare of Africa. The

Belgians were eventually to pay dearly for this miscarriage of

justice. The remembrance of the death of Gongo Lutete smouldered

amongst the negro soldiery he had raised for service with the

Belgians; and in 1895 they broke out into open mutiny at Luluabourg

and killed their Belgian commanding officer. Baron Dhanis composed

this mutiny by punishment and negotiations; but in 1897 the mutiny

broke out again amongst those Manyema and Batetela soldiers who had

been transferred to the Lado enclave of the Nile basin. The revolt

spread far and wide and was not at an end till 1900.

In 1892, King Leopold II, alarmed by the progress of the British

South Africa Company, sent out an expedition under Captain Stairs

(Stanley’s former Lieutenant—a Nova-Scotian) to occupy in his name

the territory of Katanga, which was a debateable land, to some

extent under British missionary influence, but claimed as lying

within the boundaries of the Congo State. Its king (Msidi) was an

Mnyamwezi adventurer and slave trader; nevertheless he had ruled his

country with a certain degree of wisdom, and had permitted British

missionaries to settle there and British travellers to explore;

therefore it was learned with some regret that he had been summarily

shot for refusing to hand over his territory to the Belgians. Not

content with the gigantic dominion already under his control, the

King of the Belgians aspired to extend it to the banks of the White

Nile. In 1894 an agreement was concluded with the British Government

by which, in exchange for a strip of territory which would enable

the latter to connect the northern end of Tanganyika with Uganda,

the King of the Belgians took over on lease the administration of

territories as far north as the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the White Nile.

But this settlement was practically annulled by the subsequent

Belgian convention with France, which restricted the northern

boundary of the Congo Independent State to the Mbomu affluent of the

Wele River, while the King of the Belgians retained for a time the

lease of a small patch of territory on the west bank of the White

Nile, opposite Lado.

Another event in the recent history of the Congo State, which has

caused some anger in England, was the summary execution of the

unfortunate Charles Stokes by a Belgian officer named Lothaire. Mr

Stokes (who was an Ulster Irishman) had once been a missionary, and

used to travel backwards and forwards to Uganda. He then set up for

himself as a trader, and, although a British subject, he was

sufficiently international in his sympathies to work for the Germans

in helping to found their East African colony. In the course of his

ivory-trading expeditions he entered the Congo State. It was

suspected by Lothaire that he was furnishing the Arabs with powder;

he therefore sent a messenger to Stokes, summoning him to his camp.

Stokes came unsuspecting. He was put through a cross-examination

over-night, and in the early morning taken out of his hut and

hanged. In plain language, he was murdered; for not only did he

receive no trial, but at that time British consular jurisdiction was

maintained in the Congo State, and no sufficient evidence was

brought forward to show that Stokes had sold any powder to the

Arabs, or done anything worthy of death. Major Lothaire was tried

for the murder of Stokes both at Boma and again at Brussels, but was

pronounced not guilty at each trial, and was regarded by a portion

of the Belgian press as having been a national hero. He was,

however, eventually dismissed from the service of the Congo Free

State, and an indemnity of £6000 was paid to the child of Stokes.

In July 1898, there was opened for public use (largely through the

enterprise of Colonel Thys) a railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool,

about 250 miles long, which had taken about 8½ years to construct,

but which, once finished, was of enormous aid in the development of

the natural resources of Congoland. Matadi is a port on the lower

Congo (110 miles from the sea), up to which ocean-going steamers are

able to ascend. From Léopoldville on Stanley Pool there are between

4000 and 5000 miles of navigable waterways along which steamers and

steam-launches can penetrate into the hinterland of French Congo and

the Cameroons, to within a few days’ journey of the Central Sudan

(Shari basin) and the Egyptian Sudan, German East Africa and

Rhodesia.

But the effects which followed the opening of this railway were

different from King Leopold’s anticipations. It was

discovered—slowly—by European public opinion that one of the boldest

outrages on international law and equity known to history had been

perpetrated by the man who had posed before Europe in 1876 as a

disinterested philanthropist desirous of devoting his spare funds to

the realization of Livingstone’s ideals, and to the regeneration of

Negro Africa. By means of Stanley he had between 1879 and 1885

founded his Congo Independent State, basing his right to call

himself “Roi-Souverain” of this vast dominion on a number of

treaties made by his agents in the region now known as French Congo,

and also along both banks of the main Congo river from the sea

upwards to the Kwa-Kasai confluence; that is to say, over only

one-fortieth part of the area he claimed to govern by the assent of

its native chiefs as well as of Europe.

Two of the numerous conditions imposed on his government of the

Congo were freedom of trade throughout the Congo basin, and the

right of missionaries to travel, to settle, and to build where they

would, without hindrance. Yet no sooner was King Leopold II

acknowledged internationally as King-Sovereign of the Congo State

than he began to set on one side all such stipulations of the Act of

Berlin as fettered his intentions of self-enrichment and

unquestionable autocracy. Freedom of trade, except at the mouth and

along the estuarine Congo, became an impossibility. By 1890, in the

Congo basin above Stanley Pool, ivory had been constituted a State

monopoly; and rubber was soon placed in much the same category.

Commerce was chiefly restricted to the State, and to one Dutch and

various Belgian firms, though commercial agencies on the Lower Congo

were still maintained by merchants of other nations. This policy on

the part of the Congo State, which on the strength of its

philanthropic assurances had obtained permission in 1891 to levy

import duties, was much criticized, and led to some alienation of

sympathy in England. Added to this were the extraordinary stories of

atrocities which began to be spread by British, American, and

Swedish missionaries. It was said that, to enforce the payment of

tribute in ivory and rubber, the Belgian officials ordered their

negro subordinates to cut off the hands of all who refused payment.

It was stated that the natives were plunged into a slavery worse

than anything the Arabs had introduced, that they were shot down for

trifling causes, and that the negro police and soldiers of the State

were allowed without hindrance to devour the bodies of the slain in

battle. These charges in some cases were scarcely credible as

applied to the actions of civilized human beings; King Leopold in

1896 instituted a committee of missionaries to enquire into them,

and to offer suggestions for better methods of administration. But

the committee was fettered in many ways and prevented from obtaining

evidence. The charge of permitting cannibalism has been

substantiated by the accounts of Captain S. L. Hinde, already

referred to, and by other British officers in the Congo service. The

fact was, that a territory nearly as large as Brazil had been handed

over to be governed by a number of young Belgian officers and the

employés of a few concessionaire companies. The subordinates whom

they employed in their administration and warfare were savages

barely reclaimed from the most barbarous practices; and just as, in

a far less degree, the Matebele police of the British South Africa

Company were guilty of malpractices that the Company would never

knowingly have allowed to be perpetrated, so the negro soldiers of

the Congo State committed appalling outrages before their officers

could become cognizant of their intended actions and prevent them.

But nothing can be said in excuse or mitigation of the behaviour of

certain agents of privileged companies and even persons employed on

the private domain of King Leopold, whose actions as recorded in

undisputed evidence were almost those of devils.

In July 1885 the King-Sovereign of the Congo State issued a decree

that all vacant land within the boundaries of the State were the

“private property” (the _Domaine privé_) of the Government; the

Government being then and for twenty-five years afterwards the

despotic King-Sovereign. Little objection was raised to this measure

at first, the general idea (very similar to announcements made then

and later by other European Powers in their African possessions)

being that King Leopold wished to protect the rights of the natives

from being hurriedly and foolishly sold to private speculators in

land, or concession-hunters. But in 1891 a “secret decree” was sent

out from the King’s cabinet, reserving to the State all elephants

and their ivory and all wild rubber and forest-produce on the

“vacant lands” of the _Domaine privé_. The officers of the State

were enjoined to organize the collection (as a form of taxes) of all

the ivory and rubber procurable; and the natives of Congoland

(except the small western strip near the Atlantic) were obliged to

sell all their produce to the State only. By a later decree they

were actually forbidden to leave their villages without a special

permit. In short, so far as the King-Sovereign’s writ ran, the whole

population of Belgian Congo—nearly a million square miles—was

virtually enslaved, and this by the man who in 1876 stood up before

Europe and announced that he was going to devote such of his time

and money as he could spare from Belgium to the abolition of slavery

in Central Africa and the raising of the Negro to a condition of

freedom and enlightenment.

In 1896 another “secret decree” created the _Domaine de la

Couronne_, and carved out for King Leopold II an area of 112,000

square miles in the very heart of Congoland, between the Sankuru and

the Busira rivers. This region, amazingly rich in wild rubber, was

to be privately administered by Leopold II without rendering any

account to the State exchequer, and of course without laying its

enormous revenues (wrung from the inhabitants by cruelties and

stress scarcely surpassed by the recently-revealed horrors of the

Putumayo) under any contribution towards the annual expenses of

public administration in the Congo State. In addition, the whole

rest of the _Domaine privé_ (except always the exhausted strip along

the Congo banks between Stanley Pool and the sea) was divided up

into regions strictly reserved for a State monopoly of products, and

others which were farmed out to concessionaire companies, in which

either the State, or King Leopold, or both, were partners in

profits. To these concessionaire companies were at first given

almost unlimited powers over the natives, from which resulted the

frightful abuses that shocked the conscience of Europe and

Anglo-Saxon America. One foreign trading-house which might have

protested was squared by being given part of the plunder; most other

old-established trading houses on the Lower River were prevented

from trading inland; influential Englishmen (not forgetting several

connected with the press) were admitted to this profit-taking; and

for some twelve years these truly iniquitous proceedings were

ignored, in spite of the missionary protests which began in 1898,

and of Mr Fox-Bourne’s trenchant attack[189] on King Leopold’s

policy published in 1903—ignored, that is to say, by the governments

of the States which had taken part in the Berlin Conference of 1884.

Statesmen of probity found it impossible at first to believe that

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, grandson of Louis Philippe, cousin

of Queen Victoria, husband of an Austrian Archduchess, a devoted

upholder of the Roman Church, and a very rich man, could for a

moment lend himself to a policy at once infamous, flagrantly unjust,

exceedingly cruel, and incredibly mean[190]. The gallant actions of

many a Belgian pioneer on Tanganyika and on the Lualaba—even on the

fringe of that Egyptian Sudan which Great Britain then lacked the

resolution to enter—were pointed to. The great record of Storms was

unearthed from missionary records, and public opinion was asked “Is

it possible that the man who sent out such officers as these, who

quenched the slave traffic which Livingstone abhorred but was

powerless to arrest, who brought relief from Dervish tyranny to the

harassed natives of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, could wish to enrich

himself, and himself alone, with the produce of all Congoland, could

tolerate the collection of rubber or the obtaining of ivory by

methods of compulsion only to be parallelled in the worst records of

Spain in the New World?” Yet it was true. Side by side with this

devastation of the Congo basin—a devastation which has left Arab

slave-raids far, far behind, which has reduced the native population

in fifteen years (sleeping sickness aiding) from an approximate

twenty millions to a bare nine millions—a work of civilization as

good in its way as anything that Britain or France has done in

Uganda or Nigeria was going on. Wherever Belgian officers could get

a free hand, and were not the mere agents of this singularly

heartless man, they built up native communities anew, and were even

loved and honoured by the natives. It was not the Belgian nation, so

much, that was to blame, or Belgian men who failed in those great

administrative qualities which are possessed by so many other

European nations; it was the system imposed on them by a being born

out of due time, a personality that had stepped unaltered from the

16th century into the 19th. Yet, to be just, this conception of

“African colonization” was not peculiar to Leopold II. It was the

ideal of some English minds and was still more the vogue with a

certain type of French Colonial administrator or minister. As we

have seen, French Congo had a history very like that of the Belgian

Congo.

King Leopold preserved himself long from attack and warded off many

a blow from the British Parliament by pointing to British companies

and British monopolies in Africa. And we had—it seems—no statesman

sufficiently adroit to indicate to him the cardinal difference. In

none of her permanent arrangements and at no time even in theory did

Great Britain tolerate in her African dominions or spheres of

influence monopolies which limited the trade of the country to one

or more privileged organizations, or which obliged the natives to

confine their commerce to any particular firm or individual trader.

Great Britain did acknowledge (usually where it was impossible to do

otherwise) that certain pioneer companies or persons held by

purchase under fair conditions large areas of land in “new” Africa;

but the natives’ rights to the land they occupied and used were

respected, provision was always made for their expansion, and in

most cases the whole of the vacant land was vested in the British

Government. But not on lines parallel to those which were followed

by Leopold II, not with the result of enriching the private revenues

of Queen Victoria or King Edward, or of endowing Margate with a

bandstand, Bournemouth with an opera house, or London with a new

museum. The British Government has regarded itself as holding the

vacant lands in trust for the infant state and for all its future

inhabitants, without distinction of colour, except it be that a more

liberal treatment is to be shown to black than white. All the

revenues derived from the state lands in British Africa are

accounted for annually and are applied to the service and for the

benefit of the country from which they are derived. Therein lies the

radical difference between the spoliations of King Leopold (or of

the old Spanish Colonial Empire) and the policy of Great Britain and

most other modern European powers in Asia and Africa. It may or may

not be a good thing that one half of the land in Uganda or in

Nigeria is the property of the State, a state mainly administered at

present by Europeans. But at any rate all the revenue derived from

the land can be ascertained by any native sufficiently educated to

read annual reports; and all this revenue is spent—usually with the

knowledge and advice of native counsellors—on Nigeria or Uganda, as

the case may be, and not on any other land. King Leopold, it is

true, while he took unto himself all the revenues, direct and

indirect, derived from the Congo State, had, prior to 1890,

supported out of his privy purse the cost of creating and

maintaining the Congo State (a total amount about £500,000 in value)

and probably spent in addition up till 1901 another £400,000. But

even after allowing him interest at 4 per cent, (in theory) on this

outlay of £900,000 and adding to that a theoretical Civil List at

£20,000 a year as King-Sovereign, he was still owing the Congo State

an amount understated at £4,000,000, when that State was annexed by

Belgium in 1909. That is to say, he profited by his intervention in

Congo affairs at least to that amount, and probably to an extent

much greater. And his great riches were obtained at a cruel cost in

human lives and human misery.

I desire to present all aspects of this astounding episode in the

history of the colonization of Africa. Therefore I would state that

King Leopold employed a small percentage of the profits above

computed—say £100,000—in promoting the scientific investigation of

his territories and subject peoples, with the result that our

knowledge of the fauna, flora, meteorology and above all ethnology

of the Congo basin were immensely increased. Also, however unfair in

regard to solemn treaty stipulations were his concessions and his

monopolies, these did much to enrich Belgium and Antwerp in

particular. It can well be imagined that, when so many of the king’s

subjects were raking in large and small fortunes out of Congo

rubber, ivory, and palm oil, when churches were rising from Congo

donations, museums were endowed, kiosques and public gardens were

being presented to Belgian towns from out of the fringe of this

profit-taking, Belgians (very ignorant as a rule about Africa or

Colonial policy or subjects outside Belgian life) should have been

enthusiastic about their monarch, his “slimness,” and his Congo

milch-cow. And notable English potentates in shipping and finance

were partners with King Leopold, whose press department further

stifled criticism in the journals of America, France, and Germany.

Few stories therefore are at once more romantic—and will seem more

incredible to posterity—than that which relates how this Goliath was

overcome by a David in the person of a poor shipping clerk in the

office of a Liverpool shipping firm which was amongst the partners

of King Leopold.

This shipping clerk—E. D. Morel—was sent over to Antwerp, and

Belgium generally, because he could speak French, and could

therefore arrange all the minutiae of steamer fares and passenger

accommodation, and the scales of freights for goods and produce,

with the Congo State officials. In the course of his work he became

acquainted with some of the grisly facts of Congo maladministration.

He drew his employers’ attention to these stories and their

verification. The result was his dismissal.

Almost penniless, he set to work with pen and paper to enlighten the

world through the British press and British publishers on the state

of affairs on the Congo. From African merchants, not quite so

callous as his late employers, he received support, which also came

slowly and at first grudgingly from the public. He succeeded in

interesting the Government of the day; for his charges were amply

borne out by the British consuls sent to Congoland to report (the

best-known of whom was Sir Roger Casement). Morel had to face the

insults and even the personal assaults of paid opponents at his

meetings, and the calumnies of King Leopold’s subsidized press; but

he roused public opinion in Britain, Belgium, the United States,

Switzerland, France and Germany. The first notice Goliath took of

David was—very reluctantly—to appoint a Commission of enquiry

consisting of a Belgian, an Italian, and a Swiss jurist of

distinction and honesty. Their report, though its publication was

only partial, was a virtual admission of the truth of the

allegations made by Morel and the British consuls and missionaries.

King Leopold, in fact, had no defence to offer; and although,

exerting his powers as King, as the relation of Kings and Emperors,

as a rich man, to the utmost, he managed to prolong discussions and

negotiations as long as possible, the end was inevitable. The Congo

was taken from him and was annexed by Belgium on November 14, 1908.

On December 17, 1909, King Leopold died. Stanley, “Bula Matadi,” the

real creator of the Congo State, had predeceased him by five years,

dying in 1904, the last few years of his life saddened by the

disheartening conviction that the immediate effect of his life’s

work had been a sordid scandal and the most monstrous piece of

hypocrisy ever perpetrated by Europe in Africa[191].