The romance of African exploration is rapidly passing by. We must,
in this missionary work, take into account fully the great and
peculiar difficulties in the way—difficulties beginning with the
physical geography of that continent, its lack of bays and harbors,
its generally unnavigable rivers, choked by sand-bars, impeded by
rapids and cataracts and masses of floating soil; and then the
deadly climate, the rank and putrescent vegetation, the fetid
odors poisoning the air. Will you plunge with me for a few minutes
into the African forest, starting with the latest travelers,
Keith Johnston, son of the great geographer, and Joseph Thompson,
a young man of twenty, a graduate of Edinburgh University and a
good botanist and geologist? They plunge into that African forest
opposite Zanzibar, following a path only eighteen inches wide, for
all means of conveyance by beasts of burden—horses, mules, camels,
elephants—have failed in that country, and travelers are forced
back upon the narrow foot-paths. The grass, cane-like, interwoven
with thorny creepers, is from ten to twenty feet high. They have
to cut their way with hatchets and cutlasses, it is so soon choked
by the rank growth. They are drenched with the dew for the first
two hours through and through; then they are scorched by the sun.
By and by comes a pouring shower and they are drenched again. At
night they lie down in their little shelter tents, breathing the
steamy, stuffy, poisoned air; and before they get 200 miles, Joseph
Thompson, the young man of twenty, buries under a mangrove tree his
friend Keith Johnston. He was only thirty-four, an athletic fellow,
proud of his English training, of a splendid constitution. But that
is a deadly climate. Young Thompson staggers along, often falling
in his tracks. His men have to lift him up and he has to hold on to
their belts; but, after fourteen months and fifteen hundred miles
of travel, only losing one man, no plundering, no desertions, not a
shot fired offensive or defensive, not a drop of blood shed, though
under the most intense provocations, he brings all his men back to
Zanzibar—a hearty, merry, jovial set.
This gives you a little idea of the inevitable difficulties of
African exploration. As to the encouragements, the first one I
think of (and it is a great one) is that our Lord, who leads us to
victory, has made Africa and told us to go there. The next is the
testimony of our latest travelers to the grand success of mission
work. Thompson says that while the Belgian expeditions have failed,
while the stations of the International Association have failed
because of the lack of character in the men who have led them, the
Livingstonian mission, the Free Church of Scotland mission, the
London Missionary Society’s mission, and various other missions
have all proved solid civilizing centres. Desolating wars have
ceased; the slave trade in their region is ended; the moral tone of
the natives has been evidently already lifted up.
But we must have in this missionary work more regard to a physical
basis. It is wrong, brethren, to send such men as Henry M. Ladd and
Edward P. Smith, and let them travel in open boats, exposed with
their native boatmen to almost certain death. The fact is that the
sentinel of death stands five miles out from the coast of Africa
to warn almost every traveler not to sleep on its shores in such
a region as that. If we send out these noble men who hazard their
lives for this work, we must give them these steamers—the “John
Brown” steamer at the Mendi mission, and the “Charles Sumner”
steamer at the Nile Basin station.
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