DRIVING A PRAIRIE WITH FIRE.
A strong fortification was built at Fatiko, which was finished by December, and reinforcements were sent for from Gondokoro. It was the hunting season, and many expeditions were organized for the capture of game, in which the natives joined with a hearty good will. Besides the rifle in skilled hands, the net of the natives for the capture of antelope and smaller game was much relied on, and once all enjoyed the magnificent sight of a tropical prairie on fire, with its leaping game of royal proportions, to be brought down almost at will, provided the hunter was not demoralized with its number and size.
AFFECTIONATE RESULTS OF FREEDOM.
While at Fatiko, an embassy came from King Mtesa of theUganda professing friendship and offering an army of 6000 men for,—he did not know what, but to punish any natives who might appear to be antagonistic, especially Kabba Rega.
By March, 1873, reinforcements from Gondokoro arrived in pitiable plight. Baker’s forces were now 620 strong. He re-inforced his various military stations. Then he liberated the numerous slaves the upward troops had taken from the slave hunters. Most of these were women and back in their native country. They accepted liberty with demonstrations of joy, rushed to the officers and men on whom they lavished hugs and kisses, and danced away in a delirium of excitement.
Colonel Baker’s time would expire in April. Therefore he timed his return to Gondokoro so as to be there by the first of the month, 1873. The whole situation was changed. There was scarcely a vestige of the neat station he had left. The slave dealers had carried things with a high hand, and had demoralized the troops. Filth and disorder had taken the place of cleanliness and discipline. Things were put to rights by May, and on the 25 of that month Baker started down the Nile, leaving his “Forty Thieves” as part of the Gondokoro garrison.
On June 29, Colonel Baker, Mrs. Baker and the officers of this celebrated expedition arrived at Kartoum, and reached Cairo on August 24, whence they sailed for England.
He concludes his history thus:—“The first steps in establishing the authority of a new government among tribes hitherto savage and intractable were of necessity accompanied by military operations. War is inseparable from annexation, and the law of force, resorted to in self-defence, was absolutely indispensable to prove the superiority of the power that was eventually to govern. The end justified the means.
“At the commencement of the expedition I had felt that the object of the enterprise—‘the suppression of the slave trade’—was one for which I could confidently ask a blessing.
“A firm belief in Providential support has not been unrewarded. In the midst of sickness and malaria we had strength; from acts of treachery we were preserved unharmed; in personal encounters we remained unscathed. In the end, every oppositionwas overcome: hatred and subordination yielded to discipline and order. A paternal government extended its protection through lands hitherto a field for anarchy and slavery. The territory within my rule was purged from the slave trade. The natives of the great Shooli tribe, relieved from their oppressors, clung to the protecting government. The White Nile, for a distance of 1,600 miles from Kartoum to Central Africa, was cleansed from the abomination of a traffic which had hitherto sullied its waters.
GORDON AS MANDARIN.
“Every cloud had passed away, and the term of my office expired in peace and sunshine. In this result, I humbly traced God’s blessing.”
Baker’s picture is much overdrawn. The situation in the Soudan has never been promising. In 1874, Colonel James Gordon was made Governor General of all these equatorial provinces which Baker had annexed to Egypt. Gordon was a brave enthusiast, who had acquired the title of “Chinese” Gordon, because he had organized an army at Shanghai, and, as Brigadier, helped the Chinese Government to put down a dangerous rebellion. He had received the order of Mandarin, had infinite faith in himself, and a wonderful faculty for controlling the unruly elements in oriental countries. He did some wonderful work in the Soudan in suppressing the slave-trade, disarming the Bashi-Bazouks, reconciling the natives, and preventing the Government at Cairo from parcelling out these equatorial districts to Arab slave dealers. He worked hard, organized quite an army, and had a power in the Soudan which was imperial, and which he turned to good uses. But in 1879, he differed with the Khedive and resigned. Then England and France deposed the Khedive, Ismial, and set up Tewfik, under pretext of financial reform. But these two countries could not agree as to a financial policy. France withdrew, and left England to work out the Egyptian problem. The problem is all in a nutshell. English ascendancy in Egypt is deemed necessary to protect the Suez Canal and her water way to India. For this she bombarded and reduced Alexandria in 1882 and established a suzerainty over Egypt—Turkey giving forced assent, and France refusing to join in the mix.
The new Khedive was helpless—purposely so. England planted within Egypt an army of occupation and took virtual directorship of her institutions. But the provinces all around, especially those newly annexed by Baker, revolted. Their Moslem occupants would not acknowledge English interference and sovereignty. Soudan was in rebellion both east and west of the Nile. England sent several small armies toward the interior and fought many doubtful battles. At length the project of reducingthe Soudan was given over. But how to get the garrisons out of the leading strongholds in safety became a great problem. That at Kartoum was the largest, numbering several hundred, with a large contingent of women and children. It would be death for any of these garrisons to leave their fortifications and try boats down the Nile, or escape by camel backacross the desert. Yet England was committed to the duty of relieving them.
PORTRAIT OF GORDON.
The rebellion was under the lead of the Mahdi, a Moslem prophet, who claimed to be raised up to save his people and religion. His followers were numerous and desperate. Gordon thought the old influence he had acquired over these people when Governor General of the Soudan, would avail him for the purpose of getting the forlorn garrisons away in safety. He was therefore re-appointed Governor General in 1884, and started with Colonel Stewart for Kartoum. There they were besieged for ten months by the Mahdi’s troops, and there Gordon was killed (January 27, 1885) by the enemy, and all his garrison surrendered or were killed. The English sent an army of 8,000 men up the Nile to rescue Gordon, and part of it got nearly to Kartoum, when word of the sad fate that had befallen the garrison reached it. The expedition retreated, and since then the Soudan and Upper Nile have been given over to the old Arab and slave stealing element.
By reversing the map of North America—turning it upside down—you get a good river map of Africa. The Mississippi, rising in a lake system and flowing into the gulf of Mexico, becomes the Nile flowing into the Mediterranean—both long water-ways. The St. Lawrence, rising in and draining the most magnificent lake system in the world, from Huron to Ontario, will represent the Congo, rising in and draining a lake system which may prove to be of equal extent and beauty. Both are heavy, voluminous streams, full of rapids and majestic falls. The Columbia River will represent the Zambesi, flowing into the Indian Ocean.
Civilized man has, perhaps, known the African Continent the longest, yet he knows it least. Its centre has been a mystery to him since the earliest ages. If the Egyptian geographer traced the first chart, and the astronomer there first noted the motion of sun, moon and stars; if on the Nile the first mariner tried his bark on water; it was but yesterday that the distant and hidden sources of the great stream were revealed, and it is around these sources that the geographer and naturalist have now the largest field for discovery, and in their midst that the traveller and hunter have the finest fields for romance and adventure.
The Mississippi has in three centuries become as familiar as the Rhine. The Nile, known always, has ever nestled its head in Africa’s unknown Lake Region, safe because of mangrove swamp and arid waste. But now that the secret of its sources is out, and with it the fact of a high and delightful inner Africa, full of running streams and far stretching lakes, of rich tropical verdure and abundant animal life, is the dream a foolish one that here are the possibilities of an empire whose commerce, agriculture, wealth and enlightenment shall make it as powerful and bright as its past has been impotent and dark?
We have known Africa under the delusion that it was a desert, with a fringe of vegetation on the sea coast and in the valley of the Nile. “Africs burning sands” and her benighted races are the beginning and end of our school thoughts of the “Dark Continent.” True, her Sahara is the most unmitigated desert in the world, running from the Atlantic Ocean clear to the Tigris in Asia—for the Red Sea is only a gulf in its midst. True, there is another desert in the far South, almost as blank. These, with their drifting sands, long caravans, ghastly skeletons, fierce Bedouin wanderers, friendly oases, have furnished descriptions well calculated to interest and thrill. But they are by no means the Africa of the future. They are as the shell of an egg, whose life and wonder are in the centre.
There are many old stories of African exploration. One is to the effect that a Phœnician vessel, sent out by Pharaoh Necho, left the Red Sea and in three years appeared at the Straits of Gibraltar, having circumnavigated the Continent. But it required the inducement of commercial gain to fix its boundaries exactly, to give it place on the map of the world. Not until a pathway to the east became a commercial necessity, and a short “North West Passage” a brilliant hope, did the era of Arctic adventure begin. The same necessity, and the same hope for a “South East Passage,” led the Portuguese to try all the western coast of Africa for a short cut to the Orient. For seventy years they coasted in vain, till in 1482 Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms,” afterwards called Cape of Good Hope. Twelve years later Vasco de Gama ran the first European vessel into the ports of India.
The first permanent stream found by the Portuguese on going down the Atlantic, or west, coast of Africa was the Senegal River. They thought it a western outlet of the Nile. Here Europe first saw that luxuriant, inter-tropical Africa which differed so much from the Africa of traditions and school books. They knew that something else than a sandy waste was necessary to support a river like the Senegal. They had been used to seeing and reading of the tawny Bedouin wanderers, but south of this river they found a black, stout, well made people,who in contradistinction to the thin, tawny, short Moors of the desert, became Black Moors—“black-a-moors.” And in contrast with the dry, sandy, treeless plains of Sahara they actually found a country verdant, woody, fertile and rolling.
Unhappily the wrongs of the negro began with his first contact with Europeans. The Portuguese took him home as a specimen. He then became a slave. The moral sense of Europe was still medieval. Her maritime nations fastened like leeches on the west coast of Africa and sucked her life blood. Millions of her children were carried off to Brazil, the West Indies, the Spanish Main, and the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. Much as we abhor the slave system of Africa as carried on at present by Turkish dealers, it is no more inhuman than that practiced for three hundred years by the Christian nations of Europe.
This slave trade was fatal to discovery and research in Africa, such as was warranted by the knowledge which the Portuguese brought, and which is now warranted, and being realized too, by the recent revelations of Stanley, Livingstone and others. The slaver could not, because he dared not, venture far from his rendezvous on the river or in the lagoon where his victims were collected. He kept his haunts a secret, and closed the doors on all who would be likely to interfere with his gains. Not until slavery received its death blow among civilized nations did they begin to set permanent feet, in a spirit of scientific and christian inquiry, on the interior soil of Africa, and to map out its blank spaces with magnificent lakes and rivers. Then began to come those stirring narratives of travel by Mungo Park, Landers and Clapperton, who tracked the course of the Niger River. Then began that northern march of sturdy and permanent Dutch and English colonists who are carrying their cultivation and civilization from the Southern Cape to the Kalihari Desert, the southern equivalent of the Sahara. Then also a Liberian Free State became possible, founded and ruled by the children of those who had been ruthlessly stolen from their happy equatorial homes and sold into bondage in the United States.
Between the two sterile tracts of Africa lies the real Continent. All the coast lands are a shell. Egypt is but a strip on either side the Nile. Central Africa—the Lake regions which feed the Nile, Congo and Zambesi—is a great and grand section, where nature has been prodigal in all her gifts, and which invites a civilization as unique and strong as its physical features. We may wonder at the strange things revealed by Arctic research, but here are unrivalled chains of lake and river communication, and powerful states with strange peoples and customs, of which the last generation never dreamed. No spot of all the earth invites to such adventure as this, and none profiteth so much in the revelations which add to science and which may be turned to account in commerce and the progress of civilization.
We have read the roll of names rendered immortal by efforts to reach the two Poles of the earth. Africa’s list of explorers contains the names of Livingstone, Gordon, Cameron, Speke, Grant, Burton, Baker, Schweinfurth, Stanley, Kirk, Van der Decken, Elton, Pinto, Johnston, and others, some of whom have laid down their lives in the cause of science, and every one recalling memories of gigantic difficulties grappled with, of dangers boldly encountered, of sufferings bravely borne, of great achievements performed, and all within the space of twenty years.
Before entering these Lake Regions of Africa to see what they contain, it is due to the past to recall the fact that an old chart of the African Continent was published at Rome in 1591, which contains a system of equatorial lakes and rivers. It shows the Blue Nile coming out of Abyssinia, and the White Nile taking its rise in two great lakes under the equator—the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, and the Albert Nyanza of Baker. Due south from Albert Nyanza is another lake which is the equivalent of Tanganyika, and this is not only connected with the Congo but with the Nile and Zambesi. Cameron and Stanley have both shown that Tanganyika sends its surplus waters, if any it has, to the Congo, and Livingstone has proven that the head waters of these two mighty rivers are intimately connected.Is this ancient map a happy guess, or does it present facts which afterwards fell into oblivion? Ere the slave trade put its ban between the coast traders and the dwellers of the interior, ere Portuguese influence ceased in Abyssinia, and the missions of the Congo left off communications with Rome, did these unknown regions yield their secrets to the then existing civilization? May not this geographic scrap, dug from among the rubbish of the Vatican library, be the sole relic now extant of a race of medieval explorers the fame of whose adventures has fallen dumb, and whose labors have to be gone over again?
The map of Africa, used in our school days, had a blank centre. No geographer had soiled its white expanse with lines and figures. It was the “happy hunting ground” of conjecture and fancy. The Zambesi and Congo were short stumps of rivers, with perhaps a dotted line to tell what was not known. When two traders—the Pombeiros—passed from Angola on the west to the Pacific, in the beginning of the present century, and wrote how they had crossed a hundred rivers, visited the courts of powerful negro kings, traversed countries where the people had made considerable progress in the industries and arts, their story, like that of other pioneers, was discredited and their information treated with contemptuous neglect.
But about thirty years ago the modern world was startled and gratified with its first glimpse at the Lake Regions of Africa. In 1849, Livingstone, Oswell and Murray, after weary marching across the Kalihari, or southern, desert, stood on the margin of Lake Ngami, the most southerly and first discovered of the great chain of equatorial lakes. They expected to find only a continuation of desert sands and desert hardships, but, lo! a mighty expanse of waters breaks on their vision, worth more as a discovery than a dozen nameless tribes or rivers. What could it mean? Was this the key to that mysterious outpour of rivers which, flowing north, east, and west, blended their waters with the Mediterranean, the Pacific and Atlantic? The discoverer could go no further then, but fancy was excited with the prospect of vague and limitless possibilities and speculation became active in every scientific centre. Back again into thewilderness the discoverer is drawn, and a score of others plunge into the unknown to share his fame.
From the discovery of Ngami, a broad sheet into which the Cubango, south of the Zambesi and parallel with it, expands ere it plunges into the great central Salt Pan (a Great Salt Lake), may be dated the revival of modern curiosity in the secrets of the African Continent.
In the Portuguese colonies of Abyssinia, there were rumors that a great lake existed north of the Zambesi, called Maravi or Nyassa. Its outflow was unknown, and the theory was that it was one of a long chain which fed the Nile. They thought no other stream was worthy of such a source, but they did not ask, whence then the mightier volumes that pour through the Congo and Zambesi? Others said the Nile finds ample sources in the “Mountains of the Moon.” Nobody had seen these, but old Ptolemy, the geographer, had said so two thousand years ago, and hundreds of years before, Herodotus had written, in obedience to the dictates of two Egyptian priests, that “two conical hills, Crophi and Mophi, divided the unfathomable waters of the Nile from those which ran into Ethiopia.”
This is all the information we had of the sources of the Nile down to 1863—at least of the White, or Eastern, branch of the Nile. Then it was that Speke and Grant, coming from the south, and Baker following the valley of the river toward the equator, almost met on the spot which contains its true sources. Poor Livingstone could not be made to see the merit of their discovery. He clung to the story of Herodotus, amplified by that of Ptolemy, which fixed the head of the great river in two lakes some ten degrees south of the Equator. Livingstone believed that the high water-shed between the Zambesi and Congo would pass for the Mountains of the Moon, and that in the Lualaba, flowing northward (the Lualaba afterwards turned out to be the Congo, as Stanley showed) he had the track of the true Nile. Following this will-o-the-wisp into the swamps of Lake Bangweolo, he met a lonely and lingering death.
To look on the sources of the Nile was ever a wish and dream. The conquerors of Egypt, at whatever time and ofwhatever nation, longed to unravel the problem of its fountains. In the days when a settled population extended far into Nubia and a powerful state flourished at Meroë, near the junction of the White and Blue Nile, the tramp of armed hosts in search of the “mythical fountains,” favorite haunt of Jove himself when he wished seclusion, often resounded in the deep African interior. Sesostris, the first king who patronized map making, made attempts to discover these springs. Alexander the Great, Cambyses the Persian, and the Roman Cæsars, were inspired with the same wish. Julius Cæsar said he would give up civil war could he but look on the sources of the Nile. Nero sent out a vast exploring party who told of cataracts and marshes which compelled their return. These expeditions were formidable. They returned empty handed as to science, but generally loaded with spoils of conquest. The idea of a solitary explorer, with his life in his hand and good will toward all in his heart, encountering all the perils and privations of African travel for pure love of knowledge, is wholly a modern conception.
Let mention be made here of Ismail Pasha, ex-viceroy of Egypt. To the practices of an oriental despot he added the spirit of a man of modern science. To him, more than to any other man, do we owe a complete solution of the mystery of the Nile. He plunged Egypt into inextricable debt, he ground his people with taxes, but he introduced to them the light of western knowledge, he granted the concessions which built the Suez Canal, he sought out and annexed the sources of the Nile. For twenty years European pioneers and explorers, in his pay or under his protection, worked their way southward, mapping lakes and rivers, founding settlements, capturing slave gangs, until the entire Nile Valley either acknowledges Egypt or is open to commerce and civilization, unless forsooth the recent Soudanese protest, made by the fanatical El Mahdi and his followers, should prove to be more persistent and better sustained than now seems probable.
Our trip up the Nile to Assouan, or the first cataract, past the silent shapes of the temples, sphinxes and pyramids, surrounded by sights and sounds of Oriental life, was as pastime.But now the holiday journey ends, and we are face to face with the realities and hardships of a Nubian desert. The Nile is no longer verdant on either side. The sands, dry and barren, form its shores. But that is not all. You skirt it to Korosko amid difficulties, and there you are at its great bend. If you followed it now to the next place of importance, Abu-Hammed, you would have to travel nearly 600 miles. The waters are broken by falls and the country is desolate. No one thinks of the journey, unless compelled to make it. The course is that of the caravans across the Korosko desert to Abu-Hammed. It is 400 miles of dreary waste, and calculated to burn out of the traveller any romance he may have entertained of Nubian adventure. Day marching over this desert is impossible at certain seasons. Night is given up to the uneasy motion of camel riding and the monotony of a desert tramp.
Do not think the ground is even. Here and there it is broken by wady’s or gulches, and as you descend into these the eye may be relieved with sight of vegetation. Perhaps a gazelle dashes away in fright to the nearest sand hills, or it may be you catch a glimpse of a naked Arab youth tending his flock of goats, for even desert wastes are not utterly void of plant and animal life.
These deserts are not even rainless, though as much as four years have been known to pass without a shower. A rain storm is watched with breathless hope by the nomad Arab tribes. They see the clouds drifting up from the distant Indian Ocean and pitching their black tents on the summits of the mountains that divide the Nile Valley from the Red Sea. A north wind may blow during the night and sweep them back whence they came. But more likely they burst into thunderstorm, as if all the storms of a season were compressed into one. The dry wadys of yesterday are roaring torrents by morning, bearing to the Nile their tribute of a single day, and for a day or a week, the desert air is pure and the desert sand shoots a tender vegetation, only to be withered, like Jonah’s gourd, in fewer hours than it sprang.
The Arab camel driver, however, knows well a few spotswhere are running water and green turf the year round. These are the oases, or stepping stones, by means of which the burning wilderness may be crossed. Sometimes the wells fail, or have been poisoned or filled, or are in the possession of a hostile predatory band. Then the unfortunate traveller has to face death by thirst or exhaustion as he hurries on to the next halting place. At any rate he is profoundly thankful when the welcome waters of the Nile come into view again at Abu-Hammed, and he knows he is within safe navigable distance of Kartoum, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile.
And now, in passing from Abu-Hammed to Kartoum, we have a grand secret of the Nile. For twelve hundred miles above its mouth that mysterious river receives no tributary on the right hand nor on the left. It may be traced like a ribbon of silver with a narrow fringe of green, winding in great folds through a hot and thirsty desert and under the full blaze of a sun that drinks its waters but returns nothing in the shape of rain. And man also exacts a heavy tribute for purposes of irrigation. Whence its supply? Look for a partial answer to the Atbara, whose mouth is in the east bank of the Nile, half way from Abu-Hammed to Kartoum. Here light begins to break on the exhaustless stores of the Nile. During the greater part of the year the Atbara is dry. Not a hopeful source of supply, you say at once. The sources of the Atbara are away off to the east in the mountains of Abyssinia, whose great buttresses are now visible from the Nile Valley, and whose projections push to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. There also are a Lake Region and Nile sources, whose discovery by Bruce a century ago gave the scientific world quite a stir. His account of this Abyssinian country, so unique in physical features, social life, history, religion and ancient remains, read so much like romance that it was not believed. But Beke, De Cosson, James Bruce and the great Livingstone, have since verified all and given him his proper place among accurate observers and intrepid travellers.
But it was Sir Samuel Baker, on his first journey up the Nile in 1861, who pointed out the importance of the Abyssinianrivers as Nile tributaries. He turned aside from his southward route and followed the dry bed of the Atbara for a double purpose. First, to watch the great annual flooding of this Nile feeder. Second, to enjoy the sport of capturing some of the big game, such as the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe and lion, known to abound in the thick jungles covering the lower slopes of the adjacent hills.
PORTRAIT OF BAKER.
The Atbara, or “Black Nile,” was simply a vast wady or furrow, thirty feet deep and 400 yards to half a mile across, plowed through the heart of the desert, its edges marked by a thin growth of leafless mimosas and dome palms. The only trace of water was here and there a rush-fringed pool which the impetuous torrent had hollowed out in the sudden bends in the river’s course, and where disported themselves hippopotami, crocodiles, and immense turtles, that had long ago adjusted their relations on a friendly footing on the discovery that none of them could do harm to the others. On the 23 of June, the simoom was blowing with overpowering force; the heat was furnace-like, and the tents of travellers were covered with several inches of drifted sand. Above, in the Abyssinian mountains, however, the lightnings were playing and the rains were falling as if the windows of heaven had been opened. The monsoon had set in; the rising streams were choking their narrow channels in their frantic rush to the lowlands, and were tearing away huge masses of the rich dark soil, to be spread a month hence over the flat plains of Egypt. The party encamped on the Atbara heardthrough the night a sound as if of distant thunder; but it was “the roar of the approaching water.”
Wonder of the desert! Yesterday there was a barren sheet of glaring sand with a fringe of withered bush and tree. All nature was most poor. No bush could boast a leaf. No tree could throw a shade. In one night there was a mysterious change—wonders of the mighty Nile! An army of waters was hastening to the wasted river. There was no drop of rain, no thunder cloud on the horizon to give hope. All had been dry and sultry. Dust and desolation yesterday; to-day a magnificent stream five hundred yards wide and twenty feet deep, dashing through a dreary desert. Bamboos, reeds, floating matter of all kinds, hurry along the turbid waters. Where are all the crowded inhabitants of the pools? Their prison-doors are open, the prisoners are released, and all are rejoicing in the deep sounding and rapid waters of the Atbara.
Here is the clue to one part of the Nile mystery—its great annual inundations, source of fertilizing soil and slime. The Blue Nile, further on, and with its sources in the same Abyssinian fastnesses, contributes like the Atbara, though in a secondary degree, to the annual Nile flood and to Egypt’s fertility, with this difference, that it flows all the year round.
At Kartoum, as already seen, we reach the junction of the White and Blue Nile, the frontier of two strongly contrasted physical regions, and the dividing line between the nomadic barbarism of the north and the settled barbarism of the south. The secret that has still to be unveiled is the source of that unfailing flow of water which perpetually resists the influences of absorption, evaporation and irrigation, and carries a life giving stream through the heart of Egypt at all seasons of the year.
Kartoum has ingrafted all the vices of its northern society on the squalor and misery of its southern. A more miserable, filthy and unhealthy spot can hardly be imagined. Yet it is not uninteresting, for here, up to a recent period, was the “threshold of the unknown.” It has been the starting point of numberless Nile expeditions since the days of the Pharaohs.Mehemet Ali, first viceroy of Egypt, pushed his conquest of the Soudan, a little south of it in 1839. He found the climate so unhealthy that he established a penal colony a little way up the White Nile, banishment to which was considered equivalent to death.
Says Sir Samuel Baker of Kartoum, on his second visit in 1869: “During my first visit in 1861, the population was 30,000. It is now reduced one-half, and nearly all the European residents have disappeared. And the change in the country between Berber and Kartoum is frightful. The river’s banks, formerly verdant with heavy crops, have become a wilderness. Villages, once crowded, have entirely disappeared. Irrigation has ceased. The nights, formerly discordant with the croaking of waterwheels, are now silent as death. Industry has vanished. Oppression has driven the inhabitants from the soil. It is all due to the Governor General of Soudan who, like a true Mohammedan, left his government to Providence while he increased the taxes. The population of the richest province of Soudan has fled oppression and abandoned the country. The greater portion have taken to the slave trade of the White Nile where, in their turn, they might trample on the rights of others, where, as they had been plundered, they might plunder.”
MADEMOISELLE TINNE.
The wilderness of fever-stricken marshes that line the White Nile long baffled the attempts of the most determined explorers to penetrate to the southward. At length “dry land” was reached again at Gondokoro, only five degrees from the equator. It in turn became an advanced position of Egyptian authority, a centre of mission enterprise, a half-way house where the traveller rested and equipped himself for new discoveries. From the base of Gondokoro, Petherick pursued his researches into the condition of the negro races of the Upper Nile; the Italian traveller, Miani, penetrated far towards the southwest, into the countries occupied by the Nyam-Nyam tribes, that singular region of dwarfs and cannibals; and Dr. Schweinfurth, Colonel Long, and Mdlle. Tinné followed up the search with magnificent results. Mdlle. Tinné, a brave Dutch lady, deserves special notice as having been perhaps the first European womanwho encountered the terrible hardships and perils of the explorer’s life in the cause of African discovery. She is far, however from being the last. The wives of two of the greatest pioneers in the work—Mrs. Livingstone and Lady Baker—accompaniedwith a noble-minded resolution the steps of their husbands, the one along the banks of the Zambesi, and the other on the White Nile. Mdlle. Tinné and Mrs. Livingstone paid with their lives for their devotion, and are buried by the streams from whose waters they helped to raise the veil. Lady Baker has been more fortunate. Only a girl of seventeen when she rode by her husband’s side from Gondokoro, she lived to return to Europe where her name is inseparably linked with two great events of African history—the discovery of one of the great lakes of the Nile and the suppression of the slave traffic.
MRS. BAKER.
As already intimated, the Egyptian conquest and annexation of the Soudan country, and the bad government of it which followed, made the region of the White Nile the great man-hunting ground of Africa. The traffic was general when the modern travellers began their struggle to reach the equatorial lakes. Arab traders were the chief actors in these enterprises and they were joined by a motley crew of other races, not excepting most of the white and Christian races. If they were not directly under the patronage of the Egyptian authorities at Kartoum, they made it worth while for those authorities to keep a patronizing silence, by throwing annually into their treasury something handsome in the shape of cash.
Kartoum marks pretty distinctly the limit of the Arab races and the influence of the Mohammedan religion. Beyond, and toward the equator and Nile sources, are the negro and pagan. Fanaticism and race hatred, therefore, helped to inflame theevil passions which the slave trade invariably arouses. The business of the miscreants engaged in this detestable work was simply kidnapping and murder. The trade of the White Nile was purely slave-hunting. The trifling traffic in ivory and gums was a mere deception and sham, intended to cover the operations of the slaver. A marauding expedition would be openly fitted out at Kartoum, composed of some of the most atrocious ruffians in Africa and south-western Asia, with the scum of a few European cities. Their favorite mode of going to work was to take advantage of one of those wars which are constantly being waged between the tribes of Central Africa. If a war were not going on in the quarter which the slave-hunters had marked out for their raid, a quarrel was purposely fomented—at no time a difficult task in Africa. At dead of night the marauders with their black allies would steal down upon the doomed village. At a signal the huts are fired over the heads of the sleeping inmates, a volley of musketry is poured in, and the gang of desperadoes spring upon their victims. A scene of wild confusion and massacre follows, until all resistance has been relentlessly put down, and then the slave-catcher counts over and secures his human spoils. This is the first act of the bloody drama. Most probably, if the kidnappers think they have not made a large enough “haul,” they pick a quarrel with their allies, who are in their turn shot down, or overpowered and, manacled to their late enemies, are soon floating down the Nile in a slave dhow, on their way to the markets of Egypt or Turkey. The waste of human life, the stoppage of industry and honest trade, the demoralization of the whole region within reach of the raiders, the detestable cruelties and crimes practised on the helpless captives on the journey down the river, on the caravan route across the desert, or in the stifling dens where they are lodged at the slave depots and markets, represent an enormous total of human misery.
SLAVE HUNTER AND VICTIMS.
Many will remember the efforts of Colonel Gordon, whom the Khedive made a Pasha, and also a Governor General of the Soudan, at the capital Kartoum, to suppress this nefarious traffic. And it will also be remembered how in the late revolt againstEgyptian authority, led by El Mahdi, Colonel Gordon again headed a forlorn hope to Kartoum, with the hope that he could stay the rising fanatical tide, or at least control it, so as to prevent a fresh recognition of slave stealers. He fell a victim to his philanthropic views, and was murdered in the streets of the city he went to redeem.
We have already made the reader acquainted with the heroic and more successful efforts of Colonel Baker, Pasha, in the same direction. He was not so much of a religious enthusiast as Colonel Gordon, did not rely on fate, but thought an imposing, organized force the best way to strike terror into these piratical traders, and at the same time inspire the negro races with better views of self protection. In the long and brilliant record which Colonel Baker made in Africa, the honors he gathered as a military hero bent on suppressing the slave trade will ever be divided evenly with those acquired as a dauntless traveller and accurate scientific observer.
Let it not be thought that slave catching and selling is now extinct. True, the care exercised in the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, makes it difficult to run slave cargoes into Arabia and the further east. True, Baker’s expedition broke up a force of some two thousand organized kidnappers on the Upper White Nile, but these piratical adventurers are still abroad in more obscure paths and compelled to rely more on guile and cunning than on force for securing their prey.
But let us pursue our journey from Kartoum toward the “Springs of the Nile.” We do not take the Blue Nile. That comes down from the east, and the Abyssinian mountains. We take the White Nile, which is the true Nile, and comes up from the south or southwest. And we must suppose we are going along with Colonel Baker on his first journey, which was one in search of the Nile sources. It was a scientific tour, and not an armed one like his second expedition.
Entering the White Nile, we plunge into a new world—a region whose climate and animal and vegetable life, in brief, whose whole aspect and nature, are totally unlike those of the desert which stretches up to the walls of Kartoum. We arewithin the zone of regular rainfall, an intermediate region that extends to the margin of the great lakes, where we meet with the equatorial belt of perennial rains. Henceforth we have not only heat but moisture acting upon the face of nature.
SWAMPS OF THE WHITE NILE.
One may determine which of the two climates is the more tolerable by considering whether he would prefer to be roasted or stewed. The traveller would find it hard to decide whether the desert or the swamp is the greater bar to his advance. Every mile of progress marks an increase of dampness and of warmth. First of all, we pass through the great mimosa forest, which extends, belt-like, almost across the continent, marking the confines of the Sahara and the Soudan. The reader must not imagine a dense girdle of tall trees and tangled undergrowth, but a park-like country, with wide glades between clumps andlines of thorny shrubbery. The mimosa, or Arabian acacia—the tree from which the gum-arabic of commerce is extracted—has assigned to it the out-post duty in the struggle between tropical luxuriance and desert drought. By and by it gives place to the ambatch as the characteristic tree of the Nile. The margin of the river becomes marshy and reedy. The water encroaches on the land and the land on the water. The muddy stream rolls lazily along between high walls of rank vegetation, and bears whole islands of intertwisted leaves, roots and stems on its bosom, very much as an Arctic strait bears its acres of ice floes. It breaks up into tortuous channels that lead everywhere and nowhere. A nearly vertical sun shines down on the voyager as he slowly toils up stream. Scarcely a breath of air stirs to blow away the malarious mists or fill a drooping sail. Mosquitoes are numerous, and insatiate for blood.
Day thus follows day with nothing to break the monotony except now and then the appearance of a hippopotamus, rising snortingly to the surface, a crocodile with his vicious jaws, or, where the land is solid, a buffalo pushing his head through the reeds to take a drink. The true river margin is invisible except from the boat’s masts over the head of the tall papyrus. Even could we reach it, we would wish ourselves back again, for of all the growth of this dismal swamp man is the most repulsive. The Dinka tribes of the White Nile are among the lowest in the scale of human beings. They are naked, both as to clothing and moral qualities. The Shillooks are a finer race physically, but inveterate pirates and murderers.
In the midst of this swampy region the Nile receives another important tributary from the mountains of Southern Abyssinia. It is the Sobat which, Speke says, “runs for a seven days’ journey through a forest so dense as to completely exclude the rays of the sun.”
Above its mouth we must be prepared to meet the greatest of all the obstructions of the Nile. Here are many small affluents from both east and west, and here is a vast stretch of marsh through which the waters soak as through a sponge. In the centre of this “sponge” tract is a small lake—Lake No.But to reach it or emerge from it again, by means of the labyrinthine channels, is a work of great difficulty. The “sponge” is a thick coating of roots, grasses and stems matted together so as to conceal the waters, yet open enough for them to percolate through. It may be ventured upon by human feet, and in many places supports quite a vegetation. But the traveller is in constant danger of falling through, to say nothing of the danger from various animals. It was through this “sponge” that Colonel Baker, in his second Nile expedition, managed to cut a canal, through which was dragged the first steamer that ever floated on the head waters of the great river.
CROSSING A SPONGE.
Having passed this obstacle the journey is easier to Gondokoro, where the land is firm. Twenty-three years ago Gondokoro was a collection of grass huts in the midst of an untroddenwilderness, and surrounded by barbarous and hostile tribes. It has since been made an Egyptian military station and named Ismailia.
Though the spot is not inviting except as it affords you rest after your hardships, yet it is the scene of an interesting episode in the history of African exploration. Speke and Grant had started on their memorable trip from Zanzibar in 1861. Colonel Baker and his wife had started up the Nile for its sources in the same year. Now it is February, 1863. A travel stained caravan, with two white men at its head, comes down the high ground back of the station. They quicken their pace and enter the village with shouts, waving of flags and firing of musketry. It is Speke and Grant on their return trip, with the secret of the Nile in their keeping.
On their long tramp they had visited strange peoples and countries, and by courage and tact had escaped unharmed from a number of difficulties and perils. They had traced the one shore of that vast reservoir of fresh water under the Equator which Speke had sighted on a previous expedition, and had named Victoria Nyanza. They had seen this beautiful equatorial reservoir discharging its surplus waters northward over the picturesque Ripon Falls, and knew that they were in possession of the secret which all the world had sought from the beginning.
Lower down, at the Karuma Falls, they were compelled to leave the stream, which they now felt sure was the Nile. Crossing to the right bank, they struck across the country, northward, and in a direct line for Gondokoro. Here they caught sight of the furthest outpost of Egyptian exploration, and again gladly looked on the river that was to bear them down to the Mediterranean.
By a curious coincidence, the first Englishman who had penetrated so far to the southward, was at that moment in Gondokoro. Samuel Baker and his wife were interrupted in their preparations for their journey to the Nile sources by the noise of the approaching party, and they rode out to see what all the hubbub meant. Four people from a distant nook of Europe met in the heart of Africa; and as they clasped hands, the hoarysecret of the Nile was unriddled! All of them had numberless difficulties before as well as behind them; but their hearts were undismayed, and swelled only with pride at what had been accomplished for science and for their native land. The travellers from Zanzibar bore the marks of their long journey—“battered and torn, but sound and seaworthy.” “Speke,” Baker tells us, “appeared the more worn of the two; he was excessively lean, but in reality in good tough condition. He had walked the whole way from Zanzibar, never having once ridden during the weary march. Grant was in honorable rags, his bare knees projecting through the remnants of trousers that were an exhibition of rough industry in tailor-work. He was looking tired and feverish, but both men had a fire in the eye that showed the spirit that had led them through.” The first greetings over, Baker’s earliest question was: Was there no leaf of the laurel reserved for him? Yes; there was. Below the Karuma Falls, Speke and Grant had been informed the stream from the Victoria Nyanza fell into and almost immediately emerged again from another lake, the Luta Nzigé. This therefore might be the ultimate reservoir of the Nile waters. No European had ever seen or heard of this basin before. Baker determined it should be his prize.
But now we meet a new class of obstacles as we undertake a land journey into intertropical Africa. There is no longer, as in the desert, danger from thirst and starvation, for game abounds, and we are in some degree out of the interminable swamps of river navigation. But a small army of porters must be got together. They must be drilled, and preparations must be made for feeding them. True, some explorers have gone well nigh alone. But it is not best. Stanley always travelled with one to two hundred natives, and quite successfully.
And these natives are by no means easy to handle. They are ready to make bargains, but are panicky and often desert, or, what is worse, take advantage of any relaxation of discipline to rise in mutiny. Their leader must be stern of will, yet kind and good-natured, wise as a serpent and watchful as a hawk. When a start is made, difficulties accumulate. You must expectincredible rainfalls, and an amazing growth of vegetation. Then in the dry season, which is hardly more than two to three months in a year, the shrubs and grasses are burned up far and wide.