GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA.

Globe, Volume VI, Issue 688, 2 September 1876, Page 3

GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA.

{Pall Mall Gazette.) We are living in an age of surprises and discoveries, and some of those of a nature to change all the material relations which have hitherto governed the distiibution of the race over the earth’s surface. Seas once separated are joined by man’s labour ; deserts and steppes and lofty mountain ranges cease to oppose impassable barriers between nations. Iron roads traverse the Rocky Mountains as they have already pierced the Alps, linking together the Atlantic and Pacific by a direct Ime from shore to shore; while for the purposes of communication Liverpool and New York speak with each other across the ocean wilh the quickness of thought. Voyages of five months round tbs Cape to India and China

are now reduced to less than as many weeks. So rapid is progress in every field of human activity, that fact outruns anticipation, and the most active imagination lags behind in the march of events.

In no province can this be more truly said than of geographical discovery, especially in Central Africa. It was but yesterday that Lieutenant Cameron returned from a “ walk across Africa ” from sea to sea, and yet there has been time to hear of the circumnavigation of the Albert Nyanza, and the missing link required to unite the White Nile with its source in that inland sea of equatorial Africa has been found at last. How many ages of the world have succeeded each other since the first attempts to discover the sources of the Nile I When the Pharaohs ruled in Egypt and Ethiopia and built a city at Meroe after crossing the Nubian desert, efforts were made in this direction ; but there is no reason to believe that either the armies or the explorers of Pharaoh ever penetrated far into the country ; and whep Herodotus inquired of the priests for the sources of the Nile they had only a ridiculous story to him about its rising from four fountains between Egypt and Abyssinia, Diodorus Siculus at a much later date did not get any better information from the priests or philosophers of Memphis. When the Greeks entered the country and an exploring expedition was sent out to sail round Africa, they never penetrated to the source of the Nile. Neither the Persians nor the Phoenicians knew anything of inner Africa. The Romans did not succeed much better. Although Nero seat an exploring expedition up the Nile, it seems only to have reached the marshy country near Khartoum. They made the desert their southern frontier. In a word, the ancients knew little of inner Africa beyond such information as Ptolemy and Pliny collected—(picked up, it might have been, from slaves in Cairo or on the Barbary coast)—that the Nile proceeded from great lakes, and across the Sahara was another river running eastward. Nor was this state of ignorance much improved in later ages, when the Berbers were converted to Islam and camel caravans traversed the Sahara. Arab merchants settled, indeed, on the banks of the Niger, and then, as now, roamed from kingdom to kingdom ; but they contributed nothing to the knowledge of those inner regions of Central Africa. They converted the Soudan into “ a second-hand Asiatic possession," as Barth described it, and there they stopped. And now from that same Khartoum where the Romans were checked, Colonel Gordon’s progress in command of the present ruler of Egypt’s expeditionary forces has been steady and continuous until crowned with the triumph already mentioned. After establishing a chain of military posts from Lardo on the Upper Nile to Victoria Nyanza on the one hand, and Magungo on the Albert Nyanza on the other, he despatched Signor Gessi in two lifeboats. What this meant can only be realised when it is known that the lifeboats were each capable of containing sixty or seventy men; there was also one small steamer of 38 tons; and they all had to be moved in pieces by Colonel Gordon from Gondokoro to Dufle, above the Makedo Rapids, where they were put together by workmen obtained from Khartoum. With the two boats the Albert Nyanza was circumnavigated, and its exact dimensions determined. It was found to be 140 miles in length, with a width of 50 miles— considerably less than had been imagined; just as Lake Nyassa was recently found by absolute measurement to be nearly 100 miles longer than was supposed. The President of the Geographical Society rightly said at the last meeting that so important and rapid had been the discoveries of the last three or four years that a new map of Africa must be made, the present large diagram being no longer available as a record of our knowledge. If now we turn to the future, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great events are preparing, not only in the centre of this great continent, but in Africa generally. The Egyptian conquest of Darfur and Wadai has doubtless given, as Sir Henry Rawlinson pointed out lately, a great impetus to exploration in this direction. Not that there is any question as to these equatorial lakes being the feeders of the Nile and offering a direct line of water communication, however impeded by cataracts and other obstructions, from the Mediterranean to the great water system of Central Africa. So important a fact cannot be without fruitful results. Since so many interests are concerned, it cannot be doubted that within a few years great changes will be seen in the relations of Africa and the rest of the world, and in the condition of the mixed races in occupation of this vast continent. It is too early to write the history of African exploration, and it is too early to forecast its more immediate, much less its remote, consequences on the destinies of the negro race. Exploration is only yet in its first stage, and the practical results are wholly undeveloped. But now that discovery has opened out such a prospect of commerce and civilization by direct lines of communication (from the Mediterranean by the Nile, from the Indian Ocean by the Zambesi, and the South Atlantic by the Congo), it must engage serious attention. Not only are there great expeditious in progress—from the Nile under public and private control, Egyptian and English ; from the northeast coast under Italian auspices ; from the eist by Zanzibar, under Mr Stanley ; and from Zambesi by the Scotch Church Mission, but we now hear of an internationa congress of the geographical societies at Brussels at the invitation of the King of the Belgians, The project is still in the incipient stage probably, and the exact conditions are not yet determined under which these societies will be asked to contribute to an international understanding as to the best means of uniting to open up Central Africa to commerce and civilisation. But this much may safely be concluded, that from no one could such an invitation be more welcome than from the King who was ready to bear the whole charge of Lieutenant Cameron’s expedition while its duration and cost were uncertain. It is not necessary to adopt that distinguished officer’s sanguine estimate of the capabilities of the newly discovered regions in Central Africa, with their great lakes, their rich products both vegetable and mineral, and the possibility of uniting by a short canal of twenty to thirty miles across a flat country the two great rivers Congo and Zambesi. These are visions so vast as rather to startle and deter enterprise than to encourage it. It is enough that we now know by actual observation the natural capabilities of the country, both as regards its products and salubrity ; and that these are such as to hold out every encouragement for enterprise and permanent settlement on the highlands. ;