ADDRESS OF REV. J. W. HARDING.
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.