JOURNAL
OF
AN EXCURSION,
ETC. ETC.
PREFATORY NOTICE
TO THE
Narrative of Captain Clapperton’s Journey from Kouka to Sackatoo.
The Manuscript of the following Journal was placed in my hands by Captain Clapperton, on his departure from England, with a request that I would see it through the press, whenever the account of the recent mission to Central Africa should be published. In complying with this request, I have carefully abstained from altering a sentiment, or even an expression, and rarely had occasion to add, omit, or change, a single word; so that my easy task has been confined to the mere ordinary correction of the press.
Captain Clapperton, like Major Denham, as will appear from his Journal, makes no pretensions to the systematic knowledge of natural history. They were both excellent pioneers of discovery, and capable of ascertaining the latitude by observations of the heavenly bodies; and also to compute, to a certain degree of accuracy, the longitudes of the various places which they visited: and even this is no trifling advantage to geography, though it has but too commonly been neglected by travellers. By a strict attention to these points, by comparing them with the courses and distances travelled, and by Captain Clapperton’s frequent endeavours to verify the estimated results by lunar observations (though not much to be depended on by one observer, on shore), we may now be pretty well assured of the actual and relative positions of many places, which have hitherto been wholly dislocated and scattered at random on our best maps of Africa,—all of them bad enough,—and the situation of cities and towns have also been ascertained, whose names even had never before reached us.
The only traveller of the party, who was supposed to possess a competent knowledge of natural history, was Doctor Oudney; and he was unfortunately disabled from the pursuit of it by a protracted illness, which terminated in death. As so little appears in the present volume from the pen of Doctor Oudney, and as Captain Clapperton has stated (page 5) a wish expressed by that gentleman, a short time previous to his death, that “his papers should be put into the hands of Mr. Barrow, or Professor Jameson, provided the request meets with Earl Bathurst’s approbation,” I feel it necessary to say a few words on this subject. Nothing could have been more gratifying to me than to have undertaken and executed, to the best of my power, such a task: it is quite natural that I should have willingly done so, were it for no other reason than my having been instrumental in his appointment, from the strongest testimonials in his favour which I had received from Professor Jameson, whose acquirements in natural history stand so deservedly high in public estimation, as to entitle any recommendation from him to immediate attention. Unfortunately, however, for this branch of science, Doctor Oudney, at a very early stage of their journey, caught a severe cold, which fell on his lungs, and which rendered him, on their arrival in Bornou, nearly incapable of any exertion. It will be seen from Major Denham’s Narrative, how frequently and how seriously, not to say alarmingly, ill, he became from the first moment of their arrival in Bornou. In a letter addressed to Mr. Wilmot Horton, of the date of the 12th September, 1823, Doctor Oudney says, “I send you a simple itinerary from Fezzan here; that to the river Shary, and the borders of Soudan, and my remarks on Bornou, I must leave till another time. I cannot write long; one day’s labour in that way makes me ill for a week.”
No account of these journeys to the river Shary, and the borders of Soudan, appear among his papers; nor any materials respecting them, beyond what are contained in a very general account of the proceedings of the Mission, in an official letter addressed to the Secretary of State. The papers, delivered to me by Captain Clapperton, consisted of an account of an excursion, jointly performed by these gentlemen, from Mourzuk to Ghraat, the first town in the Tuarick country:—some remarks on the journey across the Great Desert, which appear not to have been written out fair:—and the rest, of mere scraps of vocabularies, rude sketches of the human face, detached and incomplete registers of the state of the temperature, and a number of letters to and from the Consul at Tripoli, respecting the pecuniary and other affairs of the mission, wholly uninteresting, and of which no use whatever could be made.
The Journey to Ghraat above mentioned, I have caused to be printed at the end of the Introductory Chapter, with which it appears to be partly connected, omitting some trifling details, of no interest whatever; and I requested Major Denham to add a few foot-notes, chiefly geological, to his own Journal across the Great Desert. It seems to have been well known to the party that Doctor Oudney could not possibly survive the journey into Soudan; and, indeed, he was well aware of it himself; but his zeal to accomplish all that could be done, would not suffer him to remain behind. It was that zeal which led him to undertake the journey to Ghraat, which not a little increased his disorder; for, to say the truth, he evidently was labouring, while in England, under a pectoral complaint; but when I told him so, and strongly advised him not to think of proceeding (as I had before done to his unfortunate predecessor Ritchie), he, like the latter, persisted that, being a medical man, he best knew his own constitution, and that a warm climate would best agree with it. Neither of them, however, seem to have calculated on the degree of fatigue, and the sudden changes of temperature, to which they were necessarily to be exposed.