1888.
June.
The Nile.
The arbitrariness of the modern map-maker is as bad as that of his predecessors. In a late German map, for instance, considered to be the best in Germany, there is a large bay removed altogether from the Victoria Nyanza, and a straight line, drawn by pure caprice, usurps the place of a very interesting and much indented coastline, explored by me in 1875. Speke’s Lake Urigi is jostled to the east, shunted to the north; Ukerewe is utterly out of order, and the Tanganika has a great bay named after a person who had followed in the steps of six preceding investigators. Lake Leopold II. narrowly escaped being sponged out because two Germans, Kund (?) and Tappenbeck, had lost their way, and could not find it; but in the meantime an English missionary visited it, and it was left in peace. English map-makers are quite as capricious.
This map, for instance, which has made such cruel and wicked changes of Homer, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and others, was published by Constable in 1819, in a fit of aggravated biliousness no doubt.
Hugh Murray, a compiler of African travels, published in London, 1818, a book called an ‘Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in Africa,’ and as he has been an industrious collator of testimony which the best authors of twenty centuries could furnish, I avail myself of his assistance. He says:
“Herodotus shows himself to have known the course of the Nile higher probably than it has been traced by any modern European.
“From Elephantine at the southern extremity of Egypt (Assouan) to Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia, was a journey of fifty-two days, and from thence an equal distance to the country of Automolos, or exiles,[14] making in all a hundred and four days’ journey. The regions deeper in the interior were known to him only by the very short narrative of the ‘Excursion of the Nassamones.’ The river to which the travellers were carried flowing to the eastward is believed to have been the Niger, though Herodotus conceived it to be the Nile. As it was proved by this data to proceed from the west, it appeared natural that this river was one of the main branches.
“Eratosthenes compared Africa to a trapezium, of which the Mediterranean coast formed one side, the Nile another, the southern coast the longest side, and the western coast the shortest side. So little were the ancients aware of its extent that Pliny pronounced it to be the least of the continents, and inferior to Europe. Upon the Nile, therefore, they measured the habitable world of Africa, and fixed its limit at the highest known point to which that river had been ascended. This is assigned about three thousand stadia (three or four hundred miles) beyond Meroe. They seem to have been fully aware of two great rivers rising from lakes and called the Astaboras and Astapus, of which the latter (White Nile) flows from the lake to the south, is swelled to a great height by summer rains and forms then almost the main body of the Nile.