SOURCES OF THE NILE.
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.