Mehemet Ali, first viceroy of Egypt, pushed his conquest of the Soudan, a little south of it in 1839. He found the climate so unhealthy that he established a penal colony a little way up the White Nile, banishment to which was considered equivalent to death.
Says Sir Samuel Baker of Kartoum, on his second visit in 1869: “During my first visit in 1861, the population was 30,000. It is now reduced one-half, and nearly all the European residents have disappeared. And the change in the country between Berber and Kartoum is frightful. The river’s banks, formerly verdant with heavy crops, have become a wilderness. Villages, once crowded, have entirely disappeared. Irrigation has ceased. The nights, formerly discordant with the croaking of waterwheels, are now silent as death. Industry has vanished. Oppression has driven the inhabitants from the soil. It is all due to the Governor General of Soudan who, like a true Mohammedan, left his government to Providence while he increased the taxes. The population of the richest province of Soudan has fled oppression and abandoned the country. The greater portion have taken to the slave trade of the White Nile where, in their turn, they might trample on the rights of others, where, as they had been plundered, they might plunder.”
MADEMOISELLE TINNE.
The wilderness of fever-stricken marshes that line the White Nile long baffled the attempts of the most determined explorers to penetrate to the southward. At length “dry land” was reached again at Gondokoro, only five degrees from the equator. It in turn became an advanced position of Egyptian authority, a centre of mission enterprise, a half-way house where the traveller rested and equipped himself for new discoveries. From the base of Gondokoro, Petherick pursued his researches into the condition of the negro races of the Upper Nile; the Italian traveller, Miani, penetrated far towards the southwest, into the countries occupied by the Nyam-Nyam tribes, that singular region of dwarfs and cannibals; and Dr. Schweinfurth, Colonel Long, and Mdlle. Tinné followed up the search with magnificent results. Mdlle. Tinné, a brave Dutch lady, deserves special notice as having been perhaps the first European woman
who encountered the terrible hardships and perils of the explorer’s life in the cause of African discovery. She is far, however from being the last. The wives of two of the greatest pioneers in the work—Mrs. Livingstone and Lady Baker—accompanied
with a noble-minded resolution the steps of their husbands, the one along the banks of the Zambesi, and the other on the White Nile. Mdlle. Tinné and Mrs. Livingstone paid with their lives for their devotion, and are buried by the streams from whose waters they helped to raise the veil. Lady Baker has been more fortunate. Only a girl of seventeen when she rode by her husband’s side from Gondokoro, she lived to return to Europe where her name is inseparably linked with two great events of African history—the discovery of one of the great lakes of the Nile and the suppression of the slave traffic.
MRS. BAKER.
As already intimated, the Egyptian conquest and annexation of the Soudan country, and the bad government of it which followed, made the region of the White Nile the great man-hunting ground of Africa. The traffic was general when the modern travellers began their struggle to reach the equatorial lakes. Arab traders were the chief actors in these enterprises and they were joined by a motley crew of other races, not excepting most of the white and Christian races. If they were not directly under the patronage of the Egyptian authorities at Kartoum, they made it worth while for those authorities to keep a patronizing silence, by throwing annually into their treasury something handsome in the shape of cash.