Kartoum marks pretty distinctly the limit of the Arab races and the influence of the Mohammedan religion. Beyond, and toward the equator and Nile sources, are the negro and pagan. Fanaticism and race hatred, therefore, helped to inflame the
evil passions which the slave trade invariably arouses. The business of the miscreants engaged in this detestable work was simply kidnapping and murder. The trade of the White Nile was purely slave-hunting. The trifling traffic in ivory and gums was a mere deception and sham, intended to cover the operations of the slaver. A marauding expedition would be openly fitted out at Kartoum, composed of some of the most atrocious ruffians in Africa and south-western Asia, with the scum of a few European cities. Their favorite mode of going to work was to take advantage of one of those wars which are constantly being waged between the tribes of Central Africa. If a war were not going on in the quarter which the slave-hunters had marked out for their raid, a quarrel was purposely fomented—at no time a difficult task in Africa. At dead of night the marauders with their black allies would steal down upon the doomed village. At a signal the huts are fired over the heads of the sleeping inmates, a volley of musketry is poured in, and the gang of desperadoes spring upon their victims. A scene of wild confusion and massacre follows, until all resistance has been relentlessly put down, and then the slave-catcher counts over and secures his human spoils. This is the first act of the bloody drama. Most probably, if the kidnappers think they have not made a large enough “haul,” they pick a quarrel with their allies, who are in their turn shot down, or overpowered and, manacled to their late enemies, are soon floating down the Nile in a slave dhow, on their way to the markets of Egypt or Turkey. The waste of human life, the stoppage of industry and honest trade, the demoralization of the whole region within reach of the raiders, the detestable cruelties and crimes practised on the helpless captives on the journey down the river, on the caravan route across the desert, or in the stifling dens where they are lodged at the slave depots and markets, represent an enormous total of human misery.
SLAVE HUNTER AND VICTIMS.
Many will remember the efforts of Colonel Gordon, whom the Khedive made a Pasha, and also a Governor General of the Soudan, at the capital Kartoum, to suppress this nefarious traffic. And it will also be remembered how in the late revolt against
Egyptian authority, led by El Mahdi, Colonel Gordon again headed a forlorn hope to Kartoum, with the hope that he could stay the rising fanatical tide, or at least control it, so as to prevent a fresh recognition of slave stealers. He fell a victim to his philanthropic views, and was murdered in the streets of the city he went to redeem.
We have already made the reader acquainted with the heroic and more successful efforts of Colonel Baker, Pasha, in the same direction. He was not so much of a religious enthusiast as Colonel Gordon, did not rely on fate, but thought an imposing, organized force the best way to strike terror into these piratical traders, and at the same time inspire the negro races with better views of self protection. In the long and brilliant record which Colonel Baker made in Africa, the honors he gathered as a military hero bent on suppressing the slave trade will ever be divided evenly with those acquired as a dauntless traveller and accurate scientific observer.
Let it not be thought that slave catching and selling is now extinct. True, the care exercised in the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, makes it difficult to run slave cargoes into Arabia and the further east. True, Baker’s expedition broke up a force of some two thousand organized kidnappers on the Upper White Nile, but these piratical adventurers are still abroad in more obscure paths and compelled to rely more on guile and cunning than on force for securing their prey.
But let us pursue our journey from Kartoum toward the “Springs of the Nile.” We do not take the Blue Nile. That comes down from the east, and the Abyssinian mountains. We take the White Nile, which is the true Nile, and comes up from the south or southwest. And we must suppose we are going along with Colonel Baker on his first journey, which was one in search of the Nile sources. It was a scientific tour, and not an armed one like his second expedition.
Entering the White Nile, we plunge into a new world—a region whose climate and animal and vegetable life, in brief, whose whole aspect and nature, are totally unlike those of the desert which stretches up to the walls of Kartoum. We are