CHAPTER III.
HOW THE NILE QUESTION STOOD IN THE YEAR
OF GRACE 1856.

Αὐτὴ μεν ἤδε τῆς περιῤῥύτου χθονος.

This is the finial of th’ encircling earth.

Soph. Phil.

In this chapter I propose briefly to place before the reader the various shiftings of opinion touching the Nile Sources, and especially to show what had been done for Zanzibar and her coast by the theoretical and practical men of Europe between A.D. 1825 and the time of our landing on the Sawáhil, or East African shores.

The details given to Marinus of Tyre by the Arabian merchants, and their verification by the obscure Diogenes, together with the notices of the African lakes on the lower part of the Upper Nile, brought home about A.D. 60 by Nero’s exploring Centurions, were never wholly forgotten by Europe, which thus unlearned to derive with Herodotus the Nile from Western Africa.[[12]] As the pages of Marco Polo show, not to quote the voyage of ‘Sinbad the Sailor,’ Arabs and Persians still frequented these shores; and the Hindu Banyans, established from time immemorial upon the Zanzibar coast, had diffused throughout India some information touching the wealthy land. The veteran geographer of Africa, Mr James Macqueen, has commented upon the curious fact that the Padmavan of Lieut. Francis Wilford (vol. iii. of the old Asiatic Researches, ‘Course of the River Cali,’ as supposed to be derived from the Puranas) is represented by the beds of floating water-lilies crossed by Captains Speke and Grant, and upon the resemblance between the Amara, or Lake of the Gods, with the Amara people on the N. E. of the so-called Nyanza Lake. These, however, appear to be mere coincidences, or at best the results of tales learned upon the coast by the Hindu trader. Before leaving Bombay I applied to that eminent Sanskritist the Rev. J. Wilson, D.D., for any notices of East Africa which might occur in the sacred writings of the Hindus. He replied that there were none; and I had long before learned that Col. Wilford himself had acknowledged his pandit to have been an impudent impostor.

At the end of the 15th century came the Portuguese explorers, with Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy, in their hands, and followed by a multitude of soldiers, merchants, and missionaries, who invested the intertropical maritime regions of Africa, east and west. The first enthusiasm, however, soon passed away. The Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch, by the English, and by the French; whilst Ptolemy and the Periplus were ousted by Pigafetta, Dapper, and other false improvers of their doctrines. The Ptolemeian Lakes were marched about and counter-marched in every possible way. The ‘Mountain of the Moon,’ prolonged across Africa under the name Jebel Kumri, really became ‘Lunatic Mountains.’ The change from good to bad geography is well illustrated by two charts published in 1860, by H. E. the Conde de Lavradio. The first is the fac-simile of a map in the British Museum, by Diogo Homem, in 1558. It makes the Nile spring from two great reservoirs. But the second, bearing the name of Antonio Sances (1623), already reduces these lakes to one central Caspian, which sends forth the Nile, the Congo, and the Zambeze, and which, greatly shrunken, still deforms our maps under the name of Marave. Similarly, the ‘Complete System of Geography,’ by Emanuel Bowen (1747), places the Zambre Lake in S. lat. 4°-11°, the ‘centre from which proceed all the rivers in this part of Africa,’ including the Nile.

How popular the subject continued to be may be guessed from the fact that Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), cast his African reading into a favourite form with him, the ‘Adventures of Captain Singleton.’ He lands his hero about March, 1701, a little south of Cape Delgado, causes him to cross several seas and rivers, the latter often flowing northwards, and after a year’s wandering, brings him out at the Dutch settlements on the Gold Coast.

Upon the general question of modern Nile literature the curious reader will consult the well-studied writings of M. Vivien de Saint-Martin. The valuable paper ‘On the Knowledge the Ancients possessed of the Sources of the Nile,’ by my friend W. S. W. Vaux (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. viii., New Series), treats of exploration up the river, beginning from the Ionian colony, established in the upper river by Psammetichus (circa A.C. 600), and extending to the present day. The learned article by Mr John Hogg, ‘On some old Maps of Africa, in which certain of the Central and Equatorial Lakes are laid down in nearly their true positions,’[[13]] (Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. viii.), supplies a compendium of old cartography.

I proceed now to the practical part of this chapter, namely, the actual visits of inspection to Zanzibar, and their results. Until the end of the last century, our knowledge was derived almost entirely from those ‘domini Orientalis Africæ,’ the Portuguese. The few exceptions were Sir James Lancaster, who opened to the English the Orient seas. He wintered at the island in 1591; Captain Alexander Hamilton (new account of the East Indies, 1688-1723, Hakluyt’s Collection, viii. 258); and M. Saulnier de Mondevit, commanding the king’s Corvette, La Prévoyance. The latter, who, in 1786, visited the principal points of Zanzibar, published a chart with ‘Observations sur la côte du Zangueibar’ (Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, vol. vi.), and recommended a French establishment at ‘Mongalo.’