To this point, where the river becomes navigable for steamers, a common road or railway of three hundred miles in length might be easily constructed from Sierra Leone; and it is a little surprising that Great Britain, with her solicitude to reach the interior, should not have been tempted by the fertility, gold mines, and navigable waters in the rear of Sierra Leone, so well pictured by Caillié, to open at least a common highway to the Niger, an enterprise which might be effected for fifty thousand pounds. Although this may be so easily accomplished, the principal route to the interior of Africa is still the caravan track from Tripoli through the Desert, requiring three months by a hazardous and most fatiguing journey of fifteen hundred miles. The first movement for a road to the interior has been recently made in Yarriba, by T.J. Bowen, the American Baptist missionary, who pronounces it to be the prerequisite to civilization and Christianity.
Caillié readied the Niger in May, just as the rainy reason commenced, but, finding no facilities for descending the stream, he proceeded to the southwest, crossed many of its affluents, traversed a rich country, and, having exposed himself to the fever and met with many detentions, finally embarked in the succeeding March at Djenne, in a vessel of seventy tons burden, for Timbuctoo. He describes this vessel as one hundred feet in length, fourteen feet broad, and drawing seven feet of water. It was laden with rice, millet, and cotton, and manned by twenty-one men, who propelled the frail bark by poles and paddles. With a flotilla of sixty of these vessels he descended the Niger several hundred miles to Timbuctoo. He speaks of the river as varying from half to three-fourths of a mile in width, annually overflowing its banks and irrigating a large basin generally destitute of trees. After paying toll to the Tasaareks, a Moorish tribe, on the way, and losing one of the flotilla, he landed safely at Timbuctoo, and probably was the first European who visited that remote city, although Adams, an American sailor wrecked on the coast, claims to have been carried there before as a captive.
From the narratives of Park, Clapperton, Lander, and Caillié, confirmed by Bairkie and Barth, the latter of whom explored the banks of the Niger from Timbuctoo to Boussa, it has been ascertained to be a noble stream, navigable for nearly twenty-five hundred miles, with an average width of more than half a mile, and an average depth of three fathoms, —comparing favorably with our own Mississippi. There appears to be but one portion of the stream difficult for navigation, and that is the portion from Yaouri to Lagaba, a distance of eighty miles. In this space are several reefs and ledges, mostly bare at low water, and the river is narrowed in width by mountains on either side; but in the wet season it overflows its banks at this point, and is then navigated by the larger class of canoes. There can be little doubt that it is susceptible of navigation above and below by the largest class of river steamers, and that the rapids themselves may in the higher stages of water be ascended by the American high-pressure steamers which navigate our Western rivers, drawing, as they do in low stages of the Ohio and Missouri, but sixteen to eighteen inches.
As soon as it was ascertained that the Niger reached the ocean in the Bight of Benin, and that its upper waters had been navigated by Caillié and Park, a private association, aided by the British government, fitted out a brig and several steamers, with a large party of scientific men, who, in 1833, entered the Niger from the sea.
Great Britain, though enterprising and persevering, is slow in adapting means to ends, and made a series of mistakes in her successive expeditions, which might have been avoided, if she would have condescended to profit by the experience of her children on this side of the Atlantic.
The expedition of 1833 was deficient in many things. The power and speed of the steamers were insufficient, their draught of water too great, and they were so long delayed in their outfit and in their sea-voyage that they found the river falling, and were detained by shoals and sand-bars. The accommodations were unsuitable; and the men, exposed to a bad atmosphere among the mangroves at the mouth of the river, and confined in the holds of the vessels, were attacked by fever, and but ten of them survived. The expedition, however, succeeded in reaching Rabba, on the Niger, five hundred miles from the sea, ascended the Benue, eighty miles above the confluence, and charts were made and soundings taken for the distance explored.
In 1842 the British government made a new effort to explore the Niger, and built for that purpose three iron steamers, the Wilberforce, Albert, and Soudan, vessels of one hundred to one hundred and thirty-nine feet in length. The error committed in the first expedition, of too great draught, was avoided; but the steamers had so little power and keel that their voyage to the Niger was both tedious and hazardous, and their speed was found insufficient to make more than three knots per hour against the current of the river. Arriving on the coast late in the season, they were unable to ascend above the points already explored, and the officers and men, suffering from the tedious navigation, close cabins, and effluvia from the falling river, lost one-fourth of their number by fever, while the African Kroomen, accustomed to the climate and sleeping on the open deck, enjoyed perfect health. It was the intention of government to establish a model farm and mission at the confluence of the Niger and Benue; but the officers, discouraged by sickness, abandoned their original purpose, and the expedition proved another failure, involving a loss of at least sixty thousand pounds.
After the lapse of twelve years, it was ascertained that private steamers and sailing vessels were resorting to the Niger, and that an active trade was springing up in palm-oil, the trees producing which fringe the banks of the river for some hundreds of miles from the sea; and in 1853, a Liverpool merchant, McGregor Laird, who had accompanied the former expedition, fitted out, with the aid of government, the Pleiad steamer for a voyage up the Niger.
One would imagine that by this time the British government would have corrected their former errors; and a part were corrected. The speed of this steamer surpassed that of her predecessors, and her draught did not exceed five feet. She was well provided with officers, and a crew of native Kroomen from the coast; and she was supplied with ample stores of quinine. But, singular as it may appear, this steamer, destined, to ascend the great rivers up which the former expedition found a strong breeze flowing daily, was not furnished with a sail; and although the banks of the Niger were lined with forest-trees, and the supply of coal was sufficient for a few days only, not a single axe or saw was provided for cutting wood, and the Kroomen hired from the coast were compelled to trim off with shingle-hatchets nearly all the fuel used in ascending the river,—and in descending, the steamer was obliged to drift down with the current. Moreover, she was but one hundred feet in length, with an engine and boiler occupying thirty feet of her bold,—thus leaving but thirty-five feet at each end for officers, men, and stores. Neither state-room, cabin, nor awning was provided on deck to shelter the crew from an African sun.
With all these deficiencies, however, they achieved a partial triumph. Entering the river in July, they ascended the southern branch, now known as the Benue, for a distance of seven hundred miles from the sea, reaching Adamawa, a Mahometan state of the Soudan. On the fifteenth of August they encountered the rise of waters, and found the Benue nearly a mile in width and from one to three fathoms in depth. They observed it overflowing its banks for miles and irrigatin extensive and fertile plains to the depth of several feet, and saw reason to believe that this river, which flows westerly from the interior, may be navigated at least one thousand miles from the sea. As Dr. Barth visited it at a city several hundred miles above the point reached by the Pleiad, and found it flowing with a wide and deep current, it may be regarded as the gateway into the interior of Africa.