# Littell's Living Age/Volume 125/Issue 1609/The Heart of Africa and the Slave-Trade

From The Edinburgh Review.
THE HEART OF AFRICA AND THE SLAVE-TRADE.
In order to have a clear conception of the vast regions of which the works of Dr. Schweinfurth and Sir Samuel Baker treat, it is necessary that the reader should master the physical features of the country which forms what is commonly called the Basin of the Nile. Below Khartoum, situated at about 16° north lat., the stream of the Nile is a very simple matter. But at Khartoum itself the perplexities of its course at once begin, and the questions arise at that very spot which is the true main channel of that mighty river, and which are merely its affluents? The town to which we refer lies, as is well known, at the junction of the Blue Nile, the Nile of Bruce and Abyssinia flowing from the east, and the White Nile which joins its sister stream from the west. For a long period the Blue Nile was considered by geographers the true Nile, but as the horizon of knowledge was extended the White Nile was raised to that dignity, and after receiving another affluent from the eastward in the Sobat, was supposed, and is still supposed by most geographers, to be the main stream, flowing from the south-east by the name of the Bahr-el-Gebel, and traced by the recent discoveries of Baker and Speke and others as issuing from the Albert Nyanza Lake, into which, again, a stream flows from the Victoria Nyanza, called by Speke the White Nile. So much will be sufficient as to the course of the eastern stream of the Nile, the White Nile, and its affluents, and these are the rivers which traverse those south-eastern regions of the Nile Basin through which Baker travelled and campaigned. But besides the eastern or White Nile, there are a number of western affluents, which unite in the Gazelle River, which joins the White Nile just at the point where that stream is greatly impeded by great barriers and masses of weeds, which so choke the channel as to render it for some portion of the year almost impassable. This blocking of the White Nile, together with the force and volume of those western affluents which unite in the Gazelle, have lately revived discussion as to the main stream of the Nile; and some, among whom, though he does not positively say so, we think we can reckon Dr. Schweinfurth, have recently thought that the Djoor, which flows into the Gazelle at a spot called the Meshera or the Landing-Place in the Dinka territory, may, after all, be the main stream and the true Nile. On this vexed question we do not presume to offer an opinion: all that we wish to impress upon the reader is the fact that besides the White Nile and its eastern affluents, there are numerous streams flowing from the west, as the Bahr-el-Arab, the Tondy, the Rohl, and, though last not least, the Djoor, which, uniting in the short channel known as the Gazelle, find their way into the grass-grown stream of the White Nile, which, if its course becomes a little more blocked and choked by that luxuriant water vegetation, is threatened with extinction as a river, and with transformation into a series of lakes. As Baker's line of march lay along the eastern stream of the Nile, so Schweinfurth's discoveries were towards the west, and through the regions watered by the western affluents of the river which we have named above. It adds immensely to the importance and interest of those discoveries that in the course of his travels he passed out of the Nile Basin, and crossing its watershed, arrived the first of travellers from the north in a region where the streams flowed south to the shores of the Atlantic.
Having thus briefly explained the geographical features, so far as the Nile is conserned of the countries visited by each of our authors, we proceed to say that the two works which stand at the head of this article were the result of expeditions which traversed ​neighbouring regions of Central Africa with very different aims and objects. The first was a purely scientific journey made by a distinguished German naturalist, who, with great knowledge of his subject, but with comparatively slender resources, availed himself of the assistance of traders to forward and further him on his way. The other was a military expedition numbering at first many hundreds of men, and conveyed in a fleet of steamers and sailing-boats to Gondokoro on the White Nile, which was to be the headquarters of this little army. If we ask what was the object this force had in view, the command of which was formally granted by an express firman of the khedive to a distinguished traveller and elephant-hunter, with absolute power and the title of a pacha, that commander himself assures us that it was undertaken for the extirpation of that nefarious traffic in slaves, which he had discovered in his travels through the same regions to be the great bar to the civilization of Central Africa. This object is put forth on his title-page, professed in the first chapter of the book, and paraded, if we may use the expression, on page after page throughout these volumes. It was against the slave-trade, and the slave-trade alone, that Baker's expedition up the White Nile was planned after due deliberation by the khedive, and its command accepted by the traveller whose former travels in Africa in company with his heroic wife had proved him best fitted to lead a band of trained soldiers on a daring enterprise. We may say at once, while treating of the origin of the expedition, and of Baker's avowed singleness of purpose, that in all probability the motives of the Egyptian government in this matter were mixed; and that the acquisition of territory and the taming of barbarous neighbours were probably far greater recommendations in their eyes than any such philanthropic object as the suppression of that traffic in human flesh which, as we shall see afterwards, is, horrible as it may seem to the enlightened ears of Englishmen, a normal and even necessary condition of life in Upper Egypt and the Soudan. While writing this we do not mean to say that at Cairo there are not to be heard voices round the khedive's divan loudly decrying that iniquitous traffic as unworthy to exist on Egyptian soil; but, strange to say, those who use this language, returning to their houses and harems, find themselves surrounded by slaves, with whom, in spite and in the teeth of their protestations, even Lower Egypt is full. It is not wonderful therefore that, as the diahbeeah of the tourist and the traveller ascends the Nile, those outcries against the slave-trade gradually die away, until on arriving at Khartoum, the stranger is surprised to find that he is in the midst of a population whose daily bread is the traffic so stigmatized at Cairo; nay, more, that the very men so indignant against it when in presence of the khedive are not slow to receive backsheesh from the traders in that emporium who were at first the originators and are still the propagators of this accursed commerce.
After these preliminary observations, we propose to consider these two works in the order of time, and to see what both the naturalist and the pacha accomplished in their respective expeditions. Starting with very different views and traversing very divergent paths, it will be seen that they both meet at last in one common and outspoken declaration, that the slave-trade is the curse of Central Africa, and that before it and the ivory-trade with which it is inseparably connected, all other branches of trade dwindle and decay; so that regions blessed by Providence with abundant populations and most exuberant fertility produce, under the present system of trade at Khartoum, little else but slaves, and the ivory which without slaves it is impossible to procure. To begin then with Dr. Schweinfurth. To use his own words, he was "already no novice on African soil" when he prepared in the summer of 1868 for the great journey described in these two bulky and beautifully illustrated volumes. Born at Riga in 1836, the son of a merchant, he studied at Heidelberg and Berlin, and from his boyhood devoted himself to botany. In 1860, when the collections of the young ​Baron von Barnim, who had fallen a victim to the climate while travelling on the tipper Nile, were brought home, they were placed in the young Schweinfurth's hands, and their examination roused in his mind what he well calls "the blameless avarice of a plant-hunter," and the hope that he too might one day make discoveries in his favourite science. To such a man where there is a will there is always a way, and in 1863 we find him in Egypt and penetrating as far as Khartoum after skirting the Highlands of Abyssinia. Thence he returned, with an empty purse indeed, but a splendid collection of plants, in 1866. He could not, however, remain at home. He soon submitted a plan to the Royal Academy of Science at Berlin for the botanical exploration of the equatorial regions lying west of the Nile. His proposals were accepted, and in 1868, with a grant from the Humboldt Institution, he landed in Egypt to pursue his researches. "During three years," says Mr. Winwood Reade in his Introduction, "he was absent in the heart of Africa," and even before he had returned, his name was famous in Europe and America. Travelling not in the footsteps of Baker, but in a more westerly direction, he reached the neighbourhood of Baker's lake, passing through the country of the Niam Niam, and visiting the unknown kingdom of Monbuttoo. As an explorer he stands in the highest rank, and deserves to be classed with Mungo Park, Denham, and Clapperton, Livingstone, Burton, Speke and Grant, Barth and Rohlfs. Two qualifications he possessed which no other African traveller can claim to have combined. He was a scientific botanist and an excellent draughtsman, while in these most necessary acquirements for a traveller others have been mere amateurs. If we are to sum up briefly the scientific results of his discoveries, we may say that by him the limits of the Nile Basin have been finally settled, the existence of a pigmy race in these regions, so much in dispute since the days of Herodotus, has been proved, while in the skin girdles of the Niam Niam and the Monbuttoo we see how the fable of a tail-bearing race in Central Africa has arisen. That he found not one but several tribes incorrigible cannibals was to be expected; but his evidence on this fact outweighs, by its authority and gravity, the confused accounts of Du Chaillu. These, together with a great mass of geographical and ethnological discoveries, are what the scientific world owes to the endurance and learning of this most accomplished naturalist.
If it be asked how it was that Schweinfurth accomplished so much, while others in these regions have had such small success, the answer is ready. He did at Khartoum as they do at Khartoum. It is true that while at Alexandria and Cairo he armed himself with special orders from the prime minister of the viceroy, by which the governor of Khartoum was to superintend any contracts he might make with the merchants, and to take care that any obligations undertaken by any member of that body should be fulfilled; but his former experience of that place and its atmosphere had convinced Schwelnfurth that if he was to penetrate into those regions west of the Nile, it must be by attaching himself to some one of those traders when proceeding on an ivory-expedition, who would then pass him on from tribe to tribe with which he had relations, and even accompany him himself on his adventurous journey. Government help might forward him just to the verge of the countries which he wished to explore, but beyond that point all travellers would be dependent on the merchants whose greed of gain led them as pioneers into those regions over which the regular government of Egypt had no control. The neglect of this alliance with the trading interest of Khartoum had caused the failure of many expeditions fitted out at a great sacrifice of life and money. We pass over the journey from Cairo to Khartoum, which was made like Baker by going by sea from Suez to Suakin on the Red Sea, and thence, cutting across the country to Berber on the Upper Nile. Suffice it to say that Schweinfurth reached Khartoum by boat on Nov. 1, 1868, and strong in his special recommendations of ​the Egyptian government, and backed by the support of Herr Duisberg, the vice-consul of the North German Confederation, and, though last not least, by the powerful Djaffer Pacha, governor-general of the Soudan, proceeded to make his arrangements with the traders. In this indeed he had little choice. The governor-general settled it all, and fixed on Ghattas, an ivory-trader and Coptic Christian, as the traveller's guide into the regions of Western Africa. Truth to say, Ghattas would rather have declined the doubtful honour. If anything happened to the naturalist thus confided to his hands, he would have to answer for it, and as he was the richest of the ivory-traders, the government would "have the most legitimate reasons for proceeding to the confiscation of his estates." Well, therefore, in this part of his story does Schweinfurth call Ghattas "unlucky."
Our readers must bear with us if we tell them a little more about these ivory-traders, of whom Ghattas, the only Christian, by the way, among them was the chief. The trade, according to Schweinfurth, is in the hands of some six great, assisted by about twelve minor, merchants, and for some years the total value of the ivory exported from Khartoum has not exceeded 500,000 Maria Theresa dollars, and even that amount would decrease were it not that the traders year by year penetrate farther and farther into Central Africa. In this pursuit the traders, under the protection of an armed guard procured from Khartoum, have divided the vast regions in and about the Nile Basin among themselves by mutual understanding, and have established camps or depots, called seribas by Schweinfurth, and Zareebas by Baker, in the territory thus apportioned, in which each trader deposits his ivory, ammunition, goods for barter, and supplies of food. These camps are in fact palisaded villages in which the superintendents and surbordinates of the traders permanently reside. Between these settlements and Khartoum the communication is kept open by annual expeditions, those up the Nile carrying goods for barter and stores, and those down stream bringing back that ivory which costs such immense trouble to procure, besides many a cargo of slaves. At this point we may make one remark on a question to which we shall return. If the ivory thus brought back, with infinite toil and expenditure both of labour and life, produces so little when it is at last delivered at Khartoum why in the world do these traders continue to traffic in it? For 500,000 dollars can be a sum by no means equivalent to their trouble and outlay. In a word, the ivory-trade must be attended with other advantages, or it would no longer be worth the while of the traders to carry it on. But to return to our traveller. He was consigned, as we have seen, to Ghattas, and in the boats of that trader he was to begin his journey up the White Nile, and thence along the Gazelle River to the Meshera, where his river journey was to cease. Though the unlucky Ghattas had engaged for a substantial consideration to supply the traveller with the means of subsistence and to furnish him with bearers and a guard, as well as a boat for the river journey, Schweinfurth resolved to take with him six Nubians as his personal servants, who had already travelled with Petherick and other Europeans on the Upper Nile.
At length, all contracts and preparations over, the journey began on Jan. 5, 1869. On that day Schweinfurth started with thirty-two souls in his boat, eight of whom were boatmen, fifteen so-called soldiers as a guard, and two women slaves, whose hard lot it was to grind corn incessantly, a fact which we only mention to show how soon this institution of slavery, as the Americans used to call it, makes its appearance in African travel. The voyage up the White Nile has been frequently described; we pass rapidly therefore over this part of the expedition, and only pause at Fashoda in the Shillook country, where the Egyptian government had a governor or mudir, and a fort which, in 1869, was the Ultima Thule of Egyptian rule. Since then, in 1871, the whole Shillook country has been annexed to Egypt, which at the present moment is extending its rule by the conquest of Darfour under Gordon, the successor of Sir Samuel Baker. According to Schweinfurth, the Shillook country is one of the most densely peopled of the Nile regions, the inhabitants numbering more than a million souls, while in the boundless acacia forests the finest gum is produced in such quantities that a man might with the greatest ease collect a hundredweight in a day. Not once, however, did our botanist see anyone engaged in that pursuit. As the Roman people clamoured alone for pattem et circenses, so slaves and ivory are the sole articles demanded by Khartoum trade, and for them the most valuable gums and grain and oil and ​drugs are entirely neglected. Above Fashoda one great difficulty of the White Nile began. They had passed the mouth of the Giraffe River, one of the affluents or channels of the White Nile to the east, when on February 6th Dr. Schweinfurth saw his first papyrus, an event which to him, botanist as he was, "elevated the day into a festival." On the same day he met for the first time a man to whom he was indebted more than anyone else for his African discoveries; this was a Nubian, Mohammed Aboo Sammat by name, an ivory-trader bound up the Gazelle, who now joined Ghattas' expedition with a single boat. But though the first papyrus was a botanical festival to Schweinfurth it was the beginning of trouble to the sailors and traders, and to them was anything but a festival, marking as it did the commencement of those obstructions to Nile-navigation which both before and after Schweinfurth's journey have been so terrible to travellers. From whatever reason all the streams and channels of the Nile regions have been of late years periodically blocked by great rafts of river weeds, which so overgrow the stream that it dwindles away to the depth of a foot or two. Between these enormous rafts, which every year shift their position, there are lakes or oases of water, in which it is dammed up, until even on the main stream of the White Nile, as in Baker's expedition in 1870-71, no practicable channel was to be found, and he had to return foiled for a while, till at the end of the year he broke through these gigantic grass barriers, called by Schweinfurth the Sett, by almost superhuman exertions in which the combined efforts of his army were strained to the uttermost. Our naturalist's expedition was not foiled, and it did not find the Sett so terrible, but it was bad enough. "On February 8th," he writes, "began our actual conflict with this world of weeds. … The pilots were soon absolutely at a loss to determine by which channel they ought to proceed, and two hundred of our people, sailors and soldiers, were obliged to tug with ropes for hours together to pull through one boat after another." In this laborious fashion they toiled on for several days, and it was only by one of the side channels, called by the sailors, Maia Signora, because it was said to have been discovered in 1863 by the unfortunate Miss Tinné, that the expedition at last reached the mouth of the Gazelle River, which runs into the White Nile from the west. For this river and its affluents Schweinfurth takes up the cudgels against Speke, who in 1863 called it an "unimportant branch;" nor is he quite satisfied with Baker, who "has spoken of its magnitude with great depreciation." For ourselves on this occasion we are Gallios, and care little whether the Blue Nile of Bruce, or the White Nile, or the Gazelle, or the Djoor, are the main stream; and we think Ismael Pacha was quite right when he said that "every fresh African traveller had his own private sources of the Nile." Dr. Schweinfurth, even while asserting the magnitude of the Gazelle, is not at all ashamed to confess that he has not found the sources of the Nile, and on ground where doctors differ we are afraid to tread.
More to our present purpose is the fact that after reaching the mouth of the Gazelle the difficulties of the grass barrier gradually ceased. The boats proceeded prosperously along the Gazelle till they reached the Meshera or "Landing-Place" par excellence, a settlement on an island amidst swamps and marshes about sixteen miles above the confluence of the Djoor River, another of those perplexing affluents, with the Gazelle. On this pestilential island, which had already proved fatal to many European explorers, Schweinfurth was doomed to spend the rest of February and the greater part of March waiting for the native bearers; who were to carry him and his effects to the chief seriba of Ghattas. It could not have added to his spirits to reflect that here amid these swamps had perished in 1863 no less than five out of nine European members of Miss Tinné's expedition, among whom was the German botanist Dr. Steudner; here too, just before Schweinfurth's arrival, had perished Le Saint, a naval officer sent out by the French Geographical Society; and here Heuglin had lost the greater part; of his valuable time by continual relapses of fever. But there was a cheeriness of nature and an activity and energy of disposition in Schweinfurth which sustained his spirits. Instead of fretting, at the delay he was indefatigable in investigating the ethnology and natural features of the country round the Meshera, which is inhabited by a branch of the great Dinka race, whose extreme outposts extend eastward towards the Egyptian borders, of Upper Sennaar and whose tribes are counted by the hundred. While our traveller was there in 1869, the Dinkas round the Meshera acknowledged the supremacy of a woman called Shol, a sort of ​female Job, rich after the old patriarchal fashion in cattle. Her fate in a year or two was sad, as the reader will hear; but at p. 133 of his first volume Dr. Schweinfurth has depicted her in all her magnificence and ugliness. "My pen," he says, "fails to depict her repulsiveness. Her naked negro skin was leathery, coarse, and wrinkled; her figure was tottering and knock-kneed; she was utterly toothless; her thin hair hung in greasy locks; on her wrists and ankles she had almost an arsenal of metal links of iron, brass, and copper, strong enough to bind a prisoner in his cell. About her neck were hanging chains of iron, strips of leather, strings of wooden balls, and Heaven knows what lumber more. Such was old Shol." On all which we only ask what old Shol would have said had she seen some of our fine ladies, ancient women of fashion, in low dresses, their heads dressed up with ostrich feathers, and chains and beads and various trinkets around their wrinkled necks. Perhaps she would have said, "They are not so fine as I am, and they are just as ugly." So meet the extremes of fashion in every land. But besides his love of work our naturalist carried with him another receipt against African fever. In his former expeditions he had suffered so much from fever as to believe himself for that very reason fever-proof. At the very opening of his first volume he says: —
    The chief drawback to my journey was the state of my health. I suffered from a disorganized condition of the spleen, which gave me some uneasiness and misgiving; yet after all it appeared to be just the key that had unlocked the secret of the unexampled good fortune of my journey. The numerous attacks of fever had probably reduced it to such a state of inactivity that it ceased to be affected by any miasma; or perhaps it had assumed the functions of a condensator so as to render the miasma innocuous. Anyhow, it seemed to perform services which I could not do otherwise than gratefully accept as a timely gift of Providence. As a farewell on my landing at Alexandria, I experienced one slight twinge from my malady, and then it was quiet; it did not reappear, even in the noxious swamps of the Upper Nile, which had been disastrous to so many of my predecessors. No recurrence of my disorder interrupted my activity or clouded my enjoyment; but, fever-free, I remained an exception among a hundred travellers.
What can be said of a traveller, who with boundless energy and cheerfulness derives strength and comfort from what others would have considered the best ground for apprehension and dismay, but this, that with such a spirit he was preeminently fitted to brave exposure to a deadly climate, and to succeed in exploring a field which so many others before him had reached only to die when beholding it from afar?
And now, on March 25, 1869, behold our traveller starting from the Meshera with a caravan numbering five hundred persons, of whom the armed men amounted to two hundred. These were not all Ghattas' people, for the train was swollen by those of other traders who, on a six days' march through a notoriously hostile population, were anxious to combine for mutual support. Though the ivory-traders fight like game-cocks among themselves, and especially when one intrudes on the territory or beat of the other, they are always ready to act in concert against hostile tribes. In such a caravan the men of each trader are distinguished by a peculiar banner; Ghattas', as the only Christian, bearing a white flag on which were worked a crescent and St. Andrew cross. With the exception of a few who went on the backs of asses, one of which Schweinfurth wisely declined, the whole company went on foot, the baggage being borne on the heads of bearers, whether slaves or hired. Entirely on foot, our traveller began wanderings which lasted for more than two years, and extended over two thousand miles; and, while relating this, he makes the melancholy reflection that the elephant, the only animal by the aid of which Central Africa could be opened to civilization, is made to contribute towards her degradation, for he is literally exterminated by fire and sword, while his tusks, exchanged for slaves, only serve to make paper-knives, and knife-handles, and billiard-balls for Western Europe. At first the sharp trot of the African bearers was very trying to our traveller, but he soon got used to it, and was able to keep up easily with the caravan, which proceeded at the rate of thirty miles a day till the one hundred and eighty miles between the Meshera and Ghattas' chief seriba or depot was reached without any attack from the Dinkas. At this spot, which lies between 7° and 8° of north latitude, about midway between the great rivers Djoor and ​Tondy, two of those Western Nile affluents which we have mentioned, Dr. Schweinfurth remained for some months. It was what may be called the mother settlement of nine smaller depots, and situated on the borders of three great tribes, the Dinka, the Dyoor, and the Bongos, it was admirably suited for the traffic both in slaves and ivory, and an excellent centre for Schweinfurth's scientific researches. The resident armed force, consisting almost entirely of natives of Dongola, was not much below two hundred and fifty men, and under their protection a number of Nubian and other slave-dealers had taken up their abode; it was a spot exactly suited for them too, for here it was that they completed their purchases of slaves in-order to carry them on to Darfoor and Kordofan. Whatever might be said at Cairo, or even be denied by the authorities at Khartoum, here in Ghattas' chief seriba, it was useless to shut one's eyes to the fact that slaves were, even before ivory, the great staple of the district. At least half of the one thousand souls which the caravan found within the strong palisades of the seriba were slaves, either reserved for future traffic or divided among the soldiers as part of their pay; added to which all the hard household and domestic work was done by male and female slaves. Before we quit this part of our subject we may say that Ghattas' rule in the northern Bongo country extends over two hundred square miles, of which about forty-five in the immediate neighbourhood of the camps are under cultivation, the population of the whole being about twelve thousand men. This domain, which, as Schweinfurth remarks, would be worth millions of pounds in Europe, might be purchased at any time from its owner for about twenty thousand dollars, which he mentions as a proof of how little actual profit is made by expeditions fitted out at so much cost. Landed in a district so promising for his pursuits, Schweinfurth did not fret himself at the condition of the inhabitants. Here in Europe, and throughout his book, he, of course, is quite against the slave-trade, and ready to point out its baneful influence; but there in the Western Nile region, he came as a botanist, and instead of protesting against a necessary condition of existence, calmly followed up his favourite study. In fact, just where he then was, a man who declared that he would have nothing to do with slaves or slave-dealers would be considered as silly as a man who insisted in London on breathing air without carbon in it. In unfailing good health our traveller occupied himself with excursions and in arranging the collections thus made. Thus, during several months, he traversed the districts between the Djoor and Tondy, and has much to tell us of the loveliness of the country as he saw it first after the early rains. In the course of these excursions he became well acquainted with the Dinkas, the Dyoors, and the Bongos, all races which, compared with the cannibal tribes beyond them, may be considered half-civilized; all are subtle workers in iron, having fixed abodes and great herds; all however are destined, in our author's opinion, to extermination before the slave-trade, which seeks in them its chief victims, as well as before the dangerous protection of Egypt.
At the beginning of September 1869, the naturalist was enabled to despatch to the Meshera the treasures which he had collected, and which now adorn the Museum at Berlin. Thus forty packages were sewn up in hides and smeared with a kind of caoutchouc which covered them with a varnish impenetrable either to rats or insects; so that having been twelve months on the way they reached Europe in perfect safety. Having exhausted that botanical region, Schweinfurth pined for further discoveries, and having sucked Ghattas' country dry, prepared to advance farther into the interior towards the south. In this plan he found an unexpected and a most welcome ally in that chivalrous Nubian Mohammed Aboo Sammat, whose boat had joined them on the White Nile, who had since kept up his intimacy with the traveller while he was under the guardianship of Ghattas, sending him not only skins and plants, but flocks of sheep, and whose generosity now reached its climax in a most magnificent offer to convey the traveller, free of all charge, into the inmost recesses of Central Africa. A native of Dar Kenoos, in his way he was a little hero. Sword in hand he had vanquished various districts large enough to have formed small states in Europe. A merchant full of enterprise, he avoided no danger and was sparing neither of trouble nor of sacrifice. "Yet all the while," adds Schweinfurth, "he had the keenest sympathy with learning, and would travel through the remotest countries at the bidding of science to see the wonders of the world." In the matter of slaves, however, we have no doubt that ​he was as arrant a dealer as even Aboo Saood, the pet aversion of Sir Samuel Baker. Such was the man who now offered his protection to Schweinfurth, and in spite of the remonstrances of Idrees, Ghattas' chief agent at the seriba, who declared that the traveller would be starved to death in those wildernesses, and that then the firm would be held responsible for his death, Schweinfurth had little hesitation in throwing in his lot with the Nubian who was to guide him into unknown regions of botanical research, especially when he considered that if he continued his travels with Ghattas it would cost him some thousand dollars, while with Aboo Sammat he would travel free. Having made up his mind, Schweinfurth joined the caravan of his new friend at Kulongo, near the Tondy, with his six Nubians, three slaves, and an interpreter, his baggage being cut down to thirty-six packages. Then on November 17, 1869, the whole caravan, two hundred and fifty in number, crossed the Tondy, then in full flood, by swimming and wading, the baggage being carried over on a great raft of straw, the stream being about two hundred feet wide. They were now bound south-east for Sabby, the chief seriba of Aboo Sammat, which they reached on the 23rd of November, at the latitude of 6° 20m. north. There Schweinfurth was received with Oriental hospitality and respect, so that the natives, when they saw Aboo Sammat providing the stranger with a palanquin for every brook, and even with cows that he might "have new milk," said, "This white man is a lord over all the Turks," a superiority which, continued into the Niam Niam and Monbuttoo tribes, contributed not a little to the success of his journey. While the Nubian, who, besides his quarrels with the natives, had an old feud with one Shereefee, a rival ivory-trader, was looking after his interests in that district, Schweinfurth explored the country and enriched his collections. Now he became acquainted with the Mittoo country, and its fauna and flora, and after meeting Aboo Sammat at an outlaying seriba, on January 7, 1870, he prepared for his journey into the country of the hostile and cannibal Niam Niam. Before starting, however, the adventurous Nubian held a review of his force to strike awe into the natives whom he had laid under contribution; and it must be admitted that his method of proceeding and style of speaking were most effective. His people, numbering five hundred, were divided into groups according to their tribes, and with each of these, now arrayed as a savage with lance and shield, now with bow and arrow, the indefatigable Nubian danced from morning till night; now taking the character and dress of a Bongo, now as a Mittoo, now as a Niam Niam, and now as a Monbuttoo. This scene, which shows that dancing is as common to the tribes of Central Africa as it is in Dahomey and Ashantee, was followed by a gathering of chiefs to whom Aboo Sammat delivered a terrible oration. He did not want their women and children, nor their corn, but he must insist on the regular transport of provisions to his expedition and on a proper system of bearers. "If one of the bearers runs away or throws down his load, I will tear out his eyes; and if a package is stolen," turning to the chief, "I will have your head." Here he brandished a huge scimitar, like Blue Beard, over the head of his intended victim. Proceeding, he warned two other chiefs that a rival trader's people had lately come into that district, and carried off two elephants, but that this could not be allowed, or if it happened again they should pay for it in their lives. "If any ivory is taken by any one of you to a strange seriba, I will have him burnt alive." If they ran away into caves he would smoke them with cayenne pepper — à la Pélissier — till they crawled out and begged for mercy. This and much more of the same sort convinced Schweinfurth, as it must convince every one, that ivory-dealing in Central Africa has its rough as well as its smooth side, and that this chivalrous Nubian, so gentle and so scientific, was, when his blood was up, as great a cut-throat as any pirate that ever sailed under the black flag.
On January 14th, the whole caravan returned to Sabby, and in a fortnight more, which Schweinfurth spent in making up his diary and providing for the transmission of his fresh treasures to Europe, the bulk of the caravan started for the Niam Niam. As this journey would have been impossible except by the aid of the Nubian, Schweinfurth is quite right to say that all the museums of Europe which have been enriched by his collections owe an endless debt of gratitude to Aboo Sammat. This was one of the occasions on which it was prudent for the ivory-dealers to combine, and so the caravan was swollen by a number of Ghattas' people, besides which it was followed by a whole troop of ​women and female slaves, with a crowd of negro lads who followed the soldiers to carry their equipments. It is no easy matter to marshal more than eight hundred people in single file, and thus it was late on the first day when they reached the arid steppes of a wilderness which they were to cross. With little incident they proceeded south for some days bound for the territory of one Nganye, a Niam Niam chief, who, though the tribe was generally hostile, was a friend of the Nubian. At his settlement they arrived after crossing the Ibba, or Upper Tondy, then about one hundred feet broad, and Schweinfurth's eyes were gladdened with the first sight of the cannibal Niam Niam; "with their black poodle crops of black hair and the eccentric tufts and pigtails on their heads, they afforded a spectacle," he says, "which to me was infinitely novel and amusing. Amongst the hundreds of Bongos and Mittoos with whom the Dinkas were associated as drovers, these creatures stood out like beings of another world." Botanically, the chief feature of that region was the "popukky" grass, a species of panicum, the tallest and strongest our traveller had ever seen — fifteen feet high and with a haulm as thick as a man's finger, it affords the Niam Niam an excellent material for their huts, and is the haunt of those herds of elephants, who when the grass is set on fire perish by thousands — their brown and blackened tusks attesting the cruel war of extermination which is waged against this noble beast, and which threatens to extinguish the race as completely as that of the Dodo or the Great Awk.
After an interview with Nganye, who, with all his people, was most curious to see the white man, the caravan proceeded across his territory to an outlying seriba of the Nubians, called Nabambasso, in lat. 4° 50s. N., about eighty-seven miles due south of Sabby. To reach it they crossed a river called the Sway, which, according to Schweinfurth, is the upper course of the Djoor. At this seriba he remained from the 10th to the 26th of February, 1870. After again enriching his collections, the caravan started, and this time on hostile ground, for was not Wando, a great Niam Niam chief, at feud with Aboo Sammat? Schweinfurth had now been long enough among the Niam Niam to form some opinion of their character and customs. Though confirmed cannibals, and that from pure choice and no lack of other food, he is bound to admit that, with this drawback, they are rather a pleasant race than otherwise. The men brave and honest, and devoted to their domestic duties; behaviour which is repaid by their women by a modesty and constancy which places the tribe far above the usual standard of the Monbuttoo and other neighbouring tribes. To judge from the representations of the race which we find in these volumes, we should say that the Niam Niam are far handsomer in features and much more gentle in expression than any of the races which we find there delineated. Their aprons and girdles of skins, with the tails hanging down behind, have probably led to the fable of an African tail-bearing race. Of all the Central-African tribes, except perhaps the Monbuttoo, the Niam Niam have the most fantastic fashions of dressing their hair, so much so that we recommend some of the head-dresses and hair-dressing in these volumes to such of our coiffeurs who have the ambition of introducing a new style for our fine ladies.
But however interesting these Niam Niam may be, we must hasten on with Schweinfurth till we land him close to the settlement of the ferocious Wando, once Aboo Sammat's friend and father-in-law, but now his bitterest enemy, who had sworn, according to the testimony of one of his brothers, that if Mbahly or "the Little One," which was the Nubian's nickname in Central Africa, fell into his hands this time he should not escape, but be annihilated with all his crew, even down to the white man whom he was bringing with him. As this was not a pleasant position of affairs, our readers will be relieved to learn that not only was Wando's wrath assuaged for the time by the address and courage of the Nubian, but that this ferocious potentate actually condescended to pay the traveller a visit in his tent. There, with a composure and self-possession which no European prince could have surpassed, the corpulent savage threw himself into the traveller's only cane chair, making it creak with his bulk. In it, with the merest apology of a piece of skin to cover him, he sat in all but absolute nakedness, "revealing the exuberance of fat which clothed his every limb." And here let us not omit to record one great point in Wando's favour. Among a race of cannibals, he was the avowed enemy of the practice. What induced him to abandon human food is not known; perhaps he ​had had a surfeit, perhaps he was banting in his African fashion. Whatever were the reasons, there was the fact.
    I was informed [says Schweinfurth] in several quarters, that people from the neighbouring districts had come to him when they found themselves growing too fat, and had declared that they did not consider their lives safe on account of the man-eaters by whom they were surrounded. But this sentiment of the chieftain did not appear to exercise much influence on the majority of his subjects, as we only too soon became aware as we advanced farther to the south.
Which mention of fat again reminds us that farther on in his book Dr. Schweinfurth, gravely discussing the question whether a white man — strong in that charmed life which most African tribes suppose him to possess — could pass alone safely to the West Coast — decides it in the affirmative, "if the traveller were not too fat;" for fatness, whether in black or white, makes all cannibal tribes lick their lips and rub their abdomens, like that well-known New-Caledonian chief who being asked if he had seen a corpulent Australian colonist, named Boyd, who had been wrecked on his coast said nothing but "Massa Boyd, him berry fat man," significantly patting at the same time that cavity of his person into which the unhappy colonist had descended.
The visit of the corpulent and bellicose Wando gave Schweinfurth an opportunity of protesting against the want of hospitality with which he had been received. His dogs he declared had been better treated by the Nubians than he himself by Wando, though Wando called himself a king. When Wando remonstrated, Schweinfurth to give him a lesson dashed his fist against a camp-table till all the plates and cups rattled, and at the same moment the traveller's servants took the unhappy Wando to task, and threatened him with speedy and certain vengeance if he suffered a Frank to come to the least harm. They charged him not to forget that it was a Frank he was dealing with, "who could make the earth yawn and give out flames that would consume his land." No wonder that after this warning the Niam Niam king hastened home and sent the traveller some unsavoury fleshpots containing a ragout made out of the "entrails of an elephant two hundred years old." The relations between Wando and the Nubian were still too critical to admit of any longer stay in his territory than was absolutely necessary; the fire so lately quenched might break out at any moment and was merely smouldering; they hastened on therefore, thereby, as it proved, avoiding a collision, bent on proceeding still farther south into Monbuttoo land, where the Nubian had a firm friend and ally in the king of the country.
It was in the Niam Niam country that Schweinfurth at first suspected, and then became gradually sure, that he had passed the watershed of the Nile Basin, and had entered into a region in which the rivers ran south to the Atlantic. All the way from the Gazelle the country had presented a monotony of geological conformation, in which the surface of the soil was composed of a red ochreous earth, rich in bog or swamp iron ore, which had been moulded into valleys and hills by the action of the streams which traversed it east and west, at last to unite in the Nile. But here in the heart of the Niam Niam country he passed a rough and rugged upland forest region, on one side of which the waters ran north towards the Nile Basin, while on the other they ran south, and away from it. At the same time the flora and fauna of the new region underwent a change. The chimpanzee, unknown in the Nile Basin, roamed in the woods, which opened out into large galleries of Pandanus and other trees, equally wanting on the other side of the watershed. It was on March 1, 1870, so far as we can gather, that at an elevation marked by his trusty aneroid as three thousand feet, Schweinfurth on the banks of a stream called the Lindukoo crossed, the first of Europeans coming from the north, the watershed of the Nile. The word "galleries," advisedly used by Schweinfurth after the term applied to these openings in the woods by the Italian Piaggia, who first of all set foot on Niam Niam soil, is singularly appropriate to these primeval forests. There on slopes of earth saturated with water like an overfull sponge, a wealth of vegetation springs up, which, on either side of old furrows formed by the watercourses, rises in tall trees more than one hundred feet high. Their gigantic trunks are covered with brilliant creepers, which form the walls of these galleries which run along and across the terraces of the hills at different levels, as though cut by the hand of a landscape-gardener. The reader must imagine for himself how a botanist like our traveller revelled in such a scene, and how day after day he discovered fresh plants, or found others hitherto supposed to be confined to ​America flourishing in Central Africa. At every halt it was his practice to quit the camp and wander through the forest, bringing back with him quantities of plants; but as the savage Niam Niam, who was his interpreter, informed the natives, it was not science but hunger which drove this mysterious white man into the woods, where dismissing his attendants, he used to gather and devour enormous heaps of leaves. At this the wise men of the tribe would shake their heads and remark that it must be true, for while they were starving for hunger, "Mbarikpa" or the "Leaf-eater" as they nicknamed him, invariably came out of the forest with an exhilarated expression and a satiated look. Much in the same way David Douglas, who gave his name to the magnificent Douglas Pine, and who was gored to death in California by a wild bull, or lost in a wolf-trap, was known among the North-American Indians as "the Grass-man." On another occasion when the Monbuttoo saw Schweinfurth's anxiety to collect skulls for his anatomical museum they were sure that he was a sorcerer who extracted a subtle poison from those bones; while everywhere throughout his journey it was not so much the colour of his skin as his long hair, which in their eyes gave him a supernatural look, that most excited the surprise of the natives.
An object thus at once of respect, admiration, and awe, Schweinfurth passed with the adventurous Nubian out of the Niam Niam country and arrived at the court of King Munza, in Monbuttoo land, a potentate who was anxiously expecting the coming of his friend and ally, for were not his storehouses filled full of ivory, the booty of a whole year's hunting, to be exchanged for the red copper which would then flow into the royal treasury? On March 22, 1870, Schweinfurth had audience of the king at his palace, situated midway between the third and fourth degrees of north latitude, some miles beyond the Welle, a mighty stream which flows towards the Atlantic, and is quite beyond the limits of the Nile Basin. In a solemn suit of black with heavy Alpine boots which he wore so constantly that the natives thought he used them to conceal his feet, which were those of a goat, Schweinfurth awaited the arrival of King Munza. His rifles and revolver and his inevitable cane chair were borne before him by his Niam Niam squires, while his Nubian servants carried the presents reserved for his Monbuttoo majesty. The hall in which the interview took place was a hundred feet long, forty high, and fifty broad, while the bold arch of the vaulted roof was supported on pillars formed from the straight stems of trees; the spars and rafters and sides of the building being composed entirely of the leaf-stalks of the wine-palm Raphia vinifera. The floor was a hard red clay plaster, as firm and smooth as asphalt; here in England it would form an excellent skating-rink, but there in Central Africa it was a noble hall of audience for a king. With a blare of trumpets and the dub-dubbing of kettledrums. King Munza, came, the monarch whose daily food was human flesh. He was about forty, of fair height, slim but powerful build, and like the rest of his countrymen erect in figure. Though by no means ugly, and with a thoroughly Caucasian nose, which contrasted strongly with his negro lips, his features were by no means prepossessing, and his expression was a combination of "avarice, violence, and cruelty." With great self-control this cannibal king, who was attended by Aboo Sammat, and a crowd of courtiers and wives, at first took no notice of the white man, whom he was so anxious to see, and when he did condescend to recognize his existence, and asked him questions through an interpreter, the conversation was most commonplace and languished on account of the king's taciturnity. Even the presents, which consisted of a piece of black cloth, a telescope, a silver platter, a porcelain vase, a piece of carved ivory, a book with gilt edges, a double mirror which both reduced and magnified objects, and though last not least thirty necklaces of Venetian glass beads, though they excited the applause of Munza's fifty wives, and though regarded with attention by the king, were received with no approbation, and at last exhausted by hunger, Schweinfurth retired from the presence of this nil admirari monarch with the conviction that no sovereign of the West could surpass King Munza in the gift of self-possession. When he departed the king asked what return he could make the traveller, who modestly demanded a river-hog, potamochærus, and a chimpanzee, which Munza gave his royal word that he should have, and as royally never kept it. If we are asked in what the riches of this king consisted, we answer at once, in copper. With that his treasury was filled, and with copper ornaments the royal person was so covered on that day that he ​shone all over like a batterie de cuisine, and in his hand he held a strange sickle-shaped scimitar of that metal as though it were a sceptre. Iron and copper are the only metals known in that country, and the Monbuttoos look on them as silver and gold are regarded by us; the only remark that was elicited by the presentation of the silver platter being that it was white iron. With these views of the precious metals, it will be readily conceived at what advantage Aboo Sammat traded with this wily king. It was well worth his while to barter half a bar of copper, worth four or five dollars at most, for a huge elephant's tusk, which on an average realizes in Europe two or three dollars a pound, and on these terms the Nubian continued to deal with the king till his store of ivory was exhausted. These business dealings were relieved by royal visits from King Munza and his wives, and by a court-ball in honour of a great victory gained by Mummery, the king's brother and general, over the Monvoo, a tribe to the south. There is not much dancing, as is well known, at our court-balls, but in Monbuttoo land only one person danced, and that was the king himself. There in a noble hall of the palace, Schweinfurth saw him dancing before his eighty wives clothed in nothing but paint of different patterns, and his courtiers and great officers of state. As the king danced the gongs and kettledrums accompanied him, and his wives clapped their hands. The king was chastely attired; on his head he wore the skin of a great black baboon, and atop of it a plume of feathers; on his wrists and arms he had the tails of genets and guinea-hogs, and around his loins he bore an apron of the tails of other animals, while countless rings rattled upon his naked legs. As for his dancing, it was furious; "his arms dashed in every direction but still keeping time; while his legs exhibited the contortions of an acrobat's, being at one moment stretched out horizontally to the ground, and at the next pointed upwards and elevated in the air." No dancing dervish ever spun round so madly; and so the royal dancer went on for hours with very slight pauses of rest. How long it would have lasted no one could tell, when fortunately a hurricane of wind, and torrents of rain, and thunder and lightning came on, and King Munza, vanquished by the elements, abandoned the hall.
All this occupied three weeks, during which Schweinfurth was indefatigable in his researches, not only into Monbuttoo land but into the regions beyond it farther to the south. On these points, as well as into the polity and government of the Monbuttoo dynasty, which is practically a despotism based on a monopoly of trade, these volumes contain most reliable information which makes them the most valuable contributions to African discovery which we have ever read. Geographically his suspicion that the Welle had its outlet into the Atlantic was rendered a certainty during his residence in that district, and ethnologically he ascertained the existence a few days beyond the Monbuttoo borders of a race of pigmies which has haunted history since the day of Herodotus. Not only did he see a colony of this race settled near King Munza's palace, as well as a whole regiment of them in his service, but he actually exchanged a dog which King Munza fancied for a pigmy boy, named Tikkitikki, whom he brought with him as far as Berber on the Nile, where he fell a victim to a dysentery engendered by his insatiable gluttony. At the same time in these Akkas, as they call themselves, our traveller sees only another branch of the race of Bushmen on the shores of the Atlantic, whom he regards as the primeval African race which has disappeared before the inroads and extension of other more civilized tribes. Very remarkable is the fact that as the traveller in Central Africa proceeds south he finds the people less nomadic and more inclined to regular rule, and therefore to civilization. King Munza and his chiefs and great officers of state and hosts of wives, all painted in different patterns, cannibals though they be, form a polity much more approaching a regular government than the Dinkas, the Mittoos, the Bongos, and even the Niam Niam. On these and many other most interesting points we must refer our readers to these volumes themselves; suffice it to say that after having collected great masses of plants, and a whole heap of human skulls and bones, many of them just fresh from the Monbuttoo cooking-pots, our traveller and his Nubian friend were ready to push on farther south, the gallant Nubian declaring that he would guide Schweinfurth to the world's end. Unfortunately, however, there were obstacles in the way, and a lion in the path, in the person of King Munza, who had no notion of allowing Aboo Sammat to enter into commercial relations with any tribe beyond his ​own territory. Against this fixed determination all their efforts failed, and on April 12, 1870, the traders and the traveller left the royal residence, taking the little Tikkitikki with them, who, little savage that he was, howled awfully, not, as Schweinfurth thought, at parting with his family, but because he was quite sure they were only taking him with them to kill and eat him by the way. As soon as he was reassured on this point, and found that he was fed on the best of everything, he became quite resigned, and went on overeating himself till he died.
On their return to the north, the travellers found it not so easy to get out of the Monbuttoo country as into it. As soon as they reached Wando's country they found him as implacable as ever, and for some time they had to fight their way through a hostile country, Aboo Sammat himself receiving a dangerous wound, in spite of which he continued to show the most determined bravery. When they had defeated Wando, Schweinfurth was left at the seriba on Nabambasso for some weeks while the Nubian was adjusting further differences with the natives sword in hand; and then the starvation which Ghattas' people had predicted nearly overtook him. Visions of pale ale and beefsteaks rose before his disordered vision, as they had done to Baker's, and had it not been for the unctuous insects in a great ant-hill which they devoured fried, they would not have been able to keep body and soul together. At length the rains fell and the roots grew, and the Nubian returned victorious from his campaign. Then they made another start north, and, passing through Nganye's friendly country, though again suffering from hunger, they crossed the Tondy on a rude suspension bridge, and Schweinfurth at last arrived at the seriba of Kulongo on the borders of Ghattas' country, whence he had started with Aboo Sammat eight months before. This was in July 1870, and there, after completing his journals and arranging his collections, our traveller was on the eve of beginning another journey into the Niam Niam country — where we may observe that he would most certainly have perished, and as probably been eaten, since the whole expedition was cut off — when a terrible calamity overtook him, and rendered him powerless to penetrate farther into Central Africa. From Kulongo Schweinfurth had moved to Ghattas' head seriba, where he had spent so much time the year before, and here, on December 1, 1870, a conflagration broke out which consumed the whole camp.
    I had saved little beyond my life [he says]; I had lost all my clothes, my guns, and the best part of my instruments. I was without tea and without quinine. … All my preparations for my projected expedition; all the produce of my recent journey; all the entomological collections that I had made; all my examples of native industry; all my registers of meteorological events, in which I had inscribed some 7,000 barometrical observations; all my journals with the detailed narrative of the transactions of 825 days; all my measurements of the natives, and all my vocabularies; everything was gone in a single hour, the plunder of the flames.
It was indeed fortunate that a great part of his anatomical and botanical collections had been already despatched to Europe, and that science has been thus immeasurably enriched by the discoveries of this accomplished naturalist; but it is no less heart-rending to imagine the position of such a man, so full of energy and devotion to science, standing alone, as it were, in Central Africa, without shoes, or clothes, or arms, or ammunition, or instruments, or even paper to preserve his specimens; without a watch to reckon the time, or a barometer to register the weather. Many a man would have sunk under such a calamity; but Schweinfurth was equal to the occasion. Amid the ruins of his hut he discovered ink and the materials for writing and drawing. He soon made up his mind that the footsteps of a man are a much more accurate standard of measurement than those of a beast, and for the remainder of his travels he carefully counted his steps, and ascertained with a patience which none but a German would have exhibited, that in the six months during which he remained in Africa, before he re-embarked at the pestilential Meshera, he had made a million and a quarter of steps. On his travels during that period we will not dwell. They afforded him abundant proof of the fact that in those regions the institution of slavery was indigenous, and not to be extirpated by any one expedition of a reluctant government, or by stopping up one branch of the Nile to the traders who find it so profitable. We shall return, farther on, to the consideration of this question. As a traveller devoted to science, Schweinfurth took things as he found them, and made the best and the most of them. He is loud in his abhorrence of slavery, yet he had slaves as his ​servants, and his own people were stopped and nearly confiscated by the governor of Khartoum on their return, for having been concerned, like all the rest of the world, in the traffic; for, unknown to their master, they had a little venture of their own in human flesh. And for that matter, what were the two Niam Niam, whom Schweinfurth brought back with him, and little Tikkitikki himself, whom he exchanged for a dog, but the slaves of the traveller himself? Again, as to the cannibalism which he found rampant among the Niam Niam and farther south, though Schweinfurth abhorred it and rarely ventured to eat anything unctuous, except ants, lest the grease should be human fat, he accepted it as another institution, and readily availed himself of the fleshpots of the Niam Niam and Monbuttoos to enrich his anatomical collections, taking credit to himself for rescuing these poor remains of humanity from an ignoble oblivion in Central Africa, to attain a kind of immortality when numbered and catalogued in the Museum at Berlin. We have perused his book with the greatest interest, and part from him with regret. On June 26, 1871, he embarked at the Meshera, when we are sorry to say he heard that poor old Shol, the Lady Bountiful of the swamps, had been barbarously murdered in his absence by some Nubian marauders. After a prosperous voyage down the Gazelle and through the grass barrier, he reached Khartoum on July 2ist. On August 9th he departed for Berber and Suakin, and on September 30th landed at Suez. By November 3rd he reached Messina, and was thus once more on the soil of Europe after an absence of three years and four months. As we write we are glad to hear that Dr. Schteinfurth has been appointed by the khedive director of the Museum of Natural History at Cairo.
Of very different character is the other work to which we now direct the reader's attention. Our German naturalist for the sake of science shut his eyes to many iniquities and abominations, and even made use of them to further his researches; but Sir Samuel Baker's volumes breathe but one spirit from beginning to end, and that is the extermination of the slave-trade on the Upper Nile. On his former journeys, as described in "The Albert Nyanza," and "The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia," the prevalence of the traffic had so shocked his sense of humanity, and so convinced him that nothing could be done for the material or moral improvement of Central Africa till the slave-trade was extinguished, that he joyfully accepted the command of an expedition organized by the khedive in council, for the purpose, as was expressly stipulated in the firman, "of suppressing the slave-trade and introducing a system of regular commerce," which could only be done, as another article of the firman expresses it, by "subduing to the khedive's authority the countries situated to the south of Gondokoro." The supreme command of this expedition was accordingly confided to Sir Samuel White Baker for four years, commencing from the 1st of April, 1869; to whom was also given in as many words "the most absolute and supreme power — even that of death — over all those who may compose the expedition." Of this expedition it will be sufficient to say that, so far as its commander was concerned, nothing was left undone to ensure its success. Three steamers, and two steel lifeboats by the best English makers, were ordered to be so constructed that they could be carried across the Nubian Desert on camels in plates and sections. These being completed, the commander, now raised to the rank of pacha, started with an English staff, of whom Lieut. Julian Baker, his nephew, was the chief, and acompanied by his wife, the inseparable companion of his travels, he reached Khartoum by way of Suakin early in January, 1870. During this time the whole expedition which, when it reached Khartoum, should have consisted of nine steamers and fifty-five sailing-vessels containing more than 1,600 men, should have been already on its way; but on reaching that emporium of the Upper Nile Baker soon found that his undertaking was very unpopular, that every one was against it, and that every good Mohammedan in the place was convinced that it would be quite right to coalesce against an expedition commanded by a Christian avowedly to annihilate the slave-trade upon which Khartoum existed. In fact, as Baker expresses it, "the khedive in the north issued orders which were neutralized in the south by his own authorities." At last, after infinite trouble, the whole fleet, with the exception of the steel steamers from England, which, under the care of Mr. Higginbotham, the chief engineer, had then only reached Berber on the Nile, started on February 8, 1870, by which time eight months of the first of the four years during which Baker was to ​command had already expired. All went pretty well in their journey up the White Nile, till they reached the Sett or grass barrier, which we have already described as blocking up the entrance to the Gazelle River in Schweinfurth's journey. Baker's expedition found the obstacles on the Giraffe channel of the White Nile still worse than those on the western branch, and even the steamers were unable to force their way through the water vegetation. After many efforts to break through the barrier, on April 3rd Baker reluctantly gave the order to return, and on the 19th of the month reached a point near Fashoda on the White Nile in the Shillook country which we have already described in our account of Schweinfurth's discoveries. There at a spot to which he gave the name of Tewfikeeyah, he built a camp, in which he remained till December 11, 1870, to the great annoyance of the mudir or governor of Fashoda, whose connivance at the slave-trade was soon detected by Baker, who confiscated the slaves and thwarted him and the slave-traders with whom he was in league in various ways; but all this time, so far as the purposes of the expedition were concerned, was wasted by the lateness of the start the year before, a year and nine months of the four years having now expired. At this camp on August 9, 1870, Baker received, by way of the Gazelle River, a letter from Schweinfurth who, quite unknown to him, had "the extreme courtesy and generosity to entrust" him "with all the details of his geographical observations collected in his journey in the Western Nile Basin." The delay and obstacles both material and moral which he had encountered thus far rendered it absolutely necessary for Baker to return to Khartoum, where he accordingly arrived on September 21, to the astonishment of the governor and population, who fondly believed that the expedition aimed against the great staple of the place must now be abandoned. But Baker had only returned to be the better able to pounce on his enemies, the ivory and slave traders of the Soudan. The supreme command entrusted to him by the khedive was practically much limited south of Gondokoro by a contract entered into by the governor-general of Khartoum and the house of Agad, which gave that trader the monopoly of the ivory-trade in the regions north of Gondokoro till April 1872. So long as the slave-traders were masters of the position north of that point, it was useless in Baker to proceed with his conquests to the south, for the slave-traders and their allies and armed force would be between him and his base of operations. Though Baker was bound to admit the validity of this contract up to the time mentioned, it was settled at the divan of the governor-general that after that date he should "assume the monopoly of the ivory-trade in the name of the khedive throughout those regions north of Gondokoro in which Agad was now virtually independent;" and this solemn agreement was signed not only by Agad himself but also by his son-in-law and agent, and afterwards on the death of Agad his successor, one Aboo Saood, a man who ever afterwards was Baker's bête noire, and to whom as the representative of the slave-traders he ascribes all the trouble, peril, and disasters to which the expedition was exposed. But there before the governor-general nothing could have been more submissive than Aboo Saood's behaviour, and he vowed fidelity to Baker and the khedive, and offered material assistance in terms so extravagant as to awaken suspicion.
Returning from Khartoum Baker started with his expedition early in December, and having cut and forced his way through the Sett, which was nearly as dense as it had been early in the year, but still not quite impenetrable, he at last arrived at his headquarters at Gondokoro, in 4° 54s. N. lat., on April 15, 1871, when more than two years of the period of his command had expired. This place, about fourteen hundred miles by the river from Khartoum, was well known to Baker from his former journeys. It had then been the seat of an Austrian missionary station, who had planted lemons and other fruit-trees, which were still flourishing; but the missionaries themselves had died, and the natives had destroyed their house. Soon after his arrival he renamed it Ismailia, in honour of the khedive, and fondly hoped that the old name would vanish before the new. The natives in those parts were Baris, a tribe which occupies a district about ninety miles long and seventy broad, and was now governed by a sheik called Allorron. It did not take Baker, with his knowledge of the African character, long to discover that the Baris and their chief were decidedly hostile to the expedition; and this attitude he ascribes to the machinations of Aboo Saood, who saw in the extinction of the Agad contract the year after the ruin of the house of whhich he was the ​representative. Against this trader Baker does not scruple to lay the charge of a determination to make the khedive's expedition a failure, even if it resulted in the extermination of the commander and his troops. It was in vain, therefore, that Baker cleared ground, and sowed seeds, and laid out gardens; he and his men were in danger of starving in the midst of plenty, for the Baris would neither bring corn nor cattle into the camp. It added much to his trouble that several of his subordinates, and a great many of his troops, were in their hearts averse from the service on which they were engaged; so that besides his outward enemies, Baker had to be ever on his guard against a secret foe. There can be no doubt of this fact, or of the hostility of Aboo Saood, and it is clear that Baker would never have surmounted the difficulties of his position had it not been for the heroism of his wife, the devotion of his nephew and the rest of the Europeans, and the bravery and fidelity of his picked corps of forty-six men, armed with Snider rifles and commanded by one of Baker's aides-de-camp, Lieut.-Colonel Abd-el-Kader, who had distinguished himself in Mexico in the army of Bazaine. Called at first the "Forty Thieves" from their light-fingered propensities, this bodyguard became, under the strict discipline which Baker enforced, as remarkable for honesty and morality as they were for courage, and with them and them alone their commander fought his way through thousands of savages, and ultimately returned victorious over all his foes. The campaign on which Baker now entered divides itself into two parts. The first, in which he routed the Baris in the districts round Gondokoro, and, in spite of the opposition of Aboo Saood, who worked like a mole underground, finally reduced them to submission. In the course of these operations he carried off the corn and cattle of the natives, deposed their hostile sheik Allorron and set up another in his stead, and sustained a series of attacks and surprises by night which were all foiled by his own energy and the bravery of his bodyguard. It was not till the month of December of 1871 that this first portion of his campaign came to an end. The authority of the khedive had been established in the basin of the White Nile north of Gondokoro; numbers of slaves had been detected, confiscated, and set free, in the seribas of the ivory-traders; and, in a word, Baker thought himself justified in believing that the extinction of the slave-trade in those regions was in a fair way of being accomplished. But besides these philanthropic results, the firman contained clauses for the extension of the khedive's dominions to the south; and perhaps, if it had been put plainly to that potentate and his divan, it would have been found that this was their main object in organizing the expedition, and that the extinction of the traffic which Baker had so much at heart was not so very dear to them after all. At any rate, there the acquisition of territory stood in Baker's bond, and, with his adventurous nature, he set himself to the task as soon as his work round Gondokoro was done.
By this time the expedition had been upwards of twelve months without communication with Khartoum, and, indeed, Baker's most constant cause of complaint against the Egyptian government was that they neither answered his letters nor sent him supplies. The soldiers were in rags and without pay, and on December 14th would come the great Mohammedan holiday, called the Ume-el-ete, when every one was expected to be smart. On the 13th, with a happy generosity, Baker, out of his own magazines, was able to serve out new clothing to the officers and 212 men, whom he intended to carry with him to the south of Gondokoro into the country of that Kamrasi whom he had known on his previous expeditions. At the same time the wives of the men were attired in gaudy clothing, and thus the festival passed off with general good-humour. All his preparations for his onward march having been completed. Baker, on January 22, 1872, started with 212 men up the White Nile to annex Central Africa to Egypt, leaving behind him at Gondokoro 340 men, together with his English engineers, who were to put together the steamers which had been brought thus far in pieces during his absence. Thus his force of sixteen hundred men had been reduced to 552 all told. On January 27th, the expedition arrived at the cataracts of the White Nile in north latitude 4° 38s., where they left their vessels, and were met by one Bedden, a Bari chief and old friend of Baker's, who it was hoped would provide them with bearers for the sixty miles between that point and Lobord. Much to the surprise of Baker this old friend, when asked for at least two thousand bearers, ungratefully refused to supply them. Neither he nor his people had ever worked as bearers "for the Turks," ​and they would not begin now. If any readers should think that two thousand bearers were rather more than were needed to carry the effects and baggage of 212 men, let them know that there was a steamer in parts and artillery, and we know not what besides, to carry, all which had to be left behind owing to this laziness of the Bari chief and his people. Thus foiled, Baker again divided his expedition, leaving 120 men under Major Abdallah in a camp by the river, sending the English engineers back to Gondokoro, and pressing on himself to Lobord with about one hundred men, who were to drag the baggage and supplies in carts for sixty miles. With this slender force and light equipments, Baker started, on February 8th, under the guidance of an old rainmaker named Lokko. Four horses, on one of which Lady Baker rode, ten donkeys, and a whole herd of cattle accompanied the expedition, and on the 12th it readied Loboré without having fired a shot, where on the 24th they were joined by Major Abdallah and the men under his command, who in the mean time had been attacked by the Baris in their camp, and had lost their fieldpiece. From Loboré Baker pushed on for Afuddo on the White Nile above the cataracts, and thence for Fatiko, a spot 165 miles south of Gondokoro. At this point in the Sholi country, in north latitude 3° 01m., Baker found his ubiquitous foe Aboo Saood, who had pushed on here from Gondokoro to protect his interests in these parts, where he had a seriba and did a good business in slaves and ivory. This was in March 1872, and, as the contract with Agad had not yet quite expired. Baker gave Aboo Saood leave to remain on sufferance in the district, from which he was to be allowed to remove his ivory, amounting to more than three thousand tusks, on condition that he was to abandon his slave-trading and ivory-expeditions to the south and east, in which he had been up to that time actively engaged. At the same time Baker determined to build a fort and to leave a garrison at Fatiko, while he pushed on with one hundred men towards the Equator. On March 18, 1872, he started for the Unyoro country on the shores of the Albert Nyanza, though it is separated from it by a lofty range of cliffs, and when there he would be in the territory of his old acquaintance Kamrasi, whose rapacious covetousness was well known to him on his former journeys. But that potentate had been dead two years, and his son Kabba Rega reigned in his stead, who had risen to power by the wholesale murder of his brothers and relations, Rionga, an uncle, having alone escaped his attempts to take his life. As he marched through these regions along the banks of the Victoria Nile, Baker was amazed to find them, once so fertile and populous, desolated by the incursions of the Khartoum traders, who kidnap the women and children for slaves, kill the men, and plunder and destroy whatever they can lay hands on.
To make a long story short, on April 25, 1872, he reached Masindi, the capital of Kabba Rega, a large town, in latitude 1° 45m. N., 332 miles from Gondokoro and about fifty miles east of the cliffs which bound the Albert Nyanza. It must be allowed that Baker's account of Kabba Rega the young king is extremely unprepossessing; for he describes him as an awkward undignified lout of twenty, who thought himself a great monarch, and was cruel, cowardly, and treacherous to the last degree. In the capital of this monarch Baker remained till June 14th. During that period he had, as he conceived, such sufficient proof of Aboo Saood's treachery, that he sent orders to Major Abdallah at Fatiko to arrest him. But quite apart from Aboo Saood, Kabba Rega gave Baker quite enough to do. Though at first professedly friendly, the relations between them grew worse and worse, and after having tried to poison the whole force by a present of drugged beer, the treacherous king gathered his warriors around him, drove off his cattle, and attacked a fort which Baker had fortunately built to protect his force. Then ensued a series of hostile operations in which was fought the battle of Masindi, to the sore loss of the natives and the destruction of the whole town by fire, though Baker lost several valuable lives. Then the natives set fire to the quarters of Baker's force while they retired to their fort, and on the whole matters assumed such an angry complexion, that on June 13th Baker resolved to leave Masindi and fight his way back to Fatiko. Up to this time his heroic wife had exhibited the greatest bravery and devotion, and her name must ever be remembered amongst those women who have shown that they can be as brave as lions and yet as gentle as doves. On the march back through woods and marshes lined on either side by unseen foes, she still maintained a cheerfulness and resolution which sustained the spirits, of all around ​her. That Baker was thus enabled to extricate himself and his men on this weary march is the best proof that can he afforded of his military talent and of the discipline by which he had converted his Forty Thieves into one of the bravest bodyguards that ever rallied round an adored chief. On June 24th, after ten days' incessant fighting, they reached Foweera on the Victoria Nile, where Rionga met them with supplies. Him Baker appointed king of Unyoro, in the name of the khedive, in the room of the faithless Kabba Rega. Continuing his march, Baker reached the fort at Fatiko on August 2nd, where he found that the slave-traders, at the instigation of Aboo Saood, had spread the report that he, Baker, was dead, a fable which was speedily passed down the Nile to Egypt, and thence, to Europe to the alarm of Baker's many friends. One more victory still remained for Baker and his Forty Thieves. We have seen that the slave-traders had a camp at Fatiko, and in despair at seeing their hopes of the failure of the expedition frustrated, they had the rashness to open fire on Baker's men. In a few moments Baker was armed, his devoted wife handing him his rifle and belt, and in as many minutes the Forty were charging the enemy at the point of the bayonet, and scattering them in all directions.
Firmly convinced of Aboo Saood's treachery. Baker says that he ought to have hanged him on the spot; but he confesses that diplomacy was necessary, as he had, at that distance from Gondokoro, only one hundred and forty-six men to contend against many hundreds. On August 7th the traitor appeared in Baker's camp, and exhibited so much ingenuity in lying in his defence, that Baker says "he could merely reply by dismissing him with the assurance that there was only one really good and honest man in the world who invariably spoke the truth; this man was Aboo Saood. All other men were liars." So next day the traitor according to Baker departed, swearing "by the eyes and head of the Prophet," "his favourite oath," says Baker, "whenever he told the biggest lie," that there was no one so true to him as himself; a promise which he carried out by spreading every false report against the pacha and by lodging a complaint against him with the khedive at Cairo as having ruined trade. It was during his stay at Fatiko that Baker received envoys from Mtésé, the well-known king of Uganda, the region which Speke and Grant had visited, and in which Livingstone was then lingering. These envoys were beautifully clean and as civilized and intelligent as Europeans. Of old we know Mtésé had been a sad ruffian, but Baker tells us that he had become a Mussulman, said his prayers daily, no longer murdered his wives, and, if he cut the throat of a man, it was done in God's name. He kept clerks too who corresponded for him in Arabic, encouraged all trade except that in slaves, and, greatly to Baker's delight, had treated Aboo Saood's emissaries like dogs. This great potentate had now sent a letter to Baker expressing the greatest friendship and informing him that as soon as he heard of Kabba Rega's treachery, he had sent an army under General Congow to be placed at his disposal. All he desired was to see Baker's face, and, rare exception among African kings, "he did not wish for presents." Alas! all that Baker could do was to say that his command would shortly expire, and to send him a letter for Livingstone.
After his last victory at Fatiko there is little left to tell of taker's expedition. After some sporting adventures in that delightful region, which he describes as an earthly paradise, he retraced his steps to Gondokoro, where he arrived on August 1, 1873, the very day on which his four years' term of command expired. For nearly three years he had heard nothing from the government which had appointed him. On May 25th he parted from his Forty Thieves, not without emotion; and on June 29th he reached Khartoum, having passed near Fashodo a cargo of seven hundred slaves consigned to Egypt by Aboo Saood. On August 24th he reached Cairo, where he had an interview with the khedive, to whom he explained the position of the territories which he had annexed to his dominions. At the same time he laid his counter-charge against Aboo Saood, and left the evidence supporting it in the hands of the Egyptian government. Six weeks afterwards, having been decorated with the second class of the Imperial Order of the Osmanie, Baker left Egypt. The work which he had begun, whether for suppressing the slave-trade, or for, annexing new territory, has since been confided, as is well known, to Colonel Gordon, who by the last accounts has annexed Darfoor to Egypt. The last drop in the cup of bitterness which the Egyptian government has made Baker ​drink is contained in the very last sentence and postscript to his book: — "After my departure from Egypt, Aboo Saood was released and was appointed assistant to my successor."
So ends the story of Baker's attempt to extinguish the slave-trade on the White Nile. We call it an attempt, for it is evident, even from his meeting those seven-hundred slaves on the main stream so low as Fashoda, that it was not successful. So ingrained in fact is slavery in the regions in which Baker conducted his operations that, just as Schweinfurth's Nubians had ventures in slaves, so even the terror of Baker himself could not keep his own troops from engaging in the very traffic which they were sent out to suppress. On one occasion he discovered, that, under his own eyes, the soldiers had purchased no fewer than 126 slaves, while on another he distributed a number of young women whom he had set free, among his men as wives. We cannot help thinking, when we reflect on the ordinary lot of the wives of Egyptian soldiers, that the position of the women thus emancipated must have been merely that of nominal freedom; for it appears, both from the evidence of Schweinfurth and of Baker, that in the seribas of the traders, and in the forts and camps of the Egyptian governors in the Soudan and the regions of the Upper Nile, it is the common practice to allot female slaves to the soldiers in lieu of pay. More than this, with all our admiration for Baker's bravery and for the endurance and skill with which he brought his men out of the perils into which he had led them, we cannot acquit him of Quixotism in undertaking the command of such an expedition. Daily life in Egypt, whether in the bazaars of Cairo or along the silent highway of the Nile, ought to have convinced the merest tourist and tyro in travelling that slavery is an institution of the land which every one acknowledges, the more enlightened perhaps as an evil, but still as a necessity. But that a tried traveller, for a man who had already spent years in those regions of Central Africa where the slave-trade is indigenous, and slaves so common that every other man or woman is a slave, should be so credulous as to suppose that even the khedive would be ready to organize such an expedition for philanthropy alone, quite passes our belief, and, if we are called on to believe it, we can only do so in favour of Baker's heart at the expense of his head. Once committed to such an attempt, its failure was only a matter of time, and for the time at least it has failed. The emancipation of the African tribes who have fallen under the bitter yoke of slavery can only be accomplished by infinite patience and an amelioration of Egyptian morality which presuppose a still more infinite period of time. Certainly the extirpation of this horrible traffic in Central Africa is neither to be accomplished as the visionary Schweinfurth fondly fancies, by the immigration of Chinese, nor by a single expedition or by a series of expeditions however ably commanded. As we close these pages we receive another contribution to the literature of African discovery in the "Last Journals of David Livingstone," to which we regret that we cannot give a more extended notice. They exhibit the same picture of indefatigable energy and endurance on the part of the British traveller, and of barbarism and slavery amongst the natives of Africa; and they derive a peculiar interest from the closing scenes of the life of that great traveller.
* ↑ 1. The Heart of Africa. Three Years' Travels and Adventures in the Unexplored Regions of Central Africa, from 1868 to 1871. By Dr. George Schweinfurth. Translated by Ellen E. Frewer, with an Introduction by Winwood Reade. In 2 vols. London: 1873. 2. Ismailia. A Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave-Trade. By Sir Samuel W. Baker, Pacha, &c. In 2 vols. 1874.
* ↑ It is stated by the editor of Livingstone's last journals that, taking the average weight of a pair of tusks at 28 lbs., the consumption of ivory imported into Great Britain alone would require the destruction of 44,000 elephants per annum.