The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile - Samuel White Baker (paper ebook reader .TXT) 📗

surface wasted from the creation of the

world,—a darkness to be enlightened by English colonization. Before the

advancing steps of civilization the savage inhabitants of dreary wastes

retreated: regions hitherto lain hidden, and counting as nothing in the

world’s great total, have risen to take the lead in the world’s great

future.

 

Thus England’s seed cast upon the earth’s surface germinates upon soils

destined to reproduce her race. The energy and industry of the mother

country become the natural instincts of her descendants in localities

adapted for their development; and wherever Nature has endowed a land

with agricultural capabilities, and favourable geographical position,

slowly but surely that land will become a centre of civilization.

 

True Christianity cannot exist apart from civilization; thus, the spread

of Christianity must depend upon the extension of civilization; and that

extension depends upon commerce.

 

The philanthropist and the missionary will expend their noble energies

in vain in struggling against the obtuseness of savage hordes, until the

first steps towards their gradual enlightenment shall have been made by

commerce. The savage must learn to WANT; he must learn to be ambitious;

and to covet more than the mere animal necessities of food and drink.

This can alone be taught by a communication with civilized beings: the

sight of men well clothed will induce the naked savage to covet

clothing, and will create a WANT; the supply of this demand will be the

first step towards commerce. To obtain the supply, the savage must

produce some article in return as a medium of barter, some natural

production of his country adapted to the trader’s wants. His wants will

increase as his ideas expand by communication with Europeans: thus, his

productions must increase in due proportion, and he must become

industrious; industry being the first grand stride towards civilization.

 

The natural energy of all countries is influenced by climate; and

civilization being dependent upon industry, or energy, must accordingly

vary in its degrees according to geographical position. The natives of

tropical countries do not progress: enervated by intense heat, they

incline rather to repose and amusement than to labour. Free from the

rigour of winters, and the excitement of changes in the seasons, the

native character assumes the monotony of their country’s temperature.

They have no natural difficulties to contend with,—no struggle with

adverse storms and icy winds and frost-bound soil; but an everlasting

summer, and fertile ground producing with little tillage, excite no

enterprise; and the human mind, unexercised by difficulties, sinks into

languor and decay. There are a lack of industry, a want of intensity of

character, a love of ease and luxury, which leads to a devotion to

sensuality,—to a plurality of wives, which lowers the character and

position of woman. Woman, reduced to that false position, ceases to

exercise her proper influence upon man; she becomes the mere slave of

passion, and, instead of holding her sphere as the emblem of

civilization she becomes its barrier. The absence of real love

engendered by a plurality of wives, is an absolute bar to progress; and

so long as polygamy exists, an extension of civilization is impossible.

In all tropical countries polygamy is the prevailing evil: this is the

greatest obstacle to Christianity. The Mahommedan religion, planned

carefully for Eastern habits, allowed a plurality of wives, and

prospered. The savage can be taught the existence of a Deity, and become

a Mussulman; but to him the hateful law of fidelity to one wife is a bar

to Christianity. Thus, in tropical climates there will always be a

slower advance of civilization than in more temperate zones.

 

The highest civilization was originally confined to the small portion of

the globe comprised between Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. In those

countries was concentrated the world’s earliest history; and although

changed in special importance, they preserve their geographical

significance to the present day.

 

The power and intelligence of man will have their highest development

within certain latitudes, and the natural passions and characters of

races will be governed by locality and the temperature of climate.

 

There are certain attractions in localities that induce first

settlements of man; even as peculiar conditions of country attract both

birds and animals. The first want of man and beast is food: thus fertile

soil and abundant pasture, combined with good climate and water

communication, always ensure the settlement of man; while natural

seed-bearing grasses, forests, and prairies attract both birds and

beasts. The earth offers special advantages in various positions to both

man and beast; and such localities are, with few exceptions, naturally

inhabited. From the earliest creation there have been spots so

peculiarly favoured by nature, by geographical position, climate, and

fertility, that man has striven for their occupation, and they have

become scenes of contention for possession. Such countries have had a

powerful influence in the world’s history, and such will be the great

pulses of civilization,—the sources from which in a future, however

distant, will flow the civilization of the world. Egypt is the land

whose peculiar capabilities have thus attracted the desires of conquest,

and with whom the world’s earliest history is intimately connected.

 

Egypt has been an extraordinary instance of the actual formation of a

country by alluvial deposit; it has been CREATED by a single river. The

great Sahara, that frightful desert of interminable scorching sand,

stretching from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, is cleft by one solitary

thread of water. Ages before man could have existed in that inhospitable

land, that thread of water was at its silent work: through countless

years it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon the

barren sand until the delta was created; and man, at so remote a period

that we have no clue to an approximate date, occupied the fertile soil

thus born of the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa, rescued

from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first rank in the

earth’s history.

 

For that extraordinary land the world has ever contended, and will yet

contend.

 

From the Persian conquest to the present day, although the scene of

continual strife, Egypt has been an example of almost uninterrupted

productiveness. Its geographical position afforded peculiar advantages

for commercial enterprise. Bounded on the east by the Red Sea, on the

north by the Mediterranean, while the fertilizing Nile afforded inland

communication, Egypt became the most prosperous and civilized country of

the earth. Egypt was not only created by the Nile, but the very

existence of its inhabitants depended upon the annual inundation of that

river: thus all that related to the Nile was of vital importance to the

people; it was the hand that fed them.

 

Egypt depending so entirely upon the river, it was natural that the

origin of those mysterious waters should have absorbed the attention of

thinking men. It was unlike all other rivers. In July and August, when

European streams were at their lowest in the summer heat, the Nile was

at the flood! In Egypt there was no rainfall—not even a drop of dew in

those parched deserts through which, for 860 miles of latitude, the

glorious river flowed without a tributary. Licked up by the burning sun,

and gulped by the exhausting sand of Nubian deserts, supporting all

losses by evaporation and absorption, the noble flood shed its annual

blessings upon Egypt. An anomaly among rivers; flooding in the driest

season; everlasting in sandy deserts; where was its hidden origin? where

were the sources of the Nile?

 

This was from the earliest period the great geographical question to be

solved.

 

In the advanced stage of civilization of the present era, we look with

regret at the possession by the Moslem of the fairest portions of the

world,—of countries so favoured by climate and by geographical

position, that, in the early days of the earth’s history, they were the

spots most coveted; and that such favoured places should, through the

Moslem rule, be barred from the advancement that has attended lands less

adapted by nature for development. There are no countries of the earth

so valuable, or that would occupy so important a position in the family

of nations, as Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, and Egypt, under a

civilized and Christian government.

 

As the great highway to India, Egypt is the most interesting country to

the English. The extraordinary fertility being due entirely to the Nile,

I trust that I may have added my mite to the treasury of scientific

knowledge by completing the discovery of the sources of that wonderful

river, and thereby to have opened a way to the heart of Africa, which,

though dark in our limited perspective, may, at some future period, be

the path to civilization.

 

I offer to the world my narrative of many years of hardships and

difficulties, happily not vainly spent in this great enterprise: should

some un-ambitious spirits reflect, that the results are hardly worth the

sacrifice of the best years of life thus devoted to exile and suffering,

let them remember that “we are placed on earth for a certain period, to

fulfil, according to our several conditions and degrees of mind, those

duties by which the earth’s history is carried on.” (E. L. Bulwer’s

“Life, Literature, and Manners.”)

 

THE ALBERT N’YANZA.

 

CHAPTER I.

 

THE EXPEDITION

 

In March, 1861, I commenced an expedition to discover the sources of the

Nile, with the hope of meeting the East African expedition of Captains

Speke and Grant, that had been sent by the English Government from the

South via Zanzibar, for that object. I had not the presumption to

publish my intention, as the sources of the Nile had hitherto defied all

explorers, but I had inwardly determined to accomplish this difficult

task or to die in the attempt. From my youth I had been inured to

hardships and endurance in wild sports in tropical climates, and when I

gazed upon the map of Africa I had a wild hope, mingled with humility,

that, even as the insignificant worm bores through the hardest oak, I

might by perseverance reach the heart of Africa.

 

I could not conceive that anything in this world had power to resist a

determined will, so long as health and life remained. The failure of

every former attempt to reach the Nile source did not astonish me, as

the expeditions had consisted of parties, which, when difficulties

occur, generally end in difference of opinion and retreat: I therefore

determined to proceed alone, trusting in the guidance of a Divine

Providence and the good fortune that sometimes attends a tenacity of

purpose. I weighed carefully the chances of the undertaking. Before

me—untrodden Africa; against me—the obstacles that had defeated the

world since its creation; on my side—a somewhat tough constitution,

perfect independence, a long experience in savage life, and both time

and means which I intended to devote to the object without limit.

England had never sent an expedition to the Nile sources previous to

that under the command of Speke and Grant. Bruce, ninety years ago, had

succeeded in tracing the source of the Blue or Lesser Nile: thus the

honour of that discovery belonged to Great Britain; Speke was on his

road from the South; and I felt confident that my gallant friend would

leave his bones upon the path rather than submit to failure. I trusted

that England would not be beaten; and although I hardly dared to hope

that I could succeed where others greater than I had failed, I

determined to sacrifice all in the attempt. Had I been alone it would

have been no hard lot to die upon the untrodden path before me, but

there was one who, although my greatest comfort, was also my greatest

care; one whose life yet dawned at so early an age that womanhood was

still a future. I shuddered at the prospect