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African Exploration
THE AERIAL COURSE which Dr Fergusson intended to follow had not been chosen at random; his point of departure had been very carefully studied, and it was not without reason that he decided to take off from the island of Zanzibar. This island, situated off the east coast of Africa, is in latitude 6°S., i.e. 430 geographical miles below the Equator. It was from this island that the last expedition, sent via the great lakes to discover the sources of the Nile, had recently set out.
But it will be well to indicate what explorations Dr Fergusson hoped to co-ordinate. They were two: that of Dr Barth in 1849, and that of Lieutenants Burton and Speke in 1858. Dr Barth was a native of Hamburg, who obtained permission for his compatriot Overweg and himself to join Richardson's English expedition, Richardson being in charge of a mission into the Sudan. This vast country is situated between lat. 15° and 10°N., so that to reach it, it was necessary to advance over fifteen hundred miles into the interior of Africa. Hitherto this country was only known through the expedition of Denham, Clapperton and Oudney, 1822-24. Richardson, Barth and Overweg, eager to push their investigations still further, reached Tunis and Tripoli, like their predecessors, and got as far as Murzuk, the capital of Fezzan.
They then abandoned their direct line and made a deep detour westward towards Ghat, guided, not without difficulties, by the Tuaregs. After incessant suffering from pillage, vexations and armed attack, their caravan arrived, in October, in the huge oasis of Asben. Here Dr Barth detached himself from his companions, made an excursion to the town of Agades and then rejoined the expedition, which resumed its march on the 12th of December. When it arrived in the province of Damerghu the three travellers separated, and Barth made for Kano, which he reached by dint of patience and the payment of considerable tribute.
In spite of severe fever he left this town on the 7th of March, accompanied by a single servant. The chief objective of his journey was to find Lake Tchad, from which he was still three hundred and fifty miles distant. He therefore turned east and reached the town of Zuricolo, in Bornu, the heart of the great Central Empire of Africa, where he learned of the death of Richardson, who had succumbed to fatigue and privation. He arrived in Kuka, the capital of Bornu, on the banks of the lake, and, three weeks later, on the 14th of April, twelve and a half months after leaving Tripoli, he at last reached the town of Ngourou.
We hear of him leaving again on the 29th of March, 1851, with Overweg, to explore the kingdom of Adamawa, to the south of the lake. He got as for as the town of Yola, a little south of lat. 9°N. This was the extreme southern limit attained by this bold explorer. He returned to Kuka in August, and from there traversed in succession Mandara, Baghirmi and Kanem, his eastern limit being the town of Masena, long. 17°20′W.
On the 25th of November, 1852, after the death of Overweg, his last surviving companion, he plunged westward, visited Sokoto, crossed the Niger, and finally reached Timbuktu, where he had to cool his heels for eight long months, subjected by the sheik to persecution, ill-treatment and misery. But the presence of a Christian in the town could be no longer tolerated; the Fellanis threatened to besiege it. The doctor therefore left on the 17th of March, 1854, and fled to the frontier, where he remained thirtythree days in the most complete destitution, returned to Kano in November, and then back to Kuka, whence he rejoined Denham's route after four months' delay. He was back in Tripoli about the end of August 1855, and on the 6th of September returned to London alone. Such was Barth's daring expedition.
Dr Fergusson carefully noted that he had come to a stop in lat. 4°N., long. 17°W. Let us now observe what Lieutenants Burton and Speke accomplished in East Africa.
The various expeditions up the Nile never seemed to have been able to reach the mysterious sources of that river. According to the account given by Doctor Ferdinand Werne, a German, the expedition organised, in 1840, under the auspices of Mehemet Ali, came to a halt at Gondokoro, between lat. 4° and lat. 5°N.
In 1855 Brun-Rollet, a native of Savoy, who had been appointed Sardinian consul in Eastern Sudan in succession to Vaudey, who had just died, started from Khartum, and travelling as Yacoub, trading in gum and ivory, reached Belenia, crossed the fourth parallel and, overcome by illness, returned to Khartum, where he died in 1857.
Neither Dr Peney, head of the Egyptian Medical Service, who in a small steamer reached one degree south of Gondokoro and returned to die of exhaustion in Khartum, nor the Venetian Miani, who, doubling the cataracts south of Gondokoro, reached lat. 2°N, nor the Maltese merchant, Andrea De Bono, who pushed his expedition up the Nile still farther, seemed able to cross this final limit.
In 1859 M. Guillaume Lejean, placed in charge of a mission by the French Government, went to Khartum, through the Red Sea, and embarked on the Nile with a crew of twenty-one men and twenty soldiers; but he could get no farther than Gondokoro, and was exposed to very serious danger among negroes in open revolt. The expedition commanded by M. d'Escayrac de Lauture also attempted to reach the famous sources. But the same fatal limit always brought the explorers to a standstill. The envoys of Nero had of old reached lat. 9°N.; so that in eighteen centuries there had only been an advance of from five to six degrees, or from 300 to 360 geographical miles.
Several travellers had tried to reach the sources of the Nile from the east coast of Africa. Between 1768 and 1772 the Scotchman Bruce, starting from Massaua, a port of Abyssinia, traversed Tigre, inspected the ruins of Axum, saw the sources of the Nile where they did not exist, and obtained no serious result. In 1844 Dr Krapf, an Anglican missionary, founded a settlement at Mombasa, on the coast of Zanzibar, and, in the company of the Reverend Rebmann, discovered two mountains three hundred miles from the coast. These were Kilimandjaro and Kenia, which recendy Messrs von Heuglin and Thornton have partly climbed. In 1845 the Frenchman Maizan disembarked alone at Bagamoyo, opposite Zanzibar, and reached Deje la Mbora, where the chief had him put to death with cruel torture. In August 1859, the young explorer Roscher, of Hamburg, setting out with a caravan of Arab merchants, reached Lake Nyasa, where he was murdered in his sleep. Lastly, in 1857, Lieutenants Burton and Speke, both officers of the Indian Army, were sent by the Royal Geographical Society of London to explore the great African lakes.
They left Zanzibar on the 17th of June and headed straight towards the west. After four months of unprecedented suffering, their baggage stolen and their porters beaten to death, they arrived at Kazeh, the rendezvous of traders and caravans, in the heart of the Moon country. There they obtained valuable information about the customs, government, religion, fauna and flora of the country, and afterwards set out for Tanganyika, the first of the great lakes, between lat. 3° and lat. 8°S. This they reached on the 14th of February, 1858, and visited the different tribes inhabiting its banks, for the most part cannibals.
Setting out again on the 22nd of May, they returned to Kazeh on the 20th of June. There Burton, who was in a state of exhaustion, lay ill for several months, during which time Speke made a detour of three hundred miles to the north as far as Lake Ukereue, which he saw on the 3rd of August, but only one end, in lat. 2°30'S. He was back in Kazeh on the 25th of August and resumed with Burton the road to Zanzibar, which they reached again in March of the following year. The two intrepid explorers then returned to England and were awarded the annual prize of the Geographical Society of Paris.
Dr Fergusson carefully noted that they had not crossed either lat. 2°S. or long. 29°E.
Thus what remained to be done was to link up Burton and Speke's exploration with that of Dr Barth, which involved covering a distance of more than twelve degrees.