Africa

near which he died in 1798. The first recorded crossing of Africa was

accomplished between the years 1802 and 1811 by two half-caste Portuguese

traders, Pedro Baptista and A. Jose, who passed from Angola eastward to the

Zambezi.

Although the Napoleonic wars distracted the attention of Europe from

exploratory work in Africa, those wars nevertheless

Effects of the Napoleonic wars—Britain seizes the Cape.

exercised great influence on the future of the continent, both in Egypt and

South Africa. The occupation of Egypt (1798-1803) first by France and then

by Great Britain resulted in an effort by Turkey to regain direct control

over that country,5 followed in 1811 by the establishment under Mehemet Ali

of an almost independent state, and the extension of Egyptian rule over the

eastern Sudan (from 1820 onward). In South Africa the struggle with

Napoleon caused Great Britain to take possession of the Dutch settlements

at the Cape, and in 1814 Cape Colony, which had been continuously occupied

by British troops since 1806, was formally ceded to the British crown.

The close of the European conflicts with the battle of Waterloo was

followed by vigorous efforts on the part of the British government to

become better acquainted with Africa, and to substitute colonization and

legitimate trade for the slave traffic, declared illegal for British

subjects in 1807 and abolished by all other European powers by 1836. To

West Africa Britain devoted much attention. The slave trade abolitionists

had already, in 1788, formed a settlement at Sierra Leone, on the Guinea

coast, for freed slaves, and from this establishment grew the colony of

Sierra Leone, long notorious, by reason of its deadly climate, as ``The

White Man's Grave.''6 Farther east the establishments on the Gold Coast

began to take a part in the politics of the interior, and the first British

mission to Kumasi, despatched in 1817, led to the assumption of a

protectorate over the maritime tribes heretofore governed by the Ashanti.

An expedition sent in 1816 to explore the Congo from its mouth did not

succeed in getting beyond the rapids which bar the way to the interior, but

in the central Sudan much better results were obtained. In 1823 three

English travellers, Walter Oudney, Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton,

reached Lake Chad from Tripoli—the first white men to reach that lake. The

partial exploration of Bornu and the Hausa states by Clapperton, which

followed, revealed the existence of large and flourishing cities and a semi-

civilized people in a region hitherto unknown. The discovery in 1830 of the

mouth of the Niger by Clapperton's servant Lander, already mentioned, had

been preceded by the journeys of Major A.G. Laing (1826) and Rene Caillie

(1827) to Timbuktu, and was followed (1832-1833) by the partial ascent of

the Benue affluent of the Niger by Macgregor Laird. In 1841 a disastrous

attempt was made to plant a white colony on the lower Niger, an expedition

(largely philanthropic and antislavery in its inception) which ended in

utter failure. Nevertheless from that time British traders remained on the

lower Niger, their continued presence leading ultimately to the acquisition

of political rights over the delta and the Hausa states by Great Britain.7

Another endeavour by the British government to open up commercial relations

with the Niger countries resulted in the addition of a vast amount of

information concerning the countries between Timbuktu and Lake Chad, owing

to the labours of Heinrich Barth (1850-1855), originally a subordinate, but

the only surviving member of the expedition sent out.

Meantime considerable changes had been made in other parts of the

continent, the most notable being—the occupation of Algiers by France in

1830, an end being thereby put to the piratical proceedings of the Barbary

states; the continued expansion southward of Egyptian authority with the

consequent additions to the knowledge of the Nile; and the establishment of

independent states ((Orange Free State and the Transvaal) by Dutch farmers

(Boers) dissatisfied with British rule in Cape Colony. Natal, so named by

Vasco da Gama, had been made a British colony (1843), the attempt of the

Boers to acquire it being frustrated. The city of Zanzibar, on the island

of that name, founded in 1832 by Seyyid Said of Muscat, rapidly attained

importance, and Arabs began to penetrate to the great lakes of East

Africa,8 concerning which little more was known (and less believed) than in

the time of Ptolemy. Accounts of a vast inland sea, and the discovery in

1848-1840, by the missionaries Ludwig Krapf and J.Rebmann, of the snow-clad

mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, stimulated in Europe the desire for

further knowledge.

At this period, the middle of the 19th century, Protestant missions were

carrying on active propaganda on the Guinea

The era of great explorers.

coast, in South Africa and in the Zanzibar dominions. Their work, largely

beneficent, was being conducted in regions and among peoples little known,

and in many instances missionaries turned explorers and became pioneers of

trade and empire. One of the first to attempt to fill up the remaining

blank spaces in the map was David Livings tone, who had been engaged since

1840 in missionary work north of the Orange. In 1849 Livingstone crossed

the Kalahari Desert from south to north and reached Lake Ngami, and between

1851 and 1856 he traversed the continent from west to east, making known

the great waterways of the upper Zambezi. During these journeyings

Livingstone discovered, November 1855, the famous Victoria Falls, so named

after the queen of England. In 1858-1864 the lower Zambezi, the Shire and

Lake Nyasa were explored by Livingstone, Nyasa having been first reached by

the confidential slave of Antonio da Silva Porto, a Portuguese trader

established at Bihe in Angola, who crossed Africa during 1853-1856 from

Benguella to the mouth of the Rovuma. While Livingstone circumnavigated

Nyasa, the more northerly lake, Tanganyika, had been visited (1858) by

Richard Burton and J. H. Speke, and the last named had sighted Victoria

Nyanza. Returning to East Africa with J. A. Grant, Speke reached, in 1862,

the river which flowed from Victoria Nyanza, and following it (in the main)

down to Egypt, had the distinction of being the first man to read the

riddle of the Nile. In 1864 another Nile explorer, Samuel Baker, discovered

the Albert Nyanza, the chief western reservoir of the river. In 1866

Livingstone began his last great journey, in which he made known Lakes

Mweru and Bangweulu and discovered the Lualaba (the upper part of the

Congo), but died (1873) before he had been able to demonstrate its ultimate

course, believing indeed that the Lualaba belonged to the Nile system.

Livingstone's lonely death in the heart of Africa evoked a keener desire

than ever to complete the work he left undone. H. M. Stanley, who had in

1871 succeeded in finding and succouring Livingstone, started again for

Zanzibar in 1874, and in the most memorable of all exploring expeditions in

Africa circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, and, striking

farther inland to the Lualaba, followed that river down to the Atlantic

Ocean—reached in August 1877—and proved it to be the Congo. Stanley had

been preceded, in 1874, at Nyangwe, Livingstone's farthest point on the

Lualaba, by Lovett Cameron, who was, however, unable farther to explore its

course, making his way to the west coast by a route south of the Congo.

While the great mystery of Central Africa was being solved explorers were

also active in other parts of the continent. Southern Morocco, the Sahara

and the Sudan were traversed in many directions between 1860 and 1875 by

Gerhard Rohlfs, Georg Schweinfurth and Gustav Nachtigal. These travellers

not only added considerably to geographical knowledge, but obtained

invaluable information concerning the people, languages and natural history

of the countries in which they sojourned.9 Among the discoveries of

Schweinfurth was one that confirmed the Greek legends of the existence

beyond Egypt of a pygmy race. But the first discoverer of the dwarf races

of Central Africa was Paul du Chaillu, who found them in the Ogowe district

of the west coast in 1865, five years before Schweinfurth's first meeting

with the Pygmies; du Chaillu having previously, as the result of journeys

in the Gabun country between 1855 and 1859, made popular in Europe the

knowledge of the existence of the gorilla, perhaps the gigantic ape seen by

Hanno the Carthaginian, and whose existence, up to the middle of the 19th

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