Celebrated Travels and Travellers, Part 3. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century

It was Boy who finally achieved the rescue of the Landers, for he consented to pay to Obie the ransom he demanded for them and their people. Boy himself was very moderate, asking for nothing in return for his trouble and the risk he ran in taking the white men to Brass, but fifteen bars or fifteen slaves, and a barrel of rum. Although this demand was exorbitant, Lander did not hesitate to write an order on Richard Lake, captain of an English vessel at anchor in Brass river, for thirty-six bars.

The king's canoe, on which the brothers embarked on the 12th November, carried sixty persons, forty of whom were rowers. It was hollowed out of a single tree-trunk, measured more than fifty feet long, carried a four-pounder in the prow, an arsenal of cutlasses and grape-shot, and was laden with merchandise of every kind. The vast tracts of cultivated land on either side of the river showed that the population was far more numerous than would have been supposed. The scenery was flat, open, and varied; and the soil, a rich black mould, produced luxuriant trees, and green shrubs of every shade. At seven p.m. on the 11th November the canoe left the chief branch of the Niger and entered the Brass river. An hour later, Richard Lander recognized with inexpressible delight tidal waves.

A little farther on Boy's canoe came up with those of Gun and Forday. The latter was a venerable-looking old man, in spite of his wretched semi-European semi-native clothing and a very strong predilection for rum, of which he consumed a great quantity, although his manners and conversation betrayed no signs of excessive drinking.

That was a strange escort which accompanied the two Englishmen as far as the town of Brass.

"The canoes," says Lander, "were following each other up the river in tolerable order, each of them displaying three flags. In the first was King Boy, standing erect and conspicuous, his headdress of feathers waving with the movements of his body, which had been chalked in various fantastic figures, rendered more distinct by its natural colour; his hands were resting on the barbs of two immense spears, which at intervals he darted violently into the bottom of the canoe, as if he were in the act of killing some formidable wild animal under his feet. In the bows of all the other canoes fetish priests were dancing, and performing various extraordinary antics, their persons, as well as those of the people with them, being chalked over in the same manner as that of King Boy; and, to crown the whole, Mr. Gun, the little military gentleman, was most actively employed, his canoe now darting before and now dropping behind the rest, adding not a little to the imposing effect of the whole scene by the repeated discharges of his cannon."

Brass consists of two towns, one belonging to Forday, the other to King Jacket. The priests performed some curious ceremonies before disembarking, evidently having reference to the whites. Was the result of the consultation of the fetish of the town favourable or not to the visitors? The way the natives treated them would answer that question. Before he set foot on land Richard Lander, to his great delight, recognized a white man on the banks. He was the captain of a Spanish schooner at anchor in the river. The narrative goes on to say: —

"Of all the wretched, filthy, and contemptible places in this world of ours none can present to the eye of a stranger so miserable an appearance, or can offer such disgusting and loathsome sights, as this abominable Brass Town. Dogs, goats, and other animals run about the dirty streets half-starved, whose hungry looks can only be exceeded by the famishing appearance of the men, women, and children, which bespeaks the penury and wretchedness to which they are reduced; whilst the persons of many of them are covered with odious boils, and their huts are falling to the ground from neglect and decay."

Another place, called Pilot Town by the Europeans, on account of the number of pilots living in it, is situated at the mouth of the river Nun, seventy miles from Brass. King Forday demanded four bars before the Landers left the town, saying it was customary for every white man who came to Brass by the river to make that payment. It was impossible to evade compliance, and Lander drew another bill on Captain Lake. At this price Richard Lander obtained permission to go down in Boy's royal canoe to the English brig stationed at the mouth of the river. His brother and his servants were not to be set free until the return of the king. On his arrival on the brig, Lander's astonishment and shame was extreme when he found that Lake refused to give him any help whatever. The instructions given to the brothers from the ministry were read, to prove that he was not an impostor; but the captain answered, —

"If you think that you have a – fool to deal with, you are mistaken; I'll not give a – flint for your bill. I would not give a – for it."

Overwhelmed with grief at such unexpected behaviour from a fellow-countryman, Richard Lander returned to Boy's canoe, not knowing to whom to apply, and asked his escort to take him to Bonny, where there were a number of English vessels. The king refused to do this, and the explorer was obliged to try once more to move the captain, begging him to give him at least ten muskets, which might possibly satisfy Forday.

"I have told you already," answered Lake, "that I will not let you have even a flint, so bother me no more."

"But I have a brother and eight people at Brass Town," rejoined Lander, "and if you do not intend to pay King Boy, at least persuade him to bring them here, or else he will poison or starve my brother before I can get any assistance from a man-of-war, and sell all my people."

"If you can get them on board," replied the captain, "I will take them away; but as I have told you before, you do not get a flint from me."

At last Lander persuaded Boy to go back and fetch his brother and his people. The king at first declined to do so without receiving some payment on account, and it was only with difficulty that he was induced to forego this demand. When Lake found out that Lander's servants were able-bodied men, who could replace the sailors he had lost by death or who were down with fever, he relented a little. This yielding mood did not, however, last long, for he declared that if John and his people did not come in three days he would start without them. In vain did Richard prove to him beyond a doubt that if he did so the white men would be sold as slaves. The captain would not listen to him, only answering, "I can't help it; I shall wait no longer." Such inhumanity as this is fortunately very rare; and a wretch who could thus insult those not merely his equals, but so much his superiors, ought to be pilloried. At last, on the 24th November, after weathering a strong breeze which made the passage of the bar very rough and all but impossible, John Lander arrived on board. He had had to bear a good many reproaches from Boy, for whom, it must be confessed, there was some excuse; for had he not at his own cost rescued the brothers and their people from slavery, brought them down in his own canoe, and fed them, although very badly, all on the strength of their promise to pay him with as much beef and rum as he could consume? whereas he was, after all, roughly received by Lake, told that his advances would never be refunded, and treated as a thief. Certainly he had cause to complain and any one else would have made his prisoners pay dearly for the disappointment of so many hopes, and the loss of so much money.

For all this, however, Boy brought John Lander safely to the brig. Captain Lake received the traveller pretty cordially, but declared his intention of making the king go back without so much as an obolus. Poor Boy was full of the most gloomy forebodings. His haughty manner was exchanged for an air of deprecating humility. An abundant meal was placed before him, but he scarcely touched it. Richard Lander, disgusted with the stinginess and bad faith of Lake, and unable to keep his promises, ransacked all his possessions; and finding, at last, five silver bracelets and a sabre of native manufacture, which he had brought from Yarriba, he offered these to Boy, who accepted them. Finally, the king screwed up courage enough to make his demand to the captain, who, in a voice of thunder which it was difficult to believe could have come from such a feeble body, declined to accede to it, enforcing his refusal with a shower of oaths and threats, such as made Boy, who saw, moreover, that the vessel was ready to sail, beat a hasty retreat, and hurry off to his canoe.

Thus ended the vicissitudes of the Brothers Lander's journey. They were in some danger in crossing the bar, but that was their last. They reached Fernando Po, and then the Calabar River where they embarked on the Carnarvon for Rio Janeiro, at which port Admiral Baker, then commanding the station, got them a passage on board a transport-ship.

On the 9th June they disembarked at Portsmouth. Their first care, after sending an account of their journey to Lord Goderich, then Colonial Secretary, was to inform that official of the conduct of Captain Lake, conduct which was of a nature to compromise the credit of the English Government. Orders were at once given by the minister for the payment of the sums agreed upon, which were perfectly just and reasonable.

Thus was completely and finally solved the geographical problem which had for so many centuries occupied the attention of the civilized world, and been the subject of so many different conjectures. The Niger, or as the natives call it, the Joliba, or Quorra, is not connected with the Nile, and does not lose itself in the desert sands or in the waters of Lake Tchad; it flows in a number of different branches into the ocean on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, at the point known as Cape Formosa. The entire glory of this discovery, foreseen though it was by scientific men, belongs to the Brothers Lander. The vast extent of country traversed by the Niger between Yaoorie and the sea was completely unknown before their journey.

So soon as the discoveries made by Lander became known in England, several merchants formed themselves into a company for developing the resources of the new districts. In July, 1832, they equipped two steamers, the Quorra and Alburka, which, under the command of Messrs. Laird, Oldfield, and Richard Lander, appended the Niger as far as Bocqua. The results of this commercial expedition were deplorable. Not only was there absolutely no trade to be carried on with the natives, but the crews of the vessels were decimated by fever. Finally, Richard Lander, who had so often gone up and down the river, was mortally wounded by the natives, on the 27th January, 1834, and died on the morning of 5th February, at Fernando Po.

To complete our account of the exploration of Africa during the period under review, we have still to speak of the various surveys of the valley of the Nile, the most important of which were those by Cailliaud, Russegger, and Rüppell.

Frederic Cailliaud was born at Nantes in 1787, and arrived in Egypt in 1815, having previously visited Holland, Italy, Sicily, part of Greece, and European or Asiatic Turkey, where he traded in precious stones. His knowledge of geology and mineralogy won for him a cordial reception from Mehemet Ali, who immediately on his arrival commissioned him to explore the course of the Nile and the desert.

This first trip resulted in the discovery of emerald mines at Labarah, mentioned by Arab authors, which had been abandoned for centuries. In the excavations in the mountain Cailliaud found the lamps, crowbars, ropes, and tools used in working these mines by men in the employ of Ptolemy. Near the quarries the traveller discovered the ruins of a little town, which was probably inhabited by the ancient miners. To prove the reality of his valuable discovery he took back ten pounds' weight of emeralds to Mehemet Ali.

Another result of this journey was the discovery by the French explorer of the old road from Coptos to Berenice for the trade of India.

From September, 1819, to the end of 1832, Cailliaud, accompanied by a former midshipman named Letorzec, was occupied in exploring all the known oases east of Egypt, and in tracing the Nile to 10° N. lat. On his first journey he reached Wady Halfa, and for his second trip he made that place his starting-point. A fortunate accident did much to aid his researches. This was the appointment of Ismail Pacha, son of Mehemet Ali, to the command of an expedition to Nubia. To this expedition Cailliaud attached himself.

Leaving Daraou in November, 1820, Cailliaud arrived, on the 5th January in the ensuing year, at Dongola, and reached Mount Barka in the Chaguy country, where are a vast number of ruins of temples, pyramids, and other monuments. The fact of this district bearing the name of Merawe had given rise to an opinion that in it was situated the ancient capital of Ethiopia. Cailliaud was enabled to show this to be erroneous.

The French explorer, accompanying Ismail Pacha in the character of a mineralogist beyond Berber, on a quest for gold-mines, arrived at Shendy. He then went with Letorzec to determine the position of the junction of the Atbara with the Nile; and at Assour, not far from 17° N. lat., he discovered the ruins of an extensive ancient town. It was Meroë. Pressing on in a southerly direction between the 15th and 16th degrees of N. lat., Cailliaud next identified the mouth of the Bahr-el-Abiad, or White Nile, visited the ruins of Saba, the mouth of the Rahad, the ancient Astosaba, Sennaar, the river Gologo, the Fazoele country, and the Toumat, a tributary of the Nile, finally reaching the Singue country between the two branches of the river. Cailliaud was the first explorer to penetrate from the north so near to the equator; Browne had turned back at 16° 10', Bruce at 11°. To Cailliaud and Letorzec we owe many observations on latitude and longitude, some valuable remarks on the variation of the magnetic needle, and details of the climate, temperature, and nature of the soil, together with a most interesting collection of animals and botanical specimens. Lastly, the travellers made plans of all the monuments beyond the second cataract.

The two Frenchmen had preluded their discoveries by an excursion to the oasis of Siwâh. At the end of 1819 they left Fayum with a few companions, and entered the Libyan desert. In fifteen days, and after a brush with the Arabs, they reached Siwâh, having on their way taken measurements of every part of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, and determined, as Browne had done, its exact geographical position. A little later a military expedition was sent to this same oasis, in which Drovetti collected new and very valuable documents supplementing those obtained by Cailliaud and Letorzec. They afterwards visited successively the oasis of Falafre, never before explored by a European, that of Dakel, and Khargh, the chief place of the Theban oasis. The documents collected on this journey were sent to France, to the care of M. Jomard, who founded on them his work called "Voyage à l'Oasis de Siouah."

A few years later Edward Rüppell devoted seven or eight years to the exploration of Nubia, Sennaar, Kordofan, and Abyssinia in 1824, he ascended the White Nile for more than sixty leagues above its mouth.

Lastly, in 1836 to 1838, Joseph Russegger, superintendent of the Austrian mines, visited the lower portion of the course of the Bahr-el-Abiad. This official journey was followed by the important and successful surveys afterwards made by order of Mehemet Ali in the same regions.

CHAPTER III

THE ORIENTAL SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT AND AMERICAN DISCOVERIES

The decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions, and the study of Assyrian remains up to 1840 – Ancient Iran and the Avesta – The survey of India and the study of Hindustani – The exploration and measurement of the Himalaya mountains – The Arabian Peninsula – Syria and Palestine – Central Asia and Alexander von Humboldt – Pike at the sources of the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Red River – Major Long's two expeditions – General Cass – Schoolcraft at the sources of the Mississippi – The exploration of New Mexico – Archæological expeditions in Central America – Scientific expeditions in Brazil – Spix and Martin – Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied – D'Orbigny and American man.

Although the discoveries which we are now to relate are not strictly speaking geographical, they nevertheless throw such a new light on several early civilizations, and have done so much to extend the domain of history and ideas, that we are compelled to dedicate a few words to them.

The reading of cuneiform inscriptions, and the decipherment of hieroglyphics are events so important in their results, they reveal to us so vast a number of facts hitherto unknown, or distorted in the more or less marvellous narratives of the ancient historians Diodorus, Ctesias, and Herodotus, that it is impossible to pass over scientific discoveries of such value in silence.

Thanks to them, we form an intimate acquaintance with a whole world, with an extremely advanced civilization, with manners, habits, and customs differing essentially from our own. How strange it seems to hold in our hands the accounts of the steward of some great lord or governor of a province, or to read such romances as those of Setna and the Two Brothers, or stories such as that of the Predestined Prince.

Those buildings of vast proportions, those superb temples, magnificent hypogæa, and sculptured obelisks, were once nothing more to us than sumptuous monuments, but now that the inscriptions upon them have been read, they relate to us the life of the kings who built them, and the circumstances of their erection.

How many names of races not mentioned by Greek historians, how many towns now lost, how many of the smallest details of the religion, art, and daily life, as well as of the political and military events of the past, are revealed to us by the hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions.

Not only do we now see into the daily life of these ancient peoples, of whom we had formerly but a very superficial knowledge, but we get an idea even of their literature. The day is perhaps not far distant when we shall know as much of the life of the Egyptians in the eighteenth century before Christ as that of our forefathers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our own era.

Carsten Niebuhr was the first to make and bring to Europe an exact and complete copy of inscriptions at Persepolis in an unknown character. Many attempts had been made to explain them, but all had been vain, until in 1802 Grotefend, the learned Hanoverian philologist, succeeded, by an inspiration of genius, in solving the mystery in which they were enveloped.

Truly these cuneiform characters were strange and difficult to decipher! Imagine a collection of nails variously arranged, and forming groups horizontally placed. What did these groups signify? Did they represent sounds and articulations, or, like the letters of our alphabet, complete words? Had they the ideographic value of Chinese written characters? What was the language hidden in them? These were the problems to be solved! It appeared probable that the inscriptions brought from Persepolis were written in the language of the ancient Persians, but Rask, Bopp, and Lassen had not yet studied the Iranian idioms and proved their affinity with Sanskrit.

It would be beyond our province to give an account of the ingenious deductions, the skilful guesses, and the patient groping through which Grotefend finally achieved the recognition of an alphabetic system of writing, and succeeded in separating from certain groups of words what he believed to be the names of Darius and Xerxes, thus attaining a knowledge of several letters, by means of which he made out other words. It is enough for us to say that the key was found by him, and to others was left the task of completing and perfecting his work.

More than thirty years passed by, however, before any notable progress was made in these studies. It was our learned fellow-countryman Eugène Burnouf who gave them a decided impulse. Turning to account his knowledge of Sanskrit and Zend, he found that the language of the inscriptions of Persepolis was but a Zend dialect used in Bactriana, which was still spoken in the sixth century B.C., and in which the books of Zoroaster were written. Burnouf's pamphlet bears date 1836. At the same period Lassen, a German scholar of Bonn, came to the same conclusion on the same grounds.

The inscriptions already discovered were soon all deciphered; and with the exception of a few signs, on the meaning of which scholars were not quite agreed, the entire alphabet became known. But the foundations alone were laid; the building was still far from finished. The Persepolitan inscriptions appeared to be repeated in three parallel columns. Might not this be a triple version of the same inscription in the three chief languages of the Achæmenian Empire, namely, the Persian, Median, and Assyrian or Babylonian. This guess proved correct; and owing to the decipherment of one of the inscriptions, a test was obtained, and the same plan was followed as that of Champollion with regard to the Rosetta stone, on which was the tri-lingual inscription in Greek, Demotic or Enchorial, and hieroglyphic characters.

In the second and third inscriptions were recognized Syro-Chaldee, which, like Hebrew, Himyaric, and Arabic, belong to the Semitic group, and a third idiom, to which the name of Medic was given, resembling the dialects of the Turks and Tartars. But it would be presumptuous of us to enlarge upon these researches. That was to be the task of the Danish scholar Westergaard, of the Frenchmen De Saulcy and Oppert, and of the Englishmen Morris and Rawlinson, not to mention others less celebrated. We shall have to return to this subject later.

The knowledge of Sanskrit, and the investigation of Brahmanic literature, had inaugurated a scientific movement which has gone on ever since with increasing energy.

Long before Nineveh and Babylon were known as nations, a vast country, called Iran by orientalists, which included Persia, Afghanistan, and Beloochistan, was the scene of an advanced civilization, with which is connected the name of Zoroaster, who was at once a conqueror, a law-giver, and the founder of a religion. The disciples of Zoroaster, persecuted at the time of the Mohammedan conquest, and driven from their ancient home, where their mode of worship was still preserved, took refuge, under the name of Parsees, in the north-west of India.

At the end of the last century, the Frenchman Aquetil Duperron brought to Europe an exact copy of the religious books of the Parsees, written in the language of Zoroaster. He translated them, and for sixty years all the savants had found in them the source of all their religious and philological notions of Iran. These books are known under the name of the Zend-Avesta, a word which comprises the name of the language, Zend, and the title of the book, Avesta.

As the knowledge of Sanskrit increased, however, that branch of science required to be studied afresh by the light of the new method. In 1826 the Danish philologist Rask, and later Eugène Burnouf, with his profound knowledge of Sanskrit, and by the help of a translation in that language recently discovered in India, turned once more to the study of the Zend. In 1834 Burnouf published a masterly treatise on the Yacna, which marked an epoch. From the resemblance between the archaic Sanskrit and the Zend came the recognition of the common origin of the two languages, and the relationship, or rather, the identity, of the races who speak them. Originally the names of the deities, the traditions, the generic appellation, that of Aryan, of the two peoples, are the same, to say nothing of the similarity of their customs. But it is needless to dwell on the importance of this discovery, which has thrown an entirely new light on the infancy of the human race, of which for so many centuries nothing was known.

From the close of the eighteenth century, that is to say from the time when the English first obtained a secure footing in India, the physical study of the country was vigorously carried on, outstripping of course for a time that of the ethnology and kindred subjects, which require for their prosecution a more settled country and less exciting times. It must be owned, however, that knowledge of the races of the country to be controlled is as essential to the government as it is to commercial enterprise; and in 1801 Lord Wellesley, as Governor for the Company, recognizing the importance of securing a good map of the English territories, commissioned Brigadier William Lambton, to connect, by means of a trigonometrical survey, the eastern and western banks of the Indus with the observatory of Madras. Lambton was not content with the mere accomplishment of this task. He laid down with precision one arc of the meridian from Cape Comorin to the village of Takoor-Kera, fifteen miles south-east of Ellichpoor. The amplitude of this arc exceeded twelve degrees. With the aid of competent officers, amongst whom we must mention Colonel Everest, the Government of India would have hailed the completion of the task of its engineers long before 1840, if the successive annexation of new territories had not constantly added to the extent of ground to be covered.