Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image

THE UNKNOWN CONTINENT.

Wb are living. Bays the Pall Mall ' Gazette," in an ago of surprise and discoveries, and some of these of a nature to change all the material relations which have hitherto governed the distribution of the race over the earth's surface. Seas once separated are joined by man's labor ; deserts and steppes and lofty mountain ranges cease to oppose impassable harriers between nations. Iron roads traverse the Rockj Mountains as they have alrpady pierced the Alps, linking together the Atlantic and Pacific by a direct line from shore to shore, while for purposes of communication Liverpool and New York speak with each other across (he ocean with the quickness of thought. Voyages of five months around the Cape to India and China are now reduced to less than as many weeks. So rapid is progress in every field of human activity, that fact outruns anticipation, aud the most active imagination lags behind in the march of events. i In no province can this be more truly said than of geographical discovery, especially in Central Africa. It was but yesterday that Lieutenant Cameron returned from a " walk across Africa" from sea to sea, and yet there has been time to hear of the circumnavigation of the Albert Nyanza, and the missing link required to unite the White Nile with its source in that inland sea of equatorial Africa has been found at last. How many ages of the world have succeeded each other since the first attempts to discover the sources of the Nile ! When the Pharaohs ruled in Egypt and Ethiopia and built a city at Meroe after crossing the Nubian desert, efforts were made in this direction ; but there is no reason to believe that either the armies or the explorers of Pharaoh ever penetrated far into the country; and when Herodotus inquired of the priests for the Bources of the Nile, they had only a ridiculous story to give about its rising from four fountains between Egypt and Abyssinia. Diodorus Siculus, at a much later date, did not get any better information from the priests or philosophers of Memphis. When the Greeks entered the country and an exploring expedition was sent out to sail round Africa, they never penetrated to the sources of the Nile. Neither the Persians nor the Phoenicians knew anything of inner Africa. The Romans did not succeed much better. Although Nero sent an exploring expedition up the Nile, it seems only to have reached the marshy country near Khartoum. They made the desert their southern frontier. In a word, the ancients knew little of inner Africa beyond such information as Ptolemy had collected — picked up, it might have been, from slaves in Cairo or on the Barbary coast— that the Nile proceeded from great lakes, and across the Sahara was another river running eastward. Nor was this state of ignorance much improved in latter ages, when the Berbers were converted to Islam, and camel caravans traversed the Sahara. Arab merchants settled, indeed, on the banks of the Niger, and then, as now, roamed from kingdom to kingdom ; but they contributed nothing to the knowledge of those inner regions of Central Africa. They converted the Soudan into " a secondhand Asiatic possession," as Barth described it, and there they stopped. And now from that same Khartoum where the Romans were checked. Colonel Gordon's progress in command of the present ruler of Egypt's expeditionary forces have been steady and continuous J until crowned with the triumph already mentioned. After estab- j lishing a chain of military posts from Lardo on the Upper Nile to Victoria Nyanza on the one hand, and Magungo on the Albert ! Nyanza on the other, he dispatched Signor Gessi in two life-boats. ! What this meant can only be realised when it is known that the j life-boats were each capable of containing sixty or seventy wen ; j there was also one small steamer of thirty-eight tons ; and they all | had to be moved in pieces by Colonel Gordon from Gondokoro to ! Dufle, above the Makedo Rapids, where they were put together by ! workmen obtained from Khartoum. . With the two boats the Albert Nyanza was circumnavigated, and its exact dimensions I determined. It was found to be one hundred and forty miles in length, with a width of fifty miles — considerably less than had been imagined; just as Lake Nyanza was recently found by absolute measurement to be nearly one nundred miles longer than was supposed. The President of the Geographical Society rightly said' at the last meeting that so important and rapid had been the .discoveries of the last three or four years that a new map of Africa must be made, the present large diagram being no longer available as a record of our knowledge. "

This article text was automatically generated and may include errors. View the full page to see article in its original form.
Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZT18761229.2.16

Bibliographic details

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 196, 29 December 1876, Page 8

Word Count
796

THE UNKNOWN CONTINENT. New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 196, 29 December 1876, Page 8

THE UNKNOWN CONTINENT. New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 196, 29 December 1876, Page 8