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This battle resulted in the driving out of Abou Saood, the leader of the slave hunters, and the man who had rented the whole country from the authorities at Kartoum for the purpose of brigandage. He went to Cairo to complain of the treatment he had received at the hands of Baker and his party, and actually circulated the report that he and Mrs. Baker had been killed on the head-waters of the Nile.
A strong fortification was built at Fatiko, which was finished by December, and reinforcements were sent for from Gondokoro. It was the hunting season, and many expeditions were organized for the capture of game, in which the natives joined with a hearty good will. Besides the rifle in skilled hands, the net of the natives for the capture of antelope and smaller game was much relied on, and once all enjoyed the magnificent sight of a tropical prairie on fire, with its leaping game of royal proportions, to be brought down almost at will, provided the hunter was not demoralized with its number and size.
While at Fatiko, an embassy came from King Mtesa of the Uganda professing friendship and offering an army of 6000 men for, – he did not know what, but to punish any natives who might appear to be antagonistic, especially Kabba Rega.
By March, 1873, reinforcements from Gondokoro arrived in pitiable plight. Baker’s forces were now 620 strong. He re-inforced his various military stations. Then he liberated the numerous slaves the upward troops had taken from the slave hunters. Most of these were women and back in their native country. They accepted liberty with demonstrations of joy, rushed to the officers and men on whom they lavished hugs and kisses, and danced away in a delirium of excitement.
Colonel Baker’s time would expire in April. Therefore he timed his return to Gondokoro so as to be there by the first of the month, 1873. The whole situation was changed. There was scarcely a vestige of the neat station he had left. The slave dealers had carried things with a high hand, and had demoralized the troops. Filth and disorder had taken the place of cleanliness and discipline. Things were put to rights by May, and on the 25 of that month Baker started down the Nile, leaving his “Forty Thieves” as part of the Gondokoro garrison.
On June 29, Colonel Baker, Mrs. Baker and the officers of this celebrated expedition arrived at Kartoum, and reached Cairo on August 24, whence they sailed for England.
He concludes his history thus: – “The first steps in establishing the authority of a new government among tribes hitherto savage and intractable were of necessity accompanied by military operations. War is inseparable from annexation, and the law of force, resorted to in self-defence, was absolutely indispensable to prove the superiority of the power that was eventually to govern. The end justified the means.
“At the commencement of the expedition I had felt that the object of the enterprise – ‘the suppression of the slave trade’ – was one for which I could confidently ask a blessing.
“A firm belief in Providential support has not been unrewarded. In the midst of sickness and malaria we had strength; from acts of treachery we were preserved unharmed; in personal encounters we remained unscathed. In the end, every opposition was overcome: hatred and subordination yielded to discipline and order. A paternal government extended its protection through lands hitherto a field for anarchy and slavery. The territory within my rule was purged from the slave trade. The natives of the great Shooli tribe, relieved from their oppressors, clung to the protecting government. The White Nile, for a distance of 1,600 miles from Kartoum to Central Africa, was cleansed from the abomination of a traffic which had hitherto sullied its waters.
“Every cloud had passed away, and the term of my office expired in peace and sunshine. In this result, I humbly traced God’s blessing.”
Baker’s picture is much overdrawn. The situation in the Soudan has never been promising. In 1874, Colonel James Gordon was made Governor General of all these equatorial provinces which Baker had annexed to Egypt. Gordon was a brave enthusiast, who had acquired the title of “Chinese” Gordon, because he had organized an army at Shanghai, and, as Brigadier, helped the Chinese Government to put down a dangerous rebellion. He had received the order of Mandarin, had infinite faith in himself, and a wonderful faculty for controlling the unruly elements in oriental countries. He did some wonderful work in the Soudan in suppressing the slave-trade, disarming the Bashi-Bazouks, reconciling the natives, and preventing the Government at Cairo from parcelling out these equatorial districts to Arab slave dealers. He worked hard, organized quite an army, and had a power in the Soudan which was imperial, and which he turned to good uses. But in 1879, he differed with the Khedive and resigned. Then England and France deposed the Khedive, Ismial, and set up Tewfik, under pretext of financial reform. But these two countries could not agree as to a financial policy. France withdrew, and left England to work out the Egyptian problem. The problem is all in a nutshell. English ascendancy in Egypt is deemed necessary to protect the Suez Canal and her water way to India. For this she bombarded and reduced Alexandria in 1882 and established a suzerainty over Egypt – Turkey giving forced assent, and France refusing to join in the mix.
The new Khedive was helpless – purposely so. England planted within Egypt an army of occupation and took virtual directorship of her institutions. But the provinces all around, especially those newly annexed by Baker, revolted. Their Moslem occupants would not acknowledge English interference and sovereignty. Soudan was in rebellion both east and west of the Nile. England sent several small armies toward the interior and fought many doubtful battles. At length the project of reducing the Soudan was given over. But how to get the garrisons out of the leading strongholds in safety became a great problem. That at Kartoum was the largest, numbering several hundred, with a large contingent of women and children. It would be death for any of these garrisons to leave their fortifications and try boats down the Nile, or escape by camel back across the desert. Yet England was committed to the duty of relieving them.
The rebellion was under the lead of the Mahdi, a Moslem prophet, who claimed to be raised up to save his people and religion. His followers were numerous and desperate. Gordon thought the old influence he had acquired over these people when Governor General of the Soudan, would avail him for the purpose of getting the forlorn garrisons away in safety. He was therefore re-appointed Governor General in 1884, and started with Colonel Stewart for Kartoum. There they were besieged for ten months by the Mahdi’s troops, and there Gordon was killed (January 27, 1885) by the enemy, and all his garrison surrendered or were killed. The English sent an army of 8,000 men up the Nile to rescue Gordon, and part of it got nearly to Kartoum, when word of the sad fate that had befallen the garrison reached it. The expedition retreated, and since then the Soudan and Upper Nile have been given over to the old Arab and slave stealing element.
SOURCES OF THE NILE
By reversing the map of North America – turning it upside down – you get a good river map of Africa. The Mississippi, rising in a lake system and flowing into the gulf of Mexico, becomes the Nile flowing into the Mediterranean – both long water-ways. The St. Lawrence, rising in and draining the most magnificent lake system in the world, from Huron to Ontario, will represent the Congo, rising in and draining a lake system which may prove to be of equal extent and beauty. Both are heavy, voluminous streams, full of rapids and majestic falls. The Columbia River will represent the Zambesi, flowing into the Indian Ocean.
Civilized man has, perhaps, known the African Continent the longest, yet he knows it least. Its centre has been a mystery to him since the earliest ages. If the Egyptian geographer traced the first chart, and the astronomer there first noted the motion of sun, moon and stars; if on the Nile the first mariner tried his bark on water; it was but yesterday that the distant and hidden sources of the great stream were revealed, and it is around these sources that the geographer and naturalist have now the largest field for discovery, and in their midst that the traveller and hunter have the finest fields for romance and adventure.
The Mississippi has in three centuries become as familiar as the Rhine. The Nile, known always, has ever nestled its head in Africa’s unknown Lake Region, safe because of mangrove swamp and arid waste. But now that the secret of its sources is out, and with it the fact of a high and delightful inner Africa, full of running streams and far stretching lakes, of rich tropical verdure and abundant animal life, is the dream a foolish one that here are the possibilities of an empire whose commerce, agriculture, wealth and enlightenment shall make it as powerful and bright as its past has been impotent and dark?
We have known Africa under the delusion that it was a desert, with a fringe of vegetation on the sea coast and in the valley of the Nile. “Africs burning sands” and her benighted races are the beginning and end of our school thoughts of the “Dark Continent.” True, her Sahara is the most unmitigated desert in the world, running from the Atlantic Ocean clear to the Tigris in Asia – for the Red Sea is only a gulf in its midst. True, there is another desert in the far South, almost as blank. These, with their drifting sands, long caravans, ghastly skeletons, fierce Bedouin wanderers, friendly oases, have furnished descriptions well calculated to interest and thrill. But they are by no means the Africa of the future. They are as the shell of an egg, whose life and wonder are in the centre.
There are many old stories of African exploration. One is to the effect that a Phœnician vessel, sent out by Pharaoh Necho, left the Red Sea and in three years appeared at the Straits of Gibraltar, having circumnavigated the Continent. But it required the inducement of commercial gain to fix its boundaries exactly, to give it place on the map of the world. Not until a pathway to the east became a commercial necessity, and a short “North West Passage” a brilliant hope, did the era of Arctic adventure begin. The same necessity, and the same hope for a “South East Passage,” led the Portuguese to try all the western coast of Africa for a short cut to the Orient. For seventy years they coasted in vain, till in 1482 Diaz rounded the “Cape of Storms,” afterwards called Cape of Good Hope. Twelve years later Vasco de Gama ran the first European vessel into the ports of India.
The first permanent stream found by the Portuguese on going down the Atlantic, or west, coast of Africa was the Senegal River. They thought it a western outlet of the Nile. Here Europe first saw that luxuriant, inter-tropical Africa which differed so much from the Africa of traditions and school books. They knew that something else than a sandy waste was necessary to support a river like the Senegal. They had been used to seeing and reading of the tawny Bedouin wanderers, but south of this river they found a black, stout, well made people, who in contradistinction to the thin, tawny, short Moors of the desert, became Black Moors – “black-a-moors.” And in contrast with the dry, sandy, treeless plains of Sahara they actually found a country verdant, woody, fertile and rolling.
Unhappily the wrongs of the negro began with his first contact with Europeans. The Portuguese took him home as a specimen. He then became a slave. The moral sense of Europe was still medieval. Her maritime nations fastened like leeches on the west coast of Africa and sucked her life blood. Millions of her children were carried off to Brazil, the West Indies, the Spanish Main, and the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. Much as we abhor the slave system of Africa as carried on at present by Turkish dealers, it is no more inhuman than that practiced for three hundred years by the Christian nations of Europe.
This slave trade was fatal to discovery and research in Africa, such as was warranted by the knowledge which the Portuguese brought, and which is now warranted, and being realized too, by the recent revelations of Stanley, Livingstone and others. The slaver could not, because he dared not, venture far from his rendezvous on the river or in the lagoon where his victims were collected. He kept his haunts a secret, and closed the doors on all who would be likely to interfere with his gains. Not until slavery received its death blow among civilized nations did they begin to set permanent feet, in a spirit of scientific and christian inquiry, on the interior soil of Africa, and to map out its blank spaces with magnificent lakes and rivers. Then began to come those stirring narratives of travel by Mungo Park, Landers and Clapperton, who tracked the course of the Niger River. Then began that northern march of sturdy and permanent Dutch and English colonists who are carrying their cultivation and civilization from the Southern Cape to the Kalihari Desert, the southern equivalent of the Sahara. Then also a Liberian Free State became possible, founded and ruled by the children of those who had been ruthlessly stolen from their happy equatorial homes and sold into bondage in the United States.
Between the two sterile tracts of Africa lies the real Continent. All the coast lands are a shell. Egypt is but a strip on either side the Nile. Central Africa – the Lake regions which feed the Nile, Congo and Zambesi – is a great and grand section, where nature has been prodigal in all her gifts, and which invites a civilization as unique and strong as its physical features. We may wonder at the strange things revealed by Arctic research, but here are unrivalled chains of lake and river communication, and powerful states with strange peoples and customs, of which the last generation never dreamed. No spot of all the earth invites to such adventure as this, and none profiteth so much in the revelations which add to science and which may be turned to account in commerce and the progress of civilization.
We have read the roll of names rendered immortal by efforts to reach the two Poles of the earth. Africa’s list of explorers contains the names of Livingstone, Gordon, Cameron, Speke, Grant, Burton, Baker, Schweinfurth, Stanley, Kirk, Van der Decken, Elton, Pinto, Johnston, and others, some of whom have laid down their lives in the cause of science, and every one recalling memories of gigantic difficulties grappled with, of dangers boldly encountered, of sufferings bravely borne, of great achievements performed, and all within the space of twenty years.
Before entering these Lake Regions of Africa to see what they contain, it is due to the past to recall the fact that an old chart of the African Continent was published at Rome in 1591, which contains a system of equatorial lakes and rivers. It shows the Blue Nile coming out of Abyssinia, and the White Nile taking its rise in two great lakes under the equator – the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, and the Albert Nyanza of Baker. Due south from Albert Nyanza is another lake which is the equivalent of Tanganyika, and this is not only connected with the Congo but with the Nile and Zambesi. Cameron and Stanley have both shown that Tanganyika sends its surplus waters, if any it has, to the Congo, and Livingstone has proven that the head waters of these two mighty rivers are intimately connected. Is this ancient map a happy guess, or does it present facts which afterwards fell into oblivion? Ere the slave trade put its ban between the coast traders and the dwellers of the interior, ere Portuguese influence ceased in Abyssinia, and the missions of the Congo left off communications with Rome, did these unknown regions yield their secrets to the then existing civilization? May not this geographic scrap, dug from among the rubbish of the Vatican library, be the sole relic now extant of a race of medieval explorers the fame of whose adventures has fallen dumb, and whose labors have to be gone over again?
The map of Africa, used in our school days, had a blank centre. No geographer had soiled its white expanse with lines and figures. It was the “happy hunting ground” of conjecture and fancy. The Zambesi and Congo were short stumps of rivers, with perhaps a dotted line to tell what was not known. When two traders – the Pombeiros – passed from Angola on the west to the Pacific, in the beginning of the present century, and wrote how they had crossed a hundred rivers, visited the courts of powerful negro kings, traversed countries where the people had made considerable progress in the industries and arts, their story, like that of other pioneers, was discredited and their information treated with contemptuous neglect.
But about thirty years ago the modern world was startled and gratified with its first glimpse at the Lake Regions of Africa. In 1849, Livingstone, Oswell and Murray, after weary marching across the Kalihari, or southern, desert, stood on the margin of Lake Ngami, the most southerly and first discovered of the great chain of equatorial lakes. They expected to find only a continuation of desert sands and desert hardships, but, lo! a mighty expanse of waters breaks on their vision, worth more as a discovery than a dozen nameless tribes or rivers. What could it mean? Was this the key to that mysterious outpour of rivers which, flowing north, east, and west, blended their waters with the Mediterranean, the Pacific and Atlantic? The discoverer could go no further then, but fancy was excited with the prospect of vague and limitless possibilities and speculation became active in every scientific centre. Back again into the wilderness the discoverer is drawn, and a score of others plunge into the unknown to share his fame.
From the discovery of Ngami, a broad sheet into which the Cubango, south of the Zambesi and parallel with it, expands ere it plunges into the great central Salt Pan (a Great Salt Lake), may be dated the revival of modern curiosity in the secrets of the African Continent.
In the Portuguese colonies of Abyssinia, there were rumors that a great lake existed north of the Zambesi, called Maravi or Nyassa. Its outflow was unknown, and the theory was that it was one of a long chain which fed the Nile. They thought no other stream was worthy of such a source, but they did not ask, whence then the mightier volumes that pour through the Congo and Zambesi? Others said the Nile finds ample sources in the “Mountains of the Moon.” Nobody had seen these, but old Ptolemy, the geographer, had said so two thousand years ago, and hundreds of years before, Herodotus had written, in obedience to the dictates of two Egyptian priests, that “two conical hills, Crophi and Mophi, divided the unfathomable waters of the Nile from those which ran into Ethiopia.”
This is all the information we had of the sources of the Nile down to 1863 – at least of the White, or Eastern, branch of the Nile. Then it was that Speke and Grant, coming from the south, and Baker following the valley of the river toward the equator, almost met on the spot which contains its true sources. Poor Livingstone could not be made to see the merit of their discovery. He clung to the story of Herodotus, amplified by that of Ptolemy, which fixed the head of the great river in two lakes some ten degrees south of the Equator. Livingstone believed that the high water-shed between the Zambesi and Congo would pass for the Mountains of the Moon, and that in the Lualaba, flowing northward (the Lualaba afterwards turned out to be the Congo, as Stanley showed) he had the track of the true Nile. Following this will-o-the-wisp into the swamps of Lake Bangweolo, he met a lonely and lingering death.
To look on the sources of the Nile was ever a wish and dream. The conquerors of Egypt, at whatever time and of whatever nation, longed to unravel the problem of its fountains. In the days when a settled population extended far into Nubia and a powerful state flourished at Meroë, near the junction of the White and Blue Nile, the tramp of armed hosts in search of the “mythical fountains,” favorite haunt of Jove himself when he wished seclusion, often resounded in the deep African interior. Sesostris, the first king who patronized map making, made attempts to discover these springs. Alexander the Great, Cambyses the Persian, and the Roman Cæsars, were inspired with the same wish. Julius Cæsar said he would give up civil war could he but look on the sources of the Nile. Nero sent out a vast exploring party who told of cataracts and marshes which compelled their return. These expeditions were formidable. They returned empty handed as to science, but generally loaded with spoils of conquest. The idea of a solitary explorer, with his life in his hand and good will toward all in his heart, encountering all the perils and privations of African travel for pure love of knowledge, is wholly a modern conception.
Let mention be made here of Ismail Pasha, ex-viceroy of Egypt. To the practices of an oriental despot he added the spirit of a man of modern science. To him, more than to any other man, do we owe a complete solution of the mystery of the Nile. He plunged Egypt into inextricable debt, he ground his people with taxes, but he introduced to them the light of western knowledge, he granted the concessions which built the Suez Canal, he sought out and annexed the sources of the Nile. For twenty years European pioneers and explorers, in his pay or under his protection, worked their way southward, mapping lakes and rivers, founding settlements, capturing slave gangs, until the entire Nile Valley either acknowledges Egypt or is open to commerce and civilization, unless forsooth the recent Soudanese protest, made by the fanatical El Mahdi and his followers, should prove to be more persistent and better sustained than now seems probable.
Our trip up the Nile to Assouan, or the first cataract, past the silent shapes of the temples, sphinxes and pyramids, surrounded by sights and sounds of Oriental life, was as pastime. But now the holiday journey ends, and we are face to face with the realities and hardships of a Nubian desert. The Nile is no longer verdant on either side. The sands, dry and barren, form its shores. But that is not all. You skirt it to Korosko amid difficulties, and there you are at its great bend. If you followed it now to the next place of importance, Abu-Hammed, you would have to travel nearly 600 miles. The waters are broken by falls and the country is desolate. No one thinks of the journey, unless compelled to make it. The course is that of the caravans across the Korosko desert to Abu-Hammed. It is 400 miles of dreary waste, and calculated to burn out of the traveller any romance he may have entertained of Nubian adventure. Day marching over this desert is impossible at certain seasons. Night is given up to the uneasy motion of camel riding and the monotony of a desert tramp.
Do not think the ground is even. Here and there it is broken by wady’s or gulches, and as you descend into these the eye may be relieved with sight of vegetation. Perhaps a gazelle dashes away in fright to the nearest sand hills, or it may be you catch a glimpse of a naked Arab youth tending his flock of goats, for even desert wastes are not utterly void of plant and animal life.
These deserts are not even rainless, though as much as four years have been known to pass without a shower. A rain storm is watched with breathless hope by the nomad Arab tribes. They see the clouds drifting up from the distant Indian Ocean and pitching their black tents on the summits of the mountains that divide the Nile Valley from the Red Sea. A north wind may blow during the night and sweep them back whence they came. But more likely they burst into thunderstorm, as if all the storms of a season were compressed into one. The dry wadys of yesterday are roaring torrents by morning, bearing to the Nile their tribute of a single day, and for a day or a week, the desert air is pure and the desert sand shoots a tender vegetation, only to be withered, like Jonah’s gourd, in fewer hours than it sprang.
The Arab camel driver, however, knows well a few spots where are running water and green turf the year round. These are the oases, or stepping stones, by means of which the burning wilderness may be crossed. Sometimes the wells fail, or have been poisoned or filled, or are in the possession of a hostile predatory band. Then the unfortunate traveller has to face death by thirst or exhaustion as he hurries on to the next halting place. At any rate he is profoundly thankful when the welcome waters of the Nile come into view again at Abu-Hammed, and he knows he is within safe navigable distance of Kartoum, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile.
And now, in passing from Abu-Hammed to Kartoum, we have a grand secret of the Nile. For twelve hundred miles above its mouth that mysterious river receives no tributary on the right hand nor on the left. It may be traced like a ribbon of silver with a narrow fringe of green, winding in great folds through a hot and thirsty desert and under the full blaze of a sun that drinks its waters but returns nothing in the shape of rain. And man also exacts a heavy tribute for purposes of irrigation. Whence its supply? Look for a partial answer to the Atbara, whose mouth is in the east bank of the Nile, half way from Abu-Hammed to Kartoum. Here light begins to break on the exhaustless stores of the Nile. During the greater part of the year the Atbara is dry. Not a hopeful source of supply, you say at once. The sources of the Atbara are away off to the east in the mountains of Abyssinia, whose great buttresses are now visible from the Nile Valley, and whose projections push to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. There also are a Lake Region and Nile sources, whose discovery by Bruce a century ago gave the scientific world quite a stir. His account of this Abyssinian country, so unique in physical features, social life, history, religion and ancient remains, read so much like romance that it was not believed. But Beke, De Cosson, James Bruce and the great Livingstone, have since verified all and given him his proper place among accurate observers and intrepid travellers.
But it was Sir Samuel Baker, on his first journey up the Nile in 1861, who pointed out the importance of the Abyssinian rivers as Nile tributaries. He turned aside from his southward route and followed the dry bed of the Atbara for a double purpose. First, to watch the great annual flooding of this Nile feeder. Second, to enjoy the sport of capturing some of the big game, such as the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe and lion, known to abound in the thick jungles covering the lower slopes of the adjacent hills.
The Atbara, or “Black Nile,” was simply a vast wady or furrow, thirty feet deep and 400 yards to half a mile across, plowed through the heart of the desert, its edges marked by a thin growth of leafless mimosas and dome palms. The only trace of water was here and there a rush-fringed pool which the impetuous torrent had hollowed out in the sudden bends in the river’s course, and where disported themselves hippopotami, crocodiles, and immense turtles, that had long ago adjusted their relations on a friendly footing on the discovery that none of them could do harm to the others. On the 23 of June, the simoom was blowing with overpowering force; the heat was furnace-like, and the tents of travellers were covered with several inches of drifted sand. Above, in the Abyssinian mountains, however, the lightnings were playing and the rains were falling as if the windows of heaven had been opened. The monsoon had set in; the rising streams were choking their narrow channels in their frantic rush to the lowlands, and were tearing away huge masses of the rich dark soil, to be spread a month hence over the flat plains of Egypt. The party encamped on the Atbara heard through the night a sound as if of distant thunder; but it was “the roar of the approaching water.”
Wonder of the desert! Yesterday there was a barren sheet of glaring sand with a fringe of withered bush and tree. All nature was most poor. No bush could boast a leaf. No tree could throw a shade. In one night there was a mysterious change – wonders of the mighty Nile! An army of waters was hastening to the wasted river. There was no drop of rain, no thunder cloud on the horizon to give hope. All had been dry and sultry. Dust and desolation yesterday; to-day a magnificent stream five hundred yards wide and twenty feet deep, dashing through a dreary desert. Bamboos, reeds, floating matter of all kinds, hurry along the turbid waters. Where are all the crowded inhabitants of the pools? Their prison-doors are open, the prisoners are released, and all are rejoicing in the deep sounding and rapid waters of the Atbara.
Here is the clue to one part of the Nile mystery – its great annual inundations, source of fertilizing soil and slime. The Blue Nile, further on, and with its sources in the same Abyssinian fastnesses, contributes like the Atbara, though in a secondary degree, to the annual Nile flood and to Egypt’s fertility, with this difference, that it flows all the year round.
At Kartoum, as already seen, we reach the junction of the White and Blue Nile, the frontier of two strongly contrasted physical regions, and the dividing line between the nomadic barbarism of the north and the settled barbarism of the south. The secret that has still to be unveiled is the source of that unfailing flow of water which perpetually resists the influences of absorption, evaporation and irrigation, and carries a life giving stream through the heart of Egypt at all seasons of the year.
