Littell's Living Age/Volume 126/Issue 1629/The Newest African Project
THE NEWEST AFRICAN PROJECT.
People are not half as much interested in Northern Africa as in Central Africa, and it is rather stupid of them. No book about Morocco, or Algeria, or Tunis, or even Timbuctoo, will sell like a book about Lake Nyanza, even though the former is written by an artist, and the latter by one who has as little idea how to make a book as poor Dr. Livingstone. No lecture on the Niger attracts an audience like one on the Upper Nile, and men who know all about Dr. Livingstone's friends and Sir S. Baker's enemies and the khedive's new tributaries, hardly know the names of the States which claim the southern border of the Mediterranean, and do not know at all the limit of tneir southern boundaries. This neglect is a mistake, for even if a negro is more interesting than an Arab Moor, which he is not, the Moor having perhaps of all semi-savage men the largest undeveloped potentiality of genius, and having displayed his power already as conqueror, architect, and scientific inquirer, and if tropical Africa is less known than the northern region — which is now not the case — North Africa has one advantage which ought to make its geography a permanent object of enlightened curiosity. Every foot gained in Northern Africa is a foot gained for Europe, a foot of room for the development of the races to which, so far as man can perceive, the civilization of mankind has been entrusted. The Nyanza is far off, but Timbuctoo is near. Livingstone may have been clearing the way for the English ultimately, but he has cleared it immediately for the Egyptian Turks. North Africa has once been European, and if Europe could but once be convinced that it is worth having, would be European again. The emperor Napoleon, whose dreaminess was his strong as well as his weak point, dreamed and said that it was worth having; and he may have been right, though Europe, alarmed by the desert, by Mohammedan fanaticism, and by the failure of the French, who are not colonists, to colonize Algeria, declines without further evidence to believe it. Europe may be justified by the event, but a region practically limitless, which was once a granary, which may contain mineral resources of immense extent, and which is everywhere within six days' steam of Marseilles, is worth a greal deal more effort at exploration than has yet been bestowed upon it. The exploration of Northern Africa, with an especial view to its fertility, its mineral treasures, and its capacity for sustaining Europeans — a capacity probably exceeding that of Spain — should be undertaken systematically; and if the southern nations, to whom the task properly falls, are unequal to the task, Englishmen should commence it for them. They have the men, the energy, and the money, and may well expend a moderate quantity of all three in an effort to know the one grand region which European energy has once attacked, has begun to conquer, and then has abandoned to the semi-savage and the sand.
They could hardly make a better beginning — though it seems to be an indirect one — than by supporting the Mackenzie Mission, brought before a public meeting at the Mansion House on Monday, but apparently received with more of astonishment than of the enthusiasm which yields money. The project then unfolded seems a dreamy one, but its dreaminess may be exaggerated; and granting that it is a dream, it is a dream which may have material consequences. The idea of the persons who are supporting Mr. Mackenzie is to get behind the great desert barrier which divides Mediterranean Africa from the more fertile centre, and attack the continent from the west, at a point where the Canary Islands give, or would give, if they belonged to anybody but the Portuguese, an admirable basis of action. They are fertile, they belong to Europe, they can be reached from London in six days, and they are only eighty miles from the thickest section of the African continent. Africa can be entered here without interference from barbarous kings, for the dominions of the Morocco sultan do not extend so far south; or from savage populations, for there are none; or from the climate, which, though not a good one, is too dry to be dangerous. Explorers or traders may die from want of water, but they will not die of miasma, or the fevers it produces. The traveller landing at the old mouth of the Belta, between Cape Bojador and Cape Juby, has before him a straight and practicable road across the desert to Timbuctoo, in the very heart of the West-African continent, but only eight hundred miles away. Suppose, merely for argument, that a railway existed from the mouth of the Belta to Timbuctoo — twice the length, that is, of the railway from London to Edinburgh — Southampton would be within seven days' journey — fifteen hundred miles by water and eight hundred by land — of the heart of West Africa, and of Timbuctoo, a city from which the trader, if he were protected there, could trade by caravan with three-fourths of the continent, and descend the Niger at will. That is not an enticing prospect, so far as commerce is concerned, though they talk of indigo, and cotton, and oils — except to a few firms which like little trades and one hundred per cent. profit better than great trades and five per cent. — and there will be no railway, but the explorer, once on the Belta, will recognize two geographical possibilities. It is more than probable, after the experiments of General Daumas, that the sinking of fifteen or twenty artesian wells would turn the way from Cape Juby to Timbuctoo into a safe, easy, and not very tedious caravan route, by which the people of the great region which looks to Timbuctoo as its centre would habitually communicate with Europe. They now pass through Morocco by a path two thousand miles long, but this is a far shorter, much easier, and much safer way, if only water could be readily and certainly obtained, and the probability that it could is very great. There are no tribes to stop them, no kings to tax them, and the Atlantic at the end. Such a caravan route, with the safe communication it would ensure, would cost a mere trifle, would attract a trade which might be important among third-class trades, and would be a regular door of communication with the far interior of Western Africa, — with the little-known lands where, from the little evidence as yet obtained, the negro seems to have reached some capacity of understanding that peace will pay him a great deal better than war; and this speculation, which is not "dreamy," or "wild," or even foolhardy, is well worth the cost and trouble and danger of an expedition. If it is worth while to spend a little money and a competent explorer or two and some energy on exploring any place, it is worth while to spend them on a short route between the heart of Western Africa and the Atlantic; and, the end considered, there can be neither absurdity nor recklessness in the idea of traversing the eight hundred miles of desert which it is requisite to know. Mr. Giffard Palgrave did infinitely more than that in Arabia. If the tsetse-fly is there, as somebody is sure to say he is, he will not bite a camel; if the desert robber is dangerous, he will not kill anybody who subscribes at home; and if there is no water, — well, we shall know the fact, and know better how to manage the next effort. The advantage to be gained is worth the risk, but the promoters dream dreams to which this advantage is trivial, and as they include engineers, their dreams should have a hearing. They think it possible to reopen the inland sea which, as they are convinced, on evidence of great weight, once connected the centre of Western Africa with the Atlantic Ocean. Their belief is that the vast depression in the desert of Sahara known as El Juff, and certainly once the bed of a sea, being even now so encrusted with salt that vegetation will not live, was once filled by the water of the Atlantic through a fiord jutting into the continent through the valley of the Belta, and now shut off from the ocean by a bar of sand eight miles across. This bar, formed by the Belta, once cut through, they believe that a ship might steam from Southaminon to Timbuctoo, above the old ocean-bed, now a waterless, treeless, cornless desert of sand, salt, and stone, right up to the higher land, whence the Niger, after its northernmost bend, tends sharply south. The sea certainly reached there once, for there are the Atlantic shells to prove it, and probably in very recent times, — that is, times within reach of the rumours on which ancient geographers based their maps. This dream may of course be a dream, and nothing better. The floor of El Juff may prove to be many yards higher than geographers think it is. The bar may be fifty miles across, instead of only eight. The expense of cutting only eight miles may turn out to be impossible, without the assistance of rulers who want all their revenues to improve their power of killing other homicides; but still the evidence has been studied by experts, who are not prepared to reject it, and the possibility is amply sufficient to justify determined exploration, and that is all that we are at present advocating. Grant that the idea of refilling the inland sea is fantastic, and that no engineering work worth doing can be attempted in the Sahara, and that Sir A. Cotton, who pledges himself to the physical practicability of the scheme, is influenced by his permanent belief that water, as well as faith, can remove mountains, still the Mackenzie Expedition is thoroughly worthy the active support of all interested in understanding the planet they live on. Suppose some millionaire makes it his own, supports the expedition himself, and so links his name into modern history! He will not, it may be, get any percentages, though percentages are possible through the enterprise too; but he will acquire a reputation, a separate place in the world, which many men value more, and a new and permanent interest in life. It is something to make a hidden continent accessible to Europe, though only by caravan, and may be the means of enabling his successors to accomplish much more. A direct water-route into the heart of Africa, — that is a dream on which kings might spend fortunes, and never be taunted either with ignoble or fantastic expenditure.