junction with Oudney and Major Denham, to make a journey to Timbuctoo. Dr. Oudney soon fell a victim to the climate; but Clapperton and his surviving companion kept on their way, and, in spite of incredible hardships, penetrated from Tripoli on the Mediterranean to Lake Tchad, and finally to Saccatoo. But he failed to discover the termination of the Niger, which was the chief object of the expedition.
In his next journey, Clapperton started from the Bight of Benin, on the Atlantic coast, and proceeding northward, again reached Saccatoo, thus completing the journey across the heart of Africa. It is said that some of his Scottish friends, with the superstitious regard for family tradition which distinguishes their countrymen, remembered as an ominous fact that the traveller belonged to the Campbell family, a family on whom rested, in popular language, the curse of Glencoe, his grandmother having been a daughter of Colonel Campbell, of Glenlyon, the officer by whom the soldiers who committed the massacre of Glencoe were commanded. But assuredly if there was one man who ought to have been exempted from the ill fortune which the superstitious believed to wait upon the Campbells, it was the good, the heroic, and the kind hearted Clapperton. Nor was there anything in his end, though untimely, to justify the warnings of the old legend. His fate was the common one of African explorers. His friend and leader, Dr. Oudney, had died in his first expedition; and in his second expedition he had the misfortune to see his companions, Captain Pearce, Mr. Dickson, and Dr. Morrison, a naturalist, one by one succumb to the unwholesome climate. Left now with only the servants
