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HE HOME DRESS is of plain poplin or of plaid- The CHILD'S PARDESSUS is composed of gray

the shoulders, are crossed with chenille, which disposes them in lozenges; the corsage being trimmed in a similar manner. The sleeves are ruffled at the

cuffs.

cloth, with taffeta forming the and outside

the sleeves.

The DINNER TOILET is of mouse-colored moire antique. The corsage is open, and the dress ornamented with black lace.

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. CLXVII. APRIL, 1864.-VOL. XXVII

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THE

JOURNEY TO THE SOURCE OF THE NILE.*

THE one great remaining problem of African geography has been solved. The questions, "O Father Nile, who thy cause can tell?

Or in what lands thy fountains well?"

which the Roman poet asked fifteen hundred years ago, echoing the inquiries of a thousand years before, have been answered, and in this answer is involved the solution of the mystery of the interior of the African continent.

All that was known of the sacred river of Egypt up to a century ago can be told in a few words. For 1500 miles it poured its vast volume of waters almost due northward through a narrow valley, without receiving a single affluent with water enough to slake the thirst of a weary traveler; and yet so copious are the sources from which it is fed that, notwithstanding the evaporation caused by an almost cloudless sun, the myriads of rude engines which lift the water from its bed, and the hundreds of canals that, supplied by its bounty, irrigate the lower Delta, it Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.

By JOHN HANNING SPEKE. With Portrait, Maps, and numerous Illustrations. Harper and Brothers.

suffers no apparent diminution. At regular periods, which could be calculated almost to a day, the great river began to rise-not in a sudden freshet, but slowly and gradually, filling its banks, transforming the valley into a lake, and then as slowly retired, leaving behind a sediment which converted a region which would otherwise have been a desert into the garden of the world. "Egypt is the gift of the Nile," said the Father of History twenty-one centuries ago. A miracle was resorted to in explanation of this. A drop of water, it was said, falling upon a rock far away in the unknown interior swelled into this mighty overflow.

In course of centuries it was found that at Khartoum, 1500 miles from its mouth, the Nile was formed by two great affluents: the Bahrel-Azreek, or "Blue River," flowing northwestward from Abyssinia, and the Bahr-el-Abiad, or "White River," flowing northeastward from the unknown interior. Both are great streams, but the Blue River, having the wider mouth, was for a long time considered the main Nile, the White River being a tributary. So thought

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by Harper and Brothers, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

VOL. XXVIII.-No. 167.-00

Bruce, when, almost a century ago, he attempt-expedition, was a most uncomfortable man to

ed to solve the mystery of the Nile. The passage in which he describes how he ran barefoot down the hill to the spring, the undoubted source of the Blue River, is one of the most affecting in all records of explorers. It is easier, he says, to guess than to describe the situation of my mind, standing in that spot which had baffled the genius, industry, and inquiry of both ancients and moderns for the course of near three thousand years. Kings had attempted the discovery at the head of armies. Fame, riches, and honor had been held out for ages to any man who would achieve what he had done. "Though a mere private Briton, I triumphed here, in my own mind, over kings and their armies, and every comparison was leading nearer and nearer to presumption, when the place where I stood the object of my vain-glory-suggested what depressed my short-lived triumph."

The triumph was incomplete as well as shortlived, though Bruce never knew it. The Blue River is but a feeble affluent of the White. If the River of Egypt depended only upon it for water, its bed would be dry, except in floodtime, long before the sea was reached.

In 1840 Mehemet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, sent a large expedition to explore the course of the White Nile. This was accompanied by several European savans, one of whom, M. Werne, published an account of it. According to this account the expedition went as far south as to within 3 degrees from the equator, and then turned back on account of the shallowness of the water. Captain Speke, upon what we think insufficient grounds, discredits this statement. He followed the river down from a point, as we shall see, much farther south, and found no deficiency in water. The account of the Egyptian expedition is, however, too minute and circumstantial to warrant us in believing it a fabrication; while Speke's statement is also doubtless true. The explanation which we suggest to reconcile them is, that the Egyptian expedition turned off from the main stream and went up one of its branches, running from the westward. At all events, the expedition failed to discover the sources of the White River, or true Nile, and could only locate it conjecturally in two or more streams "flowing from the mountains of the Kombirat, on the equator or half a degree south of it." The maps published in the best atlases attempt to reconcile the various statements, but for all practical purposes they are worse than useless.

To Captain Speke belongs, beyond all question, the honor of having discovered the true origin of the main branch of the Nile-which is the Nile itself. Of Captain Speke personally we know less than we wish. He is a captain in the British Indian army. The portrait prefixed to his book shows him to be in the prime of life -between 30 and 40 years, apparently. He accompanied Captain Burton in his exploration of the Lake Regions of Central Africa, in 1857-59. Burton, judging from his own account of this

get along with. He quarreled with every body, from his servants up to his Government. He appears to have had a special dislike to Speke. There is hardly a chapter in his "Lake Regions of Central Africa," from Preface to Appendix, in which Speke is not mentioned or alluded to unfavorably: He knew no French or Arabic, and little of science; he was a "companion," "unfit for any other but a subordinate capacity." He gets sick more than once; has a fever, a liver complaint, ophthalmia; takes a knife to prod a beetle which has crept into his ear, and injures his hearing; goes off on an exploring expedition, and "returns moist and mildewed, and nothing done;" and so on, paragraph after paragraph. In a word, Speke can do nothing which Burton does not think ridiculous.

Burton's scorn culminates on the 25th of Au

gust, 1858. On that day Speke returned from an expedition upon which he had been sent six weeks before, "because," according to Burton, "he was a fit person to be dispatched upon this duty; moreover his presence at Kazeh was by no means desirable." The object of this expedition was to find out something about a certain Lake N’yanza, which had been reported to be a considerable body of water. Burton's account of the meeting is worth quoting in full:

66

ing trip' had led him to the northern water, and he had At length my companion had been successful, his 'flyfound its dimensions surpassing our most sanguine expect ations. We had scarcely, however, breakfasted before he announced to me the startling fact that he had discovered the sources of the White Nile. It was an inspiration per

haps; the moment he sighted the N'yanza he felt at once no doubt but that the lake at his feet gave birth to that interesting river which has been the subject of so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers. The fortunate discoverer's conviction was strong; his reasons were weak were of the category alluded to by the damsel Lucetta, when justifying her penchant in favor of the lovely gentleman,' Sir Proteus:

I have no other but a woman's reason,
I think him so because I think him so.'"

Burton goes on to tell what these reasons were, and according to his representation they were feeble enough. He then proceeds to prove quite satisfactorily to himself-writing in 1858-that it was morally and physically impossible that Lake N'yanza could be the source of the White Nile. It would be curious to inquire whether, now that Speke has so triumphantly proved his opinion to be correct, Burton is quite as well satisfied with his demonstration, even backed up as it was by the dictum of "Mr. Macqueen, F.R.G.S."

The motive for Burton's persistent deprecation of Speke is doubtless to be found in the fact that Speke published in Blackwood's Magazine an account of his explorations before Burton had prepared his book. As head of the expedition he wished for the honor arising from it; but his "companion" and "subordinate" had not only performed the one great thing which the expedition had achieved, but had put it before the world in a form which men read and noted, though Burton, when the papers

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reached him in Africa, consoled himself "by subordinate capacity; and, as may be imagined, among a supplying certain deficiencies as regards orthog-party of Arabs, Baloch, and Africans, whose language he ignored, he was unfit for any other but a subordinate caraphy and syntax" which he discovered in the account. In the preface to his "Lake Regions" he sums up his grievances thus:

pacity. Can I then feel otherwise than indignant, when I find that, after preceding me from Aden to England with the spontaneous offer, on his part, of not appearing before the Society that originated the expedition until my "During the exploration he [Captain Speke] acted in a return, he had lost no time in taking measures to secure

for himself the right of working the field which I had opened, and from that day he has placed himself en evidence as the primum mobile of an expedition in which he signed himself 'surveyor'—cujus pars minimum fuit."

presided over the Royal Geographical Society when his expedition was got up; the mouth of a little bay he calls Napoleon Channel, and Sir Roderick Murchison is complimented by having his name affixed to a creek close by; while to the African name of the lake he prefixes the name of the British Queen, styling it "Victoria N'yanza"-a designation which we trust will not be adopted. It is quite as objectionable and likely to be quite as futile as Herschell's call. ing the planet Uranus Georgium Sidus-"The George Star," or Livingstone's attempt to substitute "Victoria Falls" for Mosiatunye, "The Smoking Water," as the name for the magnificent cataract of the Zambesi.

Speke's expedition was, however, by no means finished with the discovery of the origin of the Nile. He was detained for some time among the savage tribes of the region, who were loth to part with the first white men whom they had seen; and when, by a deal of diplomacy, he succeeded in getting off, he had to follow the river for 300 miles down to Gondokoro, where he first encountered a white man, and was again on the boundaries of civilization. This was in February, 1863, and as he fairly set out on his journey in October, 1860, the expedition occupied twenty-nine months. The space traversed during this time, loosely measured on the chart, is about 1500 miles, not counting various detours which he was obliged to make. The subsequent voyage of 2000 miles down the Nile, from which a traveler, who had less to say, would easily have made a couple of volumes, is dispatched by Speke in half a dozen pages. The preliminary trip from England to the Cape of Good Hope, and thence to Zanzibar, is disposed of in a half-dozen pages; the return voyage from Egypt to England is barely alluded to in a score of lines.

So much for the quarrel-if we may so call an affair in which the contention is all on one side; for we fail to find the slightest allusion to it in Speke's account of his Discovery of the Source of the Nile. He tells us simply that he had asserted that the lake Victoria N'yanza, which he "discovered on the 30th of July, 1858, would eventually prove to be the source of the Nile," and that he set out upon the expedition with the purpose of proving the truth of his assertion. He doubtless had better reasons for believing this than those put into his mouth by Captain Burton. If in the absence of any statement from him of the grounds of his belief, we may be allowed to conjecture them, we should state some of them thus: Here in the heart of the continent is a great lake of fresh water which must be supplied by many rivers. The water poured into it must be carried off either by evaporation or by an outlet. Every stream bears with it more or less salts; pure water only is taken up by evaporation; hence a lake filled by rivers and emptied by evaporation only must in time become salt, for all the saline matter received into it remains, while the surplus of fresh water is continually evaporated. A lake remains fresh only when its waters, with their saline solutions, are carried off by an outlet. The ocean is salt because the saline matters poured into it by all the rivers remain there. The Sea of Tiberias fed and filled by the Jordan is fresh because it is emptied by that river as fast as filled; while the Dead Sea, fed by the same river, is intensely salt, because, having no outlet, its surplus waters are carried off solely by evaporation, leaving the salts behind. The Caspian is salt, because it has no outlet; the great American lakes are Speke's "Journal of the Discovery of the fresh because their overplus of waters, plunging Source of the Nile," therefore, is devoted maindown Niagara, are carried off in the St. Law-ly to an account of his adventures and discovrence. Speke might have reasoned, and most likely did reason thus in his own mind, without explaining himself to Burton. Here is N'yanza, a great fresh-water lake, which must have an outlet in some river; that river must find its way to the ocean; we know now whence come all the African rivers except the Nile; none of these can drain N'yanza; but the Nile, from its size and the nature of its inundations, must drain a vast region; and this region can be only that around N'yanza. Therefore, by the process of exhaustive reasoning, I conclude that this lake before me is the origin of the Nile.

At all events, whatever might have been the course of reasoning, the conclusion was correct. After a journey which had then lasted almost two years, Speke reached the place where the Nile pours from the lake in a stream 400 or 500 feet broad, dashing down a fall of a dozen feet. | This spot is called by the natives "the Stones ;" but Speke, with very questionable taste, names it "Ripon Falls" in honor of the nobleman who

eries in that portion of Central Africa lying between five degrees north and five degrees south of the equator, and varying little from the thirty-second parallel of longitude east from Greenwich. Of this expedition we propose to give a rapid sketch, presenting only a few of the salient points.

When Speke returned to England in 1859, after his expedition with Burton, and told to the Geographical Society what he had seen and what he believed, the answer was, "We must send you there again." The explorer was willing to go. He said, "Let Government give me £5000 for expenses, and I will undertake the work." The Society thought that Government would not give so much. Speke undertook the work for half that sum, engaging to supply the remainder of the funds himself. In addition to the £2500, the Indian Department furnished him with fifty carbines and ammunition, gave several gold watches for presents to native chiefs, and aided him in sundry other ways. The cost of the expedition must have greatly exceeded

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