Since the later years of the eighteenth century geographical knowledge has been extended in the manner of a great railway system. The main lines of exploration will provide the subject of this and following chapters; with the ramification of branch lines we can hardly concern ourselves here. Taking one consideration with another, Africa may be termed the most important area of geographical conquest during this latest period of our history. The opening of the interior of that continent was long delayed for geographical reasons which have often been insisted upon. The difficulty of inland communication, the fact that the rivers do not offer uninterrupted highways, the barrier of the tropical forests, the unhealthiness of many parts both of the coast lands and of the interior, which modern science is only now fighting—such are the disabilities against which exploration had to contend, to which must be added the lack of commercial instinct in many of the native peoples, and their unhappy experiences of the early slave-trading, and the labour-recruiting which has in some instances provided its modern counterpart.

During the larger part of the eighteenth century hardly any progress was made with the exploration of Africa. The west coast was still a resort of traders for108 slaves and gold, but very little attempt was made even to acquire further territory. In the middle of the century, however, the Turkish dislike of intruders was somewhat allayed, owing partly to the growth of the coffee trade, and it became more easy for travellers to enter Egypt. In 1770 James Bruce started on the task, which he had been anxious to undertake for many years, of searching for the Nile sources. He was courteously received by the ruler of Abyssinia, and after finding and mapping the source of the Blue Nile, he traced it to its junction with the White Nile at Khartum. On his return he was disgusted when it was proved to him by D’Anville (whose map, based on a critical judgment of data, was considerably more correct than Bruce’s) that he had been anticipated by the Portuguese Jesuits. He delayed the publication of his results for seventeen years, and when they appeared, though they constitute a remarkable description of Abyssinia and its inhabitants, they were universally disbelieved.

Towards the end of the century two causes operated for the revival of interest in African affairs—firstly, the foundation of the African Association in 1788, and, secondly, the removal by Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt of the obstacles placed in the way of travellers by Moslem fanatics. In 1795 Mungo Park, a Scotchman, started under the auspices of the African Association to explore the Niger. He travelled up the Gambia River, and after extraordinary difficulties reached the Niger at Sebu, and traced its course for three hundred miles. He had been so long away that he had been given up for dead, and his exploits, carried through with such success, aroused great enthusiasm. Unhappily, his second journey, undertaken in 1805, ended in disaster; he and all who were with him except one guide109 perished, after descending the Niger for about one thousand miles towards the coast, and only just failing to solve the problem of its outflow. In 1798 Francisco de Lacerda, a Portuguese explorer, lost his life on the Zambezi, and early in the nineteenth century Africa was actually crossed for the first time (so far as is known), by two Portuguese traders, from Mozambique to the west coast.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, when the European nations had been roused first to protest against and then to abolish the slave trade, a great deal of valuable work was done to increase the knowledge of Africa, especially by Englishmen. In 1823 W. Oudney, who was sent out as consul to Bornu, and H. Clapperton penetrated to Lake Chad, previously unvisited by any white man, and Clapperton afterwards explored the flourishing civilization of Bornu and Hausaland. He died on a second journey undertaken to open up trade with the Sultan of Sokoto; but in 1830 his servant on this last journey, Richard Lander, succeeded in solving one of the many problems which were beginning to present themselves to students of the continent—the question of the outlet of the Niger. He started from the Guinea coast, and followed the course of the river from Bussa to its mouth in canoes. Much good work was done also by A. G. Laing, who was the first European to visit Timbuktu (in 1826), but was killed there. R. Caillié, who succeeded in reaching the city in 1828, was the first to return from it in safety, which he did by crossing the Sahara to Tangier. H. Barth, who had already travelled all through North Africa, and had ascended the Nile to Wady Halfa, started in 1850 on a trading mission under the auspices of the British Government to the states of Central110 Africa; both his companions died, but Barth carried through alone a brilliant journey, in the course of which he travelled from Lake Chad to Timbuktu, and studied minutely many of the ancient civilized states of the region. Thus the geography of Senegal and the Niger had been largely cleared up by 1850. The great questions which remained untouched were those of the sources of the Nile and the Congo. By 1850 Abyssinia and the greater tributaries of the Nile were pretty well known, through the work of naturalists and travellers, the efforts of Austrian missionaries, who had established stations down to Gondokoro on the Nile, and the interest taken in exploration by Mahomed Ali, ruler of Egypt under the Turks. But the seventy miles of rapids above Gondokoro, and the fierce people of the Bari tribe who lived there, had prevented the acquisition of any but the most meagre knowledge of the upper reaches of the Nile beyond that point. The problem was now approached from a different direction. For some time missionaries had been working at Zanzibar, finding the natives there more tractable than in Abyssinia, the original field of their labours; and two of their number, L. Krapf and T. Redmann, had seen and sent home accounts of snow-mountains under the Equator—Kilimanjaro and Kenya—and also of the great lakes, which they imagined to be all parts of an enormous inland sea. Since the annexation of Aden by the British Government in 1839, moreover, officers of the English army stationed there had shown an interest in the exploration of the African coast opposite them; and in 1854 R. F. Burton got permission to try to reach the centre of Africa through Somaliland, with T. H. Speke. Burton first made a courageous and successful journey to the walled city of Harar in111 Abyssinia; but the more important stage of the expedition was ............