Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/82

68  regions of Central Africa with very different aims and objects. The first was a purely scientific journey made by a distinguished German naturalist, who, with great knowledge of his subject, but with comparatively slender resources, availed himself of the assistance of traders to forward and further him on his way. The other was a military expedition numbering at first many hundreds of men, and conveyed in a fleet of steamers and sailing-boats to Gondokoro on the White Nile, which was to be the headquarters of this little army. If we ask what was the object this force had in view, the command of which was formally granted by an express firman of the khedive to a distinguished traveller and elephant-hunter, with absolute power and the title of a pacha, that commander himself assures us that it was undertaken for the extirpation of that nefarious traffic in slaves, which he had discovered in his travels through the same regions to be the great bar to the civilization of Central Africa. This object is put forth on his title-page, professed in the first chapter of the book, and paraded, if we may use the expression, on page after page throughout these volumes. It was against the slave-trade, and the slave-trade alone, that Baker's expedition up the White Nile was planned after due deliberation by the khedive, and its command accepted by the traveller whose former travels in Africa in company with his heroic wife had proved him best fitted to lead a band of trained soldiers on a daring enterprise. We may say at once, while treating of the origin of the expedition, and of Baker's avowed singleness of purpose, that in all probability the motives of the Egyptian government in this matter were mixed; and that the acquisition of territory and the taming of barbarous neighbours were probably far greater recommendations in their eyes than any such philanthropic object as the suppression of that traffic in human flesh which, as we shall see afterwards, is, horrible as it may seem to the enlightened ears of Englishmen, a normal and even necessary condition of life in Upper Egypt and the Soudan. While writing this we do not mean to say that at Cairo there are not to be heard voices round the khedive's divan loudly decrying that iniquitous traffic as unworthy to exist on Egyptian soil; but, strange to say, those who use this language, returning to their houses and harems, find themselves surrounded by slaves, with whom, in spite and in the teeth of their protestations, even Lower Egypt is full. It is not wonderful therefore that, as the diahbeeah of the tourist and the traveller ascends the Nile, those outcries against the slave-trade gradually die away, until on arriving at Khartoum, the stranger is surprised to find that he is in the midst of a population whose daily bread is the traffic so stigmatized at Cairo; nay, more, that the very men so indignant against it when in presence of the khedive are not slow to receive backsheesh from the traders in that emporium who were at first the originators and are still the propagators of this accursed commerce.

After these preliminary observations, we propose to consider these two works in the order of time, and to see what both the naturalist and the pacha accomplished in their respective expeditions. Starting with very different views and traversing very divergent paths, it will be seen that they both meet at last in one common and outspoken declaration, that the slave-trade is the curse of Central Africa, and that before it and the ivory-trade with which it is inseparably connected, all other branches of trade dwindle and decay; so that regions blessed by Providence with abundant populations and most exuberant fertility produce, under the present system of trade at Khartoum, little else but slaves, and the ivory which without slaves it is impossible to procure. To begin then with Dr. Schweinfurth. To use his own words, he was "already no novice on African soil" when he prepared in the summer of 1868 for the great journey described in these two bulky and beautifully illustrated volumes. Born at Riga in 1836, the son of a merchant, he studied at Heidelberg and Berlin, and from his boyhood devoted himself to botany. In 1860, when the collections of the young 