Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/95

Rh  had already expired. All went pretty well in their journey up the White Nile, till they reached the Sett or grass barrier, which we have already described as blocking up the entrance to the Gazelle River in Schweinfurth's journey. Baker's expedition found the obstacles on the Giraffe channel of the White Nile still worse than those on the western branch, and even the steamers were unable to force their way through the water vegetation. After many efforts to break through the barrier, on April 3rd Baker reluctantly gave the order to return, and on the 19th of the month reached a point near Fashoda on the White Nile in the Shillook country which we have already described in our account of Schweinfurth's discoveries. There at a spot to which he gave the name of Tewfikeeyah, he built a camp, in which he remained till December 11, 1870, to the great annoyance of the mudir or governor of Fashoda, whose connivance at the slave-trade was soon detected by Baker, who confiscated the slaves and thwarted him and the slave-traders with whom he was in league in various ways; but all this time, so far as the purposes of the expedition were concerned, was wasted by the lateness of the start the year before, a year and nine months of the four years having now expired. At this camp on August 9, 1870, Baker received, by way of the Gazelle River, a letter from Schweinfurth who, quite unknown to him, had "the extreme courtesy and generosity to entrust" him "with all the details of his geographical observations collected in his journey in the Western Nile Basin." The delay and obstacles both material and moral which he had encountered thus far rendered it absolutely necessary for Baker to return to Khartoum, where he accordingly arrived on September 21, to the astonishment of the governor and population, who fondly believed that the expedition aimed against the great staple of the place must now be abandoned. But Baker had only returned to be the better able to pounce on his enemies, the ivory and slave traders of the Soudan. The supreme command entrusted to him by the khedive was practically much limited south of Gondokoro by a contract entered into by the governor-general of Khartoum and the house of Agad, which gave that trader the monopoly of the ivory-trade in the regions north of Gondokoro till April 1872. So long as the slave-traders were masters of the position north of that point, it was useless in Baker to proceed with his conquests to the south, for the slave-traders and their allies and armed force would be between him and his base of operations. Though Baker was bound to admit the validity of this contract up to the time mentioned, it was settled at the divan of the governor-general that after that date he should "assume the monopoly of the ivory-trade in the name of the khedive throughout those regions north of Gondokoro in which Agad was now virtually independent;" and this solemn agreement was signed not only by Agad himself but also by his son-in-law and agent, and afterwards on the death of Agad his successor, one Aboo Saood, a man who ever afterwards was Baker's bête noire, and to whom as the representative of the slave-traders he ascribes all the trouble, peril, and disasters to which the expedition was exposed. But there before the governor-general nothing could have been more submissive than Aboo Saood's behaviour, and he vowed fidelity to Baker and the khedive, and offered material assistance in terms so extravagant as to awaken suspicion.

Returning from Khartoum Baker started with his expedition early in December, and having cut and forced his way through the Sett, which was nearly as dense as it had been early in the year, but still not quite impenetrable, he at last arrived at his headquarters at Gondokoro, in 4° 54s. N. lat., on April 15, 1871, when more than two years of the period of his command had expired. This place, about fourteen hundred miles by the river from Khartoum, was well known to Baker from his former journeys. It had then been the seat of an Austrian missionary station, who had planted lemons and other fruit-trees, which were still flourishing; but the missionaries themselves had died, and the natives had destroyed their house. Soon after his arrival he renamed it Ismailia, in honour of the khedive, and fondly hoped that the old name would vanish before the new. The natives in those parts were Baris, a tribe which occupies a district about ninety miles long and seventy broad, and was now governed by a sheik called Allorron. It did not take Baker, with his knowledge of the African character, long to discover that the Baris and their chief were decidedly hostile to the expedition; and this attitude he ascribes to the machinations of Aboo Saood, who saw in the extinction of the Agad contract the year after the ruin of the house of whhich he was the  LIVING AGE. VOL. X. 474