The Nile quest

The first men who entered Egypt and travelled up the valley of the Nile came, almost unquestionably, from the east, and were part of those radiations from the central focus of h...

The second division of the Caucasian species of man (the Iberian being the first) was the Aryan,--a race of golden-haired, pink and white complexioned people, with eyes that are...

The race of the Greek kings who ruled over Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great and until 30 B.C., and later, again, the Byzantine Emperors of Eastern Rome did much to i...

When Egypt had become part of the Byzantine dominions, all interest in the Nile sources had died away, and men’s minds were mainly centred on religious controversies of greater...

The next page in the history of the Nile Quest is marked by the coming of the Portuguese; but before we proceed to consider what effect this movement had on the revelation of Af...

Portugal was created by the crusading spirit. The King of Castile, who had become the leading prince in the northern half of Spain, despatched a young Burgundian adventurer, Cou...

Towards the close of the seventeenth century Louis XIV. of France had begun to make the influence of his country widely felt in the Mediterranean, though before his time Richeli...

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a decline in Muhammadan fanaticism which in the preceding centuries had so zealously guarded the portals of African discover...

In 1807 Jacotin published at Paris an “Atlas de l’Égypte,” which gave a fairly accurate survey of the Nile from the Delta to Assuan. This Atlas gave the results of the geographi...

Down to 1858 all that Europe knew of the Nile basin was this: The course of the Blue Nile had been mapped to some extent from its source in Lake Tsana; and the travels of Rüppel...

Nile exploration from the north had stopped in 1851 at the rapids south of Gondokoro. It was now felt that the problem should be attacked from other directions. In 1839 the Brit...

John Hanning Speke was born on May 27, 1827, at Orleigh Court, Bideford, North Devon. His father’s family had its seat in Somersetshire, near the pretty old town of Ilminster, a...

Speke and Grant both seem to have taken the shape and existence of the Victoria Nyanza for granted. No doubt from the highlands of Karagwe and Buddu they occasionally caught gli...

On the 28th of July, 1862, Speke stood by the side of the Ripon Falls, where the Victoria Nile leaves the great Nyanza at the head of Napoleon Gulf. Grant had gone off with a po...

Samuel White Baker was born in London on the 8th June, 1821, and was the second and eventually eldest son of Mr. Samuel Baker, a city merchant, who possessed large properties an...

The journeys of Petherick and Miani in the western Nile basin have already been described. The very interesting region of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, however, had been relatively neglec...

As already related down to 1869, but little had been placed on the map concerning the western tributaries of the Nile in the region now styled generally the Bahr-al-Ghazal Provi...

Dr. Schweinfurth spent three years exploring the regions of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, and returned to Europe in the autumn of 1871. During the course of his journeys he took no observ...

Dr. Schweinfurth evidently shared Burton’s opinions on the subject of the Victoria Nyanza. Speke’s great discovery may be said to have reached its low-water mark of depreciation...

In 1874 Colonel Purdy and Colonel Colston (Englishmen) were despatched by the Egyptian government respectively into Darfur and Kordofan for surveying purposes. By their expediti...

It will be remembered that a remarkable turn was given to Nile exploration when between 1849 and 1855 the German missionaries in the employ of the Church Missionary Society at M...

The remarkable man whose name is given to this chapter was a German Jew,--Eduard Schnitzer,--born in Silesia about 1830. Becoming a doctor of medicine, he gradually drifted to A...

Two sets of circumstances now hindered further exploration of the Nile basin,--the revolt of the Mahdi, with the disasters that followed at Khartum; and the persecution of the C...

The acquisition by Germany of those interior regions of the Zanzibar coast-line which now constitute German East Africa led to a considerable development of exploration in the s...

Stanley’s relief of Emin Pasha led to the withdrawal of the latter’s government from the equatorial regions, and after a brief interval of hesitation, to the foundation of a Bri...

We will now turn to the eastern part of the Nile basin--the first to be explored, the last to be finished. It has been already related how, alarmed at the rapid successes of the...

The Nile quest is practically ended. It may be safely said that every important branch or affluent or lake-source of this the longest river in Africa (very nearly the longest in...

Early in the geological history of the globe there appear to have been rock-foldings, wrinkles in the earth’s surface in the eastern half of Africa. Sometimes this puckering of...

[9] Ptolemy Philadelphus’ chief inducement to establish stations in Abyssinia was to procure war elephants. Thus to these Egyptian Greeks and Ethiopians the African elephant did...