Africa—Mungo Park—The Landers—Livingston

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AFRICA—MUNGO PARK—THE LANDERS—LIVINGSTON.

From remote antiquity the interior of Africa has been wrapt in impenetrable mystery. Its population and its productions, its mountians and its rivers have been shrouded in fable. Those claiming to know, formerly asserted that many a noble river, unable to reach the great natural reservoir, the coean, was lost in unexplored sand.

Mungo Park,¹ the pioneer explorer, half a century ago, penetrated many hundred miles into the regions south of the great desert, a region regarded by philosophers of the Augustan age, as uninhabitable by reason of the heat. Park found populous tribes living on the spontaneous growth of the genial tropical clime; he fell in with the Niger, of the Joliba, as the natives called this magnificent river. If his life had been spared, Park would probably have solved the problem, which in our own time has been triumphantly done by the brothers Lander, who have demonstrated that the Niger of olden time, neither winds its slugglish way to the east and pours its waters into the Nile, not, losing the greater part of its volumes by evaporation, is finally absorbed in arid plains; but, after encompassing large tracts of fertile country, rolls gracefully to the south-west and is lost in the gulf of Guiana.

No less astonishing are the discoveries of Dr. Livingston,² the English missionary, who for fifteen years has been traveling from tribe to tribe, learning their peculiarities of language and modes of living, until he completed several journeys, from ocean to ocean, across the great table-land of Africa. We scarcely know which to admire the more, the perseverance or the wisdom of this renowned voyageur—the perseverance, which enable him to triumpgh over obstacles almost insurmountable, such as wild beasts, lack of food and rest unfordable streams; or the great wisdom which he manifested in his management of the natives with whom he came in contact, penetrating their intrigues, laying open their deception and rendering harmless their treachery.

Dr. L. has satisfied the world that there is an extensive plateau, situated centrally, south of the great desert, and west of the island Mozambique, which, like our own Minnesota, gives rise to rivers flowing in opposite directions, and is accessible to both oceans.

While the world has been rushing onward in pursuit of visionary theories or mercantile accumulation, this patient explorer has been preparing the way for commerce to unlock the recourses of terra incognita, possessing an exuberance of soil, equal to the prairies of the west, and able to sustain millions of population.

It is impossible that the slave-dealer should much longer monopolize this neglected portion of the earth. Light is breaking into the jungles of the wild beast and the lurking places of men more savage, and the day is not distant when, either the natives disenthraled from barbarism, or emigrants from other lands will develop the resources of Central and Southern Africa.

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