CHAPTER X

MISSIONARIES AND SNOW-MOUNTAINS

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 Rüppell (1830–1831) (the great German naturalist), of another German, Joseph Russegger, of the D’Abbadies (the great French surveyors), of Sir William Cornwallis Harris (who was sent on a mission to Shoa), Théophile Le Febvre, Mansfield Parkyns (1840–1845), H. Dufton, and C. T. Beke had cleared up a good many blank spaces in the geography of Abyssinia and of the various affluents of the Nile flowing from the snow-mountains of that African Afghanistan in the direction of the Atbara, the Blue Nile, and the Sobat. The Sobat had been explored for a hundred miles or so, as far as steamers could penetrate. The White Nile had been surveyed from Khartum to the junction of the Bahr-al-Ghazal. South of that point, under the name of Mountain Nile, it and some of its branches, such as the Giraffe River, had also been explored, and the River of the Mountains, as the Upper White Nile is called by the Arabs, had been ascended to a little distance south of Gondokoro. The Bahr-al-Ghazal, the great western feeder of the Nile, and several of its more important affluents, such as the Jur, had been made known, and the existence of the Nyam-nyam cannibal country ascertained. But the ultimate sources of the Nile stream were still undiscovered. This problem was now to be attacked from two very different directions.

In 1829 the Church Missionary Society had resolved to attempt the evangelisation of Abyssinia, and sent missionaries to the northern part of that country. Amongst these missionaries, in 1840, was a Würtemberg student named Ludwig Krapf, sent to prospect in northern Abyssinia. But the Abyssinians eventually resented this missionary enterprise, and Krapf and some others were expelled from the country in 1842.

[Illustration: REV. DR. L. LUDWIG KRAPF.]

Hearing good accounts of the more genial nature of the Zanzibar Arabs and of their Maskat ruler, Krapf journeyed down the East Coast of Africa and visited the Sayyid of Zanzibar (Majid); he obtained permission from this Arab viceroy[47] to settle at Mombasa and establish a Christian mission there. Krapf was soon joined by John Rebman (another Würtemberger). Both were well-educated men, who had been trained at Tübingen, at Basle, and in Rebman’s case at an English missionary college. They acquired a knowledge of Arabic, and soon added to it an intimate acquaintance with several African tongues. Their intercourse with the Arabs and the Negroes at Mombasa and its vicinity soon opened their ears to remarkable stories of the unknown interior. Already the Arabs were pushing farther and farther inland from these ports on the Zanzibar coast, and some of them had reached Lake Tanganyika, while they had also heard rumours of the Victoria Nyanza. The natives further told the missionaries of the wonderfully high mountains distant from ten to thirty days’ march from the coast, the tops of which were covered with “white stuff.” By 1850, through the agency of the Church Missionary Society, Rebman and Krapf were able to report from their own observation the existence of snow-mountains nearly under the equator, Rebman having discovered Kilimanjaro in 1848, while in the following year Krapf not only confirmed this discovery, but pushed his way far enough inland to catch a glimpse of Mount Kenya, the distance of which from the coast he underestimated. The missionaries also sent to Europe about the same time stories of a great inland sea. They had gathered up the reports of Lake Nyasa, Tanganyika, and the Victoria Nyanza, and had imagined these separate sheets of water to be only parts of a huge, slug-shaped lake as big as the Caspian Sea. They also reported the separate existence of Lake Baringo. These stories they illustrated by a map (Erhardt and Rebman) published in 1855. Their stories of snow-mountains in equatorial Africa only drew down on them for the most part the ridicule of English geographers, among whom was a wearisome person, Mr. Desborough Cooley, who published fine-spun theories based on a fantastic interpretation of African etymology; but their stories were believed in France, and they were awarded a medal by the Paris Geographical Society. They also impressed an American poet, Bayard Taylor, who in 1855 wrote some stirring lines on Kilimanjaro:--

“Remote, inaccessible, silent, and lone-- Who from the heart of the tropical fervours Liftest to heaven thine alien snows.”

These stories from the missionaries revived the interest in Ptolemy’s Geography. The Nile lakes were once more believed in, especially as the discovery of Kenya and Kilimanjaro appeared to confirm the stories of the Mountains of the Moon. This idea indeed was additionally favoured by the fact that the missionaries often referred to their hypothetical lake as the Sea of Unyamwezi, which name they rightly explained as meaning (we know not why) the “Land of the Moon.”[48]