used in the service of the Queen for the ransom of the lives of her subjects, assuring them that they would be reimbursed from the public treasury. No fewer than twenty-one thousand chests, valued at nine million dollars, were brought in from the opium ships and formally handed over to Commissioner Lin. The foreign community was set free, and the drug destroyed by being mixed with quicklime.
War was made to punish this outrage on the rights of the foreign community, and to exact indemnity for the seizure of their property. Canton was not captured, but held to ransom, and the haughty Viceroy sent into exile. Other cities were taken and held; and, in 1842, a treaty of peace was signed at Nanking by which five ports were opened to foreign trade. The embargo on opium was not withdrawn; but the defeat of the Chinese resulted in a virtual immunity from seizure together with a growth of the traffic, such as to justify the ill-odored name which that war still bears in history.
Treaties with other powers followed in quick succession. On demand of the French Minister, the Emperor recalled his prohibitory decrees against Christianity and issued an Edict of Toleration. If the opening of the ports gave a stimulus to trade, the decree of toleration opened a door for missionary enterprise. As yet, however, neither merchant nor missionary was allowed to penetrate into the interior; while the capital and the whole of the northern seacoast remained inaccessible. This was obviously a state of things that could not be permanent; yet fifteen years were to pass before another war came to settle the terms of intercourse on a broader basis.
When the war broke out, Li Hung Chang was seventeen years of age, living at Hofei in Anhui. As there were then no newspapers in China it may be doubted whether he heard of it until a British squadron sailed up to Nanking and extorted a treaty at the cannon’s mouth. Li was rudely startled by the appearance of a new force, to which there was no allusion in any of his ancient books. Along with the sailing-ships there were two or three small steamers. It struck the Chinese with astonishment to see them make head against wind and tide. _Shin Chuan_, “ships of the gods,” is the name they gave those mysterious vessels. Little could Li foresee the part he was destined to take in creating a steam navy for China.
Descended from a long line of scholars, he was supposed to be born to the pursuit of letters. He did, in fact, devote himself to study with unflagging zeal, because he had as yet no temptation to turn aside. Was there not, moreover, an open door before his face inviting him to win for himself the honors of a mandarinate? In his native town he placed his foot on the first step of the ladder by gaining the degree of A.B., or, in Chinese, “Budding Genius.” At the provincial capital he next carried off the laurel of the second degree, which is worth more than our A.M., not merely because it is not conferred in course, but because it falls to the lot of only one in a hundred among some thousands of competitors. These provincial tournaments occur but once in three years; and the successful candidates proceed to Peking to compete for the third degree, or D.C.L.,–_Tsin-shi_, or, “Fit for Office.” Here the chances amount to three per cent.
Li’s fortunes were again propitious, and in company with two or three hundred new-made doctors, he was summoned to the palace to contend in presence of the emperor for the honor of a seat in the Imperial Academy,–the Hanlin, or “Forest of Pencils.” Here also he met with success, but he was not among the first three whose names are marked by the vermilion pen of majesty, each of whom sheds lustre on his native province. The highest of the three is called Chuang Yuen, “Head of the List” or “Prince of Letters.” In the ‘fifties it fell to a native of Ningpo, where I then lived. His good luck was announced to his wife by the magistrate in person, who conducted her to the six gates, at each of which she scattered a handful of rice, as an omen of good fortune. In the ‘sixties, when I had removed to Peking, this honor was for the first time conferred on a Manchu, a son of the General Saishanga. His daughter was deemed a fit consort for the heir to the throne, wearing for a short time the tiara of empress, and committing suicide on the death of her lord.
In the two previous contests, handwriting goes for nothing, but in this it is not without weight, as the avowed object is to select scribes for the service of the throne. On those occasions extent of erudition and originality of thought are the qualities most esteemed; but this time the order of merit is decided by superficial elegance of style, and by facility in the composition of verse.
However defective the standard of learning, this long course of competition, extending over ten or fifteen years, has the effect of bringing before the throne a body of men each of whom is the survivor of a hundred contests. No country can boast a better system for the selection of talent, and the government guards it with jealous care. I have known more than one examiner put to death for tampering with this ballot-box of the Empire. For ages it has provided the state with able officers; nor is its least merit that of converting a dangerous demagogue into a quiet student.
While waiting for an appointment, Li heard with dismay that Nanking had been taken by a body of rebels, and that his native province was in danger of being overrun by them. A new career opened before him,–one that led more directly to the highest offices within the gift of the sovereign. Asking a commission in the army, he was assigned to a position on the staff of Tsengkofan, father of the Marquis Tseng, who was afterwards Minister to England.
This rebellion, among the strangest of strange things, now claims our attention.
IV.
THE TAIPING REBELLION.
In April, 1853, the news reached us that Nanking had fallen into the hands of a body of rebels who, by a curious irony, called themselves Taipings, “Soldiers of Peace.”
They were Chinese, not Manchus, and their leaders were all from the extreme south. Starting near Canton, they had proclaimed as their object the expulsion of the Tartars. Overrunning Kwangsi and Hunan, they had got possession of Hankow and the two adjacent cities,–a centre of wealth which may be compared to the three cities that form our Greater New York. Everywhere they put to flight the government forces; but they did not choose to stop anywhere short of the ancient capital of the Mings. Seizing some thousands of junks, they filled them with the plunder of that rich mart, and sweeping down the river, carried by assault every city on its banks until they reached Nanking. Its resistance was quickly overcome; and putting to death the entire garrison of twenty-five thousand Manchus, they announced their intention to make it the capital of their empire, as Hung Wu had done when he drove out the Mongols and restored freedom to the Chinese race.
In a few months they despatched an expedition to expel the Manchus from Peking. But that proved a more difficult task than they expected. Before the detachment had arrived at Tientsin, it was met on the Grand Canal by a strong force under Sengkolinsin, the Mongol prince. Obliged to winter on the way, it was divided and cut off in detail; this defeat making it evident to all the world that the Manchu domination might still hope for a considerable lease of life. The blood and rapine which everywhere marked their pathway alienated the sympathy of foreigners from the Soldiers of Peace. Nor did the new power at Nanking manifest the least anxiety to obtain foreign aid, feeling assured of ultimate triumph. Yet, indifferent as they were to the co-operation of foreigners, the Taipings proclaimed themselves Christians, and appeared to aim their blows no less at lifeless idols than at living enemies. Shangti, the Supreme Ruler, the God of the ancient sages, was the object of their worship. They found his name in the Christian Bibles, and they published the Bible as the source of their new faith. Their faith amounted to a frenzy, giving them courage in battle, but not imparting the self-control essential to Christian morality. Filling their coffers with spoil, they stocked their harems with the wives and daughters of their enemies. If their lives had been more decent, they might have had a better chance to secure the favor of those powerful nations which had now become the arbiters of destiny in China.
The leader of the movement was a Cantonese by the name of Hung Siu Chuen. A copy of the Bible having fallen into his hands, he applied to a Baptist missionary for instruction. How much he learned may be inferred from the fact that he gave his followers a new form of baptism, requiring them to wash the bosom as a sign for cleansing the heart. He had ecstatic visions, and preached a crusade against idolatry and the Manchus. The ease with which the Manchus had been beaten by the British in 1842 had revealed their weakness, and the new faith supplied the rebels with a fresh source of power. They mixed the teachings of the Gospel with new revelations as freely as Mohammed did in propagating the religion of the Koran. The chief called himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His prime minister assumed the title of the Holy Ghost; and his counsels were given out as decrees from Heaven. All this had an air of blasphemy that shocked the sensibilities of foreigners, and compelled them to stand aloof or to support the Manchus.
The native authorities were permitted to engage foreign ships and seamen to operate against the rebels, who sustained a siege in Nanking almost as long as the siege of Troy. From Shanghai, Suchau, and other cities the Taipings were driven out by the aid of foreigners, chiefly led by Ward and Gordon, the former an American, the latter a Briton. General Ward was never under the command of Li Hung Chang; but to him more than to any other foreigner belongs the honor of turning the tide of the Taiping Rebellion. A soldier of fortune, he offered to throw his sword into the government scale if it were paid for with many times its weight in gold. Gathering a nondescript force of various nationalities, he recaptured the city of Sungkiang, and followed this up by such a series of successes that his little troop came to be known as the “Ever-victorious Army.” Falling before the walls of Tseki, he was interred with pomp at the scene of his first victory, where a temple was erected to his memory, and he is now reckoned among the “Joss” of the Chinese Empire. His force was taken into Li’s pay.
General Gordon (the same who fell at Khartoum) acted under the direction of Li Hung Chang; and his chief exploit was the recovery of Suchau. Unable to resist his artillery, the rebel chiefs offered to capitulate. They were assured by him that their lives would be spared. To this Li Hung Chang consented, and the stronghold was at once surrendered. Regardless of his plighted faith, Li caused the five leaders to be beheaded, an act of treachery which filled Gordon with such fury that he went from camp to camp, looking for Li, determined to put a bullet in his head. Li, however, avoided a meeting until Gordon’s wrath had time to subside, and that treacherous act laid the foundation of his future fortunes. He was made governor of the province, and for forty years he rose in power and influence.
Not only was this terrible rebellion which laid waste the fairest provinces a sequel to the first war with England, it was prolonged and aggravated by a second war which broke out in 1857. In 1863, the last stronghold of the rebels was recaptured, and the rebellion finally suppressed, after twelve years of dismal carnage. In bringing about this result, no names are more conspicuous than those of Li Hung Chang and General Gordon, whose sobriquet of “Chinese Gordon” ever afterwards characterized him. Li’s good fortune served him well in this war. Having won the favor of the Court, he was in command of the forces of eastern Kiangsu, and all the brilliant successes of Ward and Gordon were credited to him. He was not only made governor of the province, but also created an Earl in perpetuity.
V.
THE “ARROW” WAR; THE TREATIES.
Never did a smaller spark ignite a greater conflagration. In 1856 a native junk named the “Arrow,” sailing under a British flag, was seized for piracy, her flag hauled down and her crew thrown into prison at Canton. On demand of Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, they were handed over to Consul Parkes (later Sir Harry); but he refused to receive them because they were not accompanied by a suitable apology. The haughty Viceroy Yeh put them all to death, provoking reprisals on the part of the British, resulting in the occupation of Canton and the capture of Peking after three campaigns to the north.
In this war England had France for ally; as the two powers had been associated in that hugest of blunders, the Crimean War. Nor was the alliance a less blunder on this occasion. Napoleon’s excuse for participation was the murder of a missionary in Kwangsi; but his real motive was a desire to checkmate Great Britain, and prevent the conquest of new territory. In the Opium War she had stopped at Nanking, leaving the pride of China unhumbled, and the state of relations so unstable that another war was required to place them on a better footing. England, with unselfish generosity, invited the co-operation of Russia and the United States. Either power might have found as good a pretext for hostile action as that of France; but they chose to maintain an attitude of neutrality, offering only such moral support as might enable them to gather up the apples after the others had shaken the tree. In 1857 Canton was taken and held by the allies. The next spring the envoys of the four powers, each with a considerable naval force, proceeded to the mouth of the Peiho, the gateway to a capital as secluded and exclusive as that of the Grand Lama. The forts made a show of resistance, but they were put to silence in less than half an hour; and negotiations which had been opened by the neutrals were resumed at Tientsin.
Dr. S. Wells Williams was Chinese secretary to the United States minister, Mr. William B. Reed; and I acted as interpreter for the spoken language. An article in favor of Christian missions occasioned some delay; and Mr. Reed, who was vain and shallow, said to us, “Now, gentlemen, hurry up with your missionary article for I intend to sign my treaty on the 18th of June [Waterloo day] with or without that clause.” Fancy a mind that could think of a treaty obtained by British guns as entitling him to be associated with Wellington! Yet Mr. Reed had the effrontery to say that he “expected us to make the missionary societies duly sensible of their obligations” to him. That twenty-ninth article was the gem of the treaty; and it had the honor of being copied into that of Lord Elgin, which was signed eight days later.
High-minded, philanthropic, and upright, Lord Elgin made a mistake which led to a renewal of the war. He refused to place Tientsin on the list of open ports, because, as he said, “Foreign powers would make use of it to overawe the Chinese capital,”–just as if overawing was not a matter of prime necessity. He hastened away to India to aid in suppressing the Sepoy mutiny, eventually becoming viceroy after another campaign in China. His brother, Sir F. Bruce, succeeded him as minister in China; and twelve months later (July, 1859) the ministers of the four powers were again at the mouth of the Peiho on their way to Peking for the exchange of ratified copies of the several treaties. The United States minister was John E. Ward, a noble-hearted son of Georgia, and the chief of our little squadron was the gallant old Commodore Tatnall.
We were not a little surprised to see the demolished forts completely rebuilt, and frowning defiance. We were told by officers who came down to the shore that no vessel would be allowed to pass; but that the way to Peking was open to us _via_ Peitang, a small port to the north.
To this Mr. Ward made no objection, but the British, who had so recently held the keys of the capital, were indignant to be met by such a rebuff. They steamed ahead between the forts, leaving the Chinese to take the consequences. All at once the long line of batteries opened fire. One or two gunboats were sunk; two or three were stranded. A storming party was repulsed, and Admiral Hope, who was dangerously wounded, begged our American commodore to give him a lift by towing up a flotilla of barges filled with a reserve force. “Blood is thicker than water,” exclaimed Tatnall, in tones that have echoed round the globe, and Ward making no objection, he threw neutrality to the winds, and proceeded to tow up the barges. Our little steamer was commanded by Lieutenant Barker, now Admiral Barker of the New York Navy Yard.
Even this failed to retrieve the day, the tide having fallen too low for a successful landing. For the British admiral nothing remained but to withdraw his shattered forces, and prepare for another campaign. For the United States minister a dazzling prospect now presented itself,–that of intervening to prevent the renewal of war. From Peitang we proceeded by land two days. Then we continued our voyage for five days by boat on the Upper Peiho.
At Peking, calling on the genial old Kweiliang, who had signed the treaty in 1858, Mr. Ward was astonished at his change of tone. “You wish to see the Emperor. That goes as a matter of course; but his Majesty knows you helped the British, and he requires that you go on your knees before the throne in token of repentance.” “Tell him,” said Mr. Ward to me, “that I go on my knees only to God and woman.” “Is not the Emperor the same as God?” replied the old courtier, taking no notice of a tribute to woman that was unintelligible to an Oriental mind. “You need not really touch the ground with your knees,” he continued; “but merely make a show of kneeling. There will be eunuchs at hand to lift you up, saying ‘Don’t kneel! Don’t kneel!'” The eunuchs, as Mr. Ward well knew, would be more likely to push us to our knees than to lift us up; and he wisely decided to decline the honor of an audience on such terms.
Displeased by his obstinacy, the Emperor ordered him to quit the capital without delay, and exchange ratifications at the sea-coast. A report was long current in Peking that foreigners have no joints in their knees; hence their reluctance to kneel. Thus vanished for Mr. Ward the alluring prospect of winning for himself and his country the beatitude of the peacemaker.
The summer of 1860 saw the Peiho forts taken, and an allied force of thirty thousand men advancing on Peking. The court fled to Tartary, and the summer palace was laid in ashes to punish the violation of a flag of truce, the bearers of which were bound hand and foot, and left to perish within its walls. For three days the smoke of its burning, carried by a northwest wind, hung like a pall over the devoted city, whose inhabitants were so terrified that they opened the gates half an hour before the time set for bombardment. No soldiers were admitted, but the demands of the Allies were all acceded to, and supplementary treaties signed within the walls by Lord Elgin and Baron Gros. Peking was opened to foreign residence. The French succeeded in opening the whole country to the labors of missionaries. Legations were established at the capital, and a new era of peace and prosperity dawned on the distracted empire.
VI.
THE WAR WITH FRANCE.
If the opening of Peking required a prolonged struggle, it was followed by a quarter-century of pacific intercourse. China had at her helm a number of wise statesmen,–such as Prince Kung and Wensiang. The Inspectorate of Customs begun under Mr. Lay took shape under the skilful management of Sir Robert Hart, and from that day to this it has proved to be a fruitful nursery of reforms, political and social.
Not only were students sent abroad for education at the instance and under the leadership of Yung Wing, but a school for interpreters was opened in the capital, which, through the influence of Sir Robert Hart, was expanded into the well-known Imperial College. On his nomination the present writer was called to the head of it, and Wensiang proposed to convert it into a great national university by making it obligatory on the members of the Hanlin Academy, the Emperor’s “Forest of Pencils,” to come there for a course of instruction in science and international law. Against this daring innovation, Wojin, a Manchu tutor of the Emperor, protested, declaring that it would be humiliating to China to have her choicest scholars sit at the feet of foreign professors. The scheme fell through, but before many years the Emperor himself had taken up the study of the English language, and two of our students were selected to be his instructors. One of them is at this present time (1902) Chinese minister at the Court of St. James. Several of our students have had diplomatic missions, and one, after serving as minister abroad, is now a leading member of the Board of Foreign Affairs in Peking. A press opened in connection with the college printed numerous text-books on international law, political economy, physics, and mathematics, translated by the president, professors, and students.
America was fortunate in the choice of the first minister whom she sent to reside at Peking. This was Anson Burlingame, who, after doing much to encourage the Chinese in the direction of progress, was by them made the head of the first embassy which they sent to foreign nations. His success in other countries was largely due to the sympathy with which he had been received in the United States by Secretary Seward, and to the advice and recommendations with which he was provided by that great statesman. So deep an interest did Mr. Seward take in China that he went in person to study its condition before the close of his career. In his visit to Peking he was accompanied by his nephew, George F. Seward, who was United States Consul at Shanghai. The latter has since that date worthily represented our country as minister at Peking; but it may be doubted whether in that high position he ever performed an international service equal in importance to one performed during his consulship, for which he has recently received the cross of the Legion of Honor. In laying out their new concession at Shanghai, the French had excited the hostility of the people by digging up and levelling down many of those graves that occupied so much space outside of the city walls, and where the Chinese who worshipped their ancestors were to be seen every day burning paper and heaping up the earth. A furious mob fell on the French police, chased them from the field, and menaced the French settlement with knife and firebrand. The consuls were appealed to for aid, but no one responded except Mr. Seward, who headed a strong force from one of our men-of-war, dispersed the mob, and secured the safety of the foreign settlement. But for his timely intervention who knows that the French consulate would not have been reduced to ashes? If the consulate had been burned down, a war would have been inevitable, with a chain of consequences that baffles the imagination.
In 1871 a horrid atrocity was perpetrated by Chinese at Tientsin which certainly would have led to war with France if Napoleon III. had not at that very time been engaged in mortal combat with Germany. The populace were made to believe that the sisters at the French hospital had been seen extracting the eyeballs from their patients to use in the manufacture of magical drugs. They were set upon by a maddened multitude, a score or more of them slaughtered, and the buildings where they had cared for the sick and suffering turned to a heap of ruins. Count Rocheschouart, instead of reserving the case to be settled at a later day, thought best to accept from the Chinese government an apology, with an ample sum in the way of pecuniary compensation. That grewsome superstition has led to bloodshed in more than one part of China.
In the summer of 1885 I was called one day from the Western Hills to the Tsungli-Yamen, or Foreign Office, on business of great urgency. On arriving, I was informed that the Chinese gunboats in the river Min had been sunk by the French the day before; that they had also destroyed the Arsenal at the mouth of the river. “This,” said the Secretary, “means war, and we desire to know how non-combatants belonging to the enemy and resident in our country are to be treated according to the rules of International Law.” While I was copying out the principles and precedents bearing on the subject, the same Secretary begged me to hasten my report, “because,” said he, “the Grand Council is waiting for it to embody in an Imperial Decree.” True enough, the next day a decree from the throne announced the outbreak of war; but it added that non-combatants belonging to the enemy would not be molested. Two of our professors were Frenchmen, and they were both permitted to continue in charge of their classes without molestation.
Hostilities were brought to a happy conclusion by the agency of Sir Robert Hart. One of his customs cruisers employed in the light-house service having been seized by the French, Mr. Campbell was sent to Paris to see the French President and petition for its release. Learning that President Grevy would welcome the restoration of peace, and ascertaining what conditions would be acceptable, Sir Robert laid them before the Chinese government, putting an end to a conflict which, if suffered to go on, might have ruined the interests of more than one country. In this war and in those peace negotiations the conduct of the Chinese was worthy of a civilized nation. Yet the result of their experience was to make them more ready to appeal to arms in cases of difficulty.
Li’s connection with this war was very real, though not conspicuous. Changpeilun, director of the arsenal at Foochow, was his son-in-law. Not only was Li disposed to aid him in taking revenge, he was himself building a great arsenal in the north; and it was, no doubt, owing to efficient succor from this quarter that Formosa was able to hold out against the forces of the French.
VII.
WAR WITH JAPAN.
Both in its inception and in its tragic ending the notable conflict with Japan connects itself with the name of Li Hung Chang. The Island Empire on the East had long been known to the Chinese, though until our times no regular intercourse subsisted between the two countries. It is recorded that a fleet freighted with youth and maidens was despatched thither by the builder of the Great Wall to seek in those islands of the blest for the herb of immortality; but none of them returned. It was to be a colony, and the flowery robe by which its object is veiled is not sufficient to hide the real aim of that ambitious potentate. Yet, through that expedition and subsequent emigrations, a pacific conquest was effected which does honor to both nations, planting in those islands the learning of China, and blending with their native traditions the essential teachings of her ancient sages.
For centuries prior to our age of treaties, non-intercourse had been enforced on both sides,–the Japanese confining their Chinese neighbors, as they did the Dutch, to a little islet in the port of Nagasaki; and China seeing nothing of Japan except an occasional descent of Japanese pirates on her exposed sea-coast.
To America belongs the honor of opening that opulent archipelago to the commerce of the world. Our shipwrecked sailors having been harshly treated by those islanders, a squadron was sent under Commodore Perry to Yeddo (now Tokio) in 1855, to punish them if necessary and to provide against future outrages. With rare moderation he merely handed in a statement of his terms and sailed away to Loochoo to give them time for reflection. Returning six months later, instead of the glove of combat he was received with the hand of friendship, and a treaty was signed which provided for the opening of three ports and the residence of an American charge d’affaires. In the autumn of 1859 it was my privilege to visit Yeddo in company with Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall. We were entertained by Townsend Harris and shown the sights of the city of the Shoguns when it was still clothed in its mediaeval costume. The long swaddling-garb of the natives had a semi-savage aspect, and the abject servility with which their todzies (interpreters) prostrated themselves before their officers excited a feeling of contempt.
Like the mayors of the palace in mediaeval France, the Shoguns or generals had relegated the Mikado to a single city of the interior; while for six hundred years they had usurped the power of the Empire, practically presenting the spectacle of two Emperors, one “spiritual” (or nominal), one “temporal” (or real). Little did we imagine that within five years the Shoguns would be swept away, and the Mikado restored to more than his ancient power. The conflagration was kindled by a spark from our engines. The feudal nobles, of whom there were four hundred and fifty, each a prince within his own narrow limits, were indignant that the Shogun had opened his ports to those aggressive foreigners of the West. Raising a cry of “Kill the foreigners!” they overturned the Shoguns and restored the Mikado. Their fury, however, subsided when they found that the foreigner was too strong to be expelled. A few more years saw them patriotically surrendering their feudal powers in order to make the central government strong enough to face the world. About the same time our Western costume was adopted, and along with it the parliamentary system of Great Britain and the school system of America. Some foreigners were shallow enough to laugh at them when they saw those little soldiers in Western uniform; and the Chinese despised them more than ever for abandoning the dress of their forefathers.
To protect themselves at once against China and Russia, the Japanese felt that the independence of Corea was to them indispensable. The King had been a feudal subject to China since the days of King Solomon; and when at the instance of Japan he assumed the title of Emperor, the Chinese resolved to punish him for such insolence. This was in 1894. The Japanese took up arms in his defence; and though they had some hard fighting, they soon made it evident that nothing but a treaty of peace could keep them out of Peking.
Li Hung Chang, who had long been Viceroy at Tientsin and who had built a northern arsenal and remodelled the Chinese army, had to confess himself beaten. For him it was a bitter pill to be sent as a suppliant to the Court of the Mikado. That China was beaten was not his fault. Yet he was held responsible by his own government and departed on that humiliating mission as if with a rope about his neck. Fortunately for him, during his mission in Japan an assassin lodged a bullet in his head, and the desire of Japan to undo the effect of that shameful act made negotiation an easy task, converting his defeat into a sort of triumph. Happily, too, he enjoyed the counsel and assistance of J.W. Foster, formerly United States Secretary of State. Formosa, one of the brightest jewels in the Chinese crown, had to be handed over to Japan, and lower Manchuria would have gone with it, had not Russia, supported by Austria and Germany, compelled the Japanese to withdraw their claims.
The next turn of the kaleidoscope shows us China seeking to follow the example of Japan in throwing off the trammels of antiquated usage. In 1898, when the tide of reform was in full swing, the Marquis Ito of Japan paid a visit to Peking, and as president of the University, I had the honor of being asked to meet him along with Li Hung Chang at a dinner given by Huyufen, mayor of the city, and the grand secretary, Sunkianai. It was a lesson intended for them when he told us how, on his returning from England in the old feudal days, his prince asked him if anything needed to be reformed in Japan. “Everything,” he replied. The lesson was lost on the three Chinese statesmen, progressive though they were, for China was then on the eve of a violent reaction which threatened ruin instead of progress.
VIII.
WAR WITH THE WORLD.
The last summer of the century saw the forts at the mouth of the Peiho captured for the third time since the beginning of 1858. It was the opening scene in the last act of a long drama, and more imposing than any that had gone before, not in the number of assailants nor in the obstinacy of resistance, but in the fact that instead of one or two nations as hitherto, all the powers of the modern world were now combined to batter down the barriers of Chinese conservatism. Getting possession of Tientsin, not without hard fighting, they advanced on Peking under eight national flags, against the “eight banners” of the Manchu tribes.
What was the mainspring of this tragic movement? What unforeseen occurrence had effected a union of powers whose usual attitude is mutual jealousy or secret hostility? In a word, it was _humanity_. Spurning petty questions of policy, they combined their forces to extinguish a conflagration kindled by pride and superstition, which menaced the lives of all foreigners in North China.
In 1898, when the Emperor had entered on a career of progress, the Empress Dowager was appealed to by a number of her old servants to save the Empire from a young Phaeton, who was driving so fast as to be in danger of setting the world on fire. Coming out of her luxurious retreat, ten miles from the city, where she had never ceased to keep an eye on the course of affairs, she again took possession of the throne and compelled her adopted son to ask her to “teach him how to govern.” This was the _coup d’etat_. In her earlier years she had not been opposed to progress, but now that she had returned to power at the instance of a conservative party, she entered upon a course of reaction which made a collision with foreign powers all but inevitable. She had been justly provoked by their repeated aggressions. Germany had seized a port in Shantung in consequence of the murder of two missionaries. Russia at once clapped her bear’s paw on Port Arthur. Great Britain set the lion’s foot on Weihaiwei; and France demanded Kwang Chan Bay, all “to maintain the balance of power.” Exasperated beyond endurance, the Empress gave notice that any further demands of the sort would be met by force of arms.
The governor of Shantung appointed by her was a Manchu by the name of Yuhien, who more than any other man is to be held responsible for the outbreak of hostilities. He it was who called the Boxers from their hiding-places and supplied them with arms, convinced apparently of the reality of their claim to be invulnerable. For a hundred years they had existed as a secret society under a ban of prohibition. Now, however, they had made amends by killing German missionaries, and he hoped by their aid to expel the Germans from Shantung. On complaint of the German Minister he was recalled; but, decorated by the hands of the Empress Dowager, he was transferred to Shansi, where later on he slaughtered all the missionaries in that province.
In Shantung he was succeeded by Yuen Shikai, a statesmanlike official, who soon compelled the Boxers to seek another arena for their operations. Instead of creeping back to their original hiding-place they crossed the boundary and directed their march toward Peking,–on the way not merely laying waste the villages of native Christians, but tearing up the railway and killing foreigners indiscriminately. They had made a convert of Prince Tuan, father of the heir apparent. He it was who encouraged their advance, believing that he might make use of them to help his son to the throne. Their numbers were swelled by multitudes who fancied that they would suffer irreparable personal loss through the introduction of railways and modern labor-saving machinery; and China can charge the losses of the last war to those misguided crowds.
Fortunately several companies of marines, amounting to four hundred and fifty men, arrived in Peking the day before the destruction of the track. The legations were threatened, churches were burnt down, native Christians put to death, and fires set to numerous shops simply because they contained foreign goods. Then it was that the foreign admirals captured the forts, in order to bring relief to our foreign community. That step the Chinese Foreign Office pronounced an act of war, and ordered the legations and all other foreigners to quit the capital. The ministers remonstrated, knowing that on the way we could not escape being butchered by Boxers. On the 20th of June, the German Minister was killed on his way to the Foreign Office. The legations and other foreigners at once took refuge in the British legation, previously agreed on as the best place to make a defence. Professor James was killed while crossing a bridge near the legation. That night we were fired on from all sides, and for eight weeks we were exposed to a daily fusillade from an enemy that counted more on reducing us by starvation than on carrying our defences by storm.
About midnight on August 13, we heard firing at the gates of the city, and knew that our deliverers were near. The next day, scaling the walls or battering down the gates, they forced their way into the city and effected our rescue. The day following, the Roman Catholic Cathedral was relieved,–the defence of which forms the brightest page in the history of the siege, and in the afternoon we held a solemn service of thanksgiving. The palaces were found vacant, the Empress Dowager having fled with her entire court. She was the same Empress who had fled from the British and French forty years before.
She was not pursued, because Prince Ching came forward to meet the foreign ministers, and he and Li Hung Chang were appointed to arrange terms of peace. Li was Viceroy at Canton. Had he been in his old viceroyalty at Tientsin, this Boxer war could not have occurred. That its fury was limited to the northern belt of provinces was owing to the wisdom of Chang[5] and Liu, the great satraps of Central China who engaged to keep their provinces in order, if not attacked by foreigners.
[Footnote 5: Chang is regarded as the ablest of China’s viceroys. He published, prior to the _coup d’etat_, a notable book, in which he argues that China’s only hope is in the adoption of the sciences and arts of the West.]
I called on the old statesman in the summer of 1901, after the last of the treaties was signed. He seemed to feel that his work was finished, but he still had energy enough to write a preface for my translation of Hall’s “International Law,” and before the end of another month his long life of restless activity had come to a close at the age of seventy-nine. By posthumous decree, he was made a Marquis.
In the autumn the court returned to Peking, the way having been opened by Li’s negotiations. Thanks to the lessons of adversity, the Dowager has been led to favor the cause of progress. Not only has she re-enacted the educational reforms proposed by the Emperor, but she has gone a step farther, and ordered that instead of mere literary finish, a knowledge of arts and sciences shall be required in examinations for the Civil Service.
The following words I wrote in an obituary notice, a few days after Li’s death:–
“For over twenty years Earl Li has been a conspicuous patron of educational reform. The University and other schools at Tientsin were founded by him; and he had a large share in founding the Imperial University in Peking. During the last twenty years I have had the honor of being on intimate terms with him. Five years ago he wrote a preface for a book of mine on Christian Psychology,–showing a freedom from prejudice very rare among Chinese officials.
“Another preface which he wrote for me is noteworthy from the fact that it is one of the last papers that came from his prolific pencil. Having finished a translation of ‘Hall’s International Law’ (begun before the siege), I showed it to Li Hung Chang not two weeks ago. The old man took a deep interest in it, and returned it with a preface in which he says ‘I am now near eighty; Dr. Martin is over seventy. We are old and soon to pass away; but we both hope that coming generations will be guided by the principles of this book.’
“With all his faults–those of his time and country–Li Hung Chang was a true patriot. For him it was a fitting task to place the keystone in the arch that commemorates China’s peace with the world.”
DAVID LIVINGSTONE.
1813-1873.
AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT.
BY CYRUS C. ADAMS.
Africa is the most ancient and the most recent conquest of the human race. As far as the light of history can be projected into the past, we see Egypt among the first and foremost on the threshold of civilization. The continent discovered last and opened last to the enterprises of the world is still Africa. Why is it that we see there both the dawn of civilization and the tardiest development of human progress?
The reasons are not far to seek. The physical conformation of no other continent is so unfavorable for exploration and development. Africa’s straight coast-lines, affording little shelter to the primitive ships of early mariners, repelled the enterprising Phoenicians and other seafarers in their eager search for new lands worth colonizing. Nor was it easy for explorers to penetrate into the interior. In its surface Africa has been compared to an inverted saucer,–the high plateaus occupying most of the interior descending to the sea by short, abrupt, and steep slopes, so that the wide and peaceful rivers of the plateaus are lashed into foam as they approach the ocean by many series of rapids and cataracts.
In all the other continents rivers have been the lines of least resistance to the advance of man. Civilization has developed first along the great rivers. The valleys were first settled, and up these valleys man carried his industries and commerce far inland. Thus the Euphrates and Tigris of Mesopotamia, the Ganges and Indus of India, and the Hoang and Yangtse of China, were the creators of history; but this is true in Africa only of the Nile. All the other rivers have been impediments instead of helpful factors in the formidable task of exploration and development.
The trying climate, also, gave Africa odious repute and delayed for centuries the study and utilization of the continent. When the British expedition under Captain Tuckey attempted to ascend the Congo, in 1816, to see if it were really the lower part of the Niger River, as had been conjectured, nearly all of its members perished miserably among the rapids less than two hundred miles from the sea. Such tragedies as this paralyzed enterprise in Africa until white men learned that the climate was not so deadly, after all, if they adhered to the manner of life, the hygienic rules, that should be observed in that tropical expanse.
In all the other continents, also, explorers have had the advantage of domestic animals to carry their food and camp equipment; but in large parts of tropical Africa the horse, ox, and mule cannot live. The bite of the little tsetse fly kills them. Its sting is hardly so annoying as that of the mosquito, but near the base of its proboscis is a little bag containing the fatal poison. Camels have been loaded near Zanzibar for the journey to Tanganyika, but they did not live to reach the great lake. The “ship of the desert” can never be utilized in the humid regions of tropical Africa.
The elephant is found from sea to sea, but he has not proved to be so amenable to domestication as his Asian brother. He may yet be reduced to useful servitude. The efforts in this direction in the German and French colonies are somewhat encouraging, though in 1901 only six elephants had thus far been broken to work and were daily used as beasts of burden. Explorers of tropical Africa have always been compelled to rely upon human porterage, the most expensive and unsatisfactory form of transportation, with the result that nearly all the great lines of exploration have been extended through the continent at enormous cost.
So most other parts of the world were occupied, colonized, civilized, before Africa was explored. A continent one-fourth larger than our own was for centuries neglected and despised. “Nothing good can come out of Africa” became proverbial. Seventy years ago Africa, away from the coasts and the Nile, was almost a blank upon our maps, save for fanciful details that are ludicrously grotesque in the light of our present knowledge (1902).
Then dawned the era of David Livingstone. Sixty-two years ago this humble Scotchman went to South Africa as a missionary. It was not long before he became imbued with the idea that missionary service could not be projected on broad, economic, and effective lines till the field was known. The explorer, he said, must precede the teacher and the merchant. We can work best for Christianity and civilization after we learn what the people are and know the nature of their environment. This was the thought that took him into the unknown; that inspired him with unflagging courage and zeal throughout twenty years of weary plodding in the African wilderness among hundreds of tribes who never before had seen a white man. And all the years he was studying the country and winning the love of its people, his faith in Africa, in its abounding resources worth the world’s seeking, in the capacity of its people for development, steadily grew till it became the all-pervading impulse of his life. Livingstone’s faith converted the world to the belief that, after all, there was good in Africa.
“I shall never forget,” said Stanley, one day in New York, “the time when I stood with Livingstone on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, and he raised his trembling hand above his head, leaned towards me as he looked me in the eye, and said in a voice broken with emotion: ‘The day is coming when the whole world will know that Africa is worth reclaiming, and that its people may be brought out of barbarism. The world needs Africa; and teachers, merchants, railroads, and every influence of civilization will be spread through this continent to fit it for the place in human interests that belongs to it.’ I thought then that Livingstone was an enthusiast and a visionary; but long ago I learned to believe that every word he said was true.”
Europe and America were thrilled by the simple narrative of those twenty-two thousand miles of wanderings that brought into the light of day millions of human beings who had been as much unknown to us as though they inhabited Mars. Livingstone did not live to know it, but it was he who kindled the great African Movement,–an outburst of zeal for geographic discovery and economic development such as was never seen before.
Thirteen years ago (1889) a Frenchman named De Bissy completed the largest map yet made of Africa. In the preparation of this great work, which occupied much of his time for eight years, he used as his sources of information nearly eighteen hundred route and other maps, nearly all of which were the result of the work of explorers in the preceding quarter of a century. All that we know of the geography of over three-fourths of Africa is the work of the past half-century since Livingstone made his first journey in 1849; and we know far more of inner Africa to-day than was known of inner North America three hundred years after Columbus discovered the western world. A little over a century ago, our great-grandfathers were reading in their school geographies that North America had no conspicuous mountains except the Alleghanies; and these mountains and the Andes of South America were believed to be one and the same chain, interrupted by the Gulf of Mexico. Many men not yet bent with years can remember when the interior of Africa was a white space on the maps; but it is not possible to-day to make such a geographical blunder as we have mentioned, about any part of Africa.
It is because of the work he did in those twenty years, sowing all the while the seeds from which sprang the great African Movement, that “the gentle master of African exploration” is acclaimed to-day as one of the world’s great men, and that his body rests in Westminster Abbey among the illustrious dead of Britain.
The son of a worthy weaver in Blantyre, Scotland, Livingstone’s early life was that of a poor boy, working in a spinning-mill, quiet, sober, affectionate, and faithful in every relation of life. Moved at last by the thirst for knowledge that has distinguished many a humble Scotch boy, he entered the University at Glasgow, studying during the winter months and spending the summers at his trade in the factory, fitting himself all the while for the conquests he little dreamed he was to achieve over difficulties almost insurmountable. A classmate spoke of him as a pale, thin, retiring young man, but frank and most kind-hearted, ready for any good and useful work, even for chopping the University fuel and grinding wheat for the bread. In 1838, when he was twenty-five years old, he went to London to be examined as a candidate for the African missionary service. Two years later he was sent to South Africa, where for eight or nine years he labored among the natives earnestly and unostentatiously north of the place now famous as the site of the Kimberley diamond mines. It was here that he became intimately acquainted with the celebrated missionary, Robert Moffatt, whose daughter he married. His devoted wife accompanied him in some of his later travels, but long before he finished his work her body was laid to rest under the shade of a tree that for years was pointed out to all visitors to the Lower Zambesi.
In 1849, began the series of explorations that continued till his death. “The end of geographical discovery is the beginning of missionary enterprise,” he wrote. Burning with zeal to reveal Africa to the world, Livingstone never forgot the main aim of his life,–to open ways for the planting of mission stations among all the scores of tribes he visited. “I hope God will in mercy permit me to establish the Gospel somewhere in this region,” he wrote from the land of the Barotse, on the Upper Zambesi. Does he now look down from his eternal home upon that very land whose churches and schools are the fruition of the labors of French Protestants; whose king, in London to attend the coronation of Edward VII., said he wanted more teachers and more men to train his people to build houses and work iron? He prayed that he might live to see “the double influence of the spirit of commerce and Christianity employed to stay the bitter fountain of African misery.” The glowing zeal of the Christian philanthropist and the untiring ardor of the born explorer were perfectly blended in the spirit of the great pioneer of modern African discovery.
Livingstone’s routes through Africa would extend about seven times between New York City and San Francisco; and in his almost endless marches over plain, through jungle, across mountains and wide rivers, the natives met him almost without exception in a generous and hospitable spirit. Love was the secret of his success. He won his way by kindness. Give the barbarous African time to see that you wish him well, that you would do him good in ways he knows are helpful, and his affection is evoked.
It was said that the British could never establish their rule over the great Wabemba tribe, southwest of Tanganyika, without a military campaign. In 1894, two humble Catholic fathers entered Lobemba, walked straight to the chief town, and were told that if they did not leave the country in one day they would be killed. As the stern message was delivered, they saw an old woman on the ground in great pain from a severe wound. The news soon spread that these unwelcome strangers had washed and dressed the wound, and made the old woman comfortable. “These people love men,” was the word that passed from lip to lip, as the sick and suffering came out from the town to be treated, while thousands of natives looked on. At nightfall the white men were told they might remain another day; they ministered for eleven days to those who needed help, and were then invited to remain the rest of their lives. The mission stations of the White Fathers are to-day scattered all over Lobemba; the country is open in every corner to the whites, and in 1899 British rule was established. The victory was won, not with guns, but by gentle, helpful kindness.
Livingstone never believed that the sympathies of our common humanity are extinct even in the bosom of a savage. Enfolded in the panoply of Christian kindness, he passed unscathed among the most warlike tribes. No memory of wrong or pain rankled in the heart of any man, woman, or child he ever met. He is known to-day as “the good old man” wherever his path led him in those twenty years.
When explorers began to study the healthful highlands of the Akikuyu tribe in East Africa a few years ago, the natives rushed to arms. “Keep away from us,” they said. “One of your white men came through the land, stealing food from our gardens, and killing all who said he ought to pay us for our vegetables. We want nothing to do with thieves and murderers like you.”
But no vengeance fell on the head of any white traveller who ever followed in the footsteps of Livingstone. Those explorers have achieved most who adhered to his example of unfailing kindness, mercy, and justice. The brutal German, whose crimes made the Akikuyu hostile to all whites, marked his path with blood from the Indian Ocean to Victoria Nyanza. Serpa Pinto, renowned for the scientific value of his work, aroused condemnation and disgust because he fought his way through many tribes, among whom Livingstone and Arnot had wandered almost alone and in perfect safety. Fortunately, there have not been many explorers militant. The brilliant discoveries of Grenfell, Delcommune, Lemaire, and others, who are in the first rank of African pioneers, were made without harming a native.
Let us glance at a few of Livingstone’s discoveries and form our own conclusions as to whether his sublime faith in the future of Africa has thus far been justified by events. In the depths of the wilderness he discovered the large lake, Mweru, through which the Upper Congo flows. Though white influences have reached that remote region only within the past two or three years, a little steamboat now plies those waters. A photograph of Mpweto, one of the white settlements on the lake, shows the commodious quarters of the Europeans, two long lines of cabins in which the native workmen live, and well-tilled gardens extending for a half-mile along the shore. Livingstone brought to light the coal fields of the Zambesi, the only coal yet known in tropical Africa. While these lines are being written, the British of Rhodesia are preparing to open mines along these deposits. He told the world of the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi, the largest known, a mile wide and twice as high as Niagara. The installation of an electrical plant at this great source of power is now in progress, and it is hoped within three years to transmit electrically all the power required to work the large copper mines in the north, the coal fields in the east, and to move trains on the Cape to Cairo Railroad for a distance of three hundred miles. The recent improvements in long-distance transmission of power encourages the belief that the Victoria Falls may some day possess large industrial utility for a wide region around them. Coffee plantations on the hills overlooking the long expanse of Nyassa, the splendid freshwater sea which Livingstone revealed in its setting of mountains, are selling their superior product in London at a high price. The town of Blantyre, among the Nyassa highlands which Livingstone first described, has a newspaper, telegraphic and cable communication with all the world, and industrial schools in which the manual arts are taught to hundreds of natives. Here is the large brick church, now famous, built by native craftsmen, who before Livingstone’s time had never seen a white man, and lived in a state of barbarism; an edifice that would adorn the suburbs of any American city, and of which the explorer, Joseph Thomson, said: “It is the most wonderful sight I have seen in Africa.” The natives made the brick, burned the lime, sawed and hewed the timbers, and erected the building to the driving of the last nail. They had the capacity, and it was evoked by the genius of one of the most remarkable men in Africa, Missionary Scott of Blantyre. Steamboats are afloat on five of the six important seas of the great lake region of Central Africa; on two of the three which Livingstone discovered. Only a beginning has been made, for the field stretches from ocean to ocean; but the man who, in 1873–the year of Livingstone’s death,–should have predicted one-half of the achievement of the present generation would have been laughed at as a crack-brained visionary.
Even the surface of Africa is changing, and the truth of Livingstone is not always the truth of to-day. In his first journey, in which he braved the perils of the South African thirst lands, he reached the broad and placid expanse of Lake Ngami, covering an area of three hundred square miles. In the gradual desiccation of that region, the lake has now entirely disappeared. Its place is wholly occupied by a partly marshy plain covered with reeds, and no vestige of water surface is to be seen. He found the little Lake Dilolo so exactly balanced on a flat plain between two great river systems that one stream from the lake flowed north to the Congo and another south to the Zambesi; but for years past there has been no connection between the lake and the Congo. He sought in vain, like many explorers after him, for the outlet to Lake Tanganyika. The mystery was not solved till, more than twenty years after, Burton discovered the lake; the solution came when the explorer Thomson and Missionary Hore found the waters of Tanganyika pouring in a perfect torrent down the valley of the Lukuga to the Congo. The explanation of the strange phenomenon is that for a series of years the evaporation exceeds the water receipts, the level of the lake steadily falls, and the valley of the Lukuga becomes choked with grass; then a period follows when the water receipts exceed the evaporation, and the waters rise, burst through the barriers of vegetation in the Lukuga, and are carried to the Congo once more.
It was his second and third journeys that established Livingstone’s fame as a great explorer. In those journeys (1853-56) his routes were from the Upper Zambesi to Loanda in Portuguese West Africa, and then from Loanda to the mouth of the Zambesi, nearly twelve thousand miles of travel. The third journey was the first crossing of the continent; and while traversing the wide savannas of the uplands and revealing the Zambesi, the fourth largest river of Africa, from source to delta, he was able to verify one of the most brilliant generalizations ever made by a geologist. Sir Roderick Murchison, President of the Royal Geographical Society, in 1852, deducing his conclusions from the very fragmentary and imperfect knowledge of Africa then extant, evolved his striking hypothesis as to the physical conformation of the continent, which has been briefly mentioned above and is the accepted fact of to-day. Livingstone was able to prove the accuracy of this hypothesis, and he dedicated his “Missionary Travels” to its distinguished author.
The Makalolo chief, Sekeletu, on the Zambesi River, supplied Livingstone with men, ivory, and trading commissions, that helped the humble and unknown white man, lacking all financial resources except his slender salary, to make the two great journeys which kindled the world’s interest and led to the wonderful achievements of our generation. In this noteworthy incident we see the human agencies through which Africa will attain the full stature allotted to her. The Caucasian and the Negro each has his onerous part in the work of bringing the civilized world and Africa into touch and accord.
When Livingstone went home, after his third journey, his fellow-countrymen crowded to see and hear the explorer, who had added more facts to geographical knowledge than any other man of his time. They saw a person of middle age, plainly and rather carelessly dressed, whose deep-furrowed and well-tanned face indicated a man of quick and keen discernment, strong impulses, inflexible resolution, and habitual self-command. They heard a speaker whose command of his mother tongue was imperfect, and who apologized for his broken, hesitating speech by saying that he had not spoken the English language for nearly sixteen years. In no public place did he ever allude to his personal sufferings, though fever had brought him to death’s door and the years had been crowded with the most harrowing cares. The work he had done and would carry on to the end, the new Africa he alone could describe, the faith that had grown and strengthened in every week of his long pilgrimage that the world needed Africa, its resources and peoples, were the burden of every utterance. The great London meeting where he first appeared took practical measures to support him in the work he had begun unaided; and one of the resolutions adopted, declaring that “the important discoveries of Dr. Livingstone will tend hereafter greatly to advance the interest of civilization, commerce, and freedom among the numerous tribes and nations of that vast continent,” was prophetic of all the best fruits of the colossal work that has been done to the present time.
During his two years at home, Livingstone wrote his “Missionary Travels.” He returned to England once more (1864-65), when he published “A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi,” and in 1866 went back to Africa to resume the explorations which ended only with his death. Between 1849 and 1873 he was four years in Europe and twenty years in the field, eating native food, sleeping in straw huts (in one of which he died), lost to view for many years at a time because he had no means of communication with the coasts. It was this fact that led to Stanley’s successful search for Livingstone in 1871. Perhaps no other explorer ever gave so many years to continuous field-work. In this respect he far surpassed the record of any other of the African pioneers.
The discoveries in his last journeys, covering the periods from 1858 to 1864, and from 1866 to 1873, were as brilliant and fruitful as his earlier work, but not so astonishing, because his first years were given to revealing the broader aspects of Africa and its tribes, while his later labors were devoted to more detailed research in a smaller field. This region, about as large as Mexico and Central America, extends north and south, from Tanganyika to the Zambesi, and covers the wide region of the Congo sources between Nyassa and Lake Bangweolo. The greatest results were the discovery of Lake Nyassa and the Shire River, now the water route into East Central Africa; Lakes Bangweolo and Mwero; and the mapping of the eastern part of the sources of the Upper Congo, which Livingstone believed to the day of his death were the ultimate fountains of the Nile. Livingstone’s “Last Journeys” was published from the manuscript which his faithful servants brought to the seacoast with the mortal remains of their gentle master.
Not far from the south coast of Bangweolo stands a wooden construction to which is affixed a bronze tablet bearing the simple inscription, “Livingstone died here. Ilala, May 1, 1873.” It has taken the place of the tree under which he died, and where his heart, which had been so true to Africa, was buried. As the tree was nearly dead, the section bearing the rude inscription cut by one of his servants was carefully removed and is now in London.
Livingstone’s geographical delineations were remarkably accurate, considering the inadequate surveying instruments with which he worked. Dr. Ravenstein, one of the greatest authorities on African cartography, has said: “I should be loath to reject Livingstone’s work simply because the ground which he was the first to explore has since his death been gone over by another explorer.” It would be marvellous, however, if in the course of twenty years of exploration he had not made some blunders. His map of Lake Bangweolo, for example, was very inaccurate. The Lokinga Mountains, which he mapped to the south of the lake, have not been found by later explorers. These imperfections resulted from the fact that his map of Bangweolo and its neighborhood was largely based upon native information. He knew that his map was inadequate, and as soon as he was able to travel he returned to Bangweolo to complete his survey. He was making straight for the true outlet of the lake, and was within thirty-five miles of it when one morning his servants found him in his lowly straw hut, dead on his knees. If Livingstone had lived a few weeks longer and been able to travel, he and not Giraud would have given us the true map of Bangweolo.
As a whole, Livingstone’s work in geography, anthropology, and natural history, stands the test of time. No river in Africa has yet been laid down with greater accuracy than the Zambesi as delineated by this explorer.
The success of Livingstone was both brilliant and unsullied. The apostle and the pioneer of Africa, he went on his way without fear, without egotism, without desire of reward. He proved that the white man may travel safely through many years in Africa. He observed richness of soil and abundance of natural products, the guarantees of commerce. He foretold the truth that the African tribes would be brought into the community of nations. The logical result of the work he began and carried so far was the downfall of the African slave-trade, which he denounced as “the open sore of the world.” What eulogy is too great for such a work and such a man?
In 1898, twenty-one journeys had been made by explorers from sea to sea. Livingstone completed the first journey, from Loanda to the mouth of the Zambesi, in one year, seven months, and twenty-two days. Nineteen years elapsed before Central Africa was crossed again, when Cameron gave two years and nearly eight months to the journey. It took Stanley two years and eight months to cross Africa, when he solved the great mystery, the course of the Congo; and when he went to the relief of Emin Pasha, in 1887, he was almost exactly the same time on the road. When Trivier crossed from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, in 1888-89, in nine days less than a year, the event was held as a remarkably rapid performance. A little later the journey was made by several travellers in from twelve to fifteen months. In 1898, the Englishman, Mr. Lloyd, crossed from Lake Victoria to the mouth of the Congo in three months, about thirteen hundred miles of the journey being by Congo steamboat and railroad. In 1902, the journey from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria is made by rail in two and one-half days,–a journey that occupied Speke for nine, and Stanley for eight months. With the present facilities, the continent may be crossed by way of the lake region and the Congo in about three months. The era of long and weary foot-marches has nearly ended; now succeeds travel by steam.
No influence has been so potent in improving the art of the explorer, or in raising the standard of the work required of him, as the enormous interest that for thirty years past has centred in African exploration. The larger part of the best achievements of the explorers of the present generation in scientific investigation, and in an approach to scientific map-making, are found in tropical Africa. Many of the hundreds of the route surveys are not unworthy to be compared with those of Pogge and Wissmann, when they laid down on their map every cultural and topographic feature for two miles on both sides of their route, from Angola to the Upper Congo. The extreme care with which some of the best explorers have performed their tasks is illustrated by the remarkable achievement of the late Dr. Junker along the Mobangi River. After years of service, his scientific equipment had become practically worthless. He started on his four-hundred-mile journey down the river through the jungle, with absolutely no instrument except a compass to aid him in determining his positions. Endeavoring, by the most scrupulous care, to make up as far as possible for his lack of scientific outfit, he trudged through the grass, compass in hand, counting every step. Every fifteen minutes he jotted in his notebook the distance and the mean direction travelled. At night he used these accumulated data to lay down on his route map the journey of the day. For many weeks he kept up this trying routine till he reached his furthest west, and again till he had returned to his starting-point, whose latitude and longitude he had previously determined. When he returned to Europe, Dr. Hassenstein and he made a map from the data Junker had collected, and fixed the position of his furthest west. This position was found later by the astronomical observations of Lieutenant Le Marinel to be less than two miles out of the way.
One of the latest to win a large prize in African discovery is Dr. A. Donaldson Smith, a young physician of Philadelphia, in the northeastern region known as Somaliland and Gallaland. His method may be mentioned here as an illustration of the kind of work that geographers now require. Before he began his explorations, he took a thorough course in the use of surveying instruments and the methods of accurately laying down his positions and making a route map. Many a cartographer, burning with desire to draw a good map of a newly explored region, has been driven to despair by the inadequacy of the route surveys in his hands. Not a few of these surveys have been unworthy of reproduction in the books of the explorers who made them, and the best that could be done was to generalize their information on maps of comparatively small scale. But Donaldson Smith’s route-maps appear in his book on the comparatively large scale of 1:1,000,000 (about sixteen statute miles to the inch), and they are worthy of that treatment, for his surveys and observations for geographical positions were recorded in such a way that their value might be easily ascertained by any one familiar with such computations. His route-maps have been found to be admirable map-making material; thus, he has not only traversed a new region of great extent, but has given in his map ample materials which may be employed by any atlas-maker in the production of good maps of all the territory that came under his observation. When Sir Clements Markham presented to Dr. Smith the Patrons’ Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, he said: “You have not, like an ordinary explorer, made a common route survey, but you have made a scientific survey, a triangulation frequently checked by astronomical observations with theodolite and chronometer.”
Most African explorers have been painstaking, conscientious workers, eager in their quest for the truth, desirous to report nothing but the truth, and treating the lowly and ignorant they have met as men, with sensibilities like their own, capable of gratitude for a kindness and keenly sensitive to an outrage. The world has recognized and applauded such heroes of discovery,–the men who faced hardship and peril, enduring and sacrificing much that knowledge might grow; who had to conquer not only unkind Nature, but to overcome the ignorant violence of man. And not a few of the leaders in this work have carried it out with a degree of tactfulness, humanity, gentleness, and kindliness of spirit amounting to genius. Some of them spent months in disguise, collecting facts of the highest scientific value among fanatical Mohammedans who would have killed them if they had known their secret. Such men were Burton in Harrar, Dr. Lenz in Timbuctoo, and De Foucauld and Harris in Morocco, who, in stained skins and borrowed costumes, personated merchants and devotees and doctors and Jews; and most of whom have enriched the literature of discovery with valuable books. Men also such as Dr. Junker, who, rich as he was, left his home to spend eight years alone among the savages of the Welle Makua basin in Central Africa, living on their food and in their huts that he might minutely study the people in their country; or Grenfell, who has travelled far more widely in the Congo basin than Stanley or any of his followers except Delcommune, and revealed to the world more river systems and unknown peoples than they, and who, in his long career as an explorer, never fired a shot upon a native, though his life was often threatened. These men, and others like them, have exemplified the manysidedness of human resources against a great variety of peril and obstacle, as no other explorers in any other part of the world have had an opportunity to do in equal measure. Their work, with its environment of almost overwhelming difficulty, should be known to our youth as most forceful illustrations of what good men may dare and do in good causes and in a worthy manner.
There have been some exceptions to this rule. A few men have been less anxious to perform useful service than to figure in the newspapers and pose before their public. One day a man stood on the north shore of Victoria Nyanza, and looking south he saw land. When he returned to London he published a sensational book, in which he said it was ridiculous for Speke to assert that he had discovered a lake as large as Scotland, one of the greatest lakes in the world. “Why,” said the writer, “I have stood on the north shore of the Victoria Nyanza and looked south and seen the southern shore. Lake Victoria is only an insignificant sheet of water, after all the talk of its being second only to Lake Superior.”
What he really saw was the chain of the Sesse Islands extending far out into the lake. His book was scarcely off the press when the letters describing Stanley’s boat journeys around the shores of Victoria Nyanza began to be published in London and New York; and the foolish fellow was compelled to recall all the copies of his book that had not passed beyond his reach, and eliminate the statements that made him so ridiculous. Fortunately, there are not many explorers of this stripe.
All who watched the progress of African discovery were constantly reminded that geographical progress is usually made only by slow and painful steps. They saw an explorer emerge from the unknown with his notebooks and route maps replete with most interesting facts for the student and the cartographer. Then another explorer would enter the same region, discover facts that had escaped the notice of the pioneer, correct blunders his predecessor had made and perpetrate blunders of his own; so explorer followed explorer, each adding something to geographical knowledge, each correcting earlier misconceptions, till the total product, well sifted by critical geographers, gave the world a fair idea of the region explored; but not the best attainable idea, for scientific knowledge of a region comes only with its detailed exploration by trained observers, equipped with the best appliances for use in their special fields of research. This is the advanced stage of geographical study, which is now being reached in many parts of Africa. It was Livingstone’s task, in 1859, to inform us that there was a great Lake Nyassa. It was Rhoades’s task, in 1897-1901, to make a careful and accurate survey of its coast-lines, and to sound its depths, so that we now have an excellent idea of the conformation of the lake bottom. Between Livingstone and Rhoades came many explorers, each adding important facts to our knowledge of this great sheet of water nearly twice as large as New Jersey.
As each explorer came from the wilds, our maps were corrected to conform with the new information he supplied; and if we should examine the maps of Africa in school geographies, atlases, and wall maps, from the time of Livingstone to the present day, we should see that, as relates to nearly every part of Africa, they have been in a continual state of transition.
For years our only map of Victoria Nyanza was that which Speke made on his second journey to the lake, in 1860-62; but Speke saw the great lake only at one point on its south shore, and along its northwest and north central coasts. His map, being based very largely upon native information, was in many respects most incomplete and erroneous.
Then came Stanley’s survey of the lake, made in a boat journey around its coasts, and for years his map supplanted that of Speke. But he was not able to follow the shore-line in all its intricate details. His mapping was a great advance upon that of Speke, but it was necessarily rough and imperfect. He missed entirely the deep indentation of Baumann Gulf and the southwestern prolongation of the lake, surveyed by Father Schynse, in 1891. Stanley’s map, modified by the partial surveys of various explorers, is still our mapping of the lake; but if the reader will watch the maps for the next year or so, he will doubtless observe important changes in the contours of Victoria Nyanza; for all the maps, from Speke to those of 1902, will be placed on the shelf to serve only as the historical record of the good, honest work which a number of explorers have done. Commander Whitehouse has recently spent thirteen months surveying with infinite pains these coasts and islands. “I seem to see,” writes Stanley of this important service, “the sailor, with his small crew and his little steel boat, wandering from point to point, crossing and recrossing, going from some island to some headland, taking his bearings from that headland back again to the island, and to some point far away.”
Commander Whitehouse has made a new delineation of the entire 2,200 miles of coasts, and the results of his survey will be used in making all the maps of the lake. His map in turn will undoubtedly be replaced some day by detailed topographic surveys of the best quality, such as the British already contemplate making of that entire region.
A wall map recently in use in one of the public schools of New York City was a curious example of ignorant compilation. It exhibited the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, the Bangweolo of Livingstone, and the Upper Congo of Stanley, all obsolete for practical purposes years before this map was printed. Most of our home map-makers were very slow in availing themselves of the rich materials constantly supplied for the maps by the army of explorers in Africa. But the most alert cartographers, particularly between 1880 and 1895, could not keep their maps abreast of the news of discovery as it came to Europe. More men and energy and money were utilized in those fifteen years of African discovery than in the first century and a half of American exploration. The route or mother-maps, some covering a wide extent of country, others devoted to a small area, or a short line of travel, were going to Europe for the improvement of atlas sheets by nearly every steamer. Father Schynse’s chart of the southwest extension of Victoria Nyanza had hardly been utilized in European map-houses before it was replaced by Dr. Baumann’s more accurate survey. Mr. Wauters of Belgium withdrew his large map of the Congo Basin from the printer four times, in order to include fresh information before it was finally issued to the public.
This process is still going on, though more slowly. The mapping we see of Lake Tanganyika, one of the longest lakes in the world, has been in use for seventeen years since missionary Hore made his boat journey of one thousand miles around its coasts, but the new map of the Moore expedition now being introduced gives the main axis of the lake a more northeast and southwest direction. The Hore map has met the fate that usually overtakes the early surveys of every region. It rendered good service as long as it was the best map; but the Moore expedition had first-rate appliances for computing longitudes, and as Captain Hore lacked these, it is not strange that his map has been found to be defective.
The world has been treated to many geographical surprises in the course of this incessant transformation of the map of the continent. Many of us may remember in our school geographies, the particular blackness and prominence of the Kong Mountains, extending for two hundred miles parallel with the Gulf of Guinea. They were accepted on the authority of Mungo Park, Caillie, and Bowditch, all reputable explorers who had not seen the mountains, but believed from native information that they existed. The French explorer, Binger, in 1887 sought in vain for them. Later explorers have been unable to find them. They are, in fact, a myth, and will be remembered chiefly as a conspicuous instance of geographic delusion. It had long been supposed that the navigation of the Niger River, the third largest river in Africa, was permanently impaired by the Bussa Rapids, about one hundred miles in length, where Mungo Park was wrecked and drowned. But Major Toutee, a few years ago, when assailed by hostile natives, made a safe journey with his boats through the rapids; and Captain Lenfant, in 1901, carried 500,000 pounds of supplies up the river and through the rapids to the French stations between Bussa and Timbuktu. He had a small, flat-bottomed steamboat and a number of little boats propelled by fifty black paddlers. He says that by the land route he would have required 12,000 porters, and they would have been one hundred and thirty days on the road.
It was believed that a land portage would always be necessary between the sea and the Zambesi, above the delta, till 1889, when Mr. Rankin discovered the Chinde branch of the delta, so broad and so deep that ocean vessels may ascend it and exchange freight with the river craft.
It has been found that more water pours into the ocean through the Congo’s mouth, which is six miles wide, than from all the other rivers in Africa together. It is second among the world’s rivers, and the dark detritus it carries to the Atlantic has been distinctly traced on the ocean bed for six hundred miles from the land. Some geographers still believed thirty years ago that all the waters of its upper basin might be tributary to the Nile. Map-makers have been kept very busy recording discoveries on the Congo. About one hundred explorers, some of them missionaries and many employees of the Congo Free State, have mapped the whole basin along its water-courses, and discovered the ultimate source of its main stream. Our ideas of the hydrography of this great basin have been revolutionized since Stanley, second only to Livingstone among the great African explorers, in 1877 revealed the course of the main river.
On his map, for example, he showed the southern tributaries as probably flowing nearly due north; but all except one of these rivers rise in the east and flow far to the west. When Wissmann was sent to the Upper Kassai to follow it to the Congo, he was greatly surprised to find himself floating westward week after week. When he reached the Congo a steamboat was waiting for him at Equatorville, two hundred miles further up the river, where he was expected to emerge. Schweinfurth believed the Welle Makua flowed north to Lake Chad on the edge of the Sahara; seventeen years later, after six or seven explorers had tried to solve the problem, the river was found to be the upper part of the Mobangi tributary of the Congo, larger than any rivers of Europe, excepting the Volga and Danube. While Stanley was for five years planting his stations on the Congo, he knew nothing of this great tributary, 1,500 miles long, whose mouth was hidden by a cluster of islands which his steamers repeatedly passed. Missionary Grenfell, on his little steamer, was ascending the Congo one day, when accidentally he got into the mouth of the Mobangi and went on for one hundred miles before he discovered that he had left the main river. Few explorers have unwittingly stumbled upon so rich a geographical prize.
While exploratory enterprises have been centred largely in tropical Africa, no part of the continent has been neglected. We now know that large areas of the Sahara are underlaid by waters which need only be brought to the surface to cover the desert around them with verdure; that most of the rain falling on the south slopes of the Atlas Mountains sinks into the earth to impermeable strata of rock, along which it makes its way far out into the desert; that where the surface is depressed so that these waters come near to it, there are wells for the refreshment of the camel caravans, and oases, blooming islands of green, in the sterile wastes; and that artesian wells bring inexhaustible supplies of water within reach, so that millions of date palms have been planted along the northern edge of the desert in southern Algiers and Tunis, making these regions the largest sources of the world’s supply of dates.
It has also been discovered why there are very large areas of dry or desert lands in Africa. The Sahara and the southwest of Africa are deserts because the prevailing winds, the carriers of moisture, blow towards the sea instead of away from it, and consequently are always dry. The winds from the Indian Ocean crossing the highlands of Abyssinia are wrung nearly dry while passing the mountains, and so Somaliland and the lowlands to the south of Abyssinia are parched.
It has been found that the most of South Africa stands so high above the sea that the influences of a temperate climate are projected far towards the Equator; so that many white men, women, and children are living and thriving on farms in Mashonaland, seven degrees of latitude nearer the equator than the south end of Florida. This fact will profoundly influence the development of South Africa. It is to be the home of millions of the white race, the seat of a highly civilized empire, whose business relations with the rest of the world will be to the advantage of every trading nation. The presence of these millions of toilers will vitally affect the work of developing tropical Africa which is now absorbing such enormous treasure and energy; for South Africa is to be brought by railroads to the very doors of the tropical zone.
It is hoped that such facts as these, even though very briefly stated, may convey broadly a correct impression of the magnitude of African exploration, since its revival about the time that Livingstone died. It is impossible in brief space to signalize the good work that many of the most conspicuous pioneers have done. The world rendered tardy tribute to the notable achievements of some of them. When Rebmann discovered Kilimanjaro, not far from the equator, and told of the snows that crown the loftiest of African summits, it was decided by British geographers that Rebmann’s snow was probably an imaginary aspect. The snow was there, and plenty of it, but Rebmann died before justice was done to his faithful labors. When Paul du Chaillu described the Obongo dwarfs of West Africa, his narrative was discredited; but four or five groups of dwarfs, probably numbering many thousands, are now known to be scattered from the lower border of Abyssinia to the Kalahara desert in the far south. The ancients had heard of the dwarfs, but the geographers of the eighteenth century expunged from the maps of Africa about all that the geographers of Greece and Rome, as well as those of later times, placed on them; and the nineteenth century was slow in crediting the early investigators even with statements that were wholly or approximately accurate.
A curious history is connected with the discovery of the northeastern group of pygmies, a little south of Abyssinia. No white man had ever seen them, but about fifteen years ago Dr. Henry Schlichter, of the British Museum, collected all the information which natives had given to missionaries, traders, and explorers of the existence of these little people some hundreds of miles from the sea. Sifting all this evidence, he concluded that these dwarfs really existed, and that they lived in a region which he marked on the map north of Lake Stefanie. Donaldson Smith had not heard of Schlichter’s paper, and knew nothing of these dwarfs, but he found them in 1895 in the region which Schlichter had indicated as their probable habitat.
The broadest generalization with regard to the African tribes is that which separates most of the peoples south of the Sahara Desert into two great groups,–the Negro tribes, whose habitat may be roughly indicated as extending between the Atlantic and Gallaland in East Africa, with the Sahara as their northern, and the latitude of the Cameroons as their southern, boundaries; and the Bantu tribes, occupying nearly all of Africa south of the Negroes. The distinction between these two great groups is not based upon special differences as to physical structure, mental characteristics, habits, or development, but depends solely upon philological considerations, the languages of the Negroes and the Bantus forming two distinct groups. Most of the slaves who were brought to our country were Negroes, while most of those transported to Latin America were from the Bantu tribes.
One fact that stood out above all others in the study of the African natives, was the remarkable prevalence of cannibalism in the Congo basin. In all his wanderings, Livingstone met only one cannibal tribe,–the Manyema living between Tanganyika and the Upper Congo; but though they are not found near the sources of the river, nor near its mouth, they occupy about one-half of the Congo basin. They are regarded with fear and abhorrence by all tribes not addicted to the practice. They number several millions. Instead of being the most debased of human creatures, many of them, in physical strength and courage, in their iron work, carving, weaving, and other arts, are among the most advanced of African tribes. The larger part of the natives in the service of the Congo Free State are from the cannibal tribes. The laws now impose severe penalties for acts of cannibalism, and the evil is decreasing as the influence of the state is extended over wider areas. A few isolated tribes along the Gulf of Guinea are also cannibals.
There is no doubt that the helpful influences of the Caucasian in every part of Africa so far outweigh his harmful influences that the latter are but a drop in the bucket in comparison. It is most unfortunate that a certain admixture of blundering, severity, brutality, and wickedness seems inseparable from the development of all the newer parts of the world. The demoralizing drink traffic, the scandalous injustice and cruelty of some of the agents of civilized governments, are not to be belittled or condoned. But there is also a very bright side to the story of the white occupancy of Africa.
The family of a deceased chief in Central Africa recently preserved his body unburied for fourteen months, in the hope that they might prevail upon the British Government to permit the sacrifice of women and slaves on his grave, that he might have companions of his own household in the other world. He was buried at last, without shedding a drop of blood. Human sacrifices are now punishable with death throughout a large part of barbarous Africa, and the terrible evil is being abated as fast as the influence of the European governments is extended over new regions. The practice of the arts of fetichism, a kind of chicanery, most injurious in its effects upon the superstitious natives, is now punishable throughout the Congo Free State and British Rhodesia. Arab slave-dealers no longer raid the Congo plains and forests for slaves, killing seven persons for every one they lead into captivity. Slave-raiding has been utterly wiped out in all parts of Africa, except in portions of the Sudan and other districts over which white rule has not yet been asserted. The Arabs of the Congo, who went there from East Africa solely that they might grow rich in the slave trade, are now settled quietly on their rice and banana plantations. The sale of strong drink has been restricted by international agreement to the coast regions, where the traffic has long existed, and its evils are somewhat mitigated there by the regulations now enforced. Fifty thousand Congo natives who would not carry a pound of freight for Stanley in 1880, are now in the service of the white enterprises, many of them working, not for barter goods, but for coin. Many of the missionary fields are thriving, and wonderful results have been achieved in some of them. In Uganda, where Stanley in 1875 saw King Mtesa impaling his victims, there are now ninety thousand natives professing Christianity, three hundred and twenty churches, and many thousands of children in the schools. Fifty thousand of the people can read. Between 1880 and 1882 Stanley carried three little steamboats around 235 miles of rapids to the Upper Congo. Eighty steamers are now afloat there, plying on nearly 8,000 miles of rivers, and connected with the sea by a railroad that has paid dividends from the day it was opened. At the end of 1890 there were only 5,813 miles of railroad in Africa. About 15,000 miles are now in operation, and the end of this decade is certain to see 25,000 miles of railroads. Trains are running from Cairo to Khartum, the seat of the Mahdist tyranny, in the centre of a vast region which, until recently, had been closed for many years to all the world.
These wonderful results are the fruits of the partition of Africa among the European states. With the exception of some waste regions in the Libyan desert, which no one has claimed, Morocco, Abyssinia, and Liberia, every square mile of African territory has been divided among European powers, either as colonies or as spheres of influence. The scramble of twenty years for African lands is at an end, there now being no valuable areas that are not covered by the existing agreements. It is no mere love of humanity that has impelled the European countries to divide these regions among themselves. We can scarcely realize the intensity of the struggle for existence in many of the overcrowded parts of Europe. Their factories are enormously productive, but their people will suffer for food unless they can export manufactures. The crying need for new markets, for new sources of raw material, drove these states into Africa. And we should be glad, for Africa’s sake, that they have gone there, even though the desire to make money is one of the most powerful incentives.
It is under the protective aegis of these governments that explorers are settling down in smaller areas to see what may be found between the explored water-courses, to study the continent in detail, to give to our knowledge of Africa the scientific quality now required. The greatest geographical work there in recent years is the extension of a line of stations across tropical Africa by Commander Lemaire, each position astronomically fixed by the most careful methods, constituting a base-line east and west through Africa to which the scientific mapping of a very large area will be referred.
The day of the minuter study of the whole continent has now dawned, and we are witnessing a most notable work. All the colonial powers, and the Germans most conspicuously, are studying the economic questions relating to their African possessions. The suitability of climates for colonists, the essential rules of hygiene, the development of agriculture, labor supplies, transportation and commercial facilities, and many other problems are receiving the most careful attention. Experiment stations are maintained in the colonies and colonial schools at home, to fit young men for service in the field. The Germans have already proved that cotton and tobacco are certain to become profitable export crops.
The mine-owners of the Witwatersrand, on which Johannesburg stands, have begun a movement which they hope will result in the immigration of 100,000 white laborers to the mining field. We may look for remarkable development in South Africa, whose promise is larger than that of any other part of the continent. Whatever may be said of some of the methods by which the British have enlarged their empire, their rule has blessed the barbarous peoples whose countries they have absorbed. The task of improving the few millions of blacks in South Africa, and of developing the large and in some respects wonderful resources of that region, will be greatly assisted by the incoming of hundreds of thousands of Europeans, bringing with them the arts and other blessings of civilization. The future of none of the newer parts of the world is brighter with the hope of great development than the region between the Zambesi and the Cape of Good Hope.
In order to observe intelligently the progress of South Africa in coming years, the limitations as well as the advantages of the country must be kept in view. More than half of it, including the entire western half, is deficient in rainfall and can never be the home of a dense white population. Some mining will develop on those broad, dry plains and sandy wastes; some agriculture where irrigation is possible; and great wool-growing wherever thrive the nutritious grasses on which 13,000,000 sheep, scattered over the Karroo of Cape Colony, and 4,000,000 in the little Orange Free State, were grazing before the recent war. Wool-growing will always be the greatest grazing industry, though cattle and horses are raised in large numbers, and the fine, soft hair of the Angora goat is second only to wool in export importance.
A narrow strip of fine farm lands across the south end of Africa, another along the southern border of the former Boer republics, and a large area among the highlands of Mashonaland, far towards the equator, produce nearly all the crops of the temperate zones. It is not yet certain, however, that South Africa will ever raise enough wheat for a great white population. On the northern slopes of the hills, east and northeast of Cape Town, are thousands of acres of grapes. Cape Colony is becoming one of the important wine countries; and in February and March, large quantities of grapes, peaches, nectarines, and plums are placed in cool rooms on steamships and sent fresh to British markets almost before English fruit trees are in bloom.
East of the grape region is an area peculiarly adapted for the cultivation of tobacco; and east of the tobacco district, north of the coastal belt of wheat in a region of sandy scrub, the bush country, are the ostrich farms, in the hands mainly of men of considerable capital, who supply nearly all the feathers derived from the domesticated ostrich. The plumes are sometimes worth as much as $200 a pound, the ordinary feathers bringing from $5 to $7 a pound. Natal is unique in two of its agricultural industries, being the only colony that is producing tea and important quantities of cane sugar.
But gold, widely scattered over the country on the interior plateau, exceeds in value all the other exports together. The world never saw such a development of gold mining in a small area as has occurred on the Witwatersrand, where Johannesburg stands. The Witwatersrand (White River Slope) is a slight elevation, the water parting between rivers, about one and a half miles wide and 125 miles long. On twenty-five miles of the rand, at and near Johannesburg, more gold was produced in the year before the Boer war than was yielded by any other country in the world, The other rich mining regions of the Transvaal and other parts of South Africa have been completely dwarfed by the wonderful product of the rand. The surveys in Matabeleland and Mashonaland show gold-bearing areas 5,000 square miles in extent, which as yet have practically no development. The mining companies on the rand and elsewhere are now preparing for far larger operations than ever before.
The Kimberley diamond mines, turning out more than $20,000,000 worth of rough stones a year, supply nearly all the diamonds of commerce. Two other diamond centres in the Orange River Colony have scarcely been touched, and diamonds are found on the Limpopo River and in other regions where no mining has been undertaken. The minerals of South Africa, including iron and coal, bid fair to be for many years the largest sources of wealth; and in wool, hides, mohair, fresh fruits, and some other products, South Africa may rival other parts of the world.
There are no good natural harbors except Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa, but by great expenditure the harbors of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, and Durban have been adapted for great commerce. Many persons mistakenly regard Cape Town as the chief commercial centre of South Africa. It is so only in respect of the export of gold and diamonds. As it is not centrally situated for business with the interior, more of the things that South Africa sells to and buys from the rest of the world, excepting gold and diamonds, pass through Port Elizabeth than through any other port. Here is centred the largest wholesale trade.
What South Africa needs is more railroads and more white labor. Manufacturing industries on an important scale are yet to come, for as yet the white population is too sparse to develop anything but the natural products of the country.
The broad summing up of the future work in Africa is that the native will be taught to help himself. The destiny of the continent depends largely upon his development, for great parts of Africa may never be adapted to become the home of many white men. The most powerful motives, philanthropic and selfish, incite and will sustain the work of helping these millions to rise to a higher plane of humanity. This work, now well begun, is the great task which in the present century will call for all the knowledge, patience, humanity, and justice that may be brought to bear upon the problem of reclaiming Africa.
AUTHORITIES.
Livingstone’s “Missionary Travels,” “A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi,” and “Last Journeys;” Blaikie’s “Livingstone’s Personal Life;” Stanley’s “How I found Livingstone.”
Stanley’s “Through the Dark Continent,” “The Congo and the Founding of its Free State,” “In Darkest Africa;” Schweinfurth’s “The Heart of Africa;” Burton’s “The Lake Regions of Central Africa;” Speke’s “Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile;” Thomson’s “To the Central African Lakes and Back;” Barth’s “Travels and Discoveries in Central Africa;” Theal’s “Compendium of South African History;” Greswell’s “Geography of Africa South of the Zambesi”; Noble’s “The Redemption of Africa” (A History of African Missions).
No comprehensive compendium of the history of African exploration has yet been written. Our knowledge of the geography, peoples and resources of Africa is treated with considerable detail in a number of works such as Reclus’s “Africa” (in “The Earth and Its Inhabitants”) and Sievers’s “Afrika” (German). A very large part of the exploratory enterprises in Africa have not been described in books, but only in the reports of the explorers, printed with their original maps in the publications of many geographical and missionary societies.
SIR AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD.
1817-1894.
MODERN ARCHAEOLOGY.
BY WILLIAM HAYES WARD, D.D., LL.D.
It was twenty-three long centuries ago that a Greek soldier of fortune, who had the honor to be also a disciple of Socrates, was leading ten thousand mercenaries back to their native land after their famous failure to set the Younger Cyrus on the throne of Persia. Clearchus and the other generals had been treacherously murdered. Dispirited, almost hopeless, on their way to the longed-for Black Sea, in anticipation of the perilous and tedious journey, past wild mountains and wilder Kurds, they toiled up the valley of the Tigris River. Of one incident of their journey their historian and leader makes no record. They reached the spot where now stands the city of Mosul. On the bank of the river their eyes fell on a bare and lofty hill. They did not know, they never suspected,–Xenophon wrote no word of it,–that under that hill lay buried the ruins of one of the mightiest conquering cities that had ever ruled the world. From the palaces of that hill, Ninus and Semiramis and Sardanapalus had led their conquering armies, all now covered with silence.
Two centuries earlier, in 606 B.C., there had occurred one of the most tremendous catastrophes recorded in all the grim annals of war. After a thousand years of primacy in the East, but twenty years after the death of Sardanapalus (the Greek name of Asshurbanapal), who had carried his armies to Egypt and had made his capital the centre of the world’s culture and magnificence, as it was of its cruel and hated power, Nineveh was captured, buried, and utterly desolated by a horde of savage Scythians from the mountains of the north and east, such people as we now call the Kurds. Its palaces had no lofty Greek columns to stand for memorials, as at Palmyra or Persepolis; and when the outer casings of brick and alabaster were cracked away, and the ashes of the upper stories and the clay of the inner constructions, soaked by the rains, covered the ruins of temple and palace, nothing was left to mark the site but the grass-covered hill. No wonder that the learned scholar of Socrates saw nothing, knew nothing of the city, most glorious and most detested of all the cities of the earth. But in its day the overthrow of Nineveh and the destruction of the Assyrian Empire had been the most terrible event in the world’s history. How the Hebrew prophets gloated over it! “Where now is the den of the lions, and the feeding-place of the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked, the lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid? Wo to the bloody city; it is all full of lies and rapine; the prey departeth not. The noise of the whip, and the noise of the rattling of wheels, and prancing horses, and bounding chariots, the horsemen mounting, and the flashing sword, and the glittering spear, and a multitude of slain, and a great heap of corpses, and there is no end of the bodies. There is no assuaging of the hurt; thy wound is grievous; all that hear the report of thee clap their hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?” And another prophet had uttered the curse: “The pelican and the porcupine shall lodge in the capitals thereof; their voice shall sound in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds; for he hath laid bare the cedar-work. This is the joyous city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, ‘I am, and there is none besides me!’ How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! Every one that passeth by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.”
Thus fell Nineveh, amid the universal rejoicing of the nations, and thus, seventy years later, fell Babylon also, which, in the short interval, Nebuchadnezzar had made more magnificent than even Nineveh had been, beautified for its capture by Cyrus. But before Babylon was the capital of Chaldea, or Nineveh the capital of Assyria, the city of Calah had been the seat of its kings, and a mighty mound–they call it Nimroud now–“as high as St. Paul’s steeple,” old travellers loved to say–marks the place on the east bank of the Tigris, twenty miles south of Nineveh; and, before Calah, Assyria had an earlier capital forty miles still nearer the Babylonian border, at Asshur, now Kalah-Shergat, on the west of the Tigris; and each capital had its palaces and records, and all are now equally buried in clay and utter oblivion. And before the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and long centuries before Nineveh or Calah or Asshur, there had been mighty kingdoms in Babylonia, of which the world had quite forgot the names, only vague rumors remaining in song or legend of Nimrod and Chedorlaomer and Ur of the Chaldees,–only what was preserved in the dimmest records of the Hebrew Scriptures. Empires were lost, buried in chiliads of forgetfulness; would they ever be recovered?
And how much else was lost, what kingdoms, what empires buried before Hebrew or Greek history began to take notice of the world outside and put them in books, no one knew, no one knows even yet, although so much has been found. The fame of Egypt was never quite forgotten, nor all its history, for Egypt was the world’s granary, and closely accessible to the ships of Corinth and Rome; and Egypt never lost her civilization in all her long succession of enslavement. But what memory had been kept of the Ionia and Greece of the days before Homer? What of the early civilization of Cyprus and Crete? Only the name of Minos, a judge in Hell. What of Persia and Elam? Were they uninhabited before the times of Xerxes and Cyrus? And who were these kings, Cyrus and Xerxes, whose names burst upon us with dim light out of a black antiquity? Even they were but shadows on a screen, just seen and disappearing. What kings and kingdoms came before them and passed away? Has history no record? Not a word. Only black vacuity has been left behind them. And there was that other empire of the East, that of the Hittites, which we now know ruled Asia Minor and Syria and contested the rule of the world with Assyria and Egypt centuries before Agamemnon and Achilles, but so utterly buried and forgotten that not a line of its history was left, not even enough to let the sharpest scholar ask a question or suspect that it ever built capitals and fought victories and produced a civilization the harvest of which we still enjoy. Nothing was left of them but their names in a Hebrew list of tribes,–“Amorites and Jebusites and Hivites and Hittites.”
Yet all these lost tribes, nay, lost nations, had left their records behind them, only they were buried under ground and out of sight. What a travesty it is on history and civilization, what an impeachment of the glory of these later Christian centuries, that the lands which these old empires crowded with a busy population should now be among the most desolate and inaccessible on the face of the earth! There we see the curse of the Moslem religion, and still more of the Turkish government. Wherever the Turk has carried the sword and the Koran, there is blight and death. Only as soldiers and scholars of Europe have forced their way into these seats of ancient empires has it been possible to ask and learn what is buried beneath their gray desolation.
The man who did more than any other to awaken the interest of the world in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh. But before his day another man had startled the world with what we may call the discovery of Egypt. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte, the man whose sword was a ploughshare turning up the fallow fields of Europe, and sowing strange crops of tyranny and liberty, and whose ambition it was to set up a new throne in the land of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies. The mighty ruins of Karnak and the imperishable pyramids filled him with amazement, and he set the scholars of France at work to publish in massive folios the wonders of that most ancient land. Then was found the Rosetta Stone, with its inscription in two languages,–Greek, which any scholar could read, and the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no living man could read. But here was the key. The words _Ptolemy_ and _Cleopatra_ were in the Greek text, and it was not hard to find what were the combinations of characters that stood for these words in the Egyptian. The letters _p, t_, and _l_ were in both names. The hieroglyphic signs found in both names must be these three letters. That beginning gave all the other signs in both words, and the rest of the alphabet soon followed. Justly great is the fame of the Frenchman Champollion, who has the honor of having first deciphered and read this lost language, and opened to us the secret treasures of its history and religion.
But with the exploration of Egypt the scholarship of the world was satisfied for fifty years. No one seemed to think to ask what might be hid under the soil of nearer Palestine and Syria and Asia Minor; much less did they seek to uncover the buried capitals of Assyria and Babylonia. Scholarship was devoted to books, to old manuscripts in convent libraries, to recovering what the wise men of Greece and Rome had written, and trying to wrest new facts out of their blundering old compilations of ancient history. It did not occur to them that a hundred kings and ten thousand merchants and priests might have left the stories of their conquests or contracts or liturgies, unrotted in the wet soil, imperishably preserved to be the record of commerce and empires as old and as great as those of Egypt, but far deeper covered with oblivion. But there they were, kept safe for twenty, thirty, fifty centuries, until the man should come whose mission it was to find them.
More than one such man came in the middle of the last century, but one man is pre-eminent, and typical of all the rest, Sir Austen Henry Layard. Before him one Frenchman, M. Paul Emile Botta, had made a fine dash on a palace city a dozen miles north of Nineveh, and had opened wonders such as the world had never seen before. But the man whose energy was fullest of impulse, whose enthusiasm compelled British Ambassadors and Ministers and Parliaments to do his bidding, who aroused the world to the importance of the exploration and disinterment of the monuments of Babylonia and Assyria, was the Englishman Layard.
He had a youthful passion for adventure, and slender means to gratify it. I wish you could see him as he is pictured in the volume which gives the story of his early adventures, before he had settled on his life-work of exploration. There he stands clad in his Bakhtiyari costume, the dress of a mountain tribe in Persia which asserted its independence of Teheran. It is a well-knit frame, fit to endure hardships. He stands holding the tall matchlock, the curved scimetar by his side, and the long pistol and the dagger in his belt. Above the yellow shoes and parti-woven stockings a red silk robe falls to his ankles, and over that a green silk garment reaches to his knees, and yet over that a shorter and richly embroidered coat, with open sleeves, is held close about the body by a wide silken sash woven in the brightest of red and gold, and holding the weapons attached to his waist. On his head is a low flat cap, visorless in front, but with a broad bow in place of a feather, all striped with the richest embroidery, and with a wide tassel of the same material falling far down his back. But the face, with its short beard dyed dark with henna, and its blue eyes, is not that of a warrior, but of a serious scholar or diplomatist. And he needed all the force of courage and all the arts of diplomacy for the work he had to do.
Layard’s early training was in the line of preparation for his life’s work. Much of his boyhood was spent in Italy, where he acquired a taste for the fine arts, and as much knowledge of them as a child could obtain who was constantly in the society of artists and connoisseurs. At about the age of sixteen he was sent to England to study the law, for which he was destined by his parents. After six years in the office of a solicitor, and in the chambers of an eminent conveyancer,–for that is the way that lawyers were educated then,–he determined to leave England and seek a career elsewhere. He had a relative in Ceylon, who gave him hopes of securing a position there, and for Ceylon he started. A friend of his, ten years older, was bound for the same destination, both fond of adventure, and they agreed to go together, and to go as far as they could by land instead of taking the long sea journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Across Europe they passed to Constantinople, through Austria, Dalmatia, Montenegro, Albania, and Bulgaria; thence across Asia Minor to Syria and Palestine; thence to Aleppo and down the Tigris to Baghdad. It was an extraordinary and adventurous journey, often dangerous; but greater danger was to follow. Layard had learned some Turkish, and now he spent the long weeks in Baghdad in the study of Persian; his companion was quite familiar with Arabic. Before they left England they had received good advice from Sir John MacNeill, the British representative at the court of the Shah: “You must either travel as important personages, with a retinue of servants and an adequate escort, or alone, as poor men, with nothing to excite the cupidity of the people amongst whom you will have to mix. If you cannot afford to adopt the first course, you must take the latter.” The latter they were forced to take.
Many a young man has the gift to acquire languages–almost any Oriental can talk three or four–and the ability to rough it and live on the fare of the people, though barbarous; and many a man has the spirit of adventure; but this young man had one peculiar and unusual qualification that directed him to his future career. As a child, he had read the “Arabian Nights” with intense delight, with their stories centred about Baghdad. Then every book of Eastern adventure, every bit of travel in Syria, Arabia, or Persia that he could find he had eagerly devoured. It was his day and night’s longing that he might visit strange lands of history and make explorations and discoveries. So wherever he was, he visited every ruin and tried to copy every inscription. If his companion would not turn aside to visit some region of renown and danger, he would go alone and join him later. As they came down the river Tigris in their boat, they passed the immense mound of Nimroud, and so impressed was Layard by it that he then, scarce twenty-three years old, resolved that some day he would search and learn what was hidden under it; but little did he imagine what wonderful monuments he was to find there only a few years later.
Without a servant, as poor men, in a caravan of fanatical and hostile Persian pilgrims returning from the shrines, just travellers trying to go by land through Persia and Afghanistan to India and Ceylon, they left Baghdad. It was a time of unusual danger, for the British Minister had been recalled from the Persian Court, and war with England was threatened. They were taken for spies, and sent to the presence of the Shah, and forbidden to follow the route they had chosen and which had been marked out for them by the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, to report on rivers and mountains and ruins not yet explored. They were insulted and robbed, and their lives were often in danger; but at last they received from the Shah their firmans. Now they separated. His companion felt that he must go by the quickest route to his destination; but Layard had no definite date before him, and he was anxious to perform the commissions of the Geographical Society, and so he plunged alone into fresh dangers.
But there is no space to tell the rest of the story of his adventures among the Bakhtiyari, of his copying of inscriptions, of his return to Baghdad and his decision to give up the plans of life in Ceylon, and of his return from Baghdad again to Shuster and Persepolis and other ancient cities of Persia, and his exploration of the Karun River and his geographical paper on the subject, his opening of British trade, and his return to Constantinople. At Mosul he found that M. Botta was planning to explore the mounds across the Tigris that covered ancient Nineveh, and he warmly encouraged his plans. At Constantinople he visited Sir Stratford Canning and delivered to him despatches that had been confided to his care, in view of a threatened war between Persia and Turkey. Here he was kept in the service of the British Embassy, and intrusted with important and delicate negotiations and investigations which were so highly appreciated by Sir Stratford that he kept him as his attache.
Meanwhile M. Botta had begun his excavations of a palace of King Sargon at Khorsabad and was sending his reports and drawings to Paris. They were all sent by way of Constantinople, and, by M. Botta’s generosity, were all seen by Mr. Layard. So deeply was he interested in them, and so intense was his desire to carry on excavations himself, that he secured his release from the Embassy, and also a grant of three hundred dollars from Sir Stratford’s own purse, which, with what he could spare from his own money, would, he hoped, suffice to begin the work, when, if anything of value appeared, it was trusted that funds would be secured from English friends of Oriental learning. Thus, six years after leaving England, Mr. Layard, well equipped in knowledge of the people and in diplomatic experience, was ready to launch on his great career, which brought him fame and earned him the post in later years of British Ambassador at the Porte, which Sir Stratford had held, and–what is far greater–gave to the world the larger part of its knowledge of the lost empires of Assyria and Babylonia.