Page:Enterprise and Adventure.djvu/79

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ENTERPRISE AND ADVENTURE.
61

the articles considered necessary for his personal convenience during the journey, together with a sum of two hundred dollars in coin, with the proviso that, in case of need, he might at Badagry, on the coast of Africa, draw upon the treasury for any sum not exceeding three hundred dollars. Such was the trifling equipment with which the two brothers set forth on a mission of the highest importance to geographical science.

Park and Clapperton, and their predecessors, had traced the course of the Niger for many hundreds of miles as it flowed in a north-easterly direction from the great mountain range which gives rise to the Senegal to Timbuctoo. Park had traced it hither in a southerly course as far as Boussa, where he perished, and the heroic Clapperton had determined the position of the place; but the question of whither it flowed from this point, or where it fell into the sea, was still entirely unknown. This was the question which the Landers started to solve, and their efforts were happily crowned with success. By tracing the course of the river from Boussa downwards, they established beyond all doubt the fact that the Quorra river, which flows into the sea in the Gulf of Guinea, was in fact the mouth of the Niger; and thus these two unlettered travellers completed in a few months what had been the work of ages.

No book of African travel surpasses in interest the narrative of these indefatigable explorers. During all the trials and hardships of their journey, their journals were invariably written on the spot at the close of each day; and when they returned they made no alteration, nor introduced a single sentence in the original manuscript. "It was intimated to us," they remark in the