From The British Quarterly Review.
ACROSS AFRICA.[1]
The record of African travel has a personal interest to almost every class of educated readers: to the lover of adventure, it is the story of adventures wild beyond even the wildest of dreams; to the sportsman, it tells of the biggest of big game; to the geographer, it is an onward step towards the solution of one of the great geographical problems of the day; to the merchant or trader, to the geologist, botanist, or zoologist, it equally tells of new fields for the exercise of commerce, of industry, or of science; and to those who more especially recognize that "the proper study of mankind is man," it offers the newest of novelties—it brings to the knowledge of the anthropologist customs yet unheard of, and soon again, we may hope, to be heard of no longer; or marshals before the missionary countless hordes as yet ignorant of the sacred name.
Appealing thus to so many distinct interests, it is not to be wondered at that the occasional short notices of Lieutenant Cameron's remarkable journey across Africa have been eagerly seized on; that crowds have everywhere gathered to hear Commander Cameron tell his own story in the fewest of words; and that the book, whose title stands at the head of this article, has been demanded at all the libraries for many months before its publication. Could it by any possibility have come out on the day that Mr. Cameron landed in England, it would have had a success such as perhaps no book has had for many years. Now that it appears, after the lapse of a considerable interval, it has been in a measure forestalled; so much of its subject-matter has been made public in other ways, that it may almost run a risk of falling dead in the literary market. And the more so, as it has been published just as Parliament opens on a time of intense political excitement, and without having any particular claim, from a literary or artistic point of view, to the attention of the more æsthetic part of the public. It would be a pity if such should be the case; for the book, though carelessly, or perhaps we should rather say clumsily, put together, has a very real and permanent interest, as the genuine story of difficult and dangerous exploration; and it will, of necessity, continue for many years to be the text-book for the geography and anthropology of south tropical Africa.
It is, we may suppose, within the recollection of our readers that Mr. Cameron was appointed by the Royal Geographical Society to the command of an expedition which should enter Africa from Zanzibar; should look for and join Dr. Livingstone—supposed then to be somewhere to the west of Lake Tanganyika—and, under his orders, should continue the exploration of central Africa, "for the purpose of supplementing his great discoveries." Joined with Mr. Cameron, was his old messmate, Dr. Dillon, a surgeon in the navy; and the two left England on the 30th of November, 1872. At Zanzibar, or at Bagamoyo on the mainland opposite, they were joined by Mr. Murphy, a lieu- tenant of artillery, and afterwards by Mr. Robert Moffat, a nephew of Dr. Livingstone, who, on hearing of the expedition, had sold his sugar plantation at Natal, and was now eager to devote himself and the whole of his little fortune to the cause of African exploration. His devotion was indeed to the death: he died of fever, at Simbo, within a few weeks after the beginning of the journey.
From the time of their arrival at Zanzibar it was some two months before the stores were all ready, and a sufficient number of men enlisted to carry them; and after the many and usual vexatious delays, the expedition made its final start from Kikoka on the 28th of March, 1873.
We may pass lightly over the earlier part of Mr. Cameron's journey, through a country which the travels of Burton, Speke, Grant, and Stanley have made almost classical: it is now well mapped along the different routes, and is, or may be, familiar to every student of geography. The expedition arrived at Unyanyembe on the 2nd of August, without further hindrance than that commonly experienced from the laziness or dishonesty of the
- ↑ Across Africa. By Verney Lovett Cameron, C.B., D.C.L., Commander Royal Navy. Two Vols. London. 1877.
