170 AFRICA of Moors. Tangier is the leading seaport, and in European wars has frequently been resorted to as a convenient and secure naval station. The W. coast of Africa, from the Sahara to Cape Negro, comprises three divisions known as Senegambia, Upper Guinea, and Lower Guinea, each of which contains a number of native states and various European colonial es- tablishments. Thus the English have Gambia on the river of the same name, with the main settlement at Bathurst ; Sierra Leone, a penin- sula 18 m. long and 12 m. broad, with a white population in 1867 of 129 persons; Gold Coast, a territory of 6,000 sq. m. in Upper Guinea, with its principal fort at Cape Coast Castle ; and Lagos, 250 m. from the Niger, a station es- tablished to secure the more complete suppres- sion of the slave trade. The French colonies are : Fort St. Louis, at the mouth of the Sen- egal river ; Goree, just S. of Cape Verd ; Grand Bassam, on the Ivory Coast ; and As- sinie, on the Gold Coast. There are also sev- eral Danish and Dutch settlements in Guinea ; but by a treaty completed in 1872 the latter were transferred by the government of the Netherlands to the British crown. Liberia, a republic founded for emancipated negroes from the United States, occupies a portion of the coast N. W. of Cape Palmas. The most promi- nent and powerful native states of Upper Guinea are the Ashantee territory and the kingdom of Dahomey. In Lower Guinea the Portuguese, who occupy many important towns, exercise supremacy over about 300,000 of the inhabitants, and there are also four in- dependent negro sovereignties, Loango, Con- go, Angola, and Benguela. Cape Colony is the largest of Great Britain's possessions in Africa, and since 1866 has included British Caffraria, which was formerly under a separate govern- ment. It was conquered from the Dutch in 1806, and now extends over an area of about 200,000 sq. m., having a population in 1869 of 566,158 souls, among whom there were 187,- 439 Europeans. A short railway runs from Cape Town into the interior as far as Welling- ton. Natal, also an English colony, owes its name to the fact that land was discovered here on Christmas day in 1497 by Vasco da Gama. Its seacoast of 170 m. is penetrated by only one good harbor, which is at D'Urban or Port Natal, and even this will not admit the largest vessels. The Orange Free State and Trans- vaal Republic are two democratic governments organized by malcontent boers and others who were dissatisfied with the British colonial rule. N. of the Cape countries the E. coast is di- vided into three parts: Mozambique, under Portuguese dominion ; Zanguebar, in which the principal town is Zanzibar, governed by the sultan or imam of Muscat ; and Ajan, a wild tract extending to Cape Guardafui and inhabited by the Somauli. Far to the north and west lies Abyssinia, where a debased form of Christianity is generally professed, and has been to some extent the established religion for many centuries. Nubia, which connects Abyssinia with Egypt, has been subject to the viceroy of the latter country since 1822. The population is Mohammedan. Comparatively little is known concerning Soodan, a name which is applied to the vast land of central Africa bounded N. by the Sahara, W. by Sen- egambia, S. by Upper Guinea and the table land, and E. by Darfoor. Among its king- doms are Bornoo, Haussa, and Wadai ; and the celebrated cities of Sackatoo and Timbuc- too are within its boundaries. To the ancients all of Africa except Egypt and the northern coast was known as Libya. Herodotus says that an expedition circumnavigated the conti- nent in the reign of Pharaoh Necho, and there are traditions of Carthaginian exploration far inland ; but whatever knowledge was gained by these efforts had been lost to the world long before the voyages of those Portuguese navigators of the 15th century who followed the entire coast from Egypt to the Indian ocean, and led the way for the numerous col- onies of Portugal afterward established upon it. Vasco da Gama was the most distinguished of these discoverers, and was the first to double the Cape of Good Hope, which he did on Nov. 20, 1497. He continued his voyage in African waters as far as Mombas, and then proceeded to India. Many of the expeditions of the earlier epoch were sent out under vari- ous commanders by Prince Henry the Naviga- tor. The French colonization of the W. coast dates from the 17th century; the Dutch East India company founded its first post at the Cape in 1650; and the African company, in- corporated by the English parliament in 1750, did not long delay the establishment of trading stations in Guinea. In 1772 Bruce, the Scotch traveller, visited the sources of the Blue Nile, and after exposure to the utmost hardship and greatest danger returned to England to find his plain and truthful narrative discredited on every hand. Mungo Park, also a Scotchman, was killed on his second trip to the Niger in 1806, after reaching Timbuctoo. The impor- tant expedition of Denham and Clapperton to Bornoo set out from Tripoli in 1822, and re- sulted in numerous discoveries. They were the first white men who ever saw Lake Tchad. In a subsequent attempt to trace the course of the Niger up from the coast Capt. Clapperton died at Sackatoo in 1827, having in his two jour- neys travelled over the entire distance between Tripoli and Cape Coast Castle. Soodan has since been much more thoroughly explored by Barth, Vogel, and Overweg, and the Niger by the brothers Lander, one of whom had been Clapperton's servant. Our earliest knowledge of the S. African interior came from adventu- rous native merchants who were bold enough to cross from Loanda on the Atlantic to the shore of the Mozambique channel ; and since 1849 the almost uninterrupted journeys of Dr. Livingstone over the great plateau have copi- ously increased our information in regard to it
