ancient course of the upper river. When the upper Niger had this direction, the Wadi Taffassassent, now a dried-up river of the central Sahara, which rose in the Ahaggar mountains, is believed to have formed the upper course of the existing lower Niger. While the upper and lower parts of the Niger have all the appearance of ancient streams, the middle Niger is the result of a “recent” capture; “it has no past, it scarcely has a present” (see R. Chudeau, Sahara soudanais, Paris, 1909).
Vague ideas of the existence of the river were possessed by the ancients. The great river flowing eastward reached by the Nasamonians as reported by Herodotus can be no other than the Niger. Pliny mentions a river Nigris, of the same nature with the Nile, separating Africa and Ethiopia, and forming the boundary of Gaetulia; History and exploration. and it is not improbable that this is the modern Niger. In Ptolemy, too, appears along with Gir (possibly the Shari) a certain Nigir (Νίγειρ) as one of the largest rivers of the interior; but so vague is his description that it is impossible definitely to identify it with the Niger.[1] Arabian geographers, such as Ibn Batuta, who were acquainted with the middle course of the river, called it the Nile of the Negroes. At the same time contradictory opinions were held as to the course of the stream. It was supposed by some geographers to run west, an opinion probably first stated by Idrisi in the 12th century. Idrisi gave the Nile of Egypt and the Nile of the Negroes a common source in the Mountain of the Moon. Fountains from the mountain formed two lakes, whence issued streams which united in a very large lake. From this third lake issued two rivers—the Nile of Egypt flowing north, and that of the Negroes flowing west (see R. Dozy and M. J. de Goeje’s Edrisi, Leiden, 1866: Premier Climat, 1st 4 sections). From Idrisi’s description it would appear that he regarded the Shari, Lake Chad, the Benue, Niger and Senegal as one great river which emptied into the Atlantic.[2] That the Niger flowed west and reached the ocean was also stated by Leo Africanus. The belief that a western branch of the Nile emptied itself into the Atlantic was held by Prince Henry of Portugal, who instructed the navigators he despatched to Guinea to look for the mouth of the river, and when in 1445 they entered the estuary of the Senegal the Portuguese were convinced that they had discovered the Nile of the Negroes (see Azurara’s Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, Beazley and Prestage’s translation, vol. ii., London, 1899, chaps. lx. and lxi., and introduction and notes). The Senegal being proved an independent river and the eastward flow of the Niger assumed, the theory that it ran into the Nile was revived, and almost to the very year in which the course of the river was actually demonstrated geographers and travellers, such as J. G. Jackson in his Empire of Marocco, first published in 1809, fought zealously for the identity of the Nile of the Negroes with the river of Egypt. The highest scientific authority of the day, Major James Rennell, believed, however, that the Niger ended, by evaporation, in the country of “Wangara”—a region located by him, through a misreading of Idrisi, far too much to the east, between 15° and 20° E. (see Rennell’s map in Hornemann’s Travels, 1802). To Rennell the Benue was an east-flowing continuation of the Niger.[3] The imagined existence of mountains–called Kong in the west and Komri (Lunar) in the east—stretching in a high and unbroken chain across Africa about 10° N. long prevented geographers from thinking of a possible southern bend to the Niger.
That the vast network of rivers on the Guinea coast, of which the Nun was the chief, known as the Oil Rivers, formed the delta of the Niger does not appear to have been suspected before the beginning of the 19th century. Consequently it was from the direction of its source that the river was first explored in modern times. In 1795 Mungo Park (q.v.) was sent out by the African Association, and was the first European to see and describe the upper river. Park landed at the Gambia, and struck the Niger near Segu (a town some distance above Sansandig) on the 20th of July 1796, Where he beheld it “glittering in the morning sun as broad as the Thames at Westminster and flowing slowly to the eastward” (Travels, 1st ed. p. 194). He descended the river some distance, and on his return journey went up stream as far as Bamako. In 1805 Park returned to Africa for the purpose of descending the Niger to its mouth. He started as before from the Gambia, reached the Niger, sailed down the river past Timbuktu, and on the eve of the successful accomplishment of his undertaking lost his life during an attack on his boat by the natives at Bussa (Nov. or Dec. 1805). Park held to the opinion that the Niger and Congo were one river, though in 1802 C. G. Reichard, a German geographer, had suggested that the Rio Nun was the mouth of the Niger.[4] Owing to Park’s death the results of his second journey were lost, and the work had to be begun afresh. In 1822 Major A. G. Laing (who had reached Timbuktu by Way of Tripoli) obtained some accurate information concerning the sources of the river, and in 1828 the French explorer René Caillié went by boat from Jenné to the port of Timbuktu. In 1826 Bussa was reached from Benin by Hugh Clapperton, and his servant Richard Lander. On Clapperton’s death Richard Lander and his brother John led in 1830 an expedition which went overland from Badagry to the Niger. Canoeing down the river from Yawri—60 m. above Bussa—to the mouth of the Rio Nun they finally settled the doubt as to the lower course of the stream. In 1832 Macgregor Laird established the African Steamship Company, and Richard Lander and R. A. K. Oldfield (as members of its first expedition) ascended the Niger to Rabba, and the Benue as far as Dagbo (80 m.). In 1841 an expedition, consisting of three steamers of the British navy, under Captain (afterwards Admiral) H. D. Trotter, went up to Egga (Egam), but Was forced to return owing to sickness and mortality.
Heinrich Barth (1851–1854) made known to Europe the course of the river from Timbuktu to Say. Barth sailed down from Saraiyamo (situated on a tributary stream south-west of Timbukutu) to Kabara; then skirted the left bank, to a small town called Bornu in 16° N., and the right thence to Say. In 1880–1881 the German E. R. Flegel ascended the Niger to Gomba opposite the confluence of the Sokoto river with the main stream, and about 70 m. below Barth’s southmost point. Zweifel and Moustier, sent out by M. Verminck, a Marseilles merchant, discovered (1879) the sources of the Falico, &c., and in 1885 the Tembi source was visited by Captain Brouet, a French officer. Indeed the additions to the knowledge of the Niger during the last two decades of the 19th century were largely the work of French officers engaged in the extension of French influence throughout the Western Sudan. From 1880 onwards Colonel (afterward General) Gallieni took a leading part in the operations on the upper river, where in 1883 a small gunboat, the Niger, was launched for the protection of the newly established French posts. In 1885 a voyage was made by Captain Delanneau
- ↑ Sir Rufane Donkin in a curious and learned work, A Dissertation on . . . the Niger (1829), made the Niger join the Gir, which last stream he calls the Nile of Bornu. The united river ran north, disappeared underground in the Sahara and reached the Mediterranean at “the quicksands of the gulph of Sidra.” Donkin believed that the desert, advancing eastwards, would overwhelm the Egyptian Nile also in its lower course. “The Delta,” he exclaims, “shall become a plashy quicksand, a second Syrtis! and the Nile shall cease to exist from the Lower Cataract downwards.”
- ↑ The hydrography of northern central Africa as now known largely explains the medieval belief in a connexion between the western rivers and the Egyptian Nile. Leaving out of account the Welle-Ubangi (and Idrisi’s description of the two Niles may infer a knowledge of that stream, which was supposed by Schweinfurth to form part of the Chad system), there is an almost continuous waterway from the mouth of the Senegal to that of the Nile. The upper waters of the Bakoy branch of the Senegal and those of the navigable Niger are less than 40 m. apart; the Niger communicates directly through the Benue, Lake Tuburi and the Logone with the Shari; the easternmost affluents of the Shari and the most western tributaries of the Bahr el Ghazel affluent of the Nile are within 20 m. of one another. With but three short porter ages a boat could be navigated the whole of this distance. Moreover, from the confluence of the Ghazel the Nile is navigable (at high water) the entire distance to the Mediterranean. (See also Shari.)
- ↑ In 1816 James McQueen correctly divined that there was a great west-flowing tributary (the Benue) to the Niger, and that after its confluence the river ran south to the Atlantic. See his View of Northern Central Africa (1821) and Geographical Survey of Africa 1840.
- ↑ See Éphémérides géographiques, vol. xii. (Weimar, Aug. 1803).
