the chief channel of trade and commerce. Steamers first ascended the Nile above the cataracts (to Korosko) in 1820. It was not till 1846 that a steamboat was placed on the White Nile. (W. E. G.; F. R. C.)
Story of Discovery.—Few problems in geographical research exercised for so long a period so potent an influence over the imaginations of man as that of the origin of the Nile. The ancient Egyptians, as is apparent from the records on their monuments, were acquainted with the main stream as far south as the junction of the White and Blue Niles. They appear also to have known the Blue Nile up to its source and the White Nile as far south as the Bahr-el-Ghazal confluence. Beyond that point the sudd probably barred progress. The knowledge acquired by the Egyptians passed to the Persians and Greeks. Herodotus (about 457 B.C.) ascended the Nile as far as the First Cataract. He was led to believe that the source of the river was far to the west—in the region of Lake Chad. Eratosthenes, superintendent of the Alexandrian library, in a map made about 250 B.C., showed, with fair accuracy, the course of the river as far as where Khartum now stands. He showed also the Atbara and Blue Nile. Eratosthenes was the first writer to hint at equatorial lakes as the sources of the river. Juba II., king of Mauretania (who died about A.D. 20), in his Libyca, quoted by Pliny, makes the Nile rise in western Mauretania, not far from the ocean, in a lake presenting characteristic Nile fauna, then pass underground for several days’ journey to a similar lake in Mauretania Caesariensis, again continue underground for twenty days’ journey to the source called Nigris on the borders of Africa and Ethiopia, and thence flow through Ethiopia as the Astapus. This remarkable story received considerable credence, and may be connected with the theory which made the Niger a branch of the Nile, (see below). Strabo (a contemporary of Juba), who ascended the river as far as Syene, states that very early investigators had connected the inundation of the Lower Nile with summer rains on the far southern mountains, and that their theory had been confirmed by the observations of travellers under the Ptolemies. About the same time Dalion, a Greek, is believed to have ascended the White Nile. Nero despatched two centurions on an expedition for the express purpose of exploring the Nile, and Seneca states that they reached a marshy impassable region, which may be easily identified with the country of the White Nile above the mouth of the Sobat. To what they referred when they reported a great mass of water falling from between two rocks is not so readily determined. During this period more accurate knowledge concerning the Nile sources was obtained from the reports of Greek traders who visited the settlements on what is now called the Zanzibar coast. A merchant named Diogenes returning (about A.D. 50) from the east coast of Africa told a Syrian geographer, Marinus of Tyre, that journeying inland for twenty-five days he reached the neighbourhood of two great lakes and a range of snow mountains whence the Nile drew its sources. Marinus published this report in his geographical works. This book is lost, but the information is incorporated in the writings of Ptolemy, who in his book and map sums up all that was known or surmised of the Nile in the middle of the 2nd century of the Christian era. Ptolemy writes that two streams issuing from two lakes[1] (one in 6° and the other in 7° S.) unite in 2° N. to make the Nile, which, in 12° N., receives the Astapus, a river flowing from Lake Coloe (on the equator). His two southern lakes, he conceived, were fed by the melting of snows on a range of mountains running east and west for upwards of 500 m.—the Mountains of the Moon, τὸ τῆς σελήνης ὄρος, Lunae Montes. It will be seen that, save for placing the sources too far to the south, Ptolemy’s statements were a near approximation to the facts. The two southern lakes may be identified with Victoria and Albert Nyanzas, and Lake Coloe with Lake Tsana. The snow-capped range of Ruwenzori occupies—at least in part—the position assigned to the Mountains of the Moon, with which chain Kilimanjaro and Kenya may also be plausibly identified. On all the subsequent history of the geography of the Nile Ptolemy’s theory had an enormous influence. Medieval maps and descriptions, both European and Arabian, reproduce the Mountains of the Moon and the equatorial lakes with a variety of probable or impossible modifications. Even Speke (see below) congratulated himself on identifying the old Ptolemian range with the high lands to the north of Tanganyika, and connected the name with that of Unyamwezi, the “country of the moon.”
In the fourteen centuries after Ptolemy virtually nothing was added to the knowledge of the geography of the Upper Nile. Arab writers of the 12th and 13th centuries make mention of the great lakes, and their reports served to revive the interest of Europe in the problem of the Nile. Idrisi made both the Nile and the Niger issue from a great lake, the Niger flowing west, the Nile north. Hence arose much confusion, the Senegal estuary being regarded by its discoverers (1445) as the mouth of a western branch of the Nile. Even until the early years of the 19th century the belief persisted in a connexion between the Nile and the Niger (see further Niger). Portuguese explorers and missionaries, who in the 15th and 16th centuries visited the east coast of Africa and Abyssinia, gained some information about the equatorial lake region and the Nile,[2] the extent of the knowledge thus acquired being shown in the map of Africa of Filippo Pigafetta, Italian traveller and historian (1533–1603) published in 1580. It was not, however, till the 17th century that the sources of the Blue Nile were visited by Europeans. In 1615 Pedro Paez, a Portuguese priest, was shown them by the Abyssinians. Ten years later another Portuguese priest, Jeronimo Lobo, also visited the sources and left a vivid description of the rise of the river and its passage through Lake Tsana. An English version of the accounts of Paez and Lobo—written by Sir Peter Wyche—was published in 1669 by order of the Royal Society, of which Sir Peter was an original Fellow. Between 1625 (the date of Lobo’s visit) and 1770, some attempts were made by French and other travellers to explore the Blue Nile, but they ended in failure. In the last-named year James Bruce (q.v.) reached Abyssinia, and in November 1772 he arrived in Egypt, having visited the source of the Blue Nile and followed it, in the main, to its confluence with the White Nile. On returning to Europe Bruce was mortified to find that whilst he was still in Egypt the French geographer D’Anville had (1772) issued a new edition of his map of Africa in which by a careful study of the writings of Paez and Lobo he had anticipated Bruce’s discoveries, D’Anville’s map is singularly accurate, if we remember the scanty information at his disposal. To Bruce, nevertheless, belongs the honour of being the first white man to trace the Blue Nile to its confluence with the White Nile. He himself, considering that the Blue Nile was the main branch of the river, claimed to be the discoverer of the long-sought caput Nili.[3]
From the time of Bruce, interest in the Nile problem grew rapidly. The Englishman W. G. Browne (q.v.) when in Darfur (1794–1796) heard that the Abiad rose far south in the Mountains of the Moon, but he makes no mention of the great lakes, and in Major Rennell’s map of 1802 there is no hint of equatorial lakes at the Abiad sources. During the French occupation of Egypt the river from the sea to Assuan was accurately surveyed, the results being embodied in Jacotin’s Atlas de l’Egypte (1807). In 1812–1814 J. L. Burckhardt, the Orientalist, went up the Nile to Korosko, travelled thence across the desert to Berber and Shendi, and crossing the Atbara made his way to the Red Sea. It was, however, due to the initiative of Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, that the White Nile was explored. In 1820–22 a military expedition under Ismail Pasha, a son of Mehemet Ali, which was joined by the French scientist Frédéric Cailliaud (who had visited Meroë in 1819) ascended the river to the
- ↑ The two lakes afterwards received the names Lake of Crocodiles and Lake of Cataracts.
- ↑ Francisco Alvarez, a priest, who was in Abyssinia 1520–1526, afterwards wrote (about 1550) an account of Abyssinia in which he refers to the Atbara as the main Nile.
- ↑ Bruce, however, acknowledged in his Travels that the Abiad (White Nile) at its confluence with the Blue Nile was the larger river. The Abiad, he writes, “preserves its stream always undiminished, because rising in latitudes where there are continual rains, it therefore suffers not the decrease the Nile does by the six months’ dry weather.”
