of animals, and even of men. This was followed by the pestilence of 1618,[1] but through this arose any quantity of wars and upheavals of political authority among the tawny Moors in the early days of European intercourse with the West African Coast. They assumed a more acute, religious form in our own century, or to be more accurate just at the end of the eighteenth, when Shazkh Utham Danfodio arose among the Fulahs as a religious reformer, and a warrior missionary. He was a great man at both, but as a disturber of traffic still greater, a thing that cannot be urged to so great an extent against the other great Muslam missionary Umaru l'Haji. Still his gathering together an army of 20,000 men in 1854-55, and going about with them on a series of proselytizing expeditions against any tribe in the Upper Niger and Senegal region he found to be in an unconverted state, was little better than a nuisance to the French authorities at that time. Danfodio's affairs have fallen into the hands of England to arrange, and very efficiently her great representative in West Africa, the Royal Niger Company, has arranged them. But for our Danfodio and his consequences, France has had twenty, and she has dealt with them both gallantly and patiently. But there will always be, as far as one can see, trouble for France with her tawny Moors, now that the sources of their support are cut off from them by many of the districts they once drew their trade from—the sea-board districts of the Benin Bight, like Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos, in the English Niger—being in the hands of a nation whose commercial instincts enable it to see the benefits of lower tariffs than France affects. Even were our tariffs to
- ↑ For an interesting account of Timbuctoo and its history, see Timbuctoo the Mysterious, by M. Felix Dubois. 1897.
