Here perhaps may be mentioned a curious attempt at Nile exploration which in an indirect way was connected with French enterprise at this period. The failure of M. du Roule to reach Abyssinia made a great impression on the mind of a Frenchman named Joseph le Roux, Count of Desneval. This nobleman had been in the Danish navy for many years, leaving that service in 1739 with the rank of Rear Admiral. All this time he had been giving his attention with laborious stupidity to the Nile problem, and was convinced that he “had found the proper key to enter these regions,” by studying in Denmark the reports of unsuccessful travellers. Accordingly, in 1739, he started with his wife for Cairo, accompanied by Lieutenant Norden, a Dane. None of the party knew a word of Arabic. The expedition first got into trouble at Cairo through the haughty manners of the Countess, who, becoming involved in a street row, slashed at the people right and left with a pair of scissors. Count Desneval penetrated some distance into Nubia, and his lieutenant, Norden, went as far (possibly) as Berber, which he mentions under its older name of Ibrim. But the Count was obliged to turn back, and Norden was imprisoned by the Turkish Governor, and barely escaped to Egypt with his life. The Count then resolved on an extraordinary expedition. He decided to obtain a commission from Spain and start with a fleet of ships to circumnavigate Africa, enter the Red Sea, and so proceed to Abyssinia. But becoming involved in the war which was then raging between Spain and England, his ship was captured by the British, and he was sent as a prisoner of war to Lisbon, where his projects of Nile exploration came to an end. The Dutch in the seventeenth century, and some of the Rhenish geographers of western Germany, had published remarkable maps of Africa, but with the exception of the west and south, these maps, in so far as the Nile basin was concerned, were based on the information presented to the world by the Portuguese Jesuits Alvarez, Paez, and Lobo, and on the interesting information concerning the geography of Abyssinia collected by the Saxon philologist Ludolf when communing in Italy with the Abyssinian envoys. These maps, as already related, did injustice to the Portuguese by enormously exaggerating the area of Abyssinia. In fact, Abyssinian geography was extended by these Dutch interpreters of Portuguese travel notes far into the south and west of Africa, so that Abyssinian place names such as Gojam, Kaffa, Enarea, and the lakes and rivers of Abyssinia were pushed down to the vicinity of the Zambezi, and right across the Congo basin. These maps, however, continued to maintain European interest in African exploration, while the French consuls in Egypt and early British travellers in that country began to transmit information (derived for the most part from Copts and Circassians) regarding the main course of the Nile.