Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, West -- Description and travel; Congo River -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Africa, West
Here the Gir, Ger, Gar, or Geir is clearly laid down as a
Mediterranean stream, whilst "Niger" gave rise to the confusion
of the Senegal with the true Niger. The name has greatly
exercised commentators' ingenuity. D'Anville believes the Niger
and the Gir to end in the same quarter of Africa, and the latter
to be entirely unknown. Gosselin, agreeing with Pliny, whose Ger
is the Nigir of the Greeks, places them south of the Atlas. Mr.
Leake (loc. cit.) holds all conjecture useless. Not so the Rev.
M. Tristram, whose geography is of the ornithological or bird's-
eye order. In "The Great Sahara" (pp. 362-4, Appendix I.), he
asks, "May not the name Giris or Gir be connected with Djidi?" i.
e. the Wadi Mzi, a mean sink in El Areg, south of Algeria.
Gräberg ("Morocco") had already identified it with the Ghir,
which flows through Sagelmessa; Burckhardt with the Jir, "a large
stream coming from about north latitude 10°, and flowing north-
west through the Wadaí, west of the borders of Dar-Fur." No
wonder that some geographers are disposed to believe Gir, Giris,
Ger, and Geir to be "a general native name for a river, like Bá"
(Bahr), "Bi" (in many Central African tongues a river,
Schweinfurth, ii. 241), "Quorra (Kwara), Gulbi and Gambaru (the
Yeou), Shadda, and Enzaddi."
It is still interesting to consider the circumstances which gave
rise to Captain Tuckey's disastrous expedition. As any map of
Africa during the early quarter of the present century, Bowdich
or Dupuis for instance, may prove, the course of the Niger was
laid down, now according to the ancients, then after Arab
information. The Dark Continent, of which D'Anville justly said
that writers abused, "pour ainsi dire, de la vaste carrière que
l'intérieur y laissait prendre" ("Mém. de l'Acad. des
Inscriptions," xxvi. 61), had not been subjected to scientific
analysis; this was reserved for the Presidential Address to the
Royal Geographical Society by the late Sir R. I. Murchison, 1852.
Geographers did not see how to pass the Niger through the" Kong
Mountains, which, uniting with the Jebel Komri, are supposed to
run in one unbroken chain across the continent;" and these Lunar
Mountains of the Moslems, which were "stretched like a chaplet of
beads from east to west," undoubtedly express, as M. du Chaillu
contends, a real feature, the double versant, probably a mere
wave of ground between the great hydrographic basins of the Niger
and the Congo, of North Africa and of Central Africa. Men still
wasted their vigour upon the Nigritis Palus, the Chelonídes
waters, the Mount Caphas, and the lakes of Wangara, variously
written Vancara and Vongara, not to mention other ways. Maps
place "Wangara"to the north-west of Dahome, where the natives
utterly ignore the name. Dupuis ("Ashantee," 1824) suggests that,
like "Takrúr," it is an obsolete Moslem term for the 660 miles of
maritime region between Cape Lahu and the Rio Formoso or the Old
Calabar River. This would include the three despotisms, Ashanti,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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