Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 1 (of 2)Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 1 (of 2)
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, East -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Tanzania -- Zanzibar; Zanzibar -- Description and travel
The ‘Father of History’ evidently held to the theory that the modern
Bahr el Ghazal (explored of late by Mr Petherich and by the
unfortunate Tinné family) was the head reservoir of the White Nile.
Nor is it impossible that in long-past ages the lakes or waters in
question were fed by a watershed whose eastern declivities still
discharge themselves into the higher basin.
Footnote 13:
In 1859 I had written (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxix.
272) ‘The Nyanza, as regards name, position, and even existence, has
hitherto been unknown to European geographers; but descriptions of
this “sea” by native travellers have been unconsciously transferred by
our writers to the Tanganyika of Ujiji, and even to the Nyassa of
Kilwa.’ Mr Hogg proposes to show that such was not the case. But the
map by John Senex (1711) throws into one three or at least two waters.
Mercator (Kauffman) lays the ‘Garava’ lakelet almost parallel with the
Zaflan (Zambeze) or Kilwa Lake. Walker (1811) and Lizars (1815) fit in
the Tanganyika correctly, whilst the Nyassa is wholly incorrect.
Of the five maps one only, that of John Senex, deserves consideration.
‘This great lake placed here by report of the negroes,’ alludes, I
believe, to legends of the Bahari-ngo (the ‘great sea,’ vulgarly,
Baringo), of which many East African travellers have heard. One Rumu
wa Kikandi, a native of Uemba, described the water to Dr Krapf as
lying five days’ journey from Mount Kenia: in the Introduction to his
last travels (p. xlviii.), however, the enterprising missionary
identifies it with the so-called Nyanza or Ukerewe Lake. I was told of
it by the Wakamba at Mombasah in 1857. The Père Léon d’Avanchers
(Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, vol. xvii. 164) also collected,
when travelling on the East African coast, in August, 1858,
information concerning Baharingo, as he writes it. Senex finally
disconnects it with the Nile, and indeed gives it no drainage at all.
I cannot but think that Mr Hogg’s learning and research have
considerably strengthened my position, and that the so-called Nyanza
Lake was, curious to say, the least known, and at the same time the
nearest, to European geographers.
Footnote 14:
This ‘restrictive treaty’ was published in No. 24 of the Bombay
Selection (1856), under the head of ‘Persian Gulf.’
Footnote 15:
We must not, however, forget that in ‘all-enlightened England’
Smollett could complain of the ‘people at the other end of the island
knowing as little of Scotland as of Japan.’
Footnote 16:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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