it themselves-brothers in arms. One fell, another came forward to lift the torch from the dying hands, and so they reached the end of the long race. Richard Lander returned with his brother John and struck the Upper Niger once more. It was theirs to turn the last bend: the great semi-circle of the Niger was rounded, and they realized that it was flowing south to the sea. Before they reached the ocean they were held to ransom by the natives, but they had seen the branches of the river parting to cut their way through the delta at the Niger's mouth. Richard Lander was not content. He returned a few years later, only to die of wounds received in a fight with natives. But now the flank had been turned. Men sought to penetrate the river from its mouth.

There came steam vessels to survey it and their crews were swept to death as though by a mower's scythe-so terrible was the pestilence of this river climate. The words of the apostle are almost literally applicable to those pioneers, to Mungo Park especially: "Others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings; yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins— being destitute, afflicted, tormented-they wandered in deserts and in mountains and in dens and caves of the earth." Park, as he was the first, so was he the greatest. His first journey is an epic of single-handed courage; his second a tragedy dominated by one splendid and pathetic figure a man of tremendous optimism and will-power whom some subtle influence drew back a second time to Africa, an influence greater than the tender affection which he had for the wife and children whom he left behind in his quiet Scottish home.

The ruthless country stayed not its hand when he died: his only son, a midshipman in the navy, obtained permission some years later to try to clear up his father's fate. He set out from Gambia, but he, too, died of disease without achieving his purpose.

Between the discoveries of the Landers and the voyage of the Dayspring—a period of over twenty years—a considerable opening up of the country had taken place, partly through the assistance given to explorers by the African Society—a group of savants and geographers-partly by trade embassies, fostered by the British Government. The portion of the Niger lying between the Benue and the sea became now fairly well-known, for the VOL. 246. NO. 501.

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course of the river having been ascertained, traders and explorers moved up the delta and reached the main stream 70 miles inland. In the Central Sudan the great German explorer Barth, a man of wide culture and observation, an ethnologist, and a linguist, had been at work about the year 1850, not merely discovering new country but probing the history and origins of the many tribes that inhabited the tracts of country that lie about the two great rivers. A great man, indeed, but without the simplicity of the earlier English explorers. As Lieutenant Glover, the relater of the voyage of the Dayspring writes in his journal: "I have been reading Denham's Travels in Africa,' and I like his account fifty times better than Barth's. He does not expect you to feel at every line what a wonderful traveller and man he is."

The expedition of the Dayspring set sail in 1857. It was financed by the government, and its object was primarily to survey the Niger and its surrounding country, and secondarily to open up trade. The vessel was specially constructed by Lairds, of Liverpool, and her engines were the first which the firm ever built. She was screw-driven, but in size and draft corresponded closely to a Thames river paddle-steamer. It was no slight undertaking to get a vessel drawing only 5ft. out to the West Coast. The five passengers whom she carried were the vital part of the expedition. Dr. Baikie, a naturalist, was in general charge of the whole undertaking, but Lieutenant John Glover, seconded from the navy to look after the surveying duties, turned out to be the real leader.

The history of this expedition has been hidden for forty years, save for a few dry scraps of official records and a scanty narrative by Mr. Crowther, a native missionary who accompanied the party, and whose knowledge, derived from his experiences on the ill-fated naval expedition under Captain Trotter fifteen years before, was found invaluable. It is only now that the publication of the private journal of the young naval officer, Lieutenant Glover, who was later to become a great colonial administrator, has thrown light on what was obscure. His picture is incomplete because it was not intended to be a consecutive narrative, only a casual diary written for the eyes of one who was a very close friend. It reveals to us above all-though unintentionally—the writer himself, a man direct and straightforward in his outlook

on life, of whole-hearted devotion to duty, without thought for himself, prone to see the best in all men, whether white or black, until taught a lesson in the school of experience, yet even then neither cynical nor callous. He could make allowances for the frailty of human nature, as exemplified in the bickerings and insubordination of the white man, which too often dogged the expedition, and for the cunning and indolence of the savage who could not rise above his surroundings. He sifted the dross and everywhere could find some grains of gold.

He was

Young Glover was in fact a Christian gentleman. That phrase has perhaps become obsolete, though not the type. imbued with an intensity of religious feeling, a feeling which was common to many other African explorers. He had the conviction that he was on a crusade, not of the sword, but of the spirit. Cooped up in the sweltering cabin on board while the tropical rain made everything reek with moisture, racked by fever on the river-bank, alone in native encampments, he read the Book of Common Prayer, either aloud to others or for his own comfort. It is curious to recollect that when Mungo Park was lying seriously ill in a native hut, the owner of the hut brought him a copy of the same book which, in some mysterious way, had come into his hands. Glover, in his journal, expresses the hope that some day at the confluence of the Niger and the Benue it may be given to him to help with his own hands in the building of the first church in these regions. Visions open before him. When the expedition had pushed northward several hundred miles beyond the river junction he climbed alone one evening a peak of the Rennell Mountains. There, as the sun set, he looked "over at least 400 square miles":

The river winding its way brought some sad thoughts to my mind. From all its various sources till its entrance into the Sea, Oppression, Bloodshed, Wrong and Darkness blot with foul spots its splendid stream. A fatality seems to hang over it. May it please God that we shall aid in its removal, and soon commerce as the means to a greater end may cover its waters with other burdens than slaves and the results of war and depredation.

The magnetism of this journal comes, not from the description of the dangers through which its author passed, but from the light which it throws upon his character. This man of action is not ashamed to set down those romantic fancies that show how young

he still was in heart. He is ever sending his thoughts home to her for whom the journal was written. "In spirit I kneel with you in the Cathedral." "I have no time to write to anyone, so make my peace with all. The little fern-leaf I enclose was gathered under the shade of the tree under which I lunched when I landed to make one of my surveying stations." It brought to him the picture of some home-scene where a stream comes through autumn woodland and the drip of spring-water falls softly upon the moss and the fern-roots.

his

Mungo Park felt the same affection for the tiny things of nature. Irresistibly one recalls the passage in his "Travels," when he lay hungry and thirsty, well-nigh naked and half dead in the wilderness, and then hope suddenly swept over him eye had mechanically caught the extraordinary beauty of a small moss, the whole plant not larger than the top of one of his fingers, and the thought came to him that "the Being who planted, watered and brought to perfection in this obscure part of the world a thing which appears of so small importance "could not look with unconcern upon himself.

Glover had an artist's perception of colour and motion. If the water-colour sketches that he has left behind were not there to prove it, his word paintings recall the fact. "This morning we sailed through a whole fleet of the beautiful nautilus, with their delicate sails of silver silk dancing merrily over the tiny waves. I have never seen anything like it before. Well might the imaginations of our first voyagers delight to fancy that they bore the souls of drowned mariners." His description of the coming of a tornado at sea is superb :

The angry clouds seem tearing themselves to pieces just above your masthead. On it comes with lightning and a rushing mighty sound. Not a breath of air, but a damp heat that is suffocating you. Then comes stealing on its first cold breath, and in an instant as if heaven and earth were coming together it is upon you. The sea is as smooth as a lake, for the deluge of rain and the pressure of the whirlwind will not suffer it to rise, but the little ripples curl up as if they would kiss your feet. In five minutes it has passed away and you can scarcely conceive the coolness of the atmosphere and the clearness of the sky above.

Not so picturesque, but desperately true, is his description of the terrible Niger delta-that impenetrable screen which for centuries cloaked the outlet of the river, " displaying the richest

and, as I should think, the most stinking, mud the earth can produce." Mr. Hastings in his commentary amplifies this description. The delta, like all the other coastal creeks, embraces a land of horrid beauty, a snake-like vivid green, where ever there is the eternal drip of rain-fall and hothouse moisture. It is inhabited by races low down in the scale of humanity, whose religion is demonology. Here the palm-oil traders lived alongside the great wooden hulks where was stored the oil that the trading ships came to load for European markets: the deadly fever and the deadlier moral laxity of the clime ransacked their bodies and souls. "They were of their time and class, out in a country where no writ ran, and for my part I think no worse of them-rather better-than of the men who to-day in healthy England brutally murder some old woman for her purse or stand snivelling with matches in the gutter of the Strand."

More pleasant than his description of the delta is Glover's vignette of an evening in a native camp after a hard day's ride through rain and swamp; it brings us to the heart of the world: A message of a thousand welcomes came from the king, and men bearing smoking dishes. These our attendants discussed, we preferring chocolate and biscuits. Then a nice appropriate prayer from good Mr. Crowther, after which we sat up talking over our pleasant logs till late, I smoking and he on his back with his feet high above his head, resting against one of the posts of the hut. I went on talking till, receiving no answer, I found that my companion was fast asleep, still heels up and head down. It was so pleasant and so strange, the night noises of the camp, occasional voices of women and the cry of children, the sound of our horses eating as they stood tethered outside the hut and an occasional neigh made music in my ear: and I, a sailor, bearded and turban'd, a guest in the camp of King Othman Zarki.

The story of the Dayspring is soon told. The vessel moved up the river slowly, anchoring here and there for days at a time, as the expedition reached some village and sought to gain the confidence of the natives. Glover spent all day in the bows of the ship marking continuously off on his surveying board the various windings of the stream and noting the leading marks. Boat work, too, was essential in order to make soundings. Nor did he confine himself to purely river work. He made expeditions inland, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or more companions -the black missionary, Crowther, afterwards to become Bishop of Nigeria, appears to have been his most congenial comrade,