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not only because of his genuine unselfishness and cheerfulness (a contrast to most of the others of the party), but also, no doubt, because (the climate having little effect on his health) he was able to keep pace with the driving energy of Glover, which no attacks of malaria, however severe, could quell. On these inland expeditions he found his survey work often hampered by ignorance and jealousy. The witch doctors sought to persuade the chiefs that "if I put all their country down upon paper and Mr. Barter (the botanist) took pieces of all their trees and herbs home, we should make charms of these things to use against them and then return and take their country from them.”

In this way, each of the five professional members of the expedition specializing in his particular work, they went forward. Some of the sailors on board had died from the effects of the climate, and the captain and mate of the vessel were far from satisfactory. They had now been 90 days on the river, had left the confluence with the Benue far behind and had passed Egga and Rabba, the two highest points reached by previous expeditions. At this time Glover was seriously ill, but kept himself going by sheer determination. Leaving Jebba they approached the famous Ju-Ju Rock of Ketsa. Here the river ran strongly, and in order to make sure of the strength of the current and the safety of the channel, Glover went ahead in a gig and satisfied himself that its passage was practicable. The Dayspring therefore steamed forward, but the 30-horse-power engines failed at the critical moment, possibly because the steam pressure from woodfired engines was insufficient. The bows swung round and the vessel crashed on the rock. She filled and sank, only her masts and funnel showing above water. The expedition as such had come to an end. Some of the crew went downstream to meet the relief ship that was due in some months' time, the others, with the five passengers, stayed to recuperate; but of the five, Glover and Barter determined to proceed up-stream to the next town of Boussa, ninety miles away, to chart the river. They obtained a native canoe and crew and set forward on what must have been to Glover the most interesting part of their journey.

To appreciate the route followed by Glover and the type of people whom he met some knowledge of the geography and history of Nigeria is essential. Southern Nigeria, the Burma of this province, a land of forest, swamp and square huts, is pagan;

its religion largely fetishism, its inhabitants primitive; yet it was they who in their trackless forests held up the Moslem advance from Central Africa and prevented it from reaching the sea. The southern province stops short of the junction of the rivers. As the forest dies away into the more open bush-land, mountain, desert or plateau of Northern Nigeria, and the rounded huts replace the square ones, the change to Moslem begins. The proselytising religion of Islam had by the middle of the nineteenth century fixed itself securely here, though much of the conversion was, as it still is, superficial. It was too intimately bound up with tribal politics to be real. The kingdom through which the expedition had been passing before the disaster to the Dayspring was Nupe. Fifty years before, Othman Fodio, the Fulani conqueror of the Hausas, had sent one of his henchmen to Nupe, and by intrigue and playing-off one tribe against another established the Fulani in power, though not in peace. For sons, by wives of either race, kept watchful eyes on one another from their minor fiefs. The knowledge which the expedition possessed of the history and immediate political outlook of Nupe was perforce limited, otherwise they would have realised that in their progress they were encountering the reflex of local politics, each chief trying to impress on them that he was all-powerful and that it was to him they were to look for help and, incidentally, to dispense their gifts. No wonder that Glover and Barter, as they pushed still further to the north-west in their canoe, found everything made smooth. Glover, in fact, complains of the lack of adventure.

But they were nearing another country which acknowledged neither the overlordship of Nupe, nor that of the Fulani themselves from their far-flung kingdoms, then embracing what are now the northerly districts of Nigeria and the eastern end of the great French Sudanese territories. Their entry into the pagan country of Borgu coincided with their leaving the river, for the time of the year was such that it was impossible to take the canoe through the rapids. It was only Glover's sea-craft that had enabled them to get thus far in safety. They had reached a point to which no European working from the river mouth had yet attained.

At this stage of the journey, Mr. Hastings allows himself to digress for a brief space from the sequence of Glover's narrative,

in order to give his personal impressions of the rapture of the unknown-the constant wish to see what is beyond, over the hill, beyond the forest, past the shimmering heat-haze, the thrill that the ancient mariner felt when he recounted how "We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea." He describes an incident that occurred to himself when following elephant tracks on the Benue River, through "the real bush, probably never trodden by human foot since the world began-for it belonged to the unoccupied spaces of the earth. Perhaps a hunter or two had crossed it in his wanderings during the century or so that had seen the first coming of inhabitants." A strange exultation came over him the idea of one man against nature and the intangible secrets of the country. As he sat resting in the half-dried bed of a stream, there came a sound out of nowhere a poisoned arrow fell clattering among the rocks.

When they left the river, Glover and his comrade rode on through the country of Borgu. They stopped in villages, but were continuously delayed by the natives on one pretext or another-now it was that horses could not be found, now that a message must be awaited from the king of the land. It was only when, despite the weakness occasioned by more frequent malaria, Glover insisted on going forward, that ways and means were produced. At last they got to the town of Wawa, but were too weak to push on further, even had they been allowed. Glover's comment on the inhabitants is precise: "I found them captious, liars, drunkards and thieves." Coming from a man of great forbearance and calm judgment, this is a strong indictment, but it corresponds accurately with the description of them given by Clapperton many years before. Mohammedanism had penetrated here it had superficially touched the chiefs, and the result was ever as Mr. Hastings finds it still to-day—“ drunk at least three days a week, stole funds-he called it borrowing— from the local treasury and told more lies in an hour than anyone I ever met." It was a different tale when Glover arrived at the town of Boussa itself, the capital of the country. Here the king received him royally. He was wearing a silver medal given to his ancestor by Mungo Park, for it was but a few miles below the town that the great explorer had met his death in the Bubari rapids.

Glover had not forgotten that here he was treading on ground

that to all African explorers must be sacred. Tradition had it that the wreckage of Park's canoe was still preserved at Boussa, but he could find no trace. Something, however, he did discover when he returned a second time to bid the king farewell. In a curiously haphazard way he obtained from a native a book of logarithms that belonged to Park, and in it a few slips of paper with jottings by the dead explorer. Both may be seen to-day in the Museum of the Royal Geographical Society.

The diary closes just at this point; but the history of the expedition is rounded off by Mr. Hastings. Returning for the second time to the camp of Jebba, Glover found the remainder of the party still waiting for the relief ship that never came. None had sufficient strength or will-power to bestir himself to make his way back to civilization. Glover's own indomitable pluck and character now came to the fore: he struck, single-handed, due south on the line that the railway now follows in order that he might get some kind of help from Lagos. On the way he nearly died of dysentery, and when he arrived at the sea-port found it impossible to obtain provisions. He had therefore to go to Sierra Leone by sea; he returned with stores and a body of Hausas who were seeking to get back to their native Kano. From Lagos he had practically to fight his way back to Jebba, turning his Hausa following into a useful guerilla force, the nucleus of what was one day to become a native constabulary. The supplies arrived just in time, and the whole party returned on the relief ship to Fernando Po.

After a few months' rest, Glover and the three scientists who remained alive went back to Rabba on the Niger, but though Glover himself did a good deal of local exploration they found it impossible to get further north. One of the party died, and by the end of the year 1859, two and a-half years after they had left England, the remainder returned home. To Glover himself a splendid future remained-a few more years in the navy, then twice Governor of Lagos, the creator of the Hausa force in the Ashanti War, Governor of the Bahamas and of Newfoundland.

Was it the saving grace of humour that carried him through so much? Sometimes it is perhaps unconscious, as in his description of a king coming to meet him direct from the fields bearing as a gift a large bundle of onions! But he can see the grotesque in the midst of real danger. On his second visit to

Boussa, when crossing a tributary of the Niger at night, he is attacked by villagers. At last he persuades them that he is a white man and they send an envoy across. The envoy stands in the water below the bank, his face just topping the stream. From the bank above the stout-hearted Glover hangs head downwards, so that in the moonlight the native may scan his face, "which certainly was not a white one." While this ludicrous performance proceeds, Glover sees on the opposite bank the glint of spears and the arrows ready to be loosed, but coolness and good humour won the day.

Those of us who have lunched or supped too near jazz bands can appreciate that Christmas morning scene at Boussa, when the king gave a musical party in his guest's honour. "The band struck up. It consisted of six large drums, three smaller, and a brass horn at least six feet long, a fiddle with one string, made of horsehair, and two boys with calabashes filled with peas. As this band was within five yards of the king, I was all but stunned by the noise."

Over another king, however, whose reception had not been as kindly as that of the monarch of Boussa, Glover easily scored. Glover brought him a present of a clay pipe, for which the king had asked. "He at once began to smoke it, and I left him very sick indeed from its effects." The giving of presents was certainly an inordinate tax, but Glover had a delicate way of effectively ensuring that the demand was not repeated: “He asked for rum, but not having any, I burned his throat with some spirit of lavender, which happened to be in my medicine chest and answered the purpose equally well." Glover adds, inconsequently, in the next breath: "I read Divine Service and then had visitors all day."

His is, indeed, a pleasant journal. And though it does not touch the poignant depths of Mungo Park's "Travels," was that because it was intended to be read only by eyes that he did not wish to mar with tears?

G. C. DUGGAN

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