GEOGRAPHICAL CONQUESTS. The 18th century, the third after the discovery of America drew to its close with darkness still shrouding half the globe from the eye of civilized man. A Strabo or a Ptolemy, if questioned in 1800 as to how much of the earth's surface he could describe with accuracy, would have had to confess that he was quite familiar with only one of the grand divisions, and that one embracing only a tithe of the land of our planet. He might perhaps have claimed that he could make a tolerable map of South America,, whose interior had been partly opened up by the zeal of the Jesuit mis sionaries. It would, however, have been full of great voids representing regions unknown to him. He would have been able also to construct a map of Asia, approximately reproducing its main features, but his outlines would have been merely the framework of blurred and empty pictures. The Himalayas had not been measured—the Andes figuring as the highest mountains on the globe. There was a bound less area within the Chinese Empire untrodden by Europeans. In Asiatic Turkey, Persia and in Afghanistan, in Turkestan and the Pamir, there were whole regions removed from the ken of cartographers. Scant information ex isted regarding Japan, Farther India, and the Malay Archipelago; next to nothing was known about Korea, and the interior of Arabia was almost a blank. Australia was still floating as a cloud on the horizon. Most of the lands north of America had not yet been discovered, and the Antarctic realm had barely been touched.
The accurate knowledge of Africa was lim ited in the main to a narrow strip along the coast. As for the interior, comprising about one-fifth of the earth's land surface, geograph ical learning had hardly begun to outgrow its medizval estate. Ca phers had been grop ing their way amid the confused reports of traders, slave dealers, and missionaries. The feature of Equatorial Africa regarding which the most correct conjecture had obtained for centuries, was the source of the Nile, which river, in accordance with the teachings of Ptolemy and the old Arab geographers, was represented on the maps as issuing from some lakes in the heart of the continent, fed by the Mountains of the Moon. Geographers knew of a great river that flowed by Timbuktu, the Queen of the Desert, and which they called the Niger, a name handed down from the time of the ancients. It had long been supposed that this stream had a western course and that the Senegal and Gambia formed its delta. A coun
ter theory was that it flowed east to a large lake, a view based in part on vague reports about Lake Tchad. Still another theory re garded the Niger as one of the great arms of the Nile. The Kongo was known only in the last portion of its interminable course, though as far back as the 17th century the opinion had been entertained that it issued from the same quarter of the continent as the Nile. The Sahara remained untraveled by Europeans, ex cept near its margin, and the great lakes of Africa were known only through tradition or vague report.
In North America, the region between the Mississippi and the Pacific and north of New Mexico still belonged in gieat part to the realm of fancy. British America remained in great part unexplored, and the coast' of Alaska had barely been grazed. There were whole regions, like the Adirondack wilderness, included within the bounds of the original States of the Ameri can Union, which were still sealed to geogra phers.
Nearly 300 years after the tracing of the coast line of Africa was completed by the voy ages of the systematic explora tion of the interior may be said to have com menced in 1788 with the foundation in London of the African Association, an event which inaugurated a new era in the history of geo graphical discovery. This society had the good fortune to command almost at the start the services of the intrepid Scotchman, Mungo Park. Before this, it is true, the pioneer of modern African exploration, Sir James Bruce, had made his memorable journey along the Blue Nile, and the ornithologist, Le Valiant, had traveled in the hunting grounds of South Africa. Just before we hear of Mungo Park, the record of discovery also tells of a narrow wedge driven toward the heart of the continent in the journey of Browne from Assuan to Darfur. The African Association assumed for one of its first tasks the unraveling of the mys tery of the Niger. The journeys of Mungo Park (who 'perished in the stream in' 1806), of Clapperton and Denham, and of Lander, covering together the period from 1795 to 1830, revealed the course of the river. The French, meanwhile, explored the Senegal and Gambia. At this time English explorers began to push from the Guinea coast into the warlike king doms of Ashanti and Dahomey. In 1826 the ill-fated Laing, and in 1828 CailliE, succeeded in reaching Timbuktu, that mysterious seat of Islamism which had for centuries fascinated geographers. (See FIGS. 1 and 2).