The Prospective Civilization of Africa [pp. 171-191]

THE PROSPECTIVE CIVILIZATION OF AFRICA.
places can be named which are 500 miles from the sea. In
Africa nearly half the contirent is beyond this distance, and
much of the interior is IOOO miles removed from the nearest
point of the coast-line.
Defect in the length of the sea-board is elsewhere, in a great
measure, compensated by the existence of large navigable rivers
flowing from the regions which are most remote from the sea.
In Asia, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, Ganges, and
Brahmaputra, the Yang-tse-kiang, Hoang-Ho, and Amoor penetrate deeply into the continent, and furnish lines of communication with the interior which are of almost equal value for
civilizing purposes with such deep gulfs-or, in geographic
phrase, inland seas-as the Baltic and the Mediterranean. In
South America, the Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata; in North
America, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the combined
Mississippi and Missouri, play the same part, and lay open the
continent to commercial and scientific enterprise to a distance,
sometimes, of 4000 miles from the ocean. Navigation extends
by means of the Orinoco almost to the base of the Andes;
the Amazon, with its tributaries, presents nearly i0o,ooo0 miles
of navigable waters; vessels of 300 tons burthen can ascend the
La Plata for nearly I300 miles; steamers mount the Mississippi
to a distance not much short of 3000, and the Missouri to a
distance of 4000 miles. The interiors of these continents, altho
remote from the sea, are thus easily accessible, and the path into
their inmost recesses lies as open as the coast-line to the trader,
geographer, or naturalist.
But in Africa the case is different. Africa has indeed at
least four great rivers-the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the
Zambesi-but these streams cannot be used as continuous waterways. The Nile, issuing from the Victoria Nyanza in a vast
stream at an elevation of nearly 4000 feet above the level of
the sea, almost immediately descends, at the Ripon Falls, in a
rush like that of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, and again, before
reaching the Albert Nyanza, plunges, at the Murchison Falls, in
a single perpendicular leap of I20 feet into a dark and boiling
basin., Access by the Nile to the Victoria Nyanza is thus absolutely impossible, and the success of geographical explorers has
been the death-blow of commercial hopes. Even the Albert
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