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CONTENTS OF YO

5. THE TRUE STORY OF THE CRUISE OF THE PORTLAND,

6. NEWS FROM GRASSLAND-A MOUNTAIN LETTER FROM JOHN ST.

JOHN, ESQ., TO HIS FRIEND IN TOWN,

7. THE BOY OF THE LIGHT-HOUSE,

8. ELEPHANT-BACK IN BURMAH,·

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PUTNAM'S MONTHLY.

A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art.

VOL. VIII-JULY, 1856.-NO. XLIII.

UNCLE TOM AT HOME.

A FEW months ago there appeared,

in the city of Berlin, a man of so very remarkable appearance, that even the witty and blasé citizens of that capital could not preserve their sneering indifference, and the question flew from mouth to mouth: Who is this stranger, all worn and weather-beaten, all beard and long hair? It was Dr. Henry Barth-the last of a memorable line of brave men that had ventured boldly, one after another, into the Great Sahara, upon the mighty rivers, and up the sides of the far-famed mountains of Africa, there to suffer, or even to die, martyrs in a cause that rewards not in crowns and in laurels. One by one, they had nobly fought their way into the heart of a land cursed with utter darkness among men, as it is blighted by the incessant glow of a tropical sun. Then had ever come a long pause of painful suspense, of ineffable awe and anguish, and, at last, from unknown waters and nameless hills, a faint, feeble voice had been heard, that sent a tender farewell to the beloved ones at home, and then was silent forever.

Africa had, in times of antiquity, already been called the enigmatical triangle," and thousands of years had been spent to explore little more than its northern coast. A Kepler and a Newton, a Laplace and a Lagrange, have taught us the place and the weight of countless stars in heaven, and yet we know not that large portion of the surVOL. VIII.-1

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face of our own mother earth. Of late, Africa has once more become the “undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns." But, undaunted and undismayed, the noble army of martyrs have marched into the land of darkness, now guided by the blazing torch of science, and now by the bright, pure light of the gospel, ready to greet, with warm, brotherly affection, that Ethiopia that shall soon stretch out her hands to God." "From thence cometh ever news," long since said the Greeks; but, alas! at what price! Every footstep on the newly-traced roads is saturated with the blood of the discoverer; every river has claimed its victim; every nation, made known to its Christian brethren, has taken the life of the first messengers of peace. And so it has ever been, from the time when the ancient world first heard of the fabulous land of the Hesperidesshut off from mankind by deserts and oceans, and guarded by gigantic monsters, grim lions and blood-thirsty cannibals-to the present century, when of thirty-five travelers who, up to 1844, had boldly entered the western coast of the ill-fated land, nine only have ever returned to their native country!

Five long years has fortunate Dr. Barth lived, amid incredible sufferings, in inner Soudan; and Providence has granted him the rare boon of escaping the fatal climate and the fierce brutality of the children of Africa; to

him only for his two companions, Richardson and Overweg, have both found an early and a lonely grave on the soil of the stranger. Traveling under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society of England, he has seen lands unknown to our maps; he has visited nations of high and refined civilization; he has discovered mountains and rivers, of which all our boasted science had, as yet, possessed no knowledge. The magnificent work, in which the rich treasures he has so painfully gathered will be diffused among the nations of the earth, is now in preparation in Germany, where the distinguished author enjoys the aid and advice of the great masters of his science of men like Ritter and Petermann. Whilst the public are impatiently waiting for this great work, former accounts of the mysterious land have been revived in Europe; and the great question that now causes our own noble ship of state to rock and rcel, as if tossed by a fierce tempest, but enhances, among ourselves, the interest we all must needs feel for the land whose children dwell among us, in sad slavery.

Why is it that we can count the hosts of heavenly stars, and call them each by their name, and yet do not know that land of our brethren? Why has great Africa, where the chosen people of the Lord so long lived in bondage, and where thousands of noble Christians, at a later period, perished in still sadder captivity, remained a mystery still, whilst two new continents have been discovered, and new empires been founded in the west and the south? Even the pathless ocean has been explored; it has been ploughed by countless ships, the lead has revealed to us the secrets of its vast depth, and the cunning hand of a Maury has traced out its paths and its high-roads. But Africa is still a mystery. Science reserves vast kingdoms yet to conquer, for coming Alexanders; and Providence seems to wait, in inscrutable wisdom, for its own time, when it will open the gates of the mystic land, and "princes shall come out of Egypt." Africa is inhospitable, even in form. Whilst Europe opens her arms wide, in all directions, and by numerous bays and bights invites the frail bark and the great ship to her inviting coast, Africa rounds herself jealously off, and remains forever a closed

and compact body. No long arm is stretched out, as in Italy, to grasp the neighboring lands; no deep gulf, like the Baltic or the Adriatic, leads up to the very heart of great countries.

The sea is a common bond," says an old proverb; but this is true only where the ocean does not separate one country from another by thousands of miles, and where men are bold, sea-faring sailors. To the south and the west, as to the east, Africa has no near neighbors; her children have never, like the bold Northmen of Europe, ventured out on the great waters. Isolated and friendless, they have, therefore, ever remained barbarians. How different, where they have been compelled to enter into the great brotherhood of nations! High on the northern coast, and up the valley of the Nile, even to distant Abyssinia, they have ever been in close intercourse with other races; there the Mediterranean and the Arabian seas were the bonds that bound them to the world. Hence the splendor of the Pharaohs, and of the kings that "knew not Joseph;" hence the power of the Prophet's chosen people, all along the coast, to the very Pillars of Hercules.

This geographical monotony strikes us, in like manner, in the interior. Europe has a number of varied and independent districts, watered each by its own fertile river, and fenced by its lofty mountain-ranges; Africa shows, as far as we know, but a vast table-land in the south, and an immense, deep-sunk desert in the north. Three times as large as the Mediterranean, the latter surpasses all other plains upon earth-for even the great valley of the Mississippi, and the fearful steppes of Siberia, can bear no comparison. Hence, Schouw compares Africa to a simple pyramid, rising with stately but graceless proportions into the burning sky, whilst Europe suggests to him the Gothic cathedral, with its countless towers and turrets. Into the Mediterranean there flows, moreover, but a single mighty river— the old, venerable Nile; and as he hides his last days in sand and slime, refusing to bear proud vessels from the great inland ocean to his silent waters above, so the early days, also, and the cradle of that wondrous patriarch of rivers, have remained a mystery, even to this day. The Niger has been known to us only for some twenty years; and here, also, a portion of its course is yet unvisited,

and has, recently, again, it is said, escaped even Dr. Barth's most active researches. Upon the streams of southern Africa, no European flag has ever yet waved. Inhospitable and inhuman, the weird land closes it gates on all sides.

Even the climate of Africa is that of a single zone, and fatal to all but the children of the soil; it knows no snow, but rain in surpassing abundance, and a heat increased by its large share of the tropics. For, of the nine hundred miles which the equator traces upon the firm land, more than one-half falls to the share of the land of burning fire," whilst our own continent has but a trifling portion, and Asia none at all. And yet, thanks to its vast continental extent, which cuts it off from all beneficial connection with the ocean, except on the coast itself, no tropical country knows such remarkable contrasts: the intolerable heat of the day is followed by severely cold nights-so that, close to the equator, upon gentle hills, the water is frequently frozen. Furious torrents of rain, as destructive as hailstorms, succeed burning droughts, and to violent tempests, a long, unbroken calm. Existence itself would hardly be possible, were it not for the isolated lakes that here and there dot the arid plain; and more of these true sources of life are fortunately found, as the dark veil that hides the heart of the mystic land is slowly lifted, here and there, by the lonely graves of humble pilgrims. Thanks to the lake Tsad, and other waters of the same kind, the lifeless wastes of the desert are found lying alongside of green prairies, covered with grateful verdure, and luxurious shrubs, over which the regal palm-tree waves its lofty crown. Between the two emerald-studded belts, however, there still rises the great sand-ocean of the earth. On its coasts, vast barren cliffs surround the death-bearing realm; the “ship of the desert," which itself came but some two thousand years ago from Asia, ventures alone across the silent land, and grateful wells, scattered in lines, in groups, and sporadically over the vast expanse, mark the few spots where life dwells on green islands, in the shade of lofty trees, and by the side of sweet waters. Thus to the north and the south the accessible coasts are separated from the interior by a vast region of desolation, and all intercourse is

fraught with danger, and paid for with heavy losses. Fearful deserts or mountains, and impassable rivers separate neighbor from neighbor. And as all upon earth is bound by one great law, and, thanks to our Maker on high, by the common ties of love and friendship, so the form of the great continent also stamps its indelible mark upon the children of the soil; the nations, the kingdoms, the very history of that whole part of the globe, are all united, by one and the same common character, into one great, slowly-rising whole, which here seems to be influenced, more than elsewhere, by the nature of the earth itself, and to breathe the very breath of the land which God has given it.

A continent unfit, with but few and scanty exceptions, for all cultivation, a surface uncovered by the gay and grateful carpet of vegetation, unsuited, in parts, even for the support of the marvelously frugal camel, can of course not sustain a large population. The interior alone, blessed with "early and latter rains," and having lakes and mighty rivers, supports some numerous and powerful nations. We comprehend them all under the common name of negroes-from niger, the Latin for black-but the work of Dr. Barth will show more than one different race, and reveal to the wondering eye a civilization unthought of and unexpected. Nevertheless, the negro yet remains the representative of Africa. An inferior race he appears in the works of the ancients; an essentially barbarous people he stands forth amidst strange assemblies, depicted on the oldest Egyptian monuments, and inferior and barbarous he has ever since remained, at home or abroad. Whilst individual instances, no doubt, show rare abilities and high powers, the race, as such, still lead a mainly animal life; endowed with great power of imitation, they still show the innate tendency to barbarism, which ever and ever reappears as soon as they are left to themselves. Far be it from us, on that account, to deny their claims upon us as men and as fellow-beings; but all history teaches us, and recent researches have but confirmed the fact, that wherever the negro has come in contact with other races, he has at once and invariably succumbed and assumed a more passive relation. The Egyptian and the Ber

ber, the Arab and the European, even the red Indian, use him as a slave. Nay, in his own native land, more than one-half of all men are slaves-the slaves of their brethren!

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The slave-trade, carried on by many a nation of European descent, ever since the fifteenth century, and, even now, far from being extinct, is a horror and a sin, for which man will yet have to make fearful amends. But, in spite of what is commonly said of the pious .but ill-advised Las Casas, Europeans neither created nor first carried on the abominable traffic. As late only as 1442, a Portuguese admiral brought the first African negroes to Europe, professedly to teach them Christianity, but, in truth, to make them slaves. Long years afterwards, when the poor Indians of this continent had toiled and died in the service of their cruel master, Sir John Hawkins brought the first cargo of three hundred Jamaica-men to Hayti, which in later days gave birth to a Toussaint L'Ouverture and his bloody revenge. But, long ages before these early transactions, in fact, as long as history speaks and traditions are known, slavery and the trade in slaves had already existed in the land of darkness. Only, when the demand for black goods" became, of a sudden, much larger on the coast, it increased in proportion. From that time onward, the kings of the interior found it no longer so profitable to murder and eat their captives as they had done heretofore; they preferred now to sell them. A striking evidence of this change in their policy is found in the simple but well authenticated fact, that since the British and American squadrons have prevented the horrible trade in a manner, murder and wholesale butchery have resumed their bloody sway in the more distant regions. Formerly all prisoners of war, even from eastern Soudan, were sent to the coast of Guinea, and there sold for exportation to Brazil or to Cuba. Since both these lands have found a cheaper ware, and a more "moral" trade in Chinese coolies, the captives of Bornu. Cashena, and Cano are no longer seen on the western coasts. Still, there is no more peace, nor more mercy among the wild tribes of the interior; war rages there, now as before, in barbarous fury. What, then, is the fate of the captive of our day? A German traveler, Vogel, now

in Africa, says that, in 1853 he joined an expedition undertaken by the Sheik of Cuca, in the kingdom of Bornu, against the people of Musgo. The army consisted of 20,000 horsemen and 15,000 drivers of camels and horned cattle. The Musgoes, not able to resist such numbers, fled with their flocks to the opposite side of Lake Tubori, and sought refuge in swamps and morasses. But the horsemen of the German's ally found their way among them, and, when the army returned, they brought with them several thousand captives. They were all women and children! The men had been slain, and a few only were dragged into the camp, there to be murdered in the most brutal and shocking manner. Burning and plundering all in their way, the army then moved to the river Sharee, and here, in a few hours, made 2,500 more captives. With dull, hacked knives, they cut off one knee and one elbow of each prisoner, and then left their ill-fated victims to bleed slowly to death on the field of battle. Others remained lying naked in the water; the nights were bitter cold, and of 4,000 prisoners, made during the whole expedition, not quite 500 reached the home of their new masters!

Thus we learn that human life is, in our day, as much less regarded in Africa as it is less valuable now than in former days, when it could be sold to the highest bidder, in the ever open markets of Guinea. It lacks there that protection of selfish interest which induces even the unfeeling owner to "husband his property," if he does not respect his fellow-being. Dr. Barth also found former slaves, who had returned, from Brazil especially, to the home of their childhood: they shuddered at the sights of barbarism and bloodshed that met their eye everywhere, and actually sighed for the land of their captivity.

If we follow these intrepid travelers into the heart of the negro realms, and visit, with them, the kingdoms of Ashantee, Dahomy, and Yarriba, or the mysterious land called Benin, we shall no longer wonder that even the ill-treated slave should forget his sufferings, and feel horror at the state of his native country. The most minute and the most careful researches have, as yet, failed to discover a history or any knowledge of ancient times among the negro races. They have invented

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