young captive gorillas. Utterly untamable, | killing them with a rude but effective harpoon, which is darted from a long and very flat-bottomed boat, which skims over the turbid surface raising scarce a ripple. Crocodile shooting by moonlight-which is the best time-is a novel and exciting sport, which he here enjoyed for the first time, and which we find no note of in former African travelers. ferocious, and not to be touched either by kindness or severity, these treacherous little beasts wore out their lives by vain struggles for liberty and savage attempts at revenge upon their captors. There is a monstrous fascination about his accounts of this animal which is scarcely equaled by the most horrid of Edgar Poe's nightmare-breeding romances. Our remaining space suffices only to give a running summary of Mr. Du Chaillu's journeys and their results. His longest and most important explorations were made by the favor of a powerful king, Quengeza by name, whose shrewd mind appreciated the benefit he was likely to derive from the friendship of a white man. At Goombi, Quengeza's capital, the traveler was received with great honor, and, with the exception of one unfortunate execution for witchcraft, when two of his own friends were murdered in cold blood, he enjoyed here a great influence over the people; many of whom begged him to send them white men to teach them. The ougangas, or medicine-men, however, hated him, because he spoke with disrespect of their superstitions, and tried to induce the king to abolish the cruel poison-ordeal to which persons accused of sorcery are obliged to submit, and by which thousands lose their lives every year through this region. Above Goombi, the Rembo, which was originally the Fernand Vaz, takes the name of Ovenga-Rembo meaning, in fact, only river. Here our traveler came upon a region somewhat healthier, with a soil of considerable fertility, though, in the utter ignorance of the negroes, they do not cultivate the ground with sufficient regularity to draw from it even subsistence for themselves: a more idle, hand-to-mouth living set of people it would be difficult to imagine. They cut small quantities of the abundant ebony, kill a few elephants, and cut sometimes a little barwood, and with these manage to obtain scant supplies of beads, guns, powder, and iron and copper kettles, from the sea-shore. In all this region the gorilla is found; and while staying with a chief named Obindji, Mr. Du Chaillu was so fortunate as to discover two new species of apes-of which the world did not before possess even that scant intelligence it had of the gorilla. These were the Kooloo-Kamba-so named from its singular cry-which is pronounced by comOne of these medicine-men played him in parative anatomists the most man-like of all the return a very shrewd trick, which we must apes; and the Nshiego Mbouvé, a remarkably relate. A man had died in the town owned docile and intelligent animal, which builds for by our traveler at the mouth of the Fernand itself, with a surprising ingenuity, a leafy roof, Vaz, and which was the base of his operations, in the forks of some high tree, where it rests at where his surplus goods were stored in houses night, secure from the drenching rains of this built by him at considerable expense. Now country, and from the attacks of beasts. Of the when a man dies in that country, it is supposed last, our traveler possessed several young ones, to be only because some enemy of his has be- which exhibited an astonishing docility and love witched him. Hence an ouganga was called for the company of man-very different from from the interior, whose duty it was to discover the morose and treacherous disposition of the the culprit who would then be submitted to the young gorilla. And, most singular of all, the ordeal of poison, and if this, by its effects, de- young Nshiego is born with a face as perfectly clared him guilty, would be decapitated, quar-white as the whitest child! It is not till it entered, and his remains cast away. The shrewd ters its second year that its face assumes a yelouganga came, and after various incantations low tint, and at three years old it is pitchy black declared himself unable to discover the sorcerer; like its mother. We can not spare rocm here but gave it as his opinion that if the people did for a more detailed account of these remarkable not abandon their town, and remove farther up animals. the river, they would all die. And before twenty-four hours were over poor Du Chaillu was left entirely alone! The medicine-man had played him a trick which nearly proved fatal to his enterprise, as it was only by promises of extravagant pay that he could induce three or four men to come back and live with him, and to keep watch over his property in his absence. Before ascending the Rembo to Goombi, Du Chaillu explored the Ogobay, to its termination, or source, in a lake called the Anengue, which he found, at the dry season, filled with little blotches of mud-islands, covered with astonishing numbers of crocodiles, who came down from the surrounding marshes to feed on the fish, which abound in the lake at this season. On these crocodiles the natives of the region live; Among all the tribes he had hitherto visited he had found a kind of grass-cloth, used for the scanty covering of both men and women-but nowhere, so far, had he seen a loom. To the question, "Where do you get this?" the invariable answer was, "from the East, from a people who are cloth-makers, and great magicians, and whose tongue we do not speak, and who can kill men whom they do not like." This peoplecloth-makers and magicians—he had long wished to see; and at last, after many delays, he set out for the high table-lands in which they were said to dwell. After many days' journey, through a mountainous region, they did reach the plains, and found the Ashira, the mysterious nation of cloth-makers, to be really a superior people, industrious, living in permanent towns, and peace able. seek our supply from among them, in Africa. In Apingi-land Mr. Du Chaillu stood upon the threshold of what he justly regards as his most important geographical discovery. He found himself at the beginning of a range of mountains, Here he was received as a spirit of great | home, these people believe that we are forced to power; the maker of guns and powder and beads -for though these negroes had never even hoped to see a white man, they knew the use of guns. Hence he journeyed yet farther east, to the Apingi, a tribe who were yet farther advanced than the Ashira, being not only better weavers, but also workers in iron, and of no mean skill, for savages, to judge by their knives and other weapons, brought home by Mr. Du Chaillu, which we have seen. The Apingi not only looked upon him as an all-potent spirit, but thought him a cannibal; and with a hospitality which can not be too much admired, the king sent him, on his arrival, a fat slave, to be roasted for his supper, promising a farther supply when it was needed. "What, then, do you white spirits do with the men you buy on the sea-shore ?" queried the Apingi king, curiously, of our horror-struck traveler. "If you don't eat them, what do you want of them ?" It seems that in the far interior the whole white race is believed to be in the practice of cannibalism; and having a short supply of human flesh at VOL. XXIII.-No. 133.-C CAMMA MAN AND WOMAN. A NEGRO BEAUTY. extending, so far as any of the negroes could tell him, in a direction nearly due east; that is to say, across the continent. He determined to follow the line of this mountain range as far as possible; though, from lack of preparations, and the debility resulting from some twenty-five attacks of African fever within two years, with constant exposure, poor fare, and hard work, forbade him to hope to cross the Continent. We must remember, in addition, that the only food which could be carried by his party was the plantain and yam, both, by their bulk and weight, rendering it impossible to carry more than a few days' supply; and that the forests of all this region are almost barren of life-vast solitudes, in which the stately ebony rears its head high above its neighbors; in which the barwood and various other precious woods are found in abundance, and where the traveler's steps are cumbered by the abounding vines which yield the caoutchouc of Africa. The only hope of penetrating such a country was to push desperately on from tribe to tribe; but when our traveler reached the Isogo villages, some four days' journey east from the Apingi, he found that the next stopping-place-with no intermediate villages was put at three days' journey, due east, which he well guessed would prove nearer six. Nevertheless, the mountainrange still pointed eastward; and it was not in the heart of a man who had pierced this great secret so far, alone, and against all odds, to give it up now. Gathering what scant supplies he could obtain, and putting on, alas! his last pair of stout shoes, he set out, determined, if possible, by energetic travel to reach the Ashango villages, where he might rest. On that last pair of stout shoes rested in reality all his hopes. Starvation he had now got pretty well accustomed to, and we think of him, in the last extremity bracing his stomach to receive a proper portion of roasted boa-constrictor, if nothing better offered. But the ground proved too much for the shoes. On the third day he tied his shirt-sleeves about his bleeding feet-and yet pushed on, with empty stomach, no villages yet in sight; the jungle dense as ever; the mountains still ranging east ward, as far as the eye could reach from any unobstructed point. At last the swollen, torn, and bleeding feet could bear him on no longer. He sat down by the side of a purling brook, bathed his feet, and sent his men to ascend an eminence near by, from whence perhaps they might descry human habitations. But there was nothing but the dreary jungle, and the mountains still ranging eastward, as far as the eye could distinguish their peaks in the distance. They returned with a snake and a monkey, having dined on which, and fastened a small American flag to the top of the highest tree they saw, as a symbol of possession, in right of first discovery, they set out on their backward trip, desperate with hunger, and not daring to stop, even to hunt, by the way. "Of the journey back," he writes, "I have but a dim and feverish recollection. I remember that my feet got worse instead of better; that when the wretched shoes were beyond even tying together with vines, I cast them away, and bandaged bare feet with what remained of my shirt. That on the second and third day of our journey we had not even a little bird to eat, but plunged forward in a stupid apathy of hunger and pain. That on the fourth morning one of the men espied a gorilla, who came roaring toward us, beating his vast chest, and waddling up to the attack with such horrid utterances and soul-freezing aspect, eyes glaring, and the monstrous face distorted with impotent rage, that for once, waking out of my dreamy stupor, and seeing this image of the devil coming upon us, I would have run if my feet had borne me. I remember that, when my gun-carrier shot the huge beast, the men rushed upon it, and tore rather than cut it up, to stifle with its loathed flesh the hunger which was gnawing at their vitals. "Then we went on, relieved for a time from starvation, I dragging my bleeding, bare, and swollen feet over the rough and thorny ground, till at last, at noon of the fifth day, we came to the Isogo towns." And here we leave him. The discoveries of Mr. Du Chaillu in the Department of Natural History alone, have been proclaimed in this country and in Europe, to be of such value and interest as to make his name honored among those enterprising men to whom Natural History is under the greatest obligations. But he has shown us not only the terrible gorilla, the curious nest-building nshiego, and many other new and beautiful animals; he has laid bare, for the operations of our enterprising commerce, a large region fruitful in many products which take the first rank in the world's commerce. India-rubber, ebony (of which he imported a cargo cut in the upper Ovenga, under his own supervision, and which was counted first-class wood for size and grain), ivory, barwood, palmoil, are found here-in a virgin country, only needing shrewd management to become a source of wealth to our merchants and of new hopes of civilization to Africa. |