ART. XI.-RECENT PUBLICATIONS. Eastern Africa. If we take up a map of Africa, published before the accession of her Majesty to the throne of these kingdoms, aud compare it with one of the present day, we are sure to be struck with the different aspect it offers to its more recent companion. In the latter, the coast line pre sents us with a mass of names of native towns, villages, and markets, which replace the naked outline of the former; whilst in the interior, deserts become fertile wildernesses, and mountain ranges are supplanted by lake-regions, only to be excelled by those of America. In no portion of the maps of Africa, which in boyhood were placed in our hands, is this more apparent than in that which delineated the countries south of the so-called Mountains of the Moon; and of that portion none was so destitute of names as the large tract which stretches from the country of the Adal to Mozambique, and is subject to the Imam of Zanzibar. It was owing, in some measure, to this absence of names in the map of Africa of that period, that we are indebted for this interesting narrative of Missionary Travels of Dr Krapf, who, during an eighteen years' residence on the eastern coast of Africa, has been the means of adding considerably to our geographical knowledge of those regions, no less than to our acquaintance with the languages, religion, manners and customs, and resources of the independent tribes which form its population. The son of a small farmer in the vicinity of Tübingen, Dr Krapf early evinced an ardent desire for knowledge, and a somewhat morbid temperament, more of fear and dread than of love, gave his mind its first and strong religious bias. He tells us himself: 66 - My father, whose circumstances were easy, followed farming, and lived in the village of Derendingen, near Tübingen, where I was born, on the 11th of January 1810, and baptized by the name of Ludwig, the wrestler,—no inapt appellation for one who was destined to become a soldier of the cross. Many were my providential escapes in childhood from dangers which beset my path, from falling into the millstream which flowed through the village, from accidents with fire-arms, or falls from trees in the eager pursuit of birds' nests. The inborn evil nature of the child was somewhat held in check by a nervous susceptibility, and the consequent dread I experienced in witnessing the contest of the elements in storms, or which shook my frame at the sight of the dead at the grave, or even when reading or listening to the narrative of the torments of the wicked in hell. On these occasions I secretly vowed to lead a pious life for the future, though, childlike, I soon forgot the promise when the exciting cause had passed away, as is ever the case throughout life with the natural, un 1 Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labours during an Eighteen Years' Residence in Eastern Africa, etc. By the Rev. Dr J. Lewis Krapf. With a Concise Account of Geographical Researches in Eastern Africa. By E. G. Ravenstein. London,Trübner and Co. 1860. regenerated heart of man. Thus, but for an apparently trivial event in my boyhood, though in it I gratefully recognise the hand of the great Teacher, the evil of my nature might have choked the good seed with its tares, or destroyed it altogether." That event was a brutal assault by a neighbour, who, mistaking the lad for another who had given him offence, nearly murdered the child in the heat of passion. An illness of six months' duration followed, and to that bed of sickness our missionary ascribes the incipient awakening of his heart to its best and truest interests. His hours were spent in reading the Scriptures; and, soothed by the care and affection of two true-hearted women, his mother and sister, of whom we have but an occasional glimpse in the autobiographical sketch of his boyhood, with which the work opens. His greatest delight was in those portions of the Old Testament which recorded the history of the patriarchs, and their intercourse with the Creator, originating an earnest desire that he "too might be permitted to listen to the voice of the Most High, even as did the prophets and apostles of old." In the autumn of 1822, during the period of his convalescence, he spent much of his time in the harvest fields amongst the farm-labourers, and to them he would relate such Bible stories as had taken a strong hold on his boyish imagination; and so earnestly and vividly did he do this, that more than one of the men would say to his father, "Mark my words: Ludwig will be a parson." In the beginning of the ensuing year, his sister had to visit Tübingen to buy a new almanack, and, mistaking the house of the widow of a former vicar for that of the bookbinder to which she had been directed, she entered into a long discourse with that lady, who treated her with much kindness and affability, inquiring after her brothers and sisters, and eliciting from her that her youngest brother, Lewis, was clever at figures; upon which the widow expressed a desire to see the lad, and to promote his welfare, suggesting that he should be sent to the grammar-school, and afterwards to college. To this lady's interference, and the zeal and affection of his noble-hearted sister, it was owing that, instead of following the plough, the boy was sent to the Anatolian School at Tübingen, and, showing considerable ability, soon became a favourite with his teachers, and gradually rose to the head of his class; and so on, till he reached the fifth and highest form, when he added the knowledge of Hebrew to that of the languages of classical antiquity, and those of Italy and France, which he had already studied along with his own native German. At first the early morning always found him on the road from home-a distance of some four or five miles from the town -with satchel on his back, in which, besides his books, were a bottle of sweet must and a great hunch of bread, to constitute an al fresco mid-day meal, and which he "quickly swallowed, between twelve and one o'clock, under the willows on the banks of the Neckar, in order more leisurely to devour his Latin Grammar and Scheller's Vocabulary, which he soon learnt by heart;" and thus in boyhood, almost intuitively, acquired a method of learning languages, which, in his missionary life, was most serviceable to him. Whilst yet on the fourth form, the rector read to the whole school an essay upon the results of missionary labour for the conversion of the heathen. The reading struck a kindred chord in the soul of the future missionary. A small still voice asked, "Why not become a missionary, and go and convert the heathen?" The Easter holidays of 1825 were at hand; and, as the boy walked homewards to Derendingen, the thought arose in his mind with the force of a command, "to go to Basel and announce himself willing to devote his life to the labours of a missionary." His future career was fixed; and again we have a glimpse of two true-hearted women upholding and strengthening the boy's resolve, furnishing him with the means, and a letter to Missionary Inspector Blunhardt, a former vicar of their own village. The journey from Derendingen to Basel, by way of Shaffhausen, and back through Freiburg, altogether some two hundred and fifty miles, was performed on foot,-no small testimony to the zeal and determination of purpose in a boy-missionary of fifteen. But even earlier the idea of African travel had become familiar to the boy's mind. He was still on the lowest form in the lower school, when his father sent him an atlas of maps, and, by a singular coincidence, just at the moment that a bookseller in the town had lent him an odd volume of Bruce's Travels in Abessinia, which had fascinated his boyish imagination by the frequent mention of hyænas. With the natural eagerness of a young and inquiring mind, he at once turned to the map of Africa to trace the scene of the traveller's adventures, and, to his astonishment, found but few names put down in the districts of Adal and Somali upon the map. "Is there, then, so great a desert yonder," was his first exclamation, "which is still untrodden by the foot of any European?"-a curious thought to have been instilled into the mind of a child, who, in manhood, was to be the means of expanding the knowledge of those very regions of which then so little was known. His visit to Basel led to a rejection of his services for the time, but accompanied by the prospect of future employment, when he should have fitted himself for the missionary calling by self-imposed preparation, and a long course of preparatory study at the Missionary Institute. At length, in February 1837, he was employed by the English Church Missionary Society, and set out on his long and difficult journey to Abessinia, the land of his youthful dreams and aspirations. "Yet," he adds, "it was not without tears at parting, and with fear and trembling, that I took up my pilgrim's staff, and bid adieu to my dear friends, and to the home of my childhood." After a short residence at Adowa with the Protestant missionaries at the Court of Ubie, the Abessinian Regent of Tigre, where they were at first well received, he and his companions were forced to retire, through the intrigues of some French Roman Catholic priests, who managed to poison the black prince's mind against the English, by alleging that the excavations they were making for the foundations of a missionary house were, in fact, the commencement of a tunnel by means of which English troops were to be smuggled in to conquer Abessinia. It is not very likely that Ubie, who appears to have been a shrewd and sensible man, should have been duped by such a representation. It is far more probable that he was compelled by his wily new friends, backed by his own priesthood, to whom the Protestant mission was distasteful, to make choice between the friendship of France or England, between that of a country seeking by every means in its power to conciliate the native princes of Africa, with the sinister intention of ultimately founding in that continent a French equivalent to British India, or of one whose only object was the disinterested purpose of spreading the Gospel and distributing the Bible amongst the Monophysite Christians of an expiring branch of Christ's Church. No doubt French gold was not wanting, as, in the end, France acquired the port of Zula, to the south of Massowa, in the Red Sea. "It is," says Mr Ravenstein, "the avowed design of France to found in the Eastern Sea an empire to rival if not to eclipse British India, of which empire Madagascar is to be the centre. Hence, notwithstanding that engineers of eminence have pronounced against the practicability of such a canal as that of Suez, the enterprise is being persevered in under the auspices of the French Government, or rather the isthmus has been occupied within the last few weeks by a party of armed ouvriers. Across the Isthmus of Suez leads the shortest route from Southern France to Madagascar and India; its possession by a power desirous to extend her dominions in that quarter, and capable of availing herself of its advantages, would therefore be of the utmost consequence. The mere fact of the isthmus being part of the Turkish empire, or of Egypt, would not deter France from occupying it; for scruples of conscience are not allowed by that nation to interfere with political'ideas.' Zula has been chosen as the second station on the route to Madagascar, and while the occupation of Suez may at will furnish a pretext for seizing upon Egypt, that of Zula may open Abessinia to French conquest. "Fortunately there is a power which can put a veto upon those plans of aggrandisement in North-Eastern Africa, and that power is Great Britain. Gibraltar, Malta, Perim, and Aden, form a magnificent line of military and naval stations on the route to India, and perfectly command it; and Perim, though at present only destined to bear a lighthouse, properly fortified, would command the entrance of the Red Sea even more effectually than Gibraltar does that of the Mediterranean. Therefore, only after having converted the last three into French strongholds, and thus striking a decisive blow at the naval supremacy of Great Britain, could France ever hope to carry out her designs." Whatever may have been the true causes of the expulsion of the Protestant missionaries from the territories of the ruler of Tigre, it is chiefly to it that we are indebted for our knowledge of the Galla, whose conversion to Christianity Dr Krapf looks upon as the future and surest means of spreading the Gospel throughout the interior of Africa. Driven from Adowa in March 1838, the three Protestant missionaries reached Massowa in safety,-the two senior, Messrs Isen berg and Blumhardt, proceeding thence to Cairo to await orders from the Committee of the Church Missionary Society as to the field of their future labours; whilst Dr Krapf, full of zeal, and with a fixed purpose not to give up Abessinia entirely to the Roman Catholic missionaries, determined to penetrate into the Christian kingdom of Shoa, whose friendly ruler, our old acquaintance, Sahela Selassie, introduced to us years ago by Sir Cornwallis Harris, had formerly sent a message to missionary Isenberg, inviting him to visit his dominions. Having reached Mokha, on his way to Tajurra on the Adal coast, the proper landing-place for penetrating into Shoa, he was taken so seriously ill as to be compelled to return to Cairo ; and it was not till the spring of the next year that, in company with his friend Isenberg, he at length reached Tajurra. The old Sultan, who affects to be the king of all the Adal tribes, gave them permission to land. The Adal call themselves in their own language Afer, and hence Dr Krapf seeks to identify their country with the Ophir of the Bible:"That the Ophir of the Bible is to be sought for on the eastern coast of Africa, is evident from two circumstances. One is, that right opposite to Arabia Felix there is a people who call themselves Afer, and called by others Adals and Danakil from their chief tribe Ad Alli, but whose designation in their own language is Afer. In the second place, it must be considered that Ophir, beyond a doubt, means gold dust; for, in Job xxviii. 6, the words dust of gold' in Hebrew are Ophirot Sahab.' Hence, by easy transition, the word Ophir was made to comprise two things, the name of a people and of a substance; and the Land of the Afer was simply the land where Afer Sahab, gold dust, was found." Our missionary was detained four weeks at Tajurra in making the necessary preparations for his journey into that land which, he says, he "had found so barren and empty in the map in his boyhood." The Adal desert of the maps is a wilderness with elephants, gazelles, and ostriches amongst its wild animals, but badly watered, and hence little visited by man; and as our travellers approached the river Hawash, and camped out for the night in the open air, a hyæna glided so near their resting-place, that they might have grasped it with their hands. The plate which illustrates the passage of this river, is the pictorial representation of a rich and fertile country, which the old maps have represented as a desert waste, and the broad river and old timber trees are worthy of the pencil of a Wilson or a Gainsborough. Dr Krapf and his companion, Isenberg, were at first well received by the ruler of the Shoans; but Sahela Selassie was a man of progress, and took more delight in watching the operations of the artizans, gunmakers, smiths, and weavers, than in listening to the polemics of the missionaries. We know of old that Africa was the land of dreams, and so it is still. The father of Sahela Selassie had had a dream, when his son was yet a boy, that when he should come to the throne Europeans would arrive and teach the Shoans all arts and knowledge. The dream seemed about to be realized. Since 1835, Combes and Tamisier, Martin, Dufey, Isenberg and Krapf, Rochet, Airston, |