SOME EARLY GEOGRAPHERS AND EXPLORERS 



OF AFRICA. 



By Rev. William Alfred Norton, B.A., B.Litt. 



{Read July lo, 191 8.) 



A contributor to the Transactions of this Association has 

 produced some interesting papers on the Bantu of the loth cen- 

 tury, as described in extracts from the " Golden Meadows of 

 Mas'udy," and these were pubHshed by the African Monthly in 

 1907. 



I should like to devote a short space to the consideration of 

 these papers — not only for the fascination they have had for me 

 since I took them as a guide to Zanzibar and the neighbouring 

 coast, but also because they contain, by way of introduction to 

 the Arab geographer, a notice of those older writers of the Medi- 

 terranean world, who circumnavigated Africa or recorded 

 exploration thereof. It is instructive to note how various in race 

 were these earlier researchers, on whom, reinspired by Mr. Tooke. 

 I also have lately again spent some time, and desire to recall a 

 few points which have struck me, and seem v^'orth while to add. 



We begin with Semites, like Al Mas'udy himself, who 

 followed them after nearly a millennium and a half ; but Western 

 Semites, from Phoenicia, whereas Mas'udy hailed from Bagdad, 

 like the earlier Sindbad, a sailor even farther famed. Our 

 j'hoenicians were in the service of a Hamite, Pharaoh Necho. who 

 was Josiah's bane, a little before 600 B.C. How they sailed the 

 Southern Sea for two years after setting out from the Red Sea, 

 and in the third year returned through the pillars of Hercules, is 

 well known and written for all to read by the Father of History, 

 who doubts, however, not of the periplus itself, but of the sun 

 ever appearing to the north of them. The story, by the bye, has 

 had a strange sequel of some interest in the annals of fraud, for 

 recently, we may remember, a scarab was produced in a Conti- 

 nental museum claiming to be engraved with a record of this 

 periplus. 



The next researcher was presumably Arjan, in the stricter 

 sense of the word, for he was a member of the royal family of 

 Persia, by name Sataspes, who, for a wrong that he did, was 

 required to circumnavigate Africa in the contrary direction to 

 that taken by the Phoenicians some 120 years before. It is 

 difficult to say who were his " little men," whom, at his furthest 

 point, where, in the trade winds, his heart failed him, he found 

 using Phoenicean raiment, if I may so express in English a 

 difference of quantity in the Greek. This would seem to have 

 been of the fibre of the Phoenix or palm-tree, if we may not 

 shorten the E, and with Bahr, translate "red raiment," that is, 

 skins red-ochred like the Kaffir blankets of to-day, though the 



