238 Intelligence respecting Africa. 



place very strongly ; but now the fortifications are going fast 

 to decay, they litiving been driven out by the Arabs in the year 

 1720 ; and I firmly believe that nothing has been done to the 

 battlements since that time. The Arabs are now intermarried 

 with the Sochilles, the native tribe of the place. The harbours 

 are very fine : the chief commerce is ivory and gum copal, 

 which articles are brought into the island by an inland tribe 

 called Whanekas. On the main we have numbers of wild 

 beasts, but none on the island, excepting hyaenas : the hippo- 

 potami are in great numbers up the rivers." 



We have received accounts of a recent discovery in Central 

 Africa, which will soon be laid before the public in greater 

 detail, but of which the following outline is sufficiently cu- 

 rious : — Major Clapperton and Captain Denham, in the course 

 of their late expedition in that quarter of the world, arrived 

 in the territory, and subsequently resided for some weeks, in 

 the capital of a nation, whose manners and history seem likely 

 to occupy, to no trivial extent, the attention of the public of 

 this country — we might safely say of the whole civilized world. 

 They found a nation jet black in colour, but not in our sense 

 of the term negroes, having long hair and fine high features. 

 This people was found to be in a state of very high civiliza- 

 tion ; and above all, the British travellers witnessed a review 

 of seven thousand cavalry, divided into regular regiments, 

 and all clothed in complete armour. Six thousand wore the 

 perfect hauberk mail of the early Norman knights : most 

 strange by far of all, one thousand appeared in perfect Roman 

 armour. The conjectures to which this has given rise are 

 various. We confess for ourselves, that, looking to the po- 

 lished and voluptuous manners ascribed to these people, the 

 elegance of their houses, &c. &c. ; in a word, the total diffe- 

 rence between them and any other race as yet discovered in 

 the interior of " Africa, the mother of monsters," our own 

 opinion is strongly that here we have a fragment of the old 

 Numidian population, — a specimen of the tribes who, after long 

 contending and long cooperating with imperial Rome, were 

 at last fain to seek safety in the central Desert, upon the disso- 

 hition of the empire. In these squadrons Messrs. Clapperton 

 and Denham probably beheld the liveliest image that ever has 

 been witnessed by modern eyes, of the legions of Jugurtha — 

 may we not say, of Hannibal ? The armour, we understand, 

 is fabricated in the most perfect style of the art ; and the Roman 

 suits might be mistaken for so many Herculanean or Pompeian 

 discoveries, if it were possible for us to imagine the existence 



of 



