Discovery hi the African Continent. 227 



who represents it as very beautiful, abounding with game, well 

 wooded, sufficiently watered, and covered with the remains of 

 the labours of a superior race of natives, who had been ac- 

 customed to fortify the approaches to their town by closing up 

 the gorges of their ravines by ramparts constructed of stone. 



Beyond the line just alluded to as marking the limits of 

 penetration into the interior, from the colony of the Cape of 

 Good Hope to the boundaries of Portugueze discovery, a huge 

 blank stretches itself quite across the Continent, utterly un- 

 known to Commerce, to Science, to Philanthropy, and to 

 Heligion. Native testimony has peopled these regions with 

 monsters, and with men worse than monsters, for it appears 

 to be the object of all savage communities to villify their 

 neighbours; it represents it as thickly populated, containing 

 numerous large towns, extensive collections of inland waters, 

 either mediterranean seas or great lakes, and considerable 

 forests. It is to this part of the Continent that the Expedition 

 about to leave the Colony is to direct its researches, and a 

 more interesting field of inquiry can hardly be imagined or 

 elsewhere exist in this a lobe of ours, which is so rapidly yield- 

 ing up its last store of hidden treasures to the curiosity of man. 

 The genius of Geo^Taphy, like the Macedonian hero, survey- 

 ing his noble acquirements, will soon have to weep over them, 

 regretting that she too has no other worlds to conquer. 



This enormous tract of Terra incognita, this sequestered 

 range, this unenlightened spot is, after all, an insulated di- 

 vision of the Continent. It has its defined boundary, and 

 there is every reason to believe from the Portuguese archives 

 published by the late and lamented Mr. Bowdicii, a nearly 

 continuous one from the Eastern to the Western Oceans. The 

 limits enclosing it on the south, that is, separating it from the 

 countries now traversed by the traders from the Cape of Good 

 Hope, have been already traced. Its northern boundary may 

 be expressed by lines drawn from where the latitudinal and 

 longitudinal points of 35° and 20^ intersect in Sofala Bay, 

 thence eastward to a similar intersection in 27° and 19", 

 thence north to latitude 15°, again west to latitude 13°, longi- 

 tude 20°, from that point south-east to long. 15°, lat. 19°, and 

 thence to Fish Bay upon the Atlantic shores, in lat. 16° 30' 

 and longitude 13°. 



The vast territory overhanging this line of demarcation, is 

 claimed by the Portugueze, and it is upon the entrance of this 

 alone that any serious difficulty or danger to exploratory ad- 

 venturers may be anticipated. Portuguese jealousy and 

 treachery are proverbial, and both of these vices it is too well 

 known have a luxuriant growth under the southern hemisphere, 

 those would no doubt be called into full excitation by the ap- 



