46 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
plates are of porcellane, adorned with branches of gold 
like those of coral. The Sansons say he has other 
palaces, called Symbase, in several parts of his domi¬ 
nions, especially one towards Butua, remarkable for the 
vast size of the stones in its walls, and for several 
ancient and unknown inscriptions over the gate.” 
But the glory of the Portuguese empire in Africa was 
short-lived. Very early English companies sent out 
expeditions and founded trading stations in Senegal and 
on the Gold Coast. The French, also, were soon in the 
field. But it was the Dutch who, in the middle of the 
seventeenth century, when they were very powerful, 
drove the Portuguese out of a great part of the African 
coast, and themselves founded a colony at the Cape of 
Good Hope. 
Up to the end of the eighteenth century not much was 
done for African exploration beyond the coasts. Various 
travellers succeeded in penetrating a short distance into 
the interior in the north and west. By the middle of 
the century the map of Africa became quite crowded 
with great lakes and rivers, mountains and cities; 
but who had drawn these features no one knew. The 
lakes and rivers were so intricately mixed up, and 
the hydrography so impossible, that D’Anville, a great 
French geographer in the later part of last century, 
swept everything off the map, except what he knew 
rested on undoubted authority. The result was that 
nearly all the interior of Africa was a great blank, and 
the work of filling it up had to be begun anew. It 
is only within the last fifty years that the blank has 
disappeared, and it is to that fifty years that our story 
must be mainly confined. Let us, however, briefly refer 
to some of the explorations of the end of the eighteenth 
and early part of the nineteenth century, which we shall 
do again in the words of Jules Verne. 
