Appletons' Popular Science Monthly (Volume 49 )

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896. Excerpt: ... away with them. They did not understand the language of the Nasamonians, nor did the latter understand that of their captors. They were conducted by these little men across a marshy country, into a town whose inhabitants were black. A large stream flowed before this town from west to east, and there were crocodiles in it." Authorities now unhesitatingly state that this river could have been no other than the Djoliba, or Niger as it is called by cartographers and geographers. This river rises in a canon of the mountainous plateau of eastern Senegambia, where it is known as the Djoliba or Joliba, flows northeast, then west, and then southeast, to empty into the Gulf of Guinea near Cape Formosa. In the neighborhood of Timbuktu, 18 5' 10" north latitude, and 40 5' 10" west longitude; the river flows from west to east. Says De Quatrefages, in Pygmies: "There" (Timbuktu) "the river bends abruptly, and flows almost directly from west to east as far as Bourroum, over a distance of over three degrees of longitude, before turning toward the south to reach the Gulf of Guinea. It is, then, between the first and the fourth degree of west longitude that the Nasamonea reached the Niger." (It should be noted here that a large proportion of our former slave population was brought from a section of Africa only a degree or so south and east of Timbuktu.) The above-quoted author very correctly states that the town in which the Nasamonians were held captave could not have been the famous Timbuktu, for Ahmed Baba, the celebrated Arab historian and annalist, declares that the town was not founded until the fifth century of the Hegira, or 1100 A. D. But, taking everything into consideration, I am inclined to believe that it was really in this neighborhood that these adventurous ...