AN AFRICAN EXPLORER.*
JOSEPH THOMSON has been aptly styled the Bayard of African travel, and the story of his life shows that he was a born ruler of men. His parents belonged originally to the best class of the Scottish peasantry, but William Thomson, a man of splendid physique and of fine character, rose from the position of a working stonemason to that of a master builder, and became afterwards the owner of a valuable stone quarry. His son's eagerness for knowledge and his love of all kinds of science, bat chiefly of geology, was exhibited while still a boy, and he was scarcely more than
a boy when, at the age of twenty, he accompanied Keith Johnston to East Central Africa as " geologist and naturalist to the expedition."
Zanzibar was reached on January 5th, 1879, and on May 19th the travellers started with a caravan of one hundred and fifty men to explore the unknown region between Dar-es-Salaam and , Lake Nyassa, " with the view of finding a practical route to the interior by which the
great chain of central lakes ;might be connected in some better way than hitherto with the east coast." After a few
weeks' march Johnston died of dysentery, and Thomson, who was at the time prostrate with fever, was left sole leader of the perilous adventure. His courage and force of character were soon put to the test, for the sudden appearance of the mach-dreaded Mahenge savages produced so great a panic that the caravan was on the verge of a calamitous rout
The natural impulse of a weaker man would have been to trust to his guns. But Joseph Thomson took a bolder course—a course which was not only nobler, but which proved in this and many a similar crisis to be safer by far, though it required infinite nerve to take it. Leaving all weapons behind him he stepped out into the open among the naked, hideously painted, feather- crowned savages, very much to their astonishment. Proclaiming that he and his party were friends, and acting as if he took it for granted that the Mahenge meant to be equally friendly, he carried his point instantly by a mere tour deforce, and thus an emergency which might have ended the expedition was, to the infinite relief of all, turned into an occasion of fraternising."
The amazing difficulties met with and conquered during the ensuing months of travel, and the success Thomson achieved must be read in his own book. Upon reaching Tanganyika he had done all that the expedition was designed to do, but Thomson, though suffering greatly from illness, was eager to make some discoveries on his own account. So after camping most of his men on the shore of the lake, be proceeded with a select band of thirty men through the country of the Warungu, where a white man had never been seen before, and here " more than once the axe was uplifted to dash oat his brains or the arrow drawn to the head to pierce his heart. It was only his perfect coolness that saved him." Later on,
after solving one geographical problem, he made "a dash for the Congo " in order to settle another, but the dangers were
too great, his men in their terror mutinied, and Thomson returned to the camp to receive a welcome that brought tears
• Joseph Thomson, African Explorer. A Biography by his Brother, Rev. J. B. Thomson. With Contributions by Friends. Maps and Illustrwionz. London: Sampson I ow and Co.
into his eyes. In his first African expedition, which lasted two years, the young explorer had travelled over three thousand miles of a country more than the half of which had been hitherto unknown to the geographer, and he had done so without bloodshed, although at imminent and almost daily risk of life. At a welcome he received from friends on reach- ing Scotland, Thomson was able to say that he had found a gentle word more potent than gunpowder, and "that it was not necessary, even in Central Africa, to sacrifice the lives of men in order to throw light upon its dark corners."
His second expedition, undertaken in the service of the Sultan of Zanzibar, was up the Rovuma river in search of coal. No coal, however, was to be found, much to the chagrin of the Sultan, but in his four months' tour Thomson added largely to his knowledge of Eastern Africa. Some time was afterwards spent in Scotland and in Continental travel, and then once more the young traveller, who may be said to have had Africa written on his heart, started to explore the unknown land which lay between Mombasa and the Victoria Nyanza. Many and noble efforts had been already made to traverse this vast region, but after forty years of labour, as the biographer observes, "there was none con- cerning which geographers knew less." At the instigation of the Royal Geographical Society, Thomson attempted a feat which had been often tried in vain. His caravan, which con- sisted of a most disreputable crew of one hundred and forty men, left Zanzibar for the interior in January, 1883, Thomson being then twenty-five years of age. The privations as well as dangers that had now to be faced explain the failure of earlier travellers. On one occasion he and his men walked for seventy miles without food or water. On another he got separated from his party, and was thirty-six hours without food, and for a time the only food that could be obtained for the caravan was the diseased flesh of cattle sold to them when in a dying state. Fever, starvation, and constant danger from the savages that hovered round him were Thomson's com- panions of travel, but he reached the goal in spite of them. He, however, very nearly paid for his success with his life, for on the return journey from Nyanza he was for two months ill of dysentery in a native but "with nothing to subsist upon but clear soup made from the half-putrid meat of diseased cattle, and with swarms of the murderous Masai prowling malignantly around the camp, who would only too gladly have massacred the whole company." When at last he reached Zanzibar it was in a shattered condition, and months passed before he regained his strength. That he received on his return a splendid reception at Burlington House need scarcely be stated. For the second time he had en- countered the extremity of danger without having recourse to violence, and had proved, as the President of the Royal Geographical Society said, that he was " a man of undaunted courage, of extraordinary resources, and pos- sessed all the qualities necessary for African traveL" Mr. Thomson points out that his brother's work as an explorer was done purely from the love of it. To him ex- ploring was a vocation, not a profession, and when on one occasion Stanley enlarged on the commercial prospects of Africa, Thomson expressed his fear lest the romance of African travel should be knocked on the head. " We have come to look upon the palm-tree," he said, "not in regard to its artistic effect, but upon the quantity of oil that it is to pro- duce. if this sort of thing is to go on, I should prefer to go to the North Pole."
Thomson's next expedition, however, was not made for purposes of discovery, but distinctly in the interests of com- merce. He was engaged by the National African Company to secure their trading-rights on the Niger, which were im- perilled by Germany. Thomson's mission was successful, but at the cost of another serious illness, and for some weeks after his return to England he is said to have been utterly disabled. More than once a painful attack warned him of an enfeebled constitution, but there was still immense recupera- tive power :-
" One feat in particular may be mentioned by which he cele- brated his return to the ranks of the convalescent. In the middle of July he walked one day [from Nithsdale] all the way to Edin- burgh—a distance of seventy miles. On the journey of sixteen hours he made only one stop—namely, in Biggar, for breakfast. He arrived in Edinburgh early in the evening, and after tea sallied forth to the Exhibition, in which he rambled about for another eouple of hours. Curiously, this extraordinary effort did him not the slightest harm." Thomson said it was his fate to move on, driven by a resist- less demon within him, and he was now carried by it to Morocco. There, disguised in a Moorish dress, he encountered dangers and toils enough to demand all his resolution and courage; but to Thomson danger was a stimulant, and he had his reward in reaching, at an altitude of more than 13,000 ft., one of the highest peaks of the Atlas Mountains. The ex- plorer's next adventure was in Northern Zambesia, where he endeavoured to do for the British South Africa Company what he had done so well on the Niger for the National African Company. In the latter case his promptitude outwitted the Germans, and " secured one of the richest regions of Africa for the British Empire ; " in the former he appears to have checkmated the Portuguese, but he did it at the cost of an illness which ultimately proved fatal. Probably no one ever encountered danger more fearlessly than Joseph Thomson, and few men have achieved so much in a short life. His choicest gift as an African explorer was the art through which he subdued bloodthirsty savages by treating them as friends. Mr. Thomson has told the story of his brother's career with brevity and skill, and the book cannot fail to attract many readers.
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