A JOURNEY IN EAST AFRICA.*
Faux the internal evidence afforded by this work, we conclude that Mrs. Pringle had not extensively studied East Africa from books, or, indeed, Eastern travels of any kind, before she started. with her husband in the summer of 1880, on a visit of inspection to the Church of Scotland's Mission at Blantyre, near the former site of Bishop Mackenzie's Mission. Had she done so, she would assuredly have expected to meet with most of the objects, incidents, and adventures that strike her with surprise, but are as familiar as the Landseer lions to all readers of eastern and east- ward travels; and, also, she would hardly have thrown a stone upon the Titanic cairn of testimony to the unpunctuality of the trains at Alexandria, the heat at Aden, the humours of Somali boys, and the naming of donkeys after European celebrities. The steady good-will and serious exactness with which Mrs. Pringle (whose husband refers to her portly volume as a " little book ") narrates these wonders and many others equally thrill- ing, are almost affecting. The reader at his own sweet will has probably learned long ago to pick up his African travel at Zanzibar, at the earliest, and then to be prepared to " skip " the derivation of ginger from the name of the island, and all description of the palace and the peculiarities of Seyid Burghash. Any reader who has not hitherto made this wise reservation will find it an alleviation in most instances, but espe- cially in the present case. Mrs. Pringle has certain things to tell which are interesting,—things that concern the mission and the achievements of Bishop Steere, whose loss is a great misfortune to the Christian settlements in East Africa,—but we cannot con- gratulate her when she invades the province of Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Lady Duff Gordon, by attempting to depict the in- teriors of Mussulman households, and to d raw the physical or moral portraits of Arabs. Her performances of either kind are feeble. African travel is exciting when it is well told ,.but it is rarely amusing ; in this instance the first faint smile is provoked by a disillusion. We had cherished a man-Friday sort of notion about Dr. Livingstone's well-known servant Chums ; but it is dispelled by the account of his entirely civilised—indeed, Neapolitan—behaviour when Bishop Steere suggested that he should accompany Mr. and Mrs. Pringle as interpreter on their journey to Blantyre. Chuma (he has since died of consumption), declined to go unless the travellers agreed to take two of his friends. As they would have been purely ornamental, for they could neither cook nor do anything else that was required, this condition was not accepted. After much persuasion, Chama consented to be separated from his friends, and started with the Bishop and Mrs. Pringle for the Consulate to get his agreement signed. Arrived at that imposing place, Chuma declared that his wife had recently died during his absence on an expedition with some other travellers, and that he was going to hold a mourning feast with his friends, which would last beyond the date fixed for the sailing of the steamer. There was nothing for it but to give up the services of the disconsolate widower. The truth was that °barna—whose conversion by his late master seems to have been of a transient kind—had got scent of a party who would employ him for a longer period at a higher rate, and thus contrived to shirk the Bishop's friends without hopelessly alienating the Bishop.
Mrs. Pringle's determination never to desert Mr. Pringle re- minds us of the noble resolution of an historic character. It is, • Towards the Mountains of the Moon : a Journey in East Africa. By Mrs. Pringle. Edinburgh and London : Blackwood and Hons.
however, irresistibly borne in upon our minds that it must have been rather hard on Mr. Pringle, after he had been led, by her exhaustion from the fatigue of their hurried departure, to "enter- tain serious doubts whether she could get so far as Brindisi," to be assured at each stopping-place that she would inevitably lose her life if she went on farther, and ultimately informed at Quillimane—" You cannot possibly leave the lady in Quilli- mane until your return from Blantyre ; for she would be sure to take fever and die. Now she has come so far, it will be safer for her to go on." Says Mrs. Pringle, " Fancy my relief ! " Quite so : but the masculine and marital' mind has room for a thought of Mr. Pringle in a dilemma clearly foreseen by St.
Paul. However, all's well that ends well ; Mrs. Pringle did not desert Mr. Pringle, but carried out her purpose, came home in safety to renown, and recounted her adventures with such success that her friends have induced her to record them in print for the benefit of society. The book is a very pretty one, with two delightful flamingoes in scarlet and silver wading in golden waters on the cover.
It would be unfair to convey the impression that there is nothing more than Chuma and flamingoes to interest Mrs. Pringle's readers ; but it is just to say that the writer might have put into a volume half the size of this one all she has to tell,—including her African fever, during which Mr. Pringle must have had a specially bad time, for he was afraid to give her quinine until the doctor arrived on the fourth day. A short history of Bishop Mackenzie's Mission is welcome, for it re- freshes our memory of the good deeds of that eminent man ; and the writer's account of the founding of the Scottish Mission in memory of Dr. Livingstone in Kapeni's country, on the Shire— the Free Church people calling their station Livingstonia, and the Established Church people calling theirs Blantyre, after the birthplace of the great explorer—is also pleasant reading.
Mis. Pringle reminds us of the origin of the " Universities Mission" in a passage that has an incidental interest just now, owing to the Portuguese action in Africa :—
" In 1857, Livingstone returned to England, full of his recent dis- coveries in Africa, and with great hopes of being able to induce some of his countrymen to go out to the neighbourhood of Lake Nyassa and found a colony. He seems to have been perfectly sanguine as to their success as colonists, and also firmly to have believed that their presence there would be sufficient of itself to act as a check upon the slave trade. But along with this colony he was anxious to combine a Christian mission to the natives. However, his attempts at procuring colonists proved utterly unsuccessful ; neither did he get the encouragement be expected from the British Government—doubt- less because they saw the inconvenience of settling a British colony in the interior of a country whose coast was held by the Portuguese. Notwithstanding, he succeeded in arousing not only a strong desire to put an end to the horrors of the slave trade, bat also a considerable amount of zeal for the spreading of Christianity among the heathen in those regions. This resulted in a project being started by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in which those of Dublin and Durham afterwards joined."
The vicissitudes and wanderings of this mission, since its first mishap, under Dr. Livingstone, when its members found them- selves in a scrape very like ours in Egypt at the present day, fighting against the people whom they had come to aid, to its present settlement at Lake Nyassa, whence it will probably work its way ultimately to the Shire highlands, are interesting.
The personal adventures recorded by the author are remark. able only inasmuch as they were mach less unpleasant and dangerous than those of most other travellers in Africa who have recounted their history. Mrs. Pringle tells us nothing new about " natives," except that when they are under the care of a doctor they will not cut their hair without his permission. We are not informed, either by her or by Mr. Pringle in the preface written by him, what was the result of their visit of inspection to the Mission of the Kirks.
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