Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 by Various

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Piozzi was not far from wrong in his judgment of her treatment of this
boy, if we may trust to her complaints of his coldness and indifference
to her. In 1814, at the time of his marriage, five years after Piozzi's
death, she gave to him her Welsh estate; and it may have been a greater
satisfaction to her than any gratification of the affections could have
afforded, to see him, before she died, high sheriff of his county, and
knighted as Sir John Salusbury Piozzi Salusbury.

There was little gayety in the life at Brynbella, or at Bath,--and the
society that Mrs. Piozzi now saw was made up chiefly of new and for the
most part uninteresting acquaintances. The old Streatham set, with a few
exceptions, were dead, and of the few that remained none retained their
former relations with its mistress. But she suffered little from the
change, was contented to win and accept the flattery of inferior people,
and, instead of spending her faculties in soothing the "radically
wretched life" of Johnson, used them, perhaps not less happily, in
lightening the sufferings of Piozzi during his last years. She tells a
touching story of him in these days.

"Piozzi's fine hand upon the organ and pianoforte deserted him. Gout,
such as I never knew, fastened on his fingers, distorting them into
every dreadful shape. ... A little girl, shewn to him as a musical
wonder of five years old, said,' Pray, Sir, why are your fingers wrapped
up in black silk so?' 'My Dear,' replied he, 'they are in mourning for
my Voice.' 'Oh, me!' cries the child, _'is she dead_?' He sung an easy
song, and the Baby exclaimed, 'Ah, Sir! you are very naughty,--you tell
fibs!' Poor Dears! and both gone now!!"

There were no morbid sensibilities in Mrs. Piozzi's composition. She can
tell all her sorrows without ever a tear. A mark of exclamation looks
better than a blot. And yet she had suffered; but it had been with such
suffering as makes the soul hard rather than tender. The pages with
which she ends this narrative of her life are curiously characteristic.

"When life was gradually, but perceptibly, closing round him [Piozzi] at
Bath, in 1808, I asked him if he would wish to converse with a Romish
priest,--we had full opportunity there. 'By no means,' said he. 'Call
Mr. Leman of the Crescent.' We did so,--poor Bessy ran and fetched him.
Mr. Piozzi received the blessed Sacrament at his hands; but recovered
sufficiently to go home and die in his own house. I sent for Salusbury,
but he came three hours too late,--his master, Mr. Shephard, with him.
In another year he went to Oxford, where he spent me above seven hundred
pounds per annum, and kept me in continual terror lest the bad habits of
the place should ruin him, body, soul, and purse. His old school-fellow,
Smythe Owen,--then. Pemberton,--accompanied him, and to that gentleman's
sister he of course gave his heart. The Lady and her friends took
advantage of my fondness, and insisted on my giving up the Welsh
estate. I did so, hoping to live at last with my own children, at
Streatham Park;--there, however, I found no solace of the sort. So,
after entangling my purse with new repairing and furnishing that place,
retirement to Bath with my broken heart and fortune was all I could wish
or expect. Thither I hasted, heard how the possessors of Brynbella,
lived and thrived, but

'Who set the twigs will he remember
Who is in haste to sell the timber?'

"Well, no matter! One day before I left it there was talk how Love had
always Interest annexed to it. 'Nay, then,' said I, 'what is my love
for Salusbury?' 'Oh!' replied Shephard, 'there is Interest there. Mrs.
Piozzi cannot, could not, I am sure, exist without some one upon whom to
energize her affections; his Uncle is gone, and she is much obliged
to young Salusbury for being ready at her hand to pet and spoil;
her children will not suffer her to love them, and'--with a coarse
laugh--'what will she do when this fellow throws her off, as he soon
will?' Shephard was right enough. I sunk into a stupor, worse far
than all the torments I had endured: but when Canadian Indians take a
prisoner, dear Mr. Conway knows what agonies they put them to; the
man bears all without complaining,--smokes, dances, triumphs in his
anguish,--

'For the son of Alcnoomak shall never complain.'

"When a little remission comes, however, then comes the torpor too;--he
cannot then be waked by pain or moderate pleasure: and such was my
case, when your talents roused, your offered friendship opened my heart
to enjoyment Oh! never say hereafter that the obligations are on your
side. Without you, dulness, darkness, stagnation of every faculty would
have enveloped and extinguished all the powers of hapless

"H.L.P."

The picture that Mrs. Piozzi paints of herself in these last words is a
sad one. She herself was unconscious, however, of its real sadness. In
its unintentional revelations it shows us the feebleness without the
dignity of old age, vivacity without freshness of intellect, the
pretence without the reality of sentiment. "Hapless H.L.P."--to have
lived to eighty years, and to close the record of so long a life with
such words!

A little more than a year after this "Abridgment" was written, in May,
1821, Mrs. Piozzi died. Her children, from whom she had lived separated,
were around her death-bed.[C]

[Footnote C: It is but four years ago that the Viscountess Keith, Mrs.
Piozzi's eldest daughter, died. She was ninety-five years old. Her long
life connected our generation with that of Johnson and Burke. She was
the last survivor of the Streatham "set,"--for, as "Queeney," she had
held a not unimportant place in it. She was at Johnson's death-bed. At
their last interview he said,--"My dear child, we part forever in this
world; let us part as Christian friends should; let us pray together."

It was in 1808 that Miss Thrale married Lord Keith, a distinguished
naval officer.

In _The Gentleman's Magazine_, for May, 1657, is an interesting notice
of Lady Keith. "During many years," it is there said, "Viscountess Keith
held a distinguished position in the highest circles of the fashionable
world in London; but during the latter portion of her life.... her time
was almost entirely devoted to works of charity and to the performance
of religious duties. No one ever did more for the good of others, and
few ever did so much in so unostentatious a manner."]

In judging her, it is to be borne in mind that the earlier and the later
portions of her life are widely different from each other. As we have
before said, Mrs. Thrale and Mrs. Piozzi are two distinct persons. Mrs.
Thrale, whom the world smiled upon, whom the wits liked and society
courted, who had the best men in England for her friends, is a woman who
will always be pleasant in memory. Her unaffected grace, her kindliness,
her good-humor, her talents, make her perpetually charming. She was
helped by her surroundings to be good, pleasant, and clever; and she
will always keep her place as one of the most attractive figures in the
circle which was formed by Johnson, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Fanny
Burney, and others scarcely less conspicuous. But Mrs. Piozzi, whom the
world frowned upon, whom the wits jeered at, and society neglected,
whose friends nobody now knows, will be best remembered and best liked
as having once been Mrs. Thrale. There is no great charge against her;
she was more sinned against than sinning; she was only weak and foolish,
only degenerated from her first excellence. And even in her old age some
traits of her youthful charms remain, and, seeing these, we regard
her with a tender compassion, and remember of her only the bright
helpfulness and freshness of her younger days, when Johnson "loved her,
esteemed her, reverenced her, and thought her the first of womankind."

* * * * *

THE NIGER, AND ITS EXPLORERS.

A century ago, the interior of Africa was a sealed book to the civilized
world. Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, had been noticed in Holy Writ;
the Nile with Thebes and Memphis on its banks, and a ship-canal to
the Red Sea with triremes on its surface, had not escaped the eye of
Herodotus: but the countries which gave birth to Queen and River were
alike unknown. The sunny fountains, the golden sands, the palmy plains
of Africa were to be traced in the verses of the poet; but he dealt
neither in latitude nor longitude. The maps presented a _terra
incognita_, or sterile mountains, where modern travellers have found
rivers, lakes, and alluvial basins,--or exhibited barren wastes, where
recent discoveries find rich meadows annually flowed, studded with
walled towns and cities, enlivened by herds of cattle, or cultivated in
plantations of maize and cotton.

Although the northern coast of Africa had once been the granary of
Carthage and Rome, cultivation had receded, and the corn-ship of
antiquity had given place to the felucca of the corsair, preying upon
the commerce of Europe. A few caravans, laden with a little ivory and
gold-dust or a few packages of drugs and spices, crept across the
Desert, and the slave-trade principally, if not alone, drew to Africa
the attention of civilized nations. Egypt, Tripoli and Tunis, Turkey and
the Spanish Provinces, the West India Isles and the Southern States,
knew it as the mart where human beings were bought and sold; and
Christians were reconciled to the traffic by the hope that it might
contribute to the moral, if not physical, welfare of the captive, by his
removal to a more civilized region.

During the last three centuries, millions of Africans have perished
either on their way to slavery or in exhausting toil under a tropical
sun; and the flag of England has been the most prominent in this
demoralizing traffic. But it is due to England to say, that, since she
withdrew from it, she has aimed to atone for the past by a noble
and persevering devotion to the improvement of Africa. By repeated
expeditions, by missions, treaties, colonies, and incentives to
commerce, she has spread her light over the interior, and is now
recognized both by the tribes of the Desert and by civilized nations as
the great protector of Africa, and both geography and commerce owe to
her most of their advances on the African continent.

So little was known of Africa, that, when Mungo Park made his report, in
1798, of the discovery of the Niger, and described large cities on its
banks, and vessels of fifty tons burden navigating its waters, the world
was incredulous; and his subsequent fate threw a cloud over the subject
which was not entirely dispelled until his course was traced and his
statements verified by modern travellers.

The route of Dr. Park was from the west coast, near Sierra Leone, to the
upper branches of the Niger. On his second expedition he took with him
a detachment of British soldiers, and a number of civilians, fresh from
England, none of whom survived him. It appears from his journal that his
men followed the foot-paths of the natives, slept in the open air, were
exposed to the dews at night, and were overtaken by the rainy season
before they embarked upon the Niger. Unacclimated, with no proper means
of conveyance, no suitable clothing, and no precautions against
the fever of the country, they nearly all became victims to their
indiscretions. Park, however, at length launched his schooner on the
Niger, passed the city of Timbuctoo, and, with two or three Englishmen,
followed the river more than a thousand miles to Boussa. Reaching the
rapids at this point in a low stage of the water, he was so indiscreet
as to fire on the natives, and was drowned in his attempt to escape from
them; but his fate remained in uncertainty for eighteen years.

The long struggle with Napoleon, the fearful loss of life which attended
the journey of Park, and the doubts as to his fate, checked for many
years the exploration of Africa. In 1821, a third attempt to explore
the Niger was made by a Major Laing, who failed in his efforts to reach
Timbuctoo, and fell a victim to Mahometan intolerance.

In 1822, a new effort was made by England to reach the interior, and
Messrs. Denham and Clapperton joined the caravan from Tripoli, and
crossed the Desert to the Soudan. They explored the country to the ninth
degree of north latitude, found large Negro and Mahometan states in the
interior, and visited Saccatoo, Kano, Murfeia, Tangalra, and other large
towns, some of which contained twenty or thirty thousand people.

In their journal we find a vivid sketch of a Negro army marching from
Bornou to the South, with horsemen in coats-of-mail, as in the days of
chivalry, and armed, as in those days, with lances and bows and arrows.
A glowing description is given of the ravages that attended their march.
When they entered an enemy's country, desolation marked their path,
houses and corn-fields were destroyed, all the full-grown males were put
to death, and the women and children reduced to servitude.

It was obvious that an incessant struggle was in progress between the
Mahometan and Negro states, and that the Mahometan faith and Arab blood
were slowly gaining an ascendency over the Negro even down to the
equator. The conquering tribes, by intermarriage with the females,
were gradually changing the race, and introducing greater energy and
intelligence; and the mixed races have exhibited great proficiency in
various branches of manufacture. The invaders took with them large herds
of cattle, and pursued a pastoral life, leaving the culture of the land
principally to the Negro.

In 1825 Clapperton made his second expedition to the interior,
accompanied by Richard Lander. In this journey the adventurous
travellers landed at Badagry, and crossed through Yarriba to the Niger.
On their way they spent several days at Katunga, the capital of Yarriba,
a city so extensive that one of its streets is described as five miles
in length. The town of Koofo, with twenty thousand inhabitants, as also
large cotton-plantations, are mentioned by these travellers; and some
idea of the territory they explored may be formed from the following
extract from their narrative:--

"The further we penetrate into the country, the more dense we find the
population to be, and civilization becomes at every step more strikingly
apparent. Large towns, at a distance of only a few miles from each
other, we were informed, lay on all sides of us, the inhabitants of
which pay the greatest respect to the laws, and live under a regular
form of government."

It is to this fertile, populous, and peaceful region of the interior
that the most successful efforts of the English missionaries have been
of late directed.

In this expedition, Captain Clapperton died of the fever of the country.
His faithful servant, Lander, after publishing his journal, returned to
Africa, in 1830, with his brother, landed at Badagry, and again crossed
the country to the Niger.

At Boussa, they obtained the first authentic information of the death of
Park, and recovered his gun, robe, and other relics. Here, embarking in
canoes, they ascended the river through its rapids to Yaouri, and
thence traced it to the sea in the Bight of Benin. On their way, they
discovered the Benue, which joins the Niger two hundred and seventy
miles from the ocean, with a volume of water and a width nearly equal to
its own. They encountered a large number of canoes, nearly fifty feet
in length, armed in some cases with a brass six-pounder at the bow, and
each manned by sixty or seventy men actively engaged in the slave-trade.
Forty of these canoes were found together at Eboe, near the mouth of the
Niger.

During the interval between the two expeditions of Lander to trace the
course of this mysterious river, France was exploring its upper waters.

In 1827, Rene Caillie, a Frenchman, adopting the disguise of a
Mahometan, left the western coast at Kakundy, a few miles north of
Sierra Leone, and crossed the intervening highlands to the affluents of
the Niger, which he struck within two hundred and fifty miles of the
coast.

He first came to the Tankesso, a rapid stream flowing into the Niger
just below its cascades, and noticed here a mountain of pale pink quartz
in regular strata of eighteen inches in thickness, a few miles below
which the river flows in a wide and tranquil stream through extensive
plains, which it fertilizes by its inundations. One hundred miles below,
at Boure, were rich gold mines within twenty miles of the Niger. In the
dry season, he found its waters very cold and waist-deep.

Caillie travelled by narrow paths impervious to horses or carriages, and
with a party of natives bearing merchandise on their heads. His route
was through a country gradually ascending and occasionally mountainous,
but fertile in the utmost degree, and watered by numerous streams and
rivulets which kept the verdure constantly fresh, with delightful plains
that required only the labor of the husbandman to produce everything
necessary for human life.

Proceeding westward, he reached the main Niger, which he found, at
the close of the dry season, and before it had received its principal
tributaries, nine feet deep and nine hundred feet in width, with a
velocity of two and a half miles an hour.

To this point, where the river becomes navigable for steamers, a common
road or railway of three hundred miles in length might be easily
constructed from Sierra Leone; and it is a little surprising that Great
Britain, with her solicitude to reach the interior, should not have been
tempted by the fertility, gold mines, and navigable waters in the rear
of Sierra Leone, so well pictured by Caillie, to open at least a common
highway to the Niger, an enterprise which might be effected for fifty
thousand pounds. Although this may be so easily accomplished, the
principal route to the interior of Africa is still the caravan track
from Tripoli through the Desert, requiring three months by a hazardous
and most fatiguing journey of fifteen hundred miles. The first movement
for a road to the interior has been recently made in Yarriba, by T.J.
Bowen, the American Baptist missionary, who pronounces it to be the
prerequisite to civilization and Christianity.

Caillie readied the Niger in May, just as the rainy reason commenced,
but, finding no facilities for descending the stream, he proceeded to
the southwest, crossed many of its affluents, traversed a rich country,
and, having exposed himself to the fever and met with many detentions,
finally embarked in the succeeding March at Djenne, in a vessel of
seventy tons burden, for Timbuctoo. He describes this vessel as one
hundred feet in length, fourteen feet broad, and drawing seven feet
of water. It was laden with rice, millet, and cotton, and manned by
twenty-one men, who propelled the frail bark by poles and paddles. With
a flotilla of sixty of these vessels he descended the Niger several
hundred miles to Timbuctoo. He speaks of the river as varying from half
to three-fourths of a mile in width, annually overflowing its banks and
irrigating a large basin generally destitute of trees. After paying toll
to the Tasaareks, a Moorish tribe, on the way, and losing one of the
flotilla, he landed safely at Timbuctoo, and probably was the first
European who visited that remote city, although Adams, an American
sailor wrecked on the coast, claims to have been carried there before as
a captive.

From the narratives of Park, Clapperton, Lander, and Caillie, confirmed
by Bairkie and Barth, the latter of whom explored the banks of the Niger
from Timbuctoo to Boussa, it has been ascertained to be a noble stream,
navigable for nearly twenty-five hundred miles, with an average width
of more than half a mile, and an average depth of three fathoms,
--comparing favorably with our own Mississippi. There appears to be but
one portion of the stream difficult for navigation, and that is the
portion from Yaouri to Lagaba, a distance of eighty miles. In this space
are several reefs and ledges, mostly bare at low water, and the river is
narrowed in width by mountains on either side; but in the wet season it
overflows its banks at this point, and is then navigated by the larger
class of canoes. There can be little doubt that it is susceptible of
navigation above and below by the largest class of river steamers, and
that the rapids themselves may in the higher stages of water be ascended
by the American high-pressure steamers which navigate our Western
rivers, drawing, as they do in low stages of the Ohio and Missouri, but
sixteen to eighteen inches.

As soon as it was ascertained that the Niger reached the ocean in the
Bight of Benin, and that its upper waters had been navigated by Caillie
and Park, a private association, aided by the British government, fitted
out a brig and several steamers, with a large party of scientific men,
who, in 1833, entered the Niger from the sea.

Great Britain, though enterprising and persevering, is slow in adapting
means to ends, and made a series of mistakes in her successive
expeditions, which might have been avoided, if she would have
condescended to profit by the experience of her children on this side of
the Atlantic.

The expedition of 1833 was deficient in many things. The power and speed
of the steamers were insufficient, their draught of water too great, and
they were so long delayed in their outfit and in their sea-voyage that
they found the river falling, and were detained by shoals and sand-bars.
The accommodations were unsuitable; and the men, exposed to a bad
atmosphere among the mangroves at the mouth of the river, and confined
in the holds of the vessels, were attacked by fever, and but ten of them
survived. The expedition, however, succeeded in reaching Rabba, on the
Niger, five hundred miles from the sea, ascended the Benue, eighty miles
above the confluence, and charts were made and soundings taken for the
distance explored.

In 1842 the British government made a new effort to explore the Niger,
and built for that purpose three iron steamers, the Wilberforce, Albert,
and Soudan, vessels of one hundred to one hundred and thirty-nine feet
in length. The error committed in the first expedition, of too great
draught, was avoided; but the steamers had so little power and keel that
their voyage to the Niger was both tedious and hazardous, and their
speed was found insufficient to make more than three knots per hour
against the current of the river. Arriving on the coast late in the
season, they were unable to ascend above the points already explored,
and the officers and men, suffering from the tedious navigation, close
cabins, and effluvia from the falling river, lost one-fourth of their
number by fever, while the African Kroomen, accustomed to the climate
and sleeping on the open deck, enjoyed perfect health. It was the
intention of government to establish a model farm and mission at the
confluence of the Niger and Benue; but the officers, discouraged by
sickness, abandoned their original purpose, and the expedition proved
another failure, involving a loss of at least sixty thousand pounds.

After the lapse of twelve years, it was ascertained that private
steamers and sailing vessels were resorting to the Niger, and that an
active trade was springing up in palm-oil, the trees producing which
fringe the banks of the river for some hundreds of miles from the sea;
and in 1853, a Liverpool merchant, McGregor Laird, who had accompanied
the former expedition, fitted out, with the aid of government, the
Pleiad steamer for a voyage up the Niger.

One would imagine that by this time the British government would have
corrected their former errors; and a part were corrected. The speed of
this steamer surpassed that of her predecessors, and her draught did not
exceed five feet. She was well provided with officers, and a crew of
native Kroomen from the coast; and she was supplied with ample stores
of quinine. But, singular as it may appear, this steamer, destined, to
ascend the great rivers up which the former expedition found a strong
breeze flowing daily, was not furnished with a _sail_; and although the
banks of the Niger were lined with forest-trees, and the supply of coal
was sufficient for a few days only, not a single _axe_ or _saw_ was
provided for cutting wood, and the Kroomen hired from the coast were
compelled to trim off with shingle-hatchets nearly all the fuel used
in ascending the river,--and in descending, the steamer was obliged to
drift down with the current. Moreover, she was but one hundred feet
in length, with an engine and boiler occupying thirty feet of her
bold,--thus leaving but thirty-five feet at each end for officers, men,
and stores. Neither state-room, cabin, nor awning was provided on deck
to shelter the crew from an African sun.

With all these deficiencies, however, they achieved a partial triumph.
Entering the river in July, they ascended the southern branch, now
known as the Benue, for a distance of seven hundred miles from the sea,
reaching Adamawa, a Mahometan state of the Soudan. On the fifteenth of
August they encountered the rise of waters, and found the Benue nearly a
mile in width and from one to three fathoms in depth. They observed it
overflowing its banks for miles and irrigatin extensive and fertile
plains to the depth of several feet, and saw reason to believe that this
river, which flows westerly from the interior, may be navigated at least
one thousand miles from the sea. As Dr. Barth visited it at a city
several hundred miles above the point reached by the Pleiad, and found
it flowing with a wide and deep current, it may be regarded as the
gateway into the interior of Africa.

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