That This Should Have Been So May Seem Very Strange To Us Who Now
Have Been Told The Answer To
The riddle; for the upper waters of
this great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by
Herodotus,
Pliny and Ptolemy, and its mouths navigated continuously
along by the seaboard by trading vessels since the fifteenth
century, but they were not recognised as belonging to the Niger.
Some geographers held that the Senegal or the Gambia was its
outfall; others that it was the Zaire (Congo); others that it did
not come out on the West Coast at all, but got mixed up with the
Nile in the middle of the continent, and so on. Yet when you come
to know the swamps this is not so strange. You find on going up
what looks like a big river - say Forcados, two and a half miles wide
at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger. Before you are up it
far great, broad, business-like-looking river entrances open on
either side, showing wide rivers mangrove-walled, but two-thirds of
them are utter frauds which will ground you within half an hour of
your entering them. Some few of them do communicate with other main
channels to the great upper river, and others are main channels
themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other and
lead nowhere in particular, and you can't even get there because of
their shallowness. It is small wonder that the earlier navigators
did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had
to be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before
it commences to what we in Devonshire should call "squander itself
about" in all these channels.
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