The Lake Regions of Central Africa. A record of modern discovery ... With ... illustrations

Front matter

THE "LADY ALICE" SHOOTING THE RAPIDS. Page 184. THE LAKE REGIONS OF ■**■ CENTRAL AFRICA. J=L JSitsorb of XHoslwt By fOHN GEDDIE. WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS. bunion: T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW. EDINBURGH; AND NEW TOBK. l88l. <M 0 It t E It t s. INTKODUCTOKY AND HISTORICAL, ... ... ... ... 9 PART FIRST. THE NILE. I. THE SECRET OF THE NILE, ... ... ... ... 22 II. THE WHITE NILE AND THE ALBERT NYANZA, ... ... 37 III. A VOYAGE ON THE VICTORIA NYANZA, ... ... ... 54 IV. UGANDA AND KING MTESA, ... ... ... ... 74 V. THE ULTIMATE NILE SOURCES, ... ... ... ... 96 PART SECOND. THE CONGO. I. TANGANYIKA, ... ... ... ... ... ... 115 II. THE LUALABA LAKES, • ... ... ... ... ... 138 III. CATARACTS AND CANNIBALS, ... ... ... ... 166 IV. THE WATER-PARTING OF THE CONGO, ... ... ... CONTENTS. PART THIRD.

THE ZAMBESI. I. FROM LAKE DILOLO TO LAKE NGAMI, ... ... ... 206 II. THE VICTORIA FALLS AND THE LOWER. ZAMBESI, ... ... 231 III. THE SHIRE AND LAKE NYASSA, ... ... ... ... "J&x&i of sEIIttstrattotts. the "lady alice" SHOOTING the rapids, ., .. Frontispiece CARAVAN CROSSING THE NUBIAN DESERT, .. ,. .. ..12 KOROSKO, THE STARTING -PLACE FOR THE DESERT, .. .. .- 30 SIR SAMUEL AND LADY BAKER ON THE MARCH, .. .. ..30 SCENE ON THE ATBARA, . . . . . . . . . . 34 MADEMOISELLE TINNE, .. .. .. ,. ... ..38 SWAMPS OF THE WHITE NILE, . . . . . . . . 43 PREPARATIONS FOR A START, .. .. .. .. ..47 A ROYAL PROGRESS, .. .. .. .. .. ..50 THE MURCHISON FALLS, . . . . . . . . - . 53 STANLEY ON THE MARCH, .. .. ,, .. ..60 RUBAGA, KING MTESA'S CAPITAL, . . . . . . . . 79 OUTLET OF THE YICTORIA NYANZA, . . ' . . . . . . 105 SIR SAMUEL BAKER SHOOTING A RHINOCEROS, . . - . . . . 112 EMBARKING AT ZANZIBAR, .. .. .. * ■ •• H7 LANDSCAPE IN USAGARA, .. .. - *■ •■ ■• 117 BURTON AND SPEKE ON TANGANYIKA, .. .. •■ •■ 121 LIVINGSTONE AND STANLEY ON TANGANYIKA, .. .. .. 125 THE " BETSY" ON TANGANYIKA, .. .. •• ■* ■ •• 12?

A SOKO HUNT, . . . . . . ■ - • ■ ■ ■ . . 150 CROSSING A SPONGE, .. .J .. •• ■■ ■■ 151 ASSEMBLING TO MARKET, NYANGWE, .. •• •• •■ 158 1 'iQ MARKET IN MANYUEMA, .. .. . ■ •• •■ " loa ATTACK BY THE ARUWIMI CANNIBALS, .. •• •• ..178 A NYAM-NYAM VILLAGE, .. .. .. •• '• •• DEATH OF FRANK POCOCK, .. .. ■ • ■■ 187 A WEIR BRIDGE, .. .. -■" »■ ■■ ■• *93 GAME ON THE ZAMBESI, .. .. •• • - •■ •■ 215 VICTORIA FALLS, .. ■■ •• •• •• ■ ■ CHARGED BY A BUFFALO, .. .. • • •■ ■■ 242 THE DENIZENS OF THE SWAMP, .. . . . . ■• ■• 250 THE SLAVE-HUNTER AND HIS VICTIMS, .. .. •■ -• LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. Entrobuctcni attb Distorted. *' Pistol. A foutra for the world and worldlings base ! I speak of Africa and golden joys." S Henry IV. FRICA is the continent with which man — civilized man — has had perhaps the longest acquaintance, and concerning which he still knows least.

Chapter I. The Secret Of The Nile

" When geographers on Afric maps With savage pictures filled the gaps , O'er uninhabitable downs Placed elephants instead of towns." Swift. OME thirty years ago the modern world was startled and gratified with its first glimpse at the Lake Region of equatorial Africa. Pigafetta's map was still covered with the thick dust of centuries ; it had to be " discovered " like the lakes themselves. Or, if any one in these days had glanced at its wild com plication of inland seas and lake-like rivers, he would have been vastly amused. The more he knew, or thought he knew, of geography, the louder he would have laughed. The maps which our fathers used at school showed as a rule a great blank occupying the interior of Africa, from the Abyssinian mountains to the Orange River, and from the coast ranges on the west side to the corresponding face of the table-land FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE CENTRAL LAKES. on the east.

No geographer had soiled the pure white expanse with his lines and figures ; it was the happy hunting-grounds of conjecture and fancy. The Zambesi and the mighty Congo itself were represented as short stumps of rivers, with perhaps a dotted prolongation into the interior, drawn accord ing to the geographer's fancy. A couple of native traders — the Pombeiros — had, indeed, early in the present century, passed from the Portuguese colony of Angola to the eastern side of the continent, and told how, on their journey, they had crossed a hun dred rivers, visited the courts of powerful negro kings, and traversed countries where the inhabi tants had made considerable progress in arts and industry. Their story, like that of other pioneers, was generally discredited, and themselves and their stores of information treated with contemptuous neglect.

But about thirty years ago authentic intelligence began to be received of the existence of great lakes in the interior. On the 1st of August 1849 Living stone, Oswell, and Murray, after weary marching across the Kalihari Desert, stood on the margin of Lake Ngami, the most southerly and the first discovered of the great chain of equatorial lakes. As we shall often have occasion to notice, there is no sight so animating and at the same time so tantalizing to the traveller through unknown countries as the sudden glimpse of a grand expanse of water stretching away to the horizon. He expected to find dry land, and, lo ! an apparently illimitable sea bars THE "MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON." his further journey, and warns him that he must return. But he has made a discovery worth that of scores of nameless rivers and unpronounceable tribes.

The fancy is excited with the prospect of vague and almost limitless possibilities, and speculation and con jecture become violently active. The discoverer is drawn back to complete his work, and a score of others plunge into the unexplored to share in his fame. From the discovery of Ngami probably may be dated the revival of modern curiosity in the secrets of the African continent. Rumours were rife in the Portuguese colonies of the existence of a large lake to the north of the Zambesi, known as Maravi, or Nyassa. Its outflow was unknown, and a favourite theory was that it belonged to the system of the Nile, and was part of a long chain of reservoirs from which the river of Egypt drew its exhaustless store of water. Only the Nile, said these speculators, who, like all their contemporaries, had formed a most inadequate idea of the volume and character of the other two great streams of Central Africa, was worthy of such a magnificent gathering -ground.

There were others who believed they confuted this view by pointing to the " Mountains of the Moon." This was a venerable geographical fiction which, like a huge caterpillar, had sprawled for centuries across the breadth of Africa, somewhere about the neigh bourhood of the equator. Nobody had penetrated their mysterious recesses, or could even say he had sighted their peaks on the horizon , but there lay the "fountains of the Nile," according to Ptolemy and AN ANTIQUE HOAX. 25 other ancient geographers, whose authority on this point, if it could be questioned, at least could not be contradicted. There is reason to believe that in this story of the Nile fountains, first told by Herodotus, on the authority of the " Secretary of Minerva at Sais," survives a venerable practical joke played by a party of facetious Egyptian priests on the geog rapher more than two thousand three hundred years ago.

This worthy but credulous old Greek gentleman visited the land of the Pharaohs, then a great seat of learning and art, and the scholarly ecclesiastics naturally paid their distinguished visitor a good deal of attention, pointing out to him with just national pride the vast monuments of Egyptian industry and ingenuity, whose ruins are still the astonishment of the world. At length the stranger put a "poser." "Whence comes this great flood that issues from the desert where there is neither rainfall nor running stream except itself ? and what is the secret of that period ical rise in its waters by which Egypt is kept con tinually green and fertile ? " The Egyptian priests of 450 B.C. could no more answer than could the Egyptians of last generation ; but they had observed how ready their visitor was to produce his tablets, and the air of complete sincerity with which he jotted down in them the most astounding particulars; so, winking slyly to one another, they told him the cock-and-bull story of the "two conical hills, named Crophi and Mophi," midway between which were " the unfathomable fountains of the Nile, half the water running northward into Egypt, and half THE SEARCH FOR THE NILE FOUNTAINS. southward into Ethiopia."

No doubt when his back was turned the rogues poked one another in the ribs — if that was one of the fashions in which an ancient Egyptian testified his delight in the arts of deceit — and chuckled at the manner in which the representative of this new-fangled Greek culture and civilization had been befooled. It is only justice to Herodotus to say, however, that he seems more than half to suspect that his informants were amusing themselves at his expense. This piece of ancient Egyptian pleasantry repre sents the only positive statement which we pos sessed regarding the sources of the White Nile down to 1861, when Speke and Grant coming from the south, and Baker following the valley of the river towards the equator, almost simul taneously solved the mystery of its flow. The story too has its tragic side ; for, as we shall see, poor Livingstone, pinning his faith resolutely by Herod otus, and believing that he had discovered the veritable fountains of the Nile and Mountains of the Moon far away to the south in the water-shed between the Congo and Zambesi, turned his back on the glimpse of home and country which the sight of Stanley afforded him, and followed this Will-o'-the wisp into the swamps of the Bangweolo, to meet his lonely and lingering death.

In Ptolemy's time, six hundred years after Herodotus, some genuine information regarding the Nile sources must have filtered through to Egypt ; for he tells us that the great river takes its rise, some ten degrees south of the equator, CONQUERORS AND DISCOVERERS. 27 in many streams that converge into two lakes, situated east and west of each other, from which issue two rivers that join and form the Nile. The unravelling of the problem of the Nile has been a favourite dream of the conquerors of Egypt since and probably long before Homer sang of its "heaven-descended stream," whose mythical head waters were a favourite haunt of Jove himself when the king of the celestials wished to revel and dis port himself in absolute seclusion from the children of men. In the clays especially when cultivation and a settled population extended far to the south of their present limits, and a powerful state flourished at Meroe, near the junction of the White and Blue Niles, the tramp of armed hosts on the march for the mythical " fountains " has often resounded deep into the African interior.

Sesostris, the first king who patronized map-making, made attempts to discover these springs. Alexander of Macedon, Cambyses the Persian, and the Roman Cæsars were inspired with the same wish. We are told by Lucan that Julius Cæsar said he would give up civil war could he but look on the sources of the Nile; and Nero despatched a party of centurions, who returned with wonderful stories of cataracts and marshes that compelled them to return. The measure of success indeed that attended these renowned warriors and hectoring heroes was poor in proportion to the vast means they set in motion to gain it. Their first motive was plunder and conquest, and the long trains of laden camels and captives that followed ISMAIL PASHA. their returning march carried away few spoils of science. The idea of the solitary explorer, with his life in his hand and goodwill towards man in his heart, encountering all the perils and privations of African travel for pure love of knowledge, is wholly a modern conception : and it is with modern discovery we have to deal.

Something must be said, however, of one remarkable political personage, who strangely com bined the practice of the Oriental despot with the theories of the modern man of science, and to whom, perhaps, more than to any other man we are chiefly indebted for the complete solution of the mystery of the Nile. This is Ismail Pasha, the ex-viceroy of Egypt. Now that he has fallen hopelessly from his high estate, and has himself become a wanderer and an exile, his great services in the cause of discovery and international commerce may be heartily acknow ledged. His career has been a failure, relieved by brilliant flashes of success. If he has deserved ill of his people, to whom he owed his first duty, he has de served nobly of science. He has overwhelmed Egypt with debt, and ground its people into the dust with burdens heavier than they could bear ; but he introduced to them the light of Western knowledge ; he built the Suez Canal, and he sought out and an nexed the sources of the Nile.

For twenty years an army of European pioneers and explorers in the khe dive's pay or under his protection have been working their way southward, mapping out lakes and rivers, founding settlements, capturing slave-gangs, until now KOROSKO, THE STARTING- PLACE FOR THE DESERT. Page SO. A START FOR THE LAKES. 29 the whole extent of the Nile valley, from the equator to the Mediterranean, owns the sway of Egypt, and is open to the influences of commerce and civil ization. Every one has heard of the series of cata racts that obstruct the navigation of the river between Assouan in Upper Egypt and Khartoum in the Soudan. Among the many schemes under taken by Ismail Pasha in pursuance of his grand idea of making Egypt coextensive with the Nile was that of constructing a " ship incline " over the First Cataract, and running a line of railwav from Wady Haifa, near the Second Cataract, to Khartoum, and ultimately, perhaps, to the great lakes.

The great work, we believe, has actually been begun ; but considering the financial condition of Egypt it is not likely that any one will be privileged, during the present generation, to travel express in a comfortable railway carriage from Cairo to the margin of the Victoria Nyanza \ On the journey we are about to take we must, like the first pioneers, be content with a much more slow and laborious method of travelling, over a route still beset with numberless dangers. And on the very threshold we meet with the most formidable obstacle of all to an advance into the interior of Africa from the side of Egypt or the Red Sea — the great Nubian Desert. This dreary tract we must ci*oss, otherwise we can have no adequate idea of the hardships of the explorer's life, the difficulties and discouragements he meets with at the very outset, and the surprising con trast between his experiences in the earlier and in the (658) A CAMEL RIDE THROUGH THE DESERT. later stages of his progress.

His voyage up the Nile, under the ever clear and brilliant sky of Egypt, past the silent shapes of the temples, the sphinxes, the pyramids, and other gigantic monuments of a great past, and surrounded by the sights and sounds of Oriental life, has been a holiday trip to the traveller bound lake wards. When he places his foot on the desert sand, and transfers his guns, his tent, and other impedimenta of travel from the river-boat to the back of the " ship of the desert " which is to con vey him across the Great Bend of the Nile from Korosko to Abu Hammed, the stern reality of his task begins. The first day's sun, reflected with over powering force from the fantastic cliffs and flinty sand of the Korosko Desert, probably burns out of him any romance that he may have entertained in connection with Nubian travel ; before the nearest halting-place is reached, the early delightful sense of the novelty of riding on camel-back has given place to a hearty detestation of the uneasy motion, the slow progress, and the abominable temper of that over lauded brute.

Soon you are glad to abandon travel in the full blaze of day, -with its blistering glare from rock and sand, the pitiless sun overhead, and the furnace-like breath of the desert air, and you march at night, when the earth is growing cool again, under the great stars. Here and there, as you descend into the bed of a " wady," or dry water-course, the eye is relieved for an instant by a patch of green verdure, a frightened gazelle dashes away to the shelter of the nearest sand-hills, or a glimpse is caught SIR SAMUEL AND LADY BAKER ON THE MARCH. A NUBIAN THUNDERSTORM. 31 of a naked Arab youth tending his flock of goats ; for even the desert is not entirely void of plant and ani mal life, though every living thing seems to partake of the arid nature and to bear the dusty colours of the surrounding waste.

Even rain is not altogether unknown, and it is looked for at least once every winter season, though sometimes four years will pass without a fall. At these times the clouds that have drifted up from the distant Indian Ocean may be seen pitching their black tents about the summits of the mountain ridges that divide the Nile Valley from the Red Sea. The nomad Arab tribes, the only inhabitants of these thirsty hills, watch them with breathless hope. A north wind may blow during the night and drift them back whence they came. More likely they burst in thunderstorm — the whole of the storms of a season compressed into one furious onslaught of light ning and rain. The dry wadies of yesterday are roaring torrents by morning, bearing down to the Nile a tribute of water for one day in the year at least.

For one day also, or perhaps for some weeks, the earth and air are swept of their impurities, and the face of the desert begins to look fresh and verdant, as grass and plants spring up rapidly on every hand ; but then again the drought and the heat return, and nature withers more rapidly than it sprang to life. There are spots, however, well known to the Arab shepherd and camel-driver, where there are running water and green turf all the year round, or where, sheltered perhaps by the naked rocks of some deep A DESERT HALT. ravine, a little oasis of palm and tamarisk trees is to be found. These are the halting-places on the march — the stepping-stones by means of which alone this howling wilderness may be crossed. Sometimes the wells fail, or are poisoned, or a predatory band occupies the springs ; and then the unfortunate traveller has to face the peril of death from thirst or exhaus tion as the fainting caravan is hurried forward to the next halting-place.

In any case he is fervently thankful when the shining waters of the Nile come again into sight at Abu Hammed, and this doleful stage of his desert wandering is at a close. But the " secret of the Nile " seems, if possible, further from solution than ever ; and the stream whose shores he now follows for many weary marches is even a more mysterious phenomenon in Upper Nubia than it is as it flows under the walls of Cairo. In the twelve hundred miles of its lower course the Nile receives no tributary either on the right hand or on the left. It may be traced like a ribbon of silver with a narrow fringe of green, winding in great folds through a hot and thirsty desert, and under the full blaze of a sun that drinks its waters but returns nothing to it in the shape of rain ; and man also exacts a heavy tribute from it for the irrigation of the soil.

It is not till we reach the mouth of the Atbara — the Bahr-el - Azwab or Black Nile — that some light begins to break in as to the sources of this exhaustless store of water. Even the Atbara though in some respects the most important of the Nile tributaries, is but a dry river-bed during a great part of the year. Its THE BED OF THE " BLACK NILE." 33 sources ai*e away to the left, in the Abyssinian mountains, whose great buttresses now begin to cut the eastern horizon. There also are a " Lake Region " and " Nile sources," the discovery of which by Bruce about a century ago made a great talk in the world. But we must not step aside to climb that stupendous wall, or look upon the wonders beyond, great though the temptations are. Abyssinia is a country so unique in its physical features, its social life, its history, its religion, and its archæological remains, that it is small wonder that Bruce's account of his sojourn there was at first received with incredulity.

The thorough trustworthiness of his narrative has been established by the brothers D'Abbadie, Dr. Beke, De Cosson, and other recent explorers ; and James Bruce — " the greatest among us all," as Dr. Livingstone declares — has taken his proper place as one of the most accurate of observers, as well as most intrepid of travellers. It was Sir Samuel Baker, however, on his first jour ney up the Nile in the summer of 1861, who first adequately pointed out the part played by the Abys sinian streams in the phenomena of the Nile — a part scarcely, if any, inferior to that of the equatorial lakes themselves. Sir Samuel turned aside from his southward route and followed the dry bed of the Atbara, partly to enjoy the hunting of the " big game " — the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe, and lion — that abound in the thick jungles covering the lower slopes of these hills, and partly to watch the great annual flooding of the Nile tributaries.

The " Black Nile " was simply a vast furrow THE ATBARA IN FLOOD. thirty feet in depth and from four hundred yards to half a mile in breadth, ploughed through the heart of the desert, its edges marked by a thin growth of leafless mimosas and dome palms. The only trace of water was here and there a rush-fringed pool which the impetuous torrent had hollowed out in the sudden bends in the river's course, and where disported themselves hippopotami, crocodiles, and immense turtles, that had long ago adjusted their relations on a friendly footing on the discovery that none of them could do harm to the others. On the 23rd of June, the simoom was blowing with overpowering force; the heat was furnace-like, and the tents of the travellers were covered with several inches of drifted sand. Above, in the Abyssinian mountains, however, the lightnings were playing and the rains were falling as if the windows of heaven had been opened.

The monsoon had set in ; the rising streams were choking their narrow channels in their frantic rush to the lowlands, and were tearing away huge masses of the rich dark soil, to be spread a month hence over the flat plains of Egypt. The party encamped on the Atbai*a heard through the night a sound as if of distant thunder ; but it was " the roar of the approaching water." The traveller describes the scene best in his own words : — " On the morning of the 24th of June I stood on the banks of the noble Atbara river at break of day. Wonder of the desert ! Yesterday there was a barren sheet of glaring sand, with a fringe of withered bush and trees upon its borders that cut the yellow ex- SCENE ON THE ATBARA. THE CLUE TO THE MYSTERY. panse of desert. For days we had journeyed along the exhausted bed.

All nature, even in nature's pov erty, was most poor : no bush could boast a leaf, no tree could throw a shade ; crisp gums crackled upon the stems of the mimosas — the sap dried upon the burst bark, sprung with the withering heat of the simoom. In one night there was a mysterious change — wonders of the mighty Nile ! An army of water was hastening to the wasted river. There was no drop of rain, no thunder-cloud on the horizon to give hope — all had been dry and sultry ; dust and desolation yesterday, to-day a magnificent stream, five hun dred yards in width and from fifteen to twenty feet in depth, flowed through the dreary desert ! Bamboos and reeds, with trash of all kinds, hurry along the muddy waters. Where are all the crowded inhabitants of the pool ? The prison doors are open, the prisoners released, and rejoicing in the mighty stream of the Atbara."

We turn our back reluctantly on this majestic mountain mass, which, with its head capped with snow and its feet in the dust of the desert, stretches upwards through so many zones, and performs such wonderful functions. We have the clue to one part of the Nile mystery — its great periodical inundations, the source of its fertilizing slime. The Bahr-el-Azrek, the Blue Nile of Bruce, contributes, like the Atbara, though in a secondary degree, to the flood of the river and the fertility of Egypt, with this difference, that it brings down some water all the year round. At Khartoum we reach the junction between the THE MEETING OF THE WATERS. Blue and the White Nile, the frontier also of two strongly -contrasted physical regions, and the dividing line between barbarism and savagery. The secret that has still to be unveiled is the source of that un failing flow of water which, resisting the influences of absorption, evaporation, and irrigation, carries a life-giving stream through the heart of Egypt at all seasons of the year.

Chapter II. The White Nile And The Albert Nyanza

" We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea." — Ancient Mariner. EITHER civilization nor savagedom has much credit by their border-city. Khartoum has ingrafted all the vices of the one state of society on the squalor and misery of the other. A traveller sums up its attractions by the remark that " a more miserable, filthy, and unhealthy spot can hardly be imagined ; " and other visitors have heartily endorsed the opinion. Nevertheless it is an interesting place. Here, up to a comparatively recent date, was the " Threshold of the Unknown." It has been the starting-point of almost numberless Nile expeditions, since the days perhaps of the Pharaohs. Mehemet Ali, the first viceroy of Egypt, and grands ather of Ismail Pasha, got a little way to the south of it in his conquest of the Soudan in 1839.

He found the climate so un healthy that he established a penal settlement at Fazougli, a little distance up the White Nile, banish ment to which was regarded as equivalent to sen- (658) WHITE NILE EXPLORERS. tence of death. At the time of Linant's expedition nothing was known beyond the fourteenth degree of north latitude, or about a hundred miles south of Khartoum. The wilderness of fever -stricken marshes that line the White Nile long baffled the attempts of the most determined explorers to penetrate to the southward. At length " dry land " was reached again at Gondokoro, only five degrees from the equator. It in turn became an advanced posi tion of Egyptian authority, a centre of mission enterprise, a half-way house where the traveller rested and equipped himself for new discoveries. From the base of Gondokoro, Petherick pursued his researches into the condition of the negro races of the Upper Nile; the Italian traveller, Miani, penetrated far towards the south-west, into the countries occupied by the Nyam-Nyam tribes, that singular region of dwarfs and cannibals ; and Dr. Schwein furth, Colonel Long, and Mdlle. Tinne followed up the search with magnificent results.

Mdlle. Tinne", a brave Dutch lady, deserves special notice as having been perhaps the first European woman who en countered the terrible hardships and perils of the explorer's life in the cause of African discovery. She is far, however, from being the last. The wives of two of the greatest pioneers in the work — Mrs. Livingstone and Lady Baker — accompanied with a noble-minded resolution the steps of their husbands, the one along the banks of the Zambesi, and the other on the White Nile. Mdlle. Tinne" and Mrs. Livingstone paid with their lives for their devotion, MADEMOISELLE TINNE. Page 38. SLAVE-HUNTING ON THE NILE. 39 and are buried by the streams from whose waters they helped to raise the veil. Lady Baker has been more fortunate. Only a girl of seventeen when she rode by her husband's side from Gondokoro, she has lived to return to Europe from the inmost heart of Africa, and her name will be associated indissolubly with the two great events of recent African history — the discovery of the great lakes and the suppression of the slave traffic.