The generation which has discovered the “Moabite Stone,” the ruins of Troy (Schliemann), and the key to the inscriptions of Etruria (Corssen), need not despair of further progress.  It has been well remarked that, whereas the course of modern exploration has generally been maritime, the ancients, whose means of navigation were less perfect, preferred travelling by land.  We are, doubtless, far better acquainted with the outlines of the African coast, and the immediately maritime region, than the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs.  But it is still doubtful whether their information respecting the interior did not surpass ours.  Eratosthenes, librarian of Alexandria (B.  C. 276-196) expresses correct notions concerning the upper course of the Nile; Marinus of Tyre[FN#13] had the advantage of borrowing from the pilot, Diogenes, who visited the Nile reservoirs of central inter-tropical Africa, and Ptolemy has been justified in certain important points by our latest explorations.

No trace of the Nzadi or Congo is to be found in the Pelusian geographer, whose furthest point is further north.  In the “Tabula Rotunda Rogeriana” of A. D. 1154 (Lelewel, No.  X.) two lakes are placed upon the equator, and the north-western discharges to the Atlantic the river Kauga or Kanga, which the learned Mr. Hogg suspected to be the Congo.  Marino Sanudo (1321), who has an idea of Guinea (Ganuya) and of Zanzibar (Zinziber), here bends Africa to the south-east, and inscribes, “Regio inhabitabilis propter calorem.”  Fra Mauro (1457) reduces “Ethiopia Occidentalis et Australis” to the minimum, and sheds the stream into the F. Xebe (Webbe or Galla-Somal River).  Martin von Behaim of Nurnberg (1492) in whose day Africa began to assume her present form, makes the Rio de Padron drain the western face of the Montes Lunae.  Diogo Ribera, chief pilot of the Indies under Charles V.  (Seville, 1529) further corrects the shape of the continent, and places the R. do Padrao north, and the Rio dos Boms Sinhaes (Zambeze) south of the Montes Lunae.  Mercator and Henry Hondt (1623) make the Zaire Lacus the northern part of the Zembre Lacus.  John Senex (circ. 1712) shows the “R.  Coango,” the later Quango, believed to be the great south-western fork of the Congo.  It is not a little peculiar that the last of the classics, Claudius Claudianus, an Alexandrian Christian withal, describes the Gir, or Girrhaeus, with peculiarly Congoese features.  In “De laud.  Stilicho.” (lib. i. 252) we have—­

“Gir, notissimus amnis
AEthiopum, simili mentitus gurgite Nilum.”

And again ("Eidyll. in Nilum,” 20): 

“Hunc bibit infrenis Garamas, domitorque ferarum
Girrhaeus, qui vasta colit sub rupibus antra,
Qui ramos ebeni, qui denies vellit eburnos.”

Here we find a Wady or torrent discharging into the Mediterranean, made equal to “Egypt’s heaven-descended stream;” caused to flow under great rocks, as the Niger was long believed to pass underground to the Nile, of which it was a western branch; and said to supply ebony, which is the characteristic not even of the Niger regions, but of the Zaire.[FN#14] A little of this peculiar and precious commodity is produced by Old Calabar, east of the Nigerian delta, and southwards it becomes common.