iscovered 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 le