ast 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
over