flows its banks at this point, and is then navigated by the larger
class of canoes. There can be little doubt that it is susceptible of
navigation above and below by the largest class of river steamers, and
that the rapids themselves may in the higher stages of water be ascended
by the American high-pressure steamers which navigate our Western
rivers, drawing, as they do in low stages of the Ohio and Missouri, but
sixteen to eighteen inches.

As soon as it was ascertained that the Niger reached the ocean in the
Bight of Benin, and that its upper waters had been navigated by Caillie
and Park, a private association, aided by the British government, fitted
out a brig and several steamers, with a large party of scientific men,
who, in 1833, entered the Niger from the sea.

Great Britain, though enterprising and persevering, is slow in adapting
means to ends, and made a series of mistakes in her successive
expeditions, which might have been avoided, if she would have
condescended to profit by the experience of her children on this side of
the Atlantic.

The expedition of 1833 was deficient in many things. The power and speed
of the steamers were insufficient, their draught of water too great, and
they were so long delayed in their outfit and in their sea-voyage that
they found the river falling, and were detained by shoals and sand-bars.
The accommodations were unsuitable; and the men, exposed to a bad
atmosphere among the mangroves at the mouth of the river, and confined
in the holds of the vessels, were attacked by fever, and but ten of them
survived. The expedition, however, succeeded in reaching Rabba, on the
Niger, five hundred miles from the sea, ascended the Benue, eighty miles
above the confluence, and charts were made and soundings taken for the
distance explored.

In 1842 the British government made a new effort to explore the Niger,
and built for that purpose three iron steamers, the Wilberforce, Albert,
and Soudan, vessels of one hundred to one hundred and thirty-nine feet
in length. The error committed in the first expedition, of too great
draught, was avoided; but the steamers had so little power and keel that
their voyage to the Niger was both tedious and hazardous, and their
speed was found insufficient to make more than three knots per hour
against the current of the river. Arriving on the coast late in the
season, they were unable to ascend above the points already explored,
and the officers and men, su