elegance, and accuracy. In the course of his perilous journey, by sea and land, Captain Franklin evinced a contempt of personal danger in the pursuit of his enterprise, and a degree of kind-heartedness to, and considera

tion for, those who accompanied him, that has rendered him equally the pride of his friends, and an honor to his country.

On the 19th of May, 1845, Sir John sailed from England in search of the North West Passage. He had two vessels, the Erebus and Terror; the crews, officers, and men numbered one hundred and thirty-eight. On

the 26th of July, sixty-eight days afterwards, they were seen by a whale ship, moored to an iceberg near the centre of Baffin's Bay. No special anxiety was entertained respecting them until the beginning of 1848, for

Franklin had intimated that the voyage would probably continue for three years, and that they might be the first to announce their own return. But as month after month passed away without any tidings, an anxious

and painful sympathy sprung up in the public mind, and the British government determined that a search for the missing vessels should be made, in three different quarters, by three separate expeditions fitted out for that purpose.

One quarter, the region known as Boothia, was beyond the scope of

these expeditions, and Lady Franklin determined to organize an expedition to explore that region. She appropriated all the means under her control, and a subscription supplied the deficiency. The Prince Albert, a

vessel of ninety tons burthen, was fitted out at Aberdeen, and Captair Forsyth, of the Royal Navy, offered his gratuitous services as commander. At about the same time, Mr. Henry Grinnell, a wealthy merchant of New York, fitted out, at his own cost, two vessels,-the Advance and the Rescue, and dispatched them to the Arctic Seas to aid in the search for Sir John. An exceedingly interesting narrative of the voyage has been published by Dr. Kane, the surgeon, naturalist and journalist of the expedition.

Time passed on, and all the vessels of the various expeditions returned to port without any tidings of the lost ones. In May, 1853, Mr. Grinnell again fitted out the Advance for the purpose of continuing the search, if necessary, for two years. She had a company of seventeen persons, under the command of Dr. Kane. She has been absent for over two years, and fears are entertained for the safety of her noble commander and his brave companions.

Subsequent to the departure of the Advance, the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew was ascertained. They had perished of hunger and hardships, in attempting to reach the settlements of the Hudson's Bay Company, by an overland journey from the Arctic Seas. Relics of the ill-starred voyagers were discovered by some agents of the company in the possession of the Esquimaux Indians. These relics consisted of philosophical instruments, watches, rings, spoons, etc., bearing the initials of Sir John and his companions. These had been picked up by the Indians at the place where the navigators had so miserably perished.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA.-PARK DENHAM, CLAPPERTON, LANDER, AND

OTHERS.

The vast continent of Africa, measuring 5000 miles in length, and about 4700 in its greatest breadth, and the area of which is calculated at 12,000,000 square miles, or nearly one-fourth of the entire land area of the globe, has presented greater obstacles to human enterprise than any other equal portion of the earth's surface. The peculiar physical condition of Africa has operated as one cause of her isolation from the rest of the world. The other portions of our earth situated under the tropics consist generally either of sea, or of narrow peninsular tracts of land, the clusters of islands blown upon the sea-breeze. Africa, on the other hand, presents scarcely one gulf or sea-break in its vast outline. A consequence of this compact geographical shape of a continent, the greater part of which is within the torrid zone, is its subjection, throughout its entire extent, to the unmitigated influence of the sun's heat. All that is noxious in climate we are accustomed to associate with Africa. Here stretching qut into a boundless desert, where for days the traveler toils amid burning sands under a stifling sky-there covered with dense and swampy jungle, breathing out pestilence, and teeming with all the repulsive forms of animal life, the African continent seems to defy the encroachments of European civilization. And although, probably, our ideas of these African horrors will be modified by more accurate knowledge, enough seems ascertained to prove that the lying open of interior Africa to the general flood of human influence will be among the last achievements of the exploring spirit of our race.

Notwithstanding the difficulties which lie in the way, Africa has at all

times been an object of curiosity and interest to the inhabitants of the civilized parts of the earth; and scientific zeal, the desire of extending traffic, and even the mere thirst for adventure, have prompted many expeditions for the purpose of exploring its coast and making discoveries in its interior. The ancients appear to have acquired much knowledge of Africa, which was afterwards lost, and had to be reäcquired by the moderns for themselves. The African coasts of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were not only familiar to the ancient geographers, but were inhabited by populations which performed a conspicuous part in the general affairs of the world, and ranked high in the scale of civilization-the Egyptians, Carthaginians, etc. Nor, if we may believe the evidence which exists in favor of the accounts of the circumnavigation of Africa by ancient navigators, were the other coasts of the continent-those, namely, which were washed by the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean-unvisited by northern ships. Regarding the interior of Africa, too, the knowledge possessed by the ancients, although very meagre in itself, was nearly as definite as that possessed by their modern descendants, until within a comparatively recent period. As far as the northern borders of the Great Desert, their own personal observation might be said to extend; and respecting the wandering tribes of black and savage people living farther to the south, they had received many vague notices. The Nile being one of the bestknown rivers of the ancient world, its origin and course were matters of great interest, and the African geography of the ancients, in general, may be said to consist of speculations respecting this extraordinary river. The first mention made of the other great African river, the Niger, is by Ptolemy, who lived seventy years after Christ. Ptolemy believed that this river discharged itself ultimately into the Nile; others, however, did not admit this conclusion, and acknowledged that the real course of the Niger was a mystery.

Such are some of the more prominent points in the ancient geography of Africa. How wild and inacurate must have been the notion entertained respecting the shape and total extent of the African continent, may be judged from the fact, that one geographer describes it as an irregular figure of four sides, the south side running nearly parallel to the equator, but considerably to the north of it! Others, again, held forth the fearful picture of Central Africa as a vast burning plain, in which no green thing grew, and into which no living being could penetrate; and this hypothesis of an uninhabitable torrid zone became at length the generally received one.

The invasion of Africa by the Arab races in the seventh century wrought a great change in the condition of the northern half of that continent. Founding powerful states along the Mediterranean coasts, these enterprising Mohammedans, or Moors, as they were called, were able, by means of the camel, to effect a passage across the Desert which had baffled the ancients, and to hold intercourse with the negroes who lived on its southern border along the banks of the Niger and the shores of Lake Tchad. In some of the negro states the Arabs obtained a preponderance, and with others they carried on an influential and lucrative commerce. The consequence was a mixture of Moorish and negro blood among the inhabitants of the countries of Central Africa bordering on the Great Desert, as well as a general diffusion of certain scraps of the Mohammedan religion

among the negro tribes. Hence it is that, in the innermost recesses of interior Africa at the present day, we find the negroes partly professing Paganism, partly Mohammedanism, but all practicing ceremonies and superstitions in which we observe the Pagan spirit with a slight Mohammedan tincture.

It was not till the fifteenth century that the career of modern European discovery in Africa commenced. The Portuguese, leading the van of the nations of Europe in that great movement of maritime enterprise which constitutes so signal an epoch in the history of modern society, selected the western course of Africa as the most promising track along which to prosecute discovery; their intercourse with the Moors having made them aware that gold and other precious commodities were to be procured in that direction. In the year 1433, Cape Bojador was passed by a navigator called Gilianez; and others succeeding him, passed Cape Blanco, and, exploring the entire coast of the Desert, reached at length the fertile shores of Gambia and Guinea. The sudden bending inwards of the coast line at the Gulf of Guinea gave a new direction and a new impulse to the activity of the Portuguese. Having no definite ideas of the breadth of the African continent, they imagined that, by continuing their course eastward along the Gulf, they would arrive at the renowned country of the great Prester John, a fabulous personage, who was believed to reign with golden sway over an immense and rich territory, situated no one could tell where, but which some contended could be no other than Abyssinia. The Portuguese, while prosecuting their discoveries along the African coast, did not neglect means for establishing a commercial intercourse with those parts of the coast which they had already explored. Settlements or factories for the convenience of the trade in gold, ivory, gum, different kinds of timber, and eventually also in slaves, were founded at various points of the coast between Cape Verd and Biafra. Various missionary settlements were likewise founded for the dissemination of the Roman Catholic faith among the natives.

The chimera of Prester John was succeeded by the more rational hope of effecting a passage to India by the way of Southern Africa. This great feat, accordingly, was at length achieved by Vasco de Gama, who, in 1497, four years after the discovery of America by Columbus, persisted in his course to the south so far as to double the Cape of Good Hope, and point the way northward into the Indian Ocean. By his voyages and those of his successors, the eastern coast of Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope through the Mozambique Channel to the Red Sea, was soon defined as accurately as the western coast had been by the voyages of his predecessors; and thus the entire outline and shape of the African continent were at length made known. This great service to science and to the human race was rendered, it ought to be remarked, by the Portuguese, who may be said to have conducted the enterprise of the circumnavigation of Africa from its beginning to its end; and this is perhaps the greatest contribution which the Portuguese, as a nation, have made to the general fund of human knowledge.

The outline of Africa having thus been laid down on the maps, and the extent of its surface ascertained, the attention of discoverers was next turned to its interior. The efforts made by the Portuguese to explore Nigritia in search of Prester John have been already alluded to; but it