An enquiry into M. Antoine d'Abbadie's journey to Kaffa, in the years 1843 and 1844, to discover the source of the Nile / [Charles T. Beke].

Charles Tilstone Beke

Date:: 1850

Credit: An enquiry into M. Antoine d'Abbadie's journey to Kaffa, in the years 1843 and 1844, to discover the source of the Nile / [Charles T. Beke]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$to have been ascertained not from oral information but from personal knowledge. 3. The errors and discrepancies in his recorded astronomical and geodetical observations, and the difficulties \^ich they present. 4. The c^re with which the first joiiniey to Enarea and Kaffa—the earlier and far more important of the two, and there¬ fore the more deserving of notice—has been since kept out of siglit; while the later and less important journey to Enarea alone has been brought prominently forward and made to supersede it. First Objection.—Insufficiency of Time. It was on the 6th of March, 1843, on my arrival at the town of Mahhdera Maiiam in Biegamidr, a province of Central Abessinia, on my return from the peninsula of Godjam where I had been resident upwards of fifteen months, that I met M. d’Abbadie, then on his way for the first time into Godjam to join his brother, who had been some time there. On the follow¬ ing morning he left Mahhdera Mariam for Godjam, taking the road by which I had just arrived. Of M. d’Abbadie’s movements during some time after his departure from Mahhdera Mariam on March 7th, 1843, cannot find any traces. But in a letter professing to have been written from Sakka in Enarea on the 16th of September of the /(, same year, he announced his arrival in that kingdom, and stated that the journey thither from the town of Yejubbi, in H the south of Godjam, near which town the great market of Baso is held, had occupied him “ more than two months.^^^ and that at the date of his letter he had been resident in Sakka nearly ^ two months more. The two periods together therefore may fairly be taken to be equal to four calendar .months; so that he must have commenced his journey from Yejubbi about the middle of May, and arrived at Sakka towards the end of July, 1843. For the present it is sufficient to bear in mind these two dates. On his second visit jtQ_En^reR,_ in 1845. M. d’Abbadie re¬ marked^ that it IS important for a traveller to take the precaution of obtaining an invitation from the king of that country ; “ as an invitation implies liberty to return,” and that monarch is ^GnTlie habit of retaining all strangers [who are] not merchants.” It is, however, not the less certain that on his ^ Ibid. p. 59.$