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
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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.

    17/68 (page 7)
    European that ever could boast of having ''trod on Kaffa ground”^—conduct to be fully appreciated by those alone who have travelled in Africa. However, leave Kaffa it appears lie did ; and after wading through the Godjeb and again traversing the hostile country of Djimraa-Kaka without hindrance from its monarch, we find him voluntarily, placing himself again in the power of the same tyrannic^ ruler of Enarea who had kept him so many months a prisoner before. And this second tmie he tells us he was detained by Abba Bogibo so long, th^ it was only by threatening measures oTretaliation on the part of [his] brother, who with a well-a^rmed troop was ready to arrest, in Godjam, until [his] return, all the Limmu [z. e. Enarea] traders,”2 that he at length succeeded in getting out of that princess hands. Unfortunately we have not been made acquainted with the precise dates of any of these extraordinary events. But an attentive examination of the traveller’s correspondence will pro¬ vide us with the means of determining very exactly the period within which they must all have taken place—these and others^ ^tbo, as will appear in the sequel, not less extraordinary. For, In'one of his letters, containing the results of various observa¬ tions made by him in Abessinia, he fixes the date at which he had already returned to Godjam from his Enhrea and Kaffa journey, by saying:—Ow the 9 th oj' Aprils 1844, I observed thesejtwq thermometers [wet-bulb and dry-bulb] at the height •y of one m^tre above the surface of the Abai or Blue Fiver, at the ford of A'muru.^’^ As, however, it was at or near the ford of Guderu, named _Melka-Furi, where the direct caravan road from Enarea to Baso market passes the river, that M. Arnauld d’Abbadie must have been encamped with his well-armed troop, ready to retaliate on the merchants of Abba Bogibo’s country for the detention of his brother; it might naturally have been expected that M. d’Abbadie’s first and most anxious thought would have been to relieve his brother from further anxiety on his account and enable him to strike his tents, and that he would consequently have hurried to him by the direct and shortest road by Melka Furi. Instead of which, the traveller seems to have quite fq^ gotten both that his brother was expecting him, and alsoIEat a straTghnihe is the shortest distance between two points. For we find him taking a circuitous route on His way back from Enarea, through the territories of unknown princes and tribes,