part of the Sahara, near Cane Blanco. He was struck in an
extraordinary degree with the desolate aspect of the region. In
ascending the river, however, he was delighted with the brilliant
verdure of the banks, the majestic beauty of the trees, and the thick
impenetrable underwood. The natives received him hospitably, and he
was much struck by their strength and courage, decidedly surpassing
similar qualities in Europeans. He saw a moorish chief, called the
Kamalingo, who, mounting on horseback, and brandishing three javelins
and a cutlass, engaged a lion in single combat, and vanquished that
mighty king of the desert. Flat noses and thick lips, so remote from
his own ideas of the beautiful, were considered on the Senegal, as
forming the perfection of the human visage; nay, he even fancies that
they were produced by artificial means. Of actual discovery, little
transpired worthy of record in the travels of Jannequin, and his
enthusiasm became soon daunted by the perils which at every step
beset him.



CHAPTER III.

Nearly seventy years had elapsed, and the spirit of African discovery
had remained dormant, whilst in the mean time the remotest quarters
of the globe had been reached by British enterprise; the vast region
of Africa still remaining an unseemly blank in the map of the earth.
To a great and maritime nation as England then was, and to the cause
of the sciences in general, particularly that of geography, it was
considered as highly discreditable, that no step should be taken to
obtain a correct knowledge of the geographical situation of the
interior of Africa, from which continual reports arrived of the