precisely twelve miles distant from the city; is it probable
that Leo, wishing to designate to his readers, in the former
passage, the exact position of Tombuctoo, by its distance
from some given point, should select for that purpose, not
the far-famed Niger itself, but an equally remote, a smaller,
and a nameless stream ? Surely not. There can hardly
be a doubt, that it is to the Niger, and to the same point of
the Niger, that he refers in both passages; that the translators,
by a very trifling mistake in the Arabic idiom, or by
a want of precision in their own, have given a different
colour to his meaning; and that the smaller stream, the
“ ramo del Niger,” and the “ fluviolum,” is really the La
Mar Zarah seen by Adams.
We have been led into a more detailed examination of
this part of the Narrative than we had at first anticipated ;
but the question is of considerable interest, not merely with
reference to the verification of Adams’s story, but as containing
in itself a probable solution of the mistakes and
doubts by which the real course of the Niger (from west to
east) was for so many ages obscured. If the La Mar Zarah
really communicates with the Niger, either at Kabra, or
through the Lake Dibbie, by a south-westerly course from
Tombuctoo, we have at once a probable explanation of the
origin of Leo’s mistake, (so ably exposed and corrected by
Major Rennell), in placing Ginea (Ganaj to the westward
of Tombuctoo. That Leo was never on the Niger itself is
sufficiently evident, for he states it to flow from east to
west; but knowing that the traders who embarked at
Tombuctoo for Ginea* proceeded, in the beginning of their
course, to the west or south-west with the stream, (which
would be the case on Adams’s river) he was probably thus
misled into a belief that the whole of the course, as well as
the general stream of the Niger, lay in that direction.
We shall here close these imperfect Remarks; in which
we have endeavoured to bring before the Reader such illustrations
as are to be collected from collateral sources, of the
most original, or most objectionable, of those points of
Adams’s story which are unsupported by direct external
evidence. We might have greatly multiplied our examples
of the indirect coincidences between Adams’s statements,
* Leo says, that the merchants of Tombuctoo sailed to Ginea during the
inundations of the Niger in the months of July, August, and September; which
seems to imply, that at other seasons there was not a continuous passage by
water. He also says in another place, that when the Niger rises, the waters flow
through certain canals to the city (Tombuctoo). As these passages when considered
together, seem to infer that the navigation of the river of Tombuctoo
(the La Mar Zarah) is obstructed by shallows during the dry season, they afford
^rounds for believing that Adams, when he saw that river (which was in the
dry season) may have had good reasons for doubting which way the stream
really ran.