In Order To Elucidate The State Of Things, Which We Have Here Supposed, We Need Not Go Further Than To The History Of Europe In Our Own Days.

How often during the successful ravages of Buonaparte, that great Arab chieftain of Christendom, might we not have drawn from the experience of Madrid, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Moscow, the aptest illustration of these conjectures respecting Timbuctoo?

And an African traveller, if so improbable a personage may be imagined, who should have visited Europe in these conjunctures, might very naturally have reported to his countrymen at home, that Russia, Germany and Spain were but provinces of France, and that the common sovereign of all these countries resided sometimes in the Escurial, and sometimes in the Kremlin.

We have seen this state of things existing in Ludamar, to the west of Timbuctoo, where a negro population is subjected to the tyranny of the Arab chieftain Ali, between whom and his southern neighbours of Bambarra and Kaarta we find a continual struggle of aggression and self-defence; and the well-known character of the Arabs would lead us to expect a similar state of things along the whole frontier of the negro population. In the pauses of such a warfare, we should expect to find no intermission of the animosity or precautions of the antagonist parties. The Arab victorious would be ferocious and intolerant, even beyond his usual violence, and the Koran or the halter would probably be the alternatives, which he would offer to his negro guest; whilst the milder nature of the negro would be content with such measures of precaution and self-defence, as might appear sufficient to secure him from the return of the enemy, whom he had expelled, without excluding the peaceful trader; and, under the re-established power of the latter, we might expect to find at Timbuctoo precisely the same state of things as Adams describes to have existed in 1811.

The reserve, with which we have seen grounds for receiving the testimony of the natives of Africa, may reasonably accompany us in our further comparative examination of their accounts and those of Adams, respecting the population and external appearance of the city of Timbuctoo. We cannot give such latitude to our credulity as to confide in the statements of Sidi Hamet; nor do we place much reliance on the account of Caillie, who was the last European who may be said to have entered its walls. Notwithstanding, therefore, the alleged splendour of its court, the polish of its inhabitants, its civilized institutions, and other symptoms of refinement, which some modern accounts or speculations, founded on native reports, have taught us to look for, we are disposed to receive the humbler descriptions of Adams, as approaching with much greater probability to the truth. Let us, however, not be understood as rating too highly the value of a sailor's reports. They must of necessity be defective in a variety of ways. Many of the subjects upon which Adams was questioned, were evidently beyond the competency of such an individual fully to comprehend or satisfactorily to describe; and we must be content to reserve our final estimates of the morals, religion, civil polity, and learning, if the term may be allowed us, of the negroes of Timbuctoo, until we obtain more conclusive information than could possibly have been derived from so illiterate a man as Adams. A sufficiency, however, may be gathered from his story, to prepare us for a disappointment of the extravagant expectations, which have been indulged respecting this boasted city.

And here we may remark, that the relative rank of Timbuctoo amongst the cities of central Africa, and its present importance with reference to European objects, appear to us to be considerably overrated. The description of Leo, in the sixteenth century, may indeed lend a colour to the brilliant anticipations in which some sanguine minds have indulged on the same subjects in the nineteenth; but with reference to the commercial pursuits of Europeans, it seems to have been forgotten, that the very circumstance which has been the foundation of the importance of Timbuctoo to the traders of Barbary, and consequently of a great portion of its fame amongst us, its frontier situation on the verge of the desert, at the extreme northern limits of the negro population, will of necessity have a contrary operation now, since a shorter and securer channel for European enterprise into the central regions of Africa has been opened by the intrepidity and perseverance of Park, from the south-western shores of the Atlantic.

Independently of this consideration, there is great reason to believe that Timbuctoo has in reality declined of late from the wealth and consequence which it appears formerly to have enjoyed. The existence of such a state of things, as we have described, in the preceding pages, the oppositions of the Moors, the resistance of the negroes, the frequent change of masters, and the insecurity of property consequent upon these intestine struggles, would all lead directly and inevitably to this result. That they have led to it, may be collected from other sources than Adams. Even Park, to whom so brilliant a description of the city was given by some of his informants, was told by others that it was surpassed in opulence and size by Houssa, Walet, and probably by Jinnie. Several instances also occur in both his missions, which prove that a considerable trade from Barbary is carried on direct from the desert to Sego and the neighbouring countries, without ever touching at Timbuctoo; and this most powerful of the states of Africa, in the sixteenth century, according to Leo, is now, in the nineteenth, to all appearance, a mere tributary dependency of a kingdom, which does not appear to have been known to Leo even by name.

Such a decline of the power and commercial importance of Timbuctoo would naturally be accompanied by a corresponding decay of the city itself; and we cannot suppose that Adams' description of its external appearance will be rejected, on account of its improbability, by those, who recollect that Leo describes the habitations of the natives, in his time, almost in the very words of the narrative now [*], and that the flourishing cities of Sego and Sansanding appear, from Park's account, to be built of mud, precisely in the same manner as Adams describes the houses of Timbuctoo.

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