gs 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 popul