t I wish government, or some society of our own country, would
offer a liberal prize for the best mode of colonising Africa, and
for meliorating the condition of the inhabitants of that vast and
little known continent. A well-digested plan for the discovery of
this continent might be followed by the most desirable events. The
efforts of the African Association have, to say the least, been
lamentably disastrous; little good can be anticipated from the
efforts of solitary or scientific travellers in a country where
science is not cultivated, and where the travellers know little or
259 nothing of the[173] general language of Africa, or of the manners
and dispositions of the natives.

[Footnote 173: The general language of North Africa is the
Western Arabic, with a knowledge of which language, a traveller
may make himself intelligible wherever he may go; either in the
negro countries of Sudan, in Egypt, Abyssinia, Sahara, or
Barbary.]

A knowledge therefore of the _African Arabic_ appears indispensable
to this great undertaking; and it should seem that a commercial
adventurer is much more likely to obtain his object than a
scientific traveller, for this plain reason,--because it is much
easier to persuade the Africans that we travel into their country
for the purposes of commerce and its result--_profit_, than to
persuade them that we are so anxious to ascertain the course of
their rivers!

Accordingly, it was aptly observed by the Negroes of Congo, when
they learned that Captain Tuckey came not to trade nor to make war;
_"What then come for? only to take walk and make book?"_

I do not mean now to lay down a plan for the colonisation of
Africa, or for opening an extensive commerce with that vast
continent, but I would suggest the propriety of the method by which
the East India Company govern their immense territories. _I would
wish to see an African Company formed on an extensive scale, with a
large capital_. I am convinced that such a company would be of more
service to the commerce of this country than the present India
trade, where the natives, _without being in want_ of our
manufactures, surpass us in ingenuity. But the Africans, on the
contrary, _are in want_ of our manufactured goods, and give immense
260 sums for them.