58 INTERCOURSE WITH AFRICA.

spots in the desert, as well as the territories on the southern confines thereof), which produces fish sufficient to supply the whole of the interior of Africa, as well as the shores of the Mediterranean, &c. &c.

Letter from Vasco de Gama, in elucidation of this Plan.

Sir, The Society of Encouragement for National Industry in France, has granted prizTes for various discoveries in the arts and sciences ; but I wish government, or some society of our own country, would offer a liberal prize for the best niode 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 nothing of the general language of * 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.