 |
Schuver in the Sudan (1881 - 1883) Fadasi Schuver's journey took six months. He was accompanied by an Italian carpenter, Giacomo Racchetti, and a young emancipated slave, Jaber. Together they reached Fadasi, slightly to the south of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, in May 1881. Schuver was anxious to investigate whether Fadasi would serve as a suitable base for an expedition ultimately intended to reach the coast somewhere between the mouth of the Juba River, and Zanzibar. [33] Schuver and his companions had no luck in Fadasi; the Italian died there, and Schuver fell ill. His horse and two donkeys, as well as two of his gazelles and two of the monkeys, also died. It was now a question of recovering his health, and waiting until the rainy season had finished. Unhappily for Schuver, it was just at this moment that Egyptian soldiers appeared in the city for the very first time, to collect taxes. This was a misfortune for Schuver, who could easily be suspected of spying out the land for the Egyptians. [34] Meanwhile all kinds of news about him was appearing in the European press, some of it wildly improbable. Thus the Parisian paper L'Exploration claimed to know that Schuver was a nephew of Pope Pius IX and that his ultimate destination was Cape Town. [35] From Fadasi, Schuver sent his first reports to the Royal Geographic Society in London, to Petermann's Geographische Mitteilungen in Gotha, and L'Exploration and Afrique explorée et civilisée in Geneva. [36] | |
