The Rulers of the Mediterranean by Richard Harding Davis

A great many thousand years ago Hercules built the mountain of Abyla and its twin mountain which we call Gibraltar. It was supposed to mark the limits of the unknown world, and it would seem from casual inspection, as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves the same purpose to this day. Men have crept into Africa and crept out again, like flies over a ceiling, and they have gained much renown at Africa's expense for having done so. They have built little towns along its coasts, and run little rocking, bumping railroads into its forests, and dragged launches over its cataracts, and partitioned it off among emperors and powers and trading companies, without having ventured into the countries they pretend to have subdued. But from Paul du Chaillu to W. A. Chanler, "the Last Explorer," as he has been called, just how much more do we know of Africa than did the Romans whose bridges still stand in Tangier?

The "Last Explorer" sounds well, and is distinctly a _mot_, but there will be other explorers to go, and perhaps to return. There are still a few things for us to learn. The Spaniards and the Pilgrim fathers touched the unknown world of America only four hundred years ago, and to-day any commercial traveller can tell you, with the aid of an A B C railroad guide, the name of every town in any part of it. But Turks and Romans and Spaniards, and, of late, English and Germans and French, have been pecking and nibbling at Africa like little mice around a cheese, and they are still nibbling at the rind, and know as little of the people they "protect," and of the countries they have annexed and colonized, as did Hannibal and Scipio. The American forests have been turned into railroad ties and telegraph poles, and the American Indian has been "exterminated" or taught to plough and to wear a high hat. The cowboy rides freely over the prairies; the Indian agent cheats the Indian -- the Indian does not cheat him; the Germans own Milwaukee and Cincinnati; the Irish rule everywhere; even the much-abused Chinaman hangs out his red sign in every corner of the country. There is not a nation of the globe that has not its hold upon and does not make fortunes out of the continent of America; but the continent of Africa remains just as it was, holding back its secret, and still content to be the unknown world.