Heuglin's list of informants

Heuglin's reason for refusing Musha Pasha's invitation to join him on his campaign to the east of Sudan was that he hoped to fulfill his growing desire to travel to the basin of the Gazelle-river. In his search for information regarding possible routes, he could choose from among the traders or explorers who were then in town and could be of importance to him. During the monsoon, from July to the end of September, Heuglin and his companion Steudner spent many evenings in the company of Europeans, in particular with Thibaut. Before he left for Mount Arash Kol on 29 September 1862, Heuglin also met several Arabs who had just returned from their journeys or were preparing to leave Khartoum in a short while. Even during their trip to Arash Kol, Heuglin was gathering information about possible routes to the Bahr el-Ghazal and from there to the Azande people.

In a paragraph entitled ‘Nachrichten über neueste Reisen in den Nil Ländern’, Heuglin provides a survey of all the persons he approached for information about the challenges posed by the different possible routes to the Gazelleriver. An extract from a series of letters, the last one dating from 8 December 1862, illustrates with what frenetic energy Heuglin held these interviews. Several of the persons named in his letters to Petermann Heuglin already knew personally. He was well informed about the circumstances and conditions of doing business with the inhabitants and other non-Western parties. Heuglin was now particularly interested in their knowledge about possible routes. Although Heuglin thought the information he received was vague and incomplete, he did not hesitate to submit the results in his letters to Petermann.

In addition to De Pruyssenaere, Heuglin and Steudner spoke with Jules Poncet, who had arrived in Sudan in 1851 with his brother Ambroise and Alexandre Vaudey, his uncle who was then a proconsul of Sardinia in Egypt and had crossed regions of the White Nile embankments and the Bahr el- Ghazal. They also met with Guillaume Lejean, who arrived in Khartoum at the beginning of August. Heuglin wrote to Petermann that Lejean ‘works quite diligently and meticulously, but only by compass, and he does not know any Arabic’. Lejean left Khartoum in the middle of October for Abyssinia to fulfill a mission on behalf of the French government.