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Frederick Hornemann

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FREDERICK HORNEMANN (fl. 1796-1800), German traveller in Africa, was born at Hildesheim. He was a young man when, early in 1796, he offered his services to the African Association of London as an explorer in Africa. By the association he was sent to Göttingen University to study Arabic and otherwise prepare for an expedition into the unknown regions of North Africa from the east. In September 1797 he arrived in Egypt, where he continued his studies. On the invasion of the country by the French he was confined in the citadel of Cairo, to preserve him from the fanaticism of the populace. Liberated by the French, he received the patronage of Bonaparte. On the 5th of September 1798 he joined a caravan returning to the Maghrib from Mecca, attaching himself to a party of Fezzan merchants who accompanied the pilgrims. As an avowed Christian would not have been permitted to join the caravan Hornemann assumed the character of a young mameluke trading to Fezzan. He then spoke, but indifferently, both Arabic and Turkish, and he was accompanied as servant and interpreter by Joseph Freudenburg, a German convert to Islam, who had thrice made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Travelling by way of the oases of Siwa and Aujila, a "black rocky desert" was traversed to Temissa in Fezzan. Murzuk was reached on the 17th of November 1798. Here Hornemann lived till June 1799, going thence to the city of Tripoli, whence in August of the same year he despatched his journals to London. He then returned to Murzuk. Nothing further is known with certainty concerning him or his companion. In Murzuk Hornemann had collected a great deal of trustworthy information concerning the peoples and countries of the western Sahara and central Sudan, and when he left Tripoli it was his intention to go direct to the Hausa country, which region he was the first European definitely to locate. "If I do not perish in my undertaking," he wrote in his journal, "I hope in five years I shall be able to make the Society better acquainted with the people of whom I have given this short description." The British consul at Tripoli heard from a source believed to be trustworthy that about June 1803 Jusef (Hornemann's Mahommedan name) was at Casna, i.e. Katsena, in Northern Nigeria, "in good health and highly respected as a marabout." A report reached Murzuk in 1819 that the traveller had gone to "Noofy" (Nupe), and had died there. Hornemann was the first European in modern times to traverse the north-eastern Sahara, and up to 1910 no other explorer had followed his route across the Jebel-esSuda from Aujila to Temissa.

The original text of Hornemann's journal, which was written in German, was printed at Weimar in 1801; an English translation, Travels from Cairo to Mourzouk, &c., with maps and dissertations by Major James Rennell, appeared in London in 1802. A French translation of the English work, made by order of the First Consul, and augmented with notes and a memoir on the Egyptian oases by L. Langles, was published in Paris in the following year. The French version is the most valuable of the three. Consult also the Proceedings of the African Association (1810), and the Geog. Jnl. Nov. 1906.

Iiorner, Francis (1778-1817), British economist, was born at Edinburgh on the 12th of August 1778. After passing through the usual courses at the high school and university of his native city, he devoted five years, the first two in England, to comprehensive but desultory study, and in 1800 was called to the Scottish bar. Desirous, however, of a wider sphere, Homer removed to London in 1802, and occupied the interval that elapsed before his admission to the English bar in 1807 with researches in law, philosophy and political economy. In February 1806 he became one of the commissioners for adjusting the claims against the nawab of Arcot, and in November entered parliament as member for St Ives. Next year he sat for Wendover, and in 1812 for St Mawes, in the patronage of the marquis of Buckingham. In 1811, when Lord Grenville was organizing a prospective ministry, Homer had the offer, which he refused, of a treasury secretaryship. He had resolved not to accept office till he could afford to live out of office; and his professional income, on which he depended, was at no time proportionate to his abilities. His labours at last began to tell upon a constitution never robust, and in October 1816 his physicians ordered him to Italy, where, however, he sank under his malady. He died at Pisa, on the 8th of February 1817. He was buried at Leghorn, and a marble statue by Chantrey was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

Without the advantages of rank, or wealth, or even of genius, Francis Horner rose to a high position of public influence and private esteem. His special field was political economy. Master of that subject, and exercising a sort of moral as well as intellectual influence over the House of Commons he, by his nervous and earnest rather than eloquent style of speaking, could fix its attention for hours on such dry topics as finance, and coinage, and currency. As chairman of the parliamentary committee for investigating the depreciation of bank-notes, for which he moved in 1810, he extended and confirmed his fame as a political economist by his share in the famous Bullion Report. It was chiefly through his efforts that the paper-issue of the English banks was checked, and gold and silver reinstated in their true position as circulating media; and his views on free trade and commerce have been generally accepted at their really high value. Horner was one of the promoters of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. His articles in the early numbers of that publication, chiefly on political economy, form his only literary legacy.

See Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner, M.P., published by his brother (see below) in 1843. Also the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews for the same year; and Blackwood's Magazine, vol. i.