AFRICAN RESOURCES.

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Though the coasts of Africa lie within sight of the most civilized countries, its depths are still mysteries. Though the valley of the Nile was, in the earliest ages of history, the seat of commerce, the arts and sciences, it is only now that we read of a new source for that sacred stream in Lake Edward Nyanza.

This wonderful continent, the Negroland of our school books, the marvel of modern times as the light of exploration pierces its forests and reveals its lakes, rivers and peoples, is a vast peninsula, triangular in shape, containing 12,300,000 square miles. This vast area renders a conception of its geographic details difficult, yet by taking several plain views of it, the whole may be brought out so that one can grasp it with a fair degree of intelligence. One way to look at it is to regard the entire seacoast as the rind of the real Africa. Follow its Mediterranean boundary on the north, its Red Sea and Indian Ocean boundary on the east, its Atlantic Ocean boundary on the south and west, and the lowland rind is always present, in some places quite thin, in others many miles thick.

This rind, low, swampy, reedy, channeled by oozy creeks, or many mouthed rivers, is the prelude to something wholly different within. On the north, north-east and north-west, we know it introduces us to the barren Sahara. In all other parts it introduces us to an upland Africa, which, for height and variety of plateaus, has no equal in the world. These plateaus are variegated with immense mountain chains, like those of the Atlas, the Moon, the Kong, the Gupata, and those just revealed by Stanley extending between the two great lakes Albert Nyanza and Victoria Nyanza, and to a height of 18,000 feet, fully 6,000 of which are clad in perpetual snow, even though lying under the Equator. Here too are those vast stretches of water which vie in size and depth with the lake systems of any other continent, and which feed mighty rivers, even though evaporation be constantly lifting their volume into the tropical air. No traveler has ever looked with other than awe upon those superb lakes Albert Nyanza, Edward Nyanza, Victoria Nyanza, Tanganyika, Leopold II., Nyassa, Bangweola, and dozens of smaller ones whose presence came upon him like a revelation. And then out of these plateaus, thousands of feet high, run all those mighty rivers which constitute the most unique and mightiest water system in the world—the Zambezi, the Congo, the Niger, the Senegal and the Nile.

This would be Africa in a general sense. But in view of the importance of this opening continent, we must get a fuller view of it. The Africa of antiquity and of the Middle Ages extended from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean to the land of the Berbers, and other strange, if not mythical peoples. It embraced Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia on the east. On the north it was skirted by the Barbary States. But its great, appalling feature was the great desert of Sahara, forbidden to Greek or Roman, Persian or Egyptian, till the Arab came on his camel, and with the flaming sword of Mohammed in hand, to pierce its waste places and make traffic possible amid its sandy wastes.

South of the Western Sahara is a fairly defined section extending from Timbuctoo to the Gulf of Guinea, or in other words nearly to the Equator. It is divided by the Kong chain of mountains, and embraces the water systems of the Senegal and Niger Rivers. This was the part of Africa which first drew European enterprise after Portugal and Spain became the world’s sailors, and began to feel their way toward the Cape of Good Hope. Three hundred years ago it was what Central Africa is to-day, a wonderland full of venturesome travelers, a source of national jealousy, a factor in European politics, a starting point for a thousand theories respecting colonization and of as many enterprises having for their object the introduction of commerce, the arts and Christianity among the natives, who were by no means as peaceably inclined as in the present day. As other natives came to find out something of the commercial value of the Senegal and Niger countries, they stepped in to get their share of the honor and profit of possession, and so this part of Africa was partitioned, till we find on the Atlantic, south of the Niger, the British colony of Sierra Leone, the kingdoms of Ashantee and Dahomey, the republic of Liberia, the coast towns of the Bight of Benin, and the strong French possessions lying just north of the Congo and extending indefinitely inland.

Back of this section, and extending south of the Sahara, to the head-waters of the Nile, is the great central basin whose waters converge in the vast estuary known as Lake Tchad. It may be somewhat vaguely termed the Soudan region, which is divided into Northern and Equatorial Soudan, the former being the seat of the recent uprising of the Mahdi, and the latter the center of the kingdom which Emin Pasha sought to wrest from Mohammedan grasp. Along the Indian Ocean coast, from Cape Guardafui to Mozambique, is a lowland stretch from two to three hundred miles wide, watered by small, sluggish rivers which find their way into the Indian Sea.

Passing down the eastern side of the continent, we come to the immense basin of the Zambezi, second only in extent to that of the Congo, stretching almost to the Atlantic coast, seat of mighty tribes like the Macololos, teeming with commercial possibilities, and even now a source of such envy between England and Portugal as to raise a question of war. South of the Zambezi comes the great Kalahari desert as a balance to the northern Sahara, and then that fringe of civilization embraced in Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Cape Colony, and so around till the Portuguese kingdoms of Benguela and Angola are reached, all of whose waters run by short courses to the sea. These great natural divisions comprise the entire area of the African continent except that vast equatorial basin drained by the Congo.

This mighty region, the Central Africa of to-day, is now largely embraced in the new Congo Free State. To the south of the mouth of the Congo is the State of Angola, and to the north, the State of Congo, claimed by the French. The great river was originally called the Zaire, and by some the Livingstone. Its first, or ocean, section extends from Banana Point to Boma, a distance of 70 miles, and is in fact an arm of the sea. Thence, upward to Vivi, a distance of 40 miles, there is a deep, broad channel, with a moderate current. Vivi is the head of the lower river navigation, being at the foot of the cataracts, which extend for over 200 miles through a system of caÑons, with more than fifty falls of various heights. They are known as Livingstone Falls, and have stretches of navigable water between them. After the cataracts are passed, Stanley Pool is reached, where are the towns of Leopoldville, Kinshassa and others, founded recently as trading or missionary stations. The vertical descent of the river from the broad, tranquil expanse of Stanley Pool to the level at Vivi, is about 1,000 feet, and from thence to the sea fully 250 feet more. Stanley Pool, or basin, is about 20 miles long and nearly 10 broad, and is filled with low wooded islands, natural homes for hippopotami, crocodiles, elephants, and all tropical animals. From Leopoldville to Stanley Falls there is uninterrupted navigation, and the distance is 1,068 miles, with a comparatively straight course and a vertical descent of four inches to the mile. Stanley Falls 1,511 feet above the sea level. The affluents of the river below Stanley Falls present a navigable surface estimated at 4,000 miles. In the wide and elevated portion of the river above Stanley Falls it is known as the Lualaba. Its course is now nearly north, and it was this fact that deceived Livingstone into the belief that he was on the Nile. This portion, though abounding in vast lake stretches and rich in affluents, is navigable only for shallow craft. It drains a fertile country whose centre is Nyangwe, the best-known market town of Central Africa and the capital of Tippoo Tib’s dominions, the conqueror of the Manyuema, and the craftiest of all the Arab potentates in Central Africa.

To the east of the Upper Congo, or Lualaba, is a magnificent stretch of grass country, extending to Lake Tanganyika, whose waters flow into the Congo, making a descent of 1,200 feet in 200 miles. As the western shores of that lake rise fully 2,500 feet, this region becomes a sort or Switzerland in tropical Africa. North and east of Tanganyika, are the Nile sources, in Lakes Albert, Edward and Victoria Nyanza—a fertile and populous region, fitted by nature for her thriftiest and best peoples. Thus we have Africa again mapped, and her grandest portion embraced in the Congo State, with its 1,500,000 square miles, its countless population, its abundance of navigable streams, its remarkably fertile soil, its boundless forests, all its requisites for the demands of an advanced civilization.

NATIVE HUNTERS KILLING SOKOS.

To the naturalist Africa opens a field for research equalled by no other continent. The whole organic world offers no such number of giant animal and plant forms. It unfolds five times as many quadrupeds as Asia, and three times as many as the Americas. Its colossal hippopotami, huge giraffes, infinite variety of antelopes, and water-bucks, the curious diving sheep, or goat, called the Quichobo, long armed apes, fierce sokos, and swarms of sprightly monkeys, excel those of Asia in size. That mammoth bird, the ostrich, whose feathers delight our modern slaves of fashion, is exclusively indigenous to Africa. The Arab may have brought the camel from the deserts of Sinai, but Africa has made a home for it. Africa is the habitat of the rhinoceros, elephant, lion, panther, leopard, ounce, jackal, hyena, wolf, fox, dog, cat, bat, rat, hare, rabbit, bear, horse, ass, zebra, sheep, with wool and without, goat, buffalo, gazelle, cattle of all kinds, some of them the finest specimens in nature, deer of the fallow type, which put to shame the sleek breeds of European parks.

AFRICAN ANT-EATER.
TERRIFIC FIGHT OF JUNGLE MONARCHS.
AFRICAN QUICHOBO.

The birds are equally numberless as to variety. There are eagles, hawks, flamingoes, kingfishers, many varieties of parrots, peacocks, partridges, pheasants, widow and cardinal birds, weavers, cuckoos, doves, pigeons, ducks, geese, and crown-birds, the plumage of the last being the most beautiful of the feathered tribe. The reptilia embraces crocodiles, the python, the boa and hundreds of smaller snakes, some harmless and some highly venomous. The rivers and lakes swarm with fish, though the variety is not so great as in more northern waters. The forests and the earth swarm with termites and ants of great variety, which draw after them a host of ant-eaters of the armadillo type; and at times spiders, caterpillars, and armies of locusts infest the trees or darken the sun. Insect life knows no limit in Africa—some the most beautiful, some the most horrid. The tsetse fly is no less a torment to cattle than the “devil of the road” is to the woe-begone traveler. And everywhere, especially in tropical Africa, vegetation has a force and vigor peculiar to that continent. Nature seems to rejoice in unfolding her strength through the seeds deposited in the soil. “Some fifty and some an hundred fold” is the law of increase, when the least care is given to planting and cultivation. Maize produces two crops a year. Tree life is gigantic, and the variety of wood infinite. Of the picturesque trees, the boabab, or monkey bread-fruit tree, whose crown of green sometimes forms a circle of over 100 feet, takes a front rank, followed by the ceiba, with its stem of 60 feet and its rich crown of foliage extending fully 60 feet further.

THE “DEVIL OF THE ROAD” AND OTHER AFRICAN WASPS, WITH CATERPILLAR NESTS.
BUSH-BUCKS OF RIVER CHOBE.

All of torrid Africa revels in plants and fruits of the most nutritious and medicinal quality, suited to the wants and well-being of the people. There is both food and medicine in the fruits of the palm, banana, orange, shaddock, pine-apple, tamarind, and the leaves and juice of the boabab. The butter-tree gives not only butter, but a fine medicine. The ground-nut yields in six weeks from the planting. The natives produce for eating, wheat, corn, rice, barley, millet, yams, lotus berries, gum, dates, figs, sugar, and various spices, and for drink, coffee, palm-wine, cocoanut milk and Cape wine. No less than five kinds of pepper are known, and the best indigo is produced, along with other valuable dyes. Cotton, hemp and flax are raised for clothing.

It has always been a fiction that Africa contained more gold than any other continent. The “gold coast” was a temptation to venturesome pioneers for a long time. Precisely how rich in minerals the “dark continent” is, remains to be proved. But it is known that iron abounds in many places, that saltpetre and emery exist in paying quantities, that amber is found on the coasts, and that diamonds are plenty in the Kimberly region. That the continent is rich in useful minerals may be taken for granted, but as these things are not perceptible to the naked eye, time must bring the proof.

Various estimates have been put upon the population of Africa. Stanley estimated the population of the Congo basin at 50,000,000. The Barbary States we know are very populous. Africa has in all probability contributed twenty-five millions of slaves to other countries within two-hundred and fifty years without apparent diminution of her own population.

So she must be not only very populous but very prolific. It would be safe to estimate her people at 200,000,000, counting the Ethiopic or true African race, and the Caucasian types, which embrace the Nubians, Abyssinians, Copts and Arabs. The Arabs are not aborigines, yet have forced themselves, with their religion, into all of Northern and Central Africa, and their language is the leading one wherever they have obtained a foot-hold. The Berber and Shelluh tongues are used in the Barbary States. The Mandingo speech is heard from the Senegal to the Joliba. On the southwestern coast there is a mixture of Portuguese. Among the true natives the languages spoken are as numerous as the tribes themselves. In the Sahara alone there are no less than forty-three dialects. Mr. Guinness, of London, president of the English Baptist Missionary Society operating in Africa, says there are 600 languages spoken in Africa, belonging principally to the great Soudanese group.

Of the human element in Africa, we present the summary given by Rev. Geo. L. Taylor. He says:—“Who and what are the races occupying our New Africa? The almost universally accepted anthropology of modern science puts Japheth (the Aryans), Shem (the Semites), and Ham (the Hamites), together as the Caucasian race or variety (not species) of mankind; and makes the Ugrians, the Mongols, the Malays and the Negroes (and some authorities make other divisions also) each another separate variety of the one common species and genus homo, man.

NATIVE TYPES IN SOUTHERN SOUDAN.

“Leaving the radical school of anthropology out of the question, it cannot be denied that the vast preponderance of conservative scientific opinion is, at least, to this effect, namely: While the Berbers (including the Twareks, Copts and Tibbus) are Hamitic, but differentiated toward the Semitic stock, the true Negroes are also probably Hamitic, but profoundly differentiated in the direction of some other undetermined factor, and the Ethiopians or Abyssinians are an intermediate link between the Caucasian Hamite and the non-Caucasian Negro, with also a prehistoric Semite mixture from southern Arabia. Barth, whose work is a mine of learning on the Soudan, concededly the best authority extant on the subject, says that while the original population of the Soudan was Negro, as was all the southern edge of the Sahara, nevertheless the Negro has been crowded southward along the whole line by the Moor (a mixt Arab) in the west, by the Berber (including both Twareks and Tibbus) in the centre, and by the Arab in the east. Timbuctoo is a city of Berber, not of Negro origin, founded before the Norman conquest of England, since conquered by Moors, and now ruled by the FulbÉ, or Fellatah, who are neither Moor, Berber, Arab, nor Negro but a distinct race between the Arab and Berber on the one side and the Negro stock on the other, and whose language and physiognomy, and only semi-woolly hair, are more Mongoloid or Kaffir than Negro; but who are the most intelligent, energetic and rapidly becoming the most powerful people in the Soudan, and whose influence is now felt from Senegambia to Baghirmi, through half a dozen native states. In all the Niger basin only the Mandingo and the Tombo countries about the head of the Joliba, or Niger, are now ruled by pure Negro dynasties, the former being a splendid and capable jet-black people, probably the finest purely Negro race yet known to Europeans. In the central Soudan the Kanuri of Kanem and Bornu came to Kanem as a conquering Tibbu-Berber stock over 500 years ago, and are now Negroid. Farther east Tibbu and Arab are the ruling elements. Haussa, Sokoto and Adamawa are now Fellatah States. The southward pressure of Moor, Twarek, Tibbu and Arab is still going on; and the FulbÉ, in the midst of the native states, is rapidly penetrating them, subverting the few native Negro dynasties still existing, and creating a new and rising race and power that is, at any rate, not Negro. Thus ancient Nigritia is rapidly ceasing to be “Negroland,” the races being more and more mixt, and newer and ruling elements of Moor, Berber and Arab constantly flowing in. This is the testimony of a long line of scholars from Barth down to Prof. A. H. Keane, author of the learned article on “Soudan,” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

“The people commonly considered Negro, in Africa, consist mainly of three great stocks—the Nigritians of the Soudan, the great Bantu stock reaching from the southern bounds of the Soudan to the southern rim of the Zambesi basin, and the great Zulu stock. All these differ widely from each other in physiology, languages, arts and customs. The Nigritians are declining under Arab and Berber pressure; the Zulus, a powerful and semi-Negro race, are rapidly extending their conquests northward beyond the Zambesi into east central Africa. The Bantus are mainly agriculturists. They fill the Congo basin, and extend eastward to the Indian Ocean, between Uganda (which is Bantu) and UnyanyembÉ. They have only recently been discovered, and are not yet much studied by Europeans.

BARI OF GONDOKORO.

“But not all so-called Negroes are true Negroes. As for the eastern highland regions of the two Niles, and thence southward from the Abyssinians and the Shillooks at Khartoum to the Bari of Gondokoro and the Waganda of Uganda—the Niam-Niam of Monbuttoo, the Manyuema of the Lualaba, and the Makololo on the Zambesi—the ruling and paramount native tribes are Negroid, but not Negro, unless our ordinary conception of the Negro is a good deal revised. As Livingstone says of the Makololo, so of all these, they are a “coffee-and-milk color;” or we may say all these peoples are from a dark coffee-brown to brownish-white, like coffee, depending on the amount of milk added. They are mostly tall, straight, leanish, wiry, active, of rather regular features, fair agriculturists and cattle-raisers, with much mechanical capacity, born merchants and traders, and almost everywhere hold darker and more truly negro tribes in slavery to themselves, where any such tribes exist. Where they have none or few domestic animals for meat, they are frequently cannibals. In the middle Congo basin the tribes are more truly Negro, and here the true Negroes are freemen, independent and capable, though in a somewhat low state of development. But, so far as now known, the true Negro, in an independent condition, holds and rules but a comparatively small part of Africa. As to capability for improvement these peoples—the Negroid races at least and probably the Negroes—are as apt and civilizable as any Caucasian or Mongolian people have originally been, if we consider how their geographical and climatic isolation has hitherto cut them off from the rest of the world and the world from them. We know that if we leave Revelation out of the account, all Caucasian civilization, whether Aryan, Semitic, or Hamitic, can be traced backward till, just on the dawn of history, it narrows down to small clans or families, with whom the light began and from whom it spread. We know the same, also, as to the non-Caucasian Chinese and Nahua civilizations of Asia and America. Had the spread of the germs of these civilizations been prevented by conditions like those in Africa, who shall say that the stage of development might not be about the same to-day? There seems to be but one uncivilizable race—if, indeed, they are such—in Africa; and that is the dwarfs. The Akka, found by Schweinfurth south of the Welle, called themselves “Betua,” the same word as the “Batua” on the Kassai. The dwarfs of the upper Zambesi call themselves by a similar word, and so with the Bushmen in South Africa. Many things go to prove that these dwarf nations are all one race, the diminutive remnants of a primeval stock of one of the lowest types of man, who have never risen above the hunter stage of life. They have been scattered, and almost exterminated, by the incoming of the powerful Bantu stock, that is now spread from the Soudan to Zululand. These dwarfs are the best living examples of similar races once scattered over Europe and Asia, whose real existence lies at the bottom of all the lore of fairies, brownies, elfs, gnomes, etc. They constitute one of the most pregnant subjects of study in all anthropology. They are seemingly always uncivilizable.”

In his “Africa in a Nutshell,” Rev. Geo. Thompson thus sketches the country, especially the central belt:—

“The Central Belt of Africa—say from 15° north to 15° south of the equator, about 2,000 miles in width—is, heavily-timbered, of the jungle nature. There are numerous large trees (one to six feet through, and 50 to 150 feet high) with smaller ones, and bushes intermingled, while vines of various kinds intertwine, from bottom to top, making progress through them, except in paths, very difficult. Only experience can give a realizing idea of an African forest—of the tangle, and the density of its shade.

“While traveling through them, even in the dry season, when the sun shines brightest, one cannot see or feel the warming rays. The leaves drip with the dews of the night, and the traveler becomes chilled, and suffers exceedingly.

“But the whole country is not now covered with such forests. They are found in places, from ten to twenty-five miles in extent, where the population is sparse, but the larger portion of the country has been cleared off and cultivated; and, while much of it is in crops all the time, other large patches are covered with bushes, of from one to three years’ growth—for they clear off a new place every year. The farm of this year is left to grow up to bushes two or three years, to kill out the grass, and then it is cleared off again. Thus, in thickly settled portions of the country, but little large timber is found, except along rivers, or on mountains. Such is the country north of the Gulf of Guinea, to near the Desert.

“The people are numerous, and the cities larger (the largest cities in Africa; they are from one to six miles through), and much of the country is under cultivation. And so of the central portion of Africa, in the vicinity of Lake Tchad.

CHASING GIRAFFES.

“But in that portion of Africa lying 500 miles south and north of the Equator, and from the Atlantic Coast, 1,000 miles eastward, the jungle and heavy forests are the most extensive, and towns farther between, and not so large.

“This is the home of the gorilla, which grows from five to six feet high, of powerful build, and with arms that can stretch from seven to nine feet; a formidable enemy to meet. It is also the home of that wonderfully varied and gigantic animal life—elephants, lions, leopards, zebras, giraffes, rhinoceri, hippopotami, crocodile etc., which distinguishes African Zoology from that of every other continent.

“This central belt of Africa is capable of sustaining a vast population. It can be generally cultivated, and its resources are wonderful. The soil is productive. The seasons are favorable, and crops can be kept growing the year through.

“Rice, of three or four kinds and of excellent quality, Indian corn, three kinds of sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, melons, squashes, tomatoes, ginger, pepper, arrowroot, coffee, sugar cane, yams, cocoa, casada, and other grains and vegetables, besides all tropical fruits, are cultivated.

“The coffee is a wild forest tree, growing seventy-five feet high and eighteen inches through. It is also cultivated largely in Liberia. Many of the people have from 100 to 1,000 acres of coffee trees.

“The Liberian coffee is of such superior quality and productiveness, that millions of plants have been sent to Java and old coffee countries, for seed. Its fame is already world-wide. The wild coffee is as good as any, but the bean is smaller. And new settlements soon become self-supporting by the culture of coffee. Sugar cane is also raised, and much sugar is made in this colony. Many steam sugar mills are in operation on St. Paul’s River and at other places.

“On the Gulf of Guinea the people are quite generally raising cotton and shipping it to England. Hundreds of cotton presses and gins have been bought, and used by them, and Africa will yet be the greatest cotton, coffee and sugar country in the world. All nations can be supplied therefrom.

“Cotton is cultivated, in small quantities, in widely-extended portions of Africa, and manufactured into cloth which is very durable. They also make leather of a superior quality.

“Gold, copper, coal, the richest iron ore in the world, and other valuable metals are abundant; from them the natives manufacture their tools, ornaments and many things of interest. Ivory, hides, gums, rubber, etc., are abundant. It is said that 50,000 elephants are killed yearly, for their ivory, in Africa.

“The country only needs development; and the many exploring parties from Europe, who are penetrating every part, seeking trade, will aid in opening its boundless treasures. Gold-mining companies are operating on the Gulf of Guinea, with paying results.

“And the natives secure and sell to the merchants large amounts of gold, in form of rough, large rings. They make fine gold ornaments, and wear vast quantities.

“This trade with Interior Africa, so eagerly sought, will soon lead to railroads, in different directions—from Liberia to the Niger, and across to Zanzibar from South Africa; and in other directions. The work is begun, and will not stop.

“The French and the English are planning for railroads in different directions. The former are building one from Senegal to Timbuctoo.

“The nations of Europe are, to-day, in a strife to secure the best locations for trade with this rich country. And soon there will be no more ‘unexplored regions.’

“The coasts on the west and east are generally low and unhealthy. But the interior is higher, and will be more suited to the white man.

“It is, in the main, an elevated table-land, from 1,000 to 6,000 feet above the sea, variegated with peaks and mountains, from 3,000 to 20,000 feet high, snow-capped, and with valleys and broad plains, hot springs, and salt pans, and innumerable springs, inlets and streams.

“In some regions, for a distance often to twenty miles, there is a scarcity of water in the dry season. Other places are flat plains, which are overflowed in the rainy season, so they cannot be inhabited or cultivated, except in the dry season. And such localities are unhealthy.

“But by far the greater part of the country is capable of being inhabited and cultivated—with an abundance of timber of many kinds, suitable for all the purposes of civilization, for boats, houses, wagons, furniture and implements—but all different from anything in America. Some kinds are equal to fine mahogany.

“This central portion of Africa is blessed with numerous large lakes, three large rivers, and many smaller.

“The Niger rises 200 miles back of Liberia, runs northeasterly, to near Timbuctoo, then southward to the Gulf of Guinea. It is already navigated for hundreds of miles by English steamers.

“In fourteen years the exports have increased from $150,000 to $10,000,000; trading factories from two to fifty-seven; and steamers from two to twenty, and other boats.

“The BinuÉ is a large branch coming in from the eastward.

“And the Congo, rising nearly 15° south of the equator, runs through various lakes, making a northward course for more than 1,000 miles, to 21/2° north of the equator, then bends westward and southwesterly to the Atlantic; being from one to sixteen miles wide, and very deep; filled with inhabited islands and abounding in magnificent scenery. The banks along the rapids rise from 100 to 1,200 feet high. It freshens the ocean for six miles from land, and its course can be seen in the ocean for thirty-six miles.

“There are two series of rapids in it—a great obstacle to navigation—but the desire for trade will overcome these.

“The first series of rapids commences about 100 miles from the sea, and extends some 200 miles in falls and cascades—with smoother stretches between—to Stanley Pool. There are thirty-two of these falls. From thence is a broad, magnificent river, with no obstruction for nearly 1,000 miles, to the next series of rapids at Stanley Falls. From this, again, is another long stretch of navigable river. It pours nearly five times the amount of water of the Mississippi.

“Between Lake Bangweola and Stanley Pool, the Congo falls 2,491 feet; between the pool and ocean, 1,147 feet, making 3,638 feet in all.

“The Nile falls over 1,200 feet between Victoria and Albert Lakes, and 2,200 from Albert to the sea.

“Most of the rivers which rise in the interior of Africa have heavy fall.

“Then there are numerous large rivers emptying into the Congo, on each side, which can be ascended far into the interior. Those on the north can be easily connected with the head waters of the Gaboon River, and those on the south with the head waters of the Zambesi, emptying into the Indian Ocean; and on the east, with Lake Tanganyika.

“It will be seen that the Congo River will be of vast importance in the development of Africa. A railroad will soon be built around the falls, to connect with the steamers above.

“The soil of Upper Congo is very rich, the forests are exceedingly valuable, the climate quite favorable, and the people numerous and kind.

“A few years ago the trade of the Congo was only a few thousand dollars yearly. It is now, so soon, from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 a year. Trading houses and steamers are multiplying.

“The Congo Valley contains over 5,000 miles of navigable river and lake. The nations can be supplied from this region with cotton, coffee, sugar, gum copal, ivory, rubber, valuable dyes, iron, gold, copper, and many other things—when it shall be civilized and a market formed.

“Many are running to and fro, and knowledge is being rapidly increased in those parts.

“Then there are the rivers Senegal, Gambia (navigable for 200 miles), Sierra Leone, Calabar, etc.

“The lakes are numerous, from the size of Lake Michigan, or larger, to those covering only a few square miles.

“Lake Tchad, in the centre of the continent, is nearly the size of Lake Michigan, with marshy surroundings, from which as yet no outlet has been discovered, though the Tshaddi, or River BinuÉ, may be found to be the outlet of this lake.

“In Central East Africa is a lake system of vast extent. Victoria Nyanza is about 250 miles long, surrounded mostly with hills and mountains, from 300 to 6,000 feet high. It contains many islands, and numerous large rivers empty into it. It is nearly 4,000 feet above the sea, and, with its rivers, constitutes the principal and most southern source of the Nile. The equator crosses its northern end. It is nearly as large as Lake Superior.

“West of this, about 200 miles, is the Albert Nyanza, 400 miles long, and 2,720 feet above the level of the sea. This receives the outlet of the Victoria; and from this the Nile bursts forth, a large river, and runs its course of nearly 3,000 miles to the Mediterranean Sea.

“Albert is nearly three times as large as Lake Erie.

“South and west of these two lakes are numerous smaller ones—some of them very beautiful—all emptying into the Victoria Nyanza, or “Big Water.”

“South of these, and separated by a mountain ridge, is Lake Tanganyika, 380 miles long and very deep, from twelve to forty miles wide, surrounded by mountains 2,000 to 5,000 feet high. It is 2,756 feet above the sea. Till about 1875 it was an internal sea, receiving large rivers, but having no outlet, as proven by Stanley, who circumnavigated it on purpose to settle this point. But near midway, on the west, was a low place, where the bank was only three feet above the water. And here, after steadily rising for ages, it broke over, and cut a channel to the Congo, into which it now empties, in a deep, rapid stream.

“West and south of this is a series of lakes, connected with the great Congo River. The most southerly, in latitude 13° or 14°, is Bangweola, about 175 miles long and sixty wide. (Dr. Livingstone, in his last journey, crossed this from the north and died in the marsh on its southern border, May 4, 1873.) This empties into Lake Moero, nearly 3,000 feet above the sea.

“North and west of this are a number of other lakes, all emptying into and swelling the mighty Congo.

“Northeast of Victoria are other large lakes, as reported by the natives, but not yet accurately delineated. Thomson has lately discovered one 6,000 feet above the sea.

“Southeast of Tanganyika, about 250 miles, is Nyassa Lake, 300 miles long, first definitely described by Dr. Livingstone. This is 1,800 feet above the sea. There is a small steamer on this lake—as also on Victoria and Tanganyika. And steamers are briskly plying up and down the Congo.

“Ere many years there will be a railroad from Nyassa to Tanganyika—an easy route—and from Zanzibar to the great lakes—a more difficult route. The pressing demands of trade insure these results. A wagon road is already partly constructed between the two lakes, making a speedier, safer and easier route to the interior via Zambesi and ShirÉ Rivers, Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, with a land carriage of only seventy-five miles between the rapids on the ShirÉ and Lake Nyassa.”

That portion of Africa below the tropics, and known in general as South Africa, has resources of animal, forest, soil, climate, water and mineral which have proved inviting to Europeans, though there is nothing to render them any more acceptable than similar features as found in other sub-tropical or temperate latitudes, excepting, perhaps, the peculiar mineral deposits in the Kimberly section, which yield diamonds of great value, and a richness of animal life which formerly proved fascinating to the hunter and adventurer.

The belt extending clear across the continent from Angola and Benguela, south of the Congo, to the mouth of the Zambesi, and which is a water shed between the Congo basin and rivers running southward, till the great valley of the Zambesi is reached, has all the peculiarities of soil, climate, forest and people found in the Congo basin. Its tribes, according to Pinto, are of the same general type as those further north. The rivers abound in hippopotami and crocodiles, the forests in antelope and buffaloes, elephants, lions and wild birds. There is the same endless succession of wooded valleys and verdure clad plains, and the same products under cultivation. The natives are if anything better skilled in the uses of iron, and are more ingenious in turning it to domestic account, as in the manufacture of utensils, traps and other conveniences. They are natural herdsmen, dress better, at least more fantastically, perpetuate all of the native superstitions, and are more confirmed traders, having for a longer time been in remote contact with the Portuguese influence penetrating the Zambesi, and extending inland from Loanda and Benguela.

We therefore turn to Equatorial, or Central Africa, in quest of those resources which are distinguishing, and which give to the continent its real value in commercial eyes. And in so doing, there is no authority superior to that of Stanley, whose opportunity for observation has been greatest. We can readily detect in his narrative the enthusiasm of a pioneer, but at the same time must feel persuaded that fuller and more exact research, and, especially the supreme trial to which commercial development puts all things natural, will far more than verify his first impressions.

AFRICAN HATCHET.

This Africa is typed by the Congo Basin, which stretches practically across Africa, interweaving with the Zambesi water system on the south and the Nile system on the north. The Congo is the feature of its basin, and the kernel of the greatest commercial problem of the age. To understand it, is to understand more of African resource than any other natural object furnishes. It has its maritime region, which is the African rind before alluded to. This region extends from Banana Point at the mouth of the great river to Boma, seventy miles from the sea, and the river passes through it in the form of a broad deep estuary. At Boma the hilly, mountainous region commences, the groups of undulations rising gradually to a height of 2000 feet above the sea. The river is still navigable in this region, up to Vivi, 110 miles from the sea, though the channel is reduced to a width of 1500 yards. From Vivi to Isangila, a distance of fifty miles, is the lower series of Livingstone Falls. From Isangila to Manyanga is a navigable stretch of eighty-eight miles. Then comes the upper series of Livingstone Falls, extending for eighty-five miles, from Manyanga to Leopoldville, on Stanley Pool. This practically brings the mighty flood through the mountainous region of 240 miles in width, and opens a navigable stretch of 1068 miles, extending from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls. From Stanley Falls to Nyangwe, in the fruitful country of the Manyuema, a nation in themselves, and notorious in Central Africa for their valor and cruelty in war, is a course of 385 miles, navigable for light craft. From Nyangwe to Lake Moero the river course is 440 miles. This lake is sixty-seven miles long. Thence is a river stretch of 220 miles to Lake Bangweola which is 161 miles long. It then begins to lose itself in its head waters in the ChibalÉ Hills, though its main affluent here, the Chambesi, has a length of 360 miles. This gives a total length of main stream equal to 3034 miles. It divides itself into five geographic sections; the maritime section, from the sea to Leopoldville; the Upper Congo section, extending from Leopoldville to Stanley Falls; the Lualaba (so called by Livingstone) section from Stanley Falls to the Chambesi; the Chambesi, or head water section; and the Tanganyika section.

The first section, which includes the really maritime and the mountainous, is, in its lower part next to the sea, but thinly populated, owing to the slave trade and the effect of internal wars. But the natives are, as a rule, tractable and amenable to improvement and discipline. They are industrious and perfectly willing to hire themselves as porters. In its mountainous part, the country is composed of swells of upland separated by gorges and long, winding water courses, showing that the land has been gradually stripped for centuries of its rich loam by the tropical rains. On the uplands are groves of palm and patches of tropical forest. In the hollows are rich vegetable products, so thick as to be impenetrable. The round-nut, palm-nut, rubber, gum-copal, orchilla, and various other articles of commerce, are natural products of this section.

NATIVES RUNNING TO WAR.

Through the second section the Congo sweeps in the shape of an ox-bow, 1068 miles, crossing the Equator twice. Here is that mighty system of tributaries which more than double the navigable waters of the great basin. On the south are the Kwa, navigable up to Lake Leopold II, a distance of 281 miles; the Lukanga with its shores lined with shrewd native traders; the Mohindu, navigable for 650 miles; the Ikelemba, seat of the Bakuti tribe, navigable for 125 miles; the Lulungu, reported to be more populous than the Congo, navigable for 800 miles; the Lubiranzi, navigable for twenty-five miles.

On the north side is the Lufini, navigable for thirty miles; the Alima, navigable for fifty miles; the Likuba, with fifty miles of navigation; the Bunga, 150 miles; the Balui, 350, the Ubanga and Ngala, 450 miles, together; the Itimbiri, 250 miles; the NkukÙ, sixty miles; the Biyerre ninety-six miles; the Chofu, twenty-five miles.

This section alone, therefore, gives a direct steam mileage of 5250 miles, and the rivers drain an area of over 1,000,000 square miles. Stanley says the wealth of Equatorial Africa lies in this section. It is cut by the Equator, whose rain-belt discharges showers for ten months in the year. North and south from the Equator, the dry periods are longer. The population of the section, Stanley estimates to be 43,500,000. His observations were, of course, confined to the river districts, but other travelers confirm his estimates. Weissman says of the Lubilash country, “It is densely peopled and some of the villages are miles in length. They are clean, with commodious houses shaded by oil-palms and bananas, and surrounded by carefully divided fields in which, quite contrary to the usual African practice, man is seen to till the fields while women attend to household offices. From the Lubilash. to the Lumani there stretches almost uninterruptedly a prairie region of great fertility, the future pasture grounds of the world. The reddish loam, overlying the granite, bears luxuriant grass and clumps of trees, and only the banks are densely wooded. The rain falls during eight months of the year, from September to April, but they are not excessive. The temperature varies, from 63° to 81°, but occasionally, in the dry season, falls as low as 45°.”

The southeastern portion of this section is, on the authority of Tippoo Tib, who doubtless ranged it more extensively than any other man, dotted with villages, some of which took him two hours to pass through. The country is a succession of prairies and parks, of rare fertility and beauty. On the north and northeast of this section is the residence of the Monbuttus, Niam-Niams and Dinkas, all powerful tribes, living in comparative peace, having neat villages surrounded by fruitful plantations, lovers of the chase, rich in herds of fine cattle, skilled in the manufacture of spears and utensils of iron, experts in pottery making and ornamentation, light of form but wonderfully agile, a copper rather than black color, and very numerous. Says Sweinfurth, “From the WellÉ river to the residence of the Monbuttu king, Munza, the way leads through a country of marvellous beauty, an almost unbroken line of the primitively simple dwellings extending on either side of the caravan route.” The Niam-Niam country alone he estimates at 5400 square miles in extent, with a population of 2,000,000 which would give the extraordinary rate of 370 to the square mile.

Stanley’s own observation on the Mohindu and Itimbiri river fully confirmed the story of Miyongo respecting the Lulungu, that the further he traveled from the banks of the river the thicker he would find the population.

All of this immense section is capable of the richest and most varied vegetable productions. True, until intercourse comes about by steam, or otherwise, but little use can be made of these products, yet there they are in abundance now, and susceptible of infinite additions under the care of intelligent tillage. There is an almost infinite variety of palms, the most useful of which is the oil-palm, whose nut supplies the dark-red palm oil, which has proved such a source of wealth in the Oil-river regions of the Niger country and on the west coast in general. The kernel of these nuts makes an oil-cake which is excellent for fattening and conditioning cattle. This palm towers in every forest grove and beautifies every island in the rivers. In many places it constitutes the entire forest, to the exclusion of trees of harder wood and sturdier growth. As each tree yields from 500 to 1000 nuts, some idea of the commercial value of each can be gathered.

Another valuable plant in commerce and one which abounds in this section is the India rubber plant. It is of three kinds, all of them prolific, and all as yet untouched. Stanley estimates that enough india rubber could be gathered on the islands of the Congo and in the adjacent forests on the shores, in one year, to pay for the construction of a Congo railway. Then there are other gums, useful for varnishes, as the white and red opal. These are gathered and treasured by the natives of the fishing villages, and used as torches while fishing, but they know nothing of their value in the arts. Vegetable oils are extracted from the ground-nut, the oil-berry and the castor plant. The ground-nut oils are used by the natives for lights, the extract of the oil-berry is used for cooking, while the castor-oils are used as medicine, just as with civilized people.

UBANGI BLACKSMITHS.

Whole areas of forest are covered with dense canopies of orchilla, useful as a dye, and every village has a supply of red-wood powder. But in nothing are the forests and plains of this immense section so remarkable as in the variety and quality of the vegetation capable of producing commercial fibres. Here are endless supplies of paper material, rope material, material for baskets, mattings and all kinds of cloths, such as we now make of hemp and jute.

The more industrious and ingenious tribes run to specialties in turning luxuriant nature into account. The red-wood powder of Lake Mantamba is counted the best. Iboco palm-fibre matting ranks as the jute textiles of Scotland. The Irebu are the Japanese sun-shade and floor-mat makers. The Yalulima are artists in the manufacture of double bells. The Ubangi are the Toledo sword-makers of Africa. How bountiful their supply of iron is remains to be ascertained, but it is presumably a plentiful mineral, and its use among these people, not to say numerous other tribes, is evidence that the stone age of Africa was past, long before the heathen of Europe and America had ceased to strike fire by flints in their chilly caverns, or crush one another’s skulls with granite tomahawks. The iron spears and swords of some of these African tribes are models in their way, keen as Damascus blades and bright as if mirrored on Sheffield emery wheels.

One of the comforts of civilization, the buffalo robe, is fast becoming a thing of the past. Africa may yet furnish a supply, or at least a valuable skin for tanning purposes, out of the numerous herds of buffalo which are found everywhere in this great central section. The kings and chiefs of the African tribes affect monkey skin drapery as royal dresses. If they knew the favor in which similar dresses were held upon our boulevards, they might take contracts to supply the fashionable outside world for generations, and thereby enrich themselves. Our tanneries, furrier-shops and rug-makers would go wild with delight over African invoices of goat-skins, antelope hides, lion and leopard skins, if annual excursions of traders and hunters could be sent to the Upper Congo country, at the cost of a through passage on an express train. And how our milliners would rejoice over the beauty and variety of bonnet decorations if they could reduce to possession even a tithe of the gorgeous plumage which flits incessantly through the forest spaces of tropical Africa.

Then where in Africa is there not honey, sweet as that of Hybla or Hymettus, with its inseparable product, bees-wax? Not all the perfumes of Arabia nor of the Isles of the Sea can equal in volume and fragrance the frankincense and myrrh of the Congo region. As to ivory, Stanley estimates the elephant herds of the Congo basin at 15,000 in number, each herd numbering twelve to fifteen elephants—a total of 200,000 giants, each one walking about with fifty pounds of ivory in his head, or 10,000,000 pounds in all, worth in the rough $25,000,000, or when manufactured, a sum sufficient to enrich a kingdom. Nor does he consider this estimate too large, for he had met travelers who had seen as many as 300 elephants in a single herd, and who had killed so many that their carcasses blocked the stream they were crossing. Major Vetch had killed twenty in one locality, and a missionary, Mr. Ingham, had, more in a self-supporting than in a sporting spirit, shot twenty-five and turned their tusks into money. For a century, the ivory trade has been an important one on the eastern coast of Africa, yet the field of supply has only been skirted.

NATIVES KILLING AN ELEPHANT.

But civilization must tap and destroy this source of wealth, unless parks could be preserved and elephants reared for the sake of their ivory. Wonderful as are his figures respecting this resource, Stanley regards it as of little moment in comparison with other resources of the great basin. It would not equal in commercial value the pastime of the idle warriors of the basin, if each one were to find such in the picking of a third of a pound of rubber a day for a year, or in the melting of two-thirds of a pound of palm-oil, for then the aggregate of either would exceed $25,000,000 in value, and nature would be none the poorer for the drain upon her resources. The same could be said if each warrior picked half a pound of gum-copal per day, collected half a pound of orchilla, or ground out half a pound of red-wood powder.

Stanley, and indeed all explorers of Central Africa, are convinced that iron ore abounds. It must be that the iron formations are manifest, for the natives are not given to mining, yet most of the tribes are iron-workers, patient and skillful, according to the unanimous testimony of travelers, and as the trophies sent home testify. Near Phillipville are copper mines which supply a large portion of Western Africa with copper ingots. Among the Manyanga tribes, copper ingots are a commodity as common as vegetables and fowls. To the southeast of the Upper Congo section are copper supplies for the numerous caravans that find ingress and egress by way of the Zambesi. Both Livingstone and Pinto found tribes on the Upper Zambesi who were skillful copper-smiths. It is known that black-lead exists in the Congo region. It has ever been a dream that Africa possessed rich gold fields. Though this dream was early dispelled as to the Gold Coast, it appertains as to other regions, for the roving Arabs are accustomed to return from their inland visits bearing bottles filled with gold dust, which they say they have filled from the beds of streams which they crossed.

Every observer can inform himself as to the agricultural resources of Central Africa. It is an exception on the Upper Congo, and for that matter anywhere in Central Africa, to find a village without its cleared and cultivated plats for maize and sugarcane, and some of these plats have the extent and appearance of well-ordered plantations. Everywhere the banana and plantain flourish, and yield a bountiful supply of wholesome, nourishing food. Millet is grown among some tribes for the sake of the flour it yields; but everywhere on the main river the chief dependence for a farinaceous diet is on the manioc plant, which yields the tapioca of commerce. The black bean grows almost without cultivation, and yields prolifically.

There is hardly anything in the vegetable line that does not find a home in tropical Africa. The sweet-potato grows to immense size, as do cucumbers, melons of all kinds, pumpkins, tomatoes, while cabbages, the Irish potato, the onion and other garden vegetables introduced from the temperate zone thrive in a most unexpected manner.

Wherever the Arab traders and settlers have struck this section from the east they have introduced the cultivation of rice and wheat with success, and they have carried along the planting of the mangoe, lime, orange, lemon, pine-apple and guava, all of which take hold, grow vigorously and produce liberally. All of these last have been tried on the Congo with the greatest encouragement.

Then there is practically no limit to the spice plants found growing naturally in the Congo section and capable of introduction. Ginger and nutmeg are quite common amid the rich plant growth of the entire section. As the immense prairie stretches of the Upper Congo and the Lake regions may at no distant day become the grazing ground for the world’s cattle supply, or the granary of nations, so the river bottoms, and the uplands as well, may become the cotton producing areas of the manufacturing world. Cotton is indigenous and grows everywhere. It is especially fond of the cleared spots which mark the site of deserted villages, and asserts itself to the exclusion of other vegetation. It has neither frost nor drought to contend with, and nature has given it a soil in which it may revel, without the requirement of sedulous cultivation.

It may well be asked in connection with this section, what is there which civilization demands, or is used to, for its table, its factory, or store-house, that it does not produce, or cannot be made to produce? If it supports a population almost equal to that of Europe, a population without appliances for farming and manufacturing, a population of comparative idlers, what a surplus it might produce under intelligent management and with a moderate degree of industry. The native energy of Africa, even with the most advanced tribes, is sadly misdirected, or rather, not directed at all. The best muscle of every tribe is diverted to warlike pursuits or to the athleticism of the chase. Whilst it is not a rule that it is undignified for a full grown male to work, the customs are such as to attract him into other channels of effort, so that the burden of work is thrown upon the women. They are the vegetable gardeners, the raisers of fowls and goats, and in the cattle regions of the Upper Congo and Zambesi, they are the milk-maids, the calf-raisers and herd attendants. Therefore, African labor is today like African vegetation; it is labor run wild. It is a keen, excellent labor under the spur of reward, just as the African commercial sense is alive to all the tricks of trade. What it requires is instruction and proper direction, and with these one may find in tropical Africa a resource of far more value, both at home and abroad, than all the untold wealth of forest, soil or mine.

We see and hear too little of the human resources of Africa. By this we do not mean that religion does not regard the African as a fit subject for conversion, nor that ethnology does not seek to study him as a curiosity, nor that commerce fails to use him as a convenience, nor that the lust of the Orient has ceased to discuss him as a source of gratification, but we do mean that with all the writing about African resources and possibilities, the fertility of soil, the luxuriance of forest, the plenitude of minerals, the exuberance of animal life, there is but meagre discussion of the place the native himself is to fill, considered also in the light of a natural resource. While we grow infatuated with descriptions of African wealth and possibility, we almost skip the mightiest problem Africa can reveal, the relationship its own people are to bear to its material development, their status as factors in unfolding the inner continent to the outer world. The eyes of commercial and manufacturing Europe are so set upon the main advantage, to wit, that of grabbing African lands and appropriating at a cheap rate whatever is accessible, as to overlook the future of the native. Our own eyes have been so dimmed by the melancholy sight of the North American Indian fading away before our boasted civilization, or by sight of the sons of Africa forced into degradation at the behest of hard-hearted greed, as that they are actually blind to the human factor in African enterprise. With all our respect for civilization, it must be confessed that it has failed signally to use to advantage what it found God-made and at hand, when it struck new continents and islands. It has destroyed and supplanted, as on the American continents, the Pacific islands, in Southern Africa, in the East Indies. Is that to be the role of civilization in Central Africa? Does not that continent present a higher and more humanitarian problem? Driven to desperation by a baffling climate, yet spurred by an inordinate cupidity, will not the civilization of the white man be compelled to the exercise of a genius which shall embrace the native populations, classify them as an indispensable resource, lift them to a plain of intelligent energy, look upon them as things of equality, and ultimately regard them as essentials in the art of progress and the race for development? We regard extinction of the African races as fatal to African development. There is no place in the world where the civilized commercial instinct crosses so directly the natural laws of the universe as in Africa. There is no place in the world where the ordinary forces of colonization are so nonplussed as in Africa. If we are to go ahead with our humanitarian and commercial and political problems in Africa, in the old fashioned, uncompromising, brutal way; if Africa is to be civilized by the rejection of Africans, by their extinction or degradation; then will civilization commit a graver mistake and more heinous crime than when it forced the Indian into the lava-bed, the Aztec into the Pacific or the Inca into bondage, and death in the mine. America has its race problem on hand, to be solved more by blacks than whites. Africa presents the same problem to the world. Whatever the white man may make out of African resource by following the usual formula of civilization, reduction, extirpation and so on, on the unchristian plea that the end justifies the means, that result can be safely increased a thousand times if only it is not forgotten that the native is the true, the natural, factor in any rational and permanent scheme of development.

The next section of Central Africa which comes under observation is that which is watered by the Lualaba, or in other words, the Congo, from Stanley Falls to Lake Bangweola. This is an immense section, embracing 246,000 square miles, or a length of 1260 miles. This section comprehends the several lakes on the Lualaba and the drainage system on both sides of that river, but excluding Tanganyika, and that part of the reservoir system known as the Muta NzigÉ. Lake Bangweola covers 10,000 square miles; Lake Moero, 2,700 square miles; and Lake Kassali, 2,200 square miles. From Stanley Falls to NyangwÉ is 327 miles, all navigable, except the six miles below NyangwÉ. On the right side, going up, the Lualaba receives the Leopold river, navigable for thirty miles; the Lowa, navigable for an unknown distance; the Ulindi, 400 yards wide, and navigable; the Lira, a deep, clear stream, 300 yards wide; the Luama, 250 miles long; the Luigi, and Lukuga, the latter being the outlet of Lake Tanganyika.

On the left side, the Lualaba receives the Black River, the Lumani, and the Kamolondo. Above NyangwÉ, the main stream is again navigable to Moero Lake. Altogether there are 1,100 miles of navigable water in this section. It has, for twenty years, been a favorite stamping ground for slave traders, and its population has therefore been greatly decimated, yet Stanley estimates it at 6,000,000, embraced in nine principal and many subordinate tribes. On the Lower Lualaba are four important trading points, long used by the Arabs for their nefarious purposes, and all readily accessible to the eastern coast of Africa, over well defined routes. These points are Kasongo, NyangwÉ, Vibondo, and Kirundu. They are even more accessible from the west coast by way of the Congo, and Stanley regards them as valuable points for the gathering and dissemination of trade, since their populations have had twenty years of experience in traffic with outsiders. With their assistance the fine herds of cattle reared by the tribes of the plains east of the Lualaba might be brought to that river, and distributed along the entire length of the Congo, or even carried to European markets. This section is just as rich in natural products as that of the Upper Congo, and of the same general character.

The Chambesi is the main stream pouring into Lake Bangweola. Stanley makes it give a name to the section which embraces the head-waters of the Congo. It is a basin, walled in by high mountains whose sides and ravines furnish the springs of the Congo, and whose heights form the water-shed between the Congo and Zambesi. The Chambesi is a large, clear, swift stream, with several important affluents. It runs through a country, overgrown with papyrus, rushes, and tall grasses, which are most wearisome to the traveler. The country abounds in food, and the people are “civil and reasonable,” as Livingstone says. The interminable prairies are broken only by occasional rows of forest, indicative of a stream or ravine. Much of the land is inundated during the rainy season, giving rise to swamps of great extent and of difficult passage. Where this is not the case, the land affords rich pasturage for the herds of the Babisa and other tribes engaged in stock raising. This remote but interesting section is not over 46,000 miles in extent, with a population of 500,000.

As Stanley depends on Livingstone for his description of the Chambesi and Upper Lualaba country, and as this region was the object of a special journey by Livingstone—unfortunately for science and humanity, his last journey—it is proper to get an impression of it from the great explorer himself.

He started for it from Delagoa Bay, by way of the Rovuma river, which empties into Delagoa Bay, on the east coast nearly half way between the mouth of the Zambesi and Zanzibar. This river has its source well inland toward Lake Nyassa, and hence its ascent would bring him into the Lake region. All this ground has now become historic through the English and Portuguese struggle for its permanent possession.

Though the last of Livingstone’s journeys it was his most hopeful. Says he:—“The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild, unexplored country is very great. When on lands of a couple of thousand feet elevation, brisk exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm, and the day’s exertion always makes the evening’s repose thoroughly enjoyable. We have usually the stimulus of remote chances of danger from man or beast. Our sympathies are drawn out toward our humble, hardy companions by a community of interests, and it may be of perils, which make us all friends. Nothing but the most pitiable puerility would lead any manly heart to make their inferiority a theme for self-exaltation. However, that is often done, as if with the vague idea that we can, by magnifying their deficiencies, demonstrate our own perfections. The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is, that the mind is made more self-reliant. It becomes more confident of its own resources—there is greater presence of mind. The body is soon well knit. The muscles of the limbs grow as hard as a board, and seem to have no fat. The countenance is bronzed and there is no dyspepsia. Africa is a most wonderful country for the appetite, and it is only when one gloats over marrow bones or elephants’ feet that indigestion is possible. No doubt much toil is involved, and fatigue of which travelers in the more temperate climes can form but a faint conception. But the sweat of one’s brow is no longer a curse when one works for God. It proves a tonic to the system and is actually a blessing. No one can truly appreciate the charm of repose unless he has undergone severe exertion.”

Thus buoyantly he started for the interior, employing a retinue of human carriers and servants, and supplementing them with camels, mules and trained buffaloes. It was, in some respects, the most unique caravan of exploration that ever entered an unknown land. As to camels for carriers, away from the desert and through trackless jungle and forest, it was in the nature of an experiment which soon grew tiresome and ended in failure. As to the mules, they soon fell a prey to the tsetse fly. As to the buffaloes, which, together with the native oxen, had stood him in good stead through all his wanderings in the Kalahari desert, where they are in daily use as beasts of burden and the saddle by the natives, these too fell a victim to the merciless attack of the tsetse. He was therefore left with his two faithful attendants, Chuma and Susi, and his retinue of native carriers.

ON A JOURNEY IN THE KALAHARI DESERT.

Passing through the wonderful country which borders the Rovuma, a country of peaceful tribes and plentiful products, with nothing more than the usual adventures of an African traveler, he at last arrived at Lake Nyassa. At this lake, Livingstone was on the west side of what is now known as the Mozambique territory, though it is more familiar as Nyassaland. The lake is part of the northern Zambesi water system, and its outlet into that stream is through the river ShirÉ. On account of the absence of boats, which were all in the hands of suspicious Arab slave merchants, he was forced to pass down the east side of the lake and cross over its outlet, the ShirÉ. It was by the waters of this beautiful river and the Zambesi that Livingstone always hoped to secure an easy access to Central Africa. The only obstacles then were the foolish policy of the Portuguese with regard to custom duties at the mouth of the Zambesi, and the falls on the ShirÉ which obstruct its navigation for seventy miles. Had he lived a few more years he would have seen both of these obstacles in part overcome, and the mission work of Bishop Steere, supplementing that of Bishop Mackenzie, so far forward as to girdle the lake with prosperous mission stations. As Livingstone rounded the southern end of the lake, he could not help recalling the fact that far down the ShirÉ lay in its last sleep the body of the lamented Mackenzie, and that further down on the right bank of the Zambesi slept the remains of her whose death had changed all his future prospects. His prophecy that at no distant day civilization and the Gospel would assert itself in this promising land is now meeting with fulfillment in the claims of England to a right of way into Central Africa through this very region, at the expense of Portugal, whose older right has been forfeited by non-use.

In striking westward from the lake, Livingstone found the people to be a modification of the great Waiyau branch, which extends from the lake to Mozambique. He was also impressed with the fact that but one stock inhabited all the country on the Zambesi, ShirÉ, Lake Nyassa and Lake Tanganyika, owing to the slight difference in their dialects. The first tribe he came in contact with were both pastoral and agricultural. Their cattle ranged over grassy, fertile plains, and were characterized by the large hump on the shoulders, which seemed, in some instances, to weigh as much as a hundred pounds. They cultivated very fine gardens, and all seemed to work, though the burden of labor fell on the slaves. Wild animals were plenty, and during Livingstone’s stay in the village a woman was carried away and wholly devoured by a lion.

WOMEN CARRIERS.

In passing westward to the next village, his escort consisted of a large party of Waiyau, accompanied by six women carriers, who bore supplies for their husbands, a part of which consisted of native beer. His course brought him upon that peculiarity of soil which characterizes all the head streams of the Shire county, the Zambesi and the Congo. He designates it as earth sponge. The vegetation about the streams falls down, but is not incorporated with the earth. It forms a rich, black loamy mass, two or three feet thick which rests on the sand of the streams. When dry it cracks into gaps of two or three inches in width, but when wet it is converted into a sponge, which presents all the obstacles of a swamp or bog to the foot of the traveler.

On this journey, he witnessed a native method of hunting with dogs and the basket trap. The trap is laid down in the track of some small animal and the dogs are put on the trail. The animal in its flight runs into the open mouth of the trap, and through a set of converging bamboo splits which prevent its return. Mice and rats are caught in similarly constructed traps, which are made of wire instead of wood. A similar method of catching wild animals of larger growth was formerly in vogue in the southern Zambesi section. Long leads of wattled palisading were erected, open at the base and gradually narrowing to an apex, in which a pit was dug covered over with a layer of grass. Hunters scoured the plains in extended circles, beating in all the game within the circles. The frightened beasts, pushed by the gradually closing hunters and demoralized by their antics and noises, rush into the trap prepared for them and fall helplessly into the pit, where they are captured. This method of hunting is called “hopo.”

DRIVING GAME INTO THE HOPO. Larger.
PIT AT END OF HOPO. Larger.

The village he reached was inhabited by the Manganza, who are extremely clever in the art of manufacture. Their looms turn out a strong serviceable cotton cloth. Their iron weapons show a taste for design not equalled by any of their neighbors, and it is the same with all implements relating to husbandry. Though far better artisans than the more distinctive Waiyau, they are deficient in dash and courage. He was now at an elevation of 4,000 feet above the sea, in the midst of a very fine country, where the air was delightfully clear and delicious. The cultivation was so general, and the fields so regularly laid out, that it required but little imagination to picture it as an English scene. The trees were only in clumps, and marked the tops of ridges, the sites of villages or the places of sepulture. The people go well armed with bows and arrows, and fine knives of domestic manufacture, and being great hunters they have pretty well rid their section of game. The women wear their hair long, dress in reasonably full clothing, and have somewhat the appearance of the ancient Egyptians.

The westward journey brought him to the Kanthunda people, partly plain-dwellers and partly mountaineers. They are very pompous and ceremonious. Food was found in plenty, raised by their own hands, since game was well nigh extinct. The villages were now very frequent, mostly situated in groves composed of large trees. The country was broken into high ranges of hills with broad valley sweeps between. The thermometer frequently sank to 64° at night, but the sun was intolerably hot during the day, necessitating short journeys.

All this time Livingstone had been passing westward through the system which drains either into Lake Nyassa or directly into the Zambesi. His objective being the basin which supplies the head streams of the Congo, he turned his journey northward in the direction of the mountains which divide the two great river systems.

The tribes he now struck were greatly harassed by the Mazuti, who stole their corn annually and made frequent raids for the capture of slaves. Yet they were hospitable and prosperous, being skillful weavers and iron-workers. The country was mountainous, for he was on the divide between the waters which drain into Lake Nyassa and those which flow into the Loangwa on the west, the latter being an important affluent of the Zambesi. Striking the head-waters of the Lokushwa, a tributary of the Loangwa, he followed its course to the main stream, through a country of dwarf forests, and peoples collected in stockades, who were the smiths for a large region, making and selling hoes and other iron utensils.

He crossed the Loangwa at a point where it is 100 yards wide, and in a country abounding in game. It was here that he indulged in those regretful thoughts respecting the gradual passing away of the magnificent herds of wild animals—zebras, elands, buffaloes, giraffes, gnus, and numerous species of deer and antelope—which once roamed all over Central and South Africa, down to the Cape of Good Hope, which are every year being thinned away, or driven northwards. The lion—the boasted king of animals—makes a poor figure beside the tsetse fly in travellers’ records. The general impression about him is that, in spite of his formidable strength, his imposing roaring, and his majestic mane, he is a coward and a skulker. Livingstone had a hearty contempt for the brute, though in his time he had been severely mauled and bitten by him. The lion, however, when sore pressed by hunger, has been known to pluck up sufficient courage to tear off the flimsy roof of a native hut and leap down upon the sleeping inmates. The elephant—a much grander animal in every respect—occasionally performs a similar feat, his motive being curiosity, or perhaps mischief, if one of his periodical fits of ill-nature is upon him. A sight may now and again be got of a roaming rhinoceros tramping stolidly with surly gruntings through the depths of the thicket: a glade will be suddenly opened up where a group of shaggy buffaloes are grazing; or a herd of startled giraffes will break away in a shambling gallop, their long necks swinging ungracefully to and fro, as they crash their way through the forest, like “locomotive obelisks.” Now and then a shot may be got at a troop of zebras, pallahs, wild beeste, or other big-game animals, and the scanty larder be replenished for a time; but the traveler must often lay his account with being absolutely in want of food, and be fain, like Livingstone, to draw in his belt an inch or two in lieu of dinner.

CAPSIZED BY A HIPPOPOTAMUS.

But the most gallant sport in these regions—excelling in danger and excitement even elephant-hunting—is the chase of the hippopotamus. On the Loangwa Livingstone met an entire tribe, the Makomwe, devoted exclusively to hippopotamus hunting. They reside in temporary huts on the islands, and when game gets scarce in one place they move to another. The flesh of the animals they kill is exchanged for grain brought to the river by the more settled tribes. In hunting, two men have charge of a long, shapely canoe. The men, one in the bow and one in the stern, use short, broad paddles, and as they guide the canoe down the river upon the sleeping hippopotamus, not a ripple is seen on the water. The paddlers seem to be holding their breaths and communicate by signs only. As they near their prey, the harpooner in the bow, lays down his paddle, rises slowly up, with his harpoon poised in his hand, and at the right moment plunges it into the animal near the heart. His companion in the stern now backs the canoe. At this stage there is little danger, for the beast remains for a time at the bottom of the river. But soon his surprise is over, the wound begins to smart, he feels the need of air, through exhaustion. The strong rope attached to the harpoon has a float fastened to one end, and this float designates the spot occupied by the beast. It is known that he will soon come to the surface, and the canoe now approaches the float, the harpooner having another harpoon poised in hand ready for a second throw. The situation is full of danger. Perhaps the second lunge is successful, but the beast generally comes up with an angry bellow and is ready to smash the canoe in his enormous jaws. Woe betide the occupants, unless they seek safety in the water. This they are often forced to do, but even then are not safe, unless they swim below the surface. Other canoes now come up and each one sends an harpoon into the body of the prey. Then they all begin to pull on the connecting ropes, dragging the beast hither and thither, till it succumbs through loss of blood. Swarms of crocodiles invariably crowd about the scene, attracted by the scent of the bleeding carcass.

The people he met with after passing the Loangwa were less civil, yet by no means hostile. The forests were of larger growth and more extensive. Animal life was rich in variety, as much so as on the Zambesi itself, and it was nothing unusual to bring down a gnu, an eland, and other royal animals in the same day. The country was a wide valley stretch, clothed with vegetation and very fertile. It reached to the Lobemba country, whose people are crafty and given to falsehoods. They are fond of hunting and attack the elephant with dogs and spears. The land is beautiful and fruitful, but the tribes have been torn by slave-raiders and intestinal wars.

The Babisa people, further north, are franker and better off. They trade without urging, and are given to much social gaiety. Livingstone witnessed in their midst the performance of the rain dance by four females, who appeared with their faces smeared, with war hatchets in their hands, and singing in imitation of the male voice. These people degenerate as the northern brim of the Loangwa valley is approached, and are dependent for food on wild fruits, roots and leaves.

HUNTER’S PARADISE.

Passing further up among the head-streams of the Loangwa, the country becomes a succession of enormous earth waves, sustaining a heavy growth of jungle, without traces of paths. Marks of elephant and buffalo feet are frequent in the oozy soil about the streams, but the animals are shy. Serpents are plenty, and every now and then cobras and puff-adders are seen in the trails. The climate is delightful, bordering on cool, for now it must be understood, the elevation is high, the traveller being well up on the water-shed between the Congo and Zambesi.

At length the mountain ranges are scaled, and the streams begin to run westward into the Chambesi, the main head stream of the Congo. The wet season dawns and all the rivulets are full. The sponge which composes their banks is soggy, so that the feet slip and are constantly wet. All around is forest, deep and luxuriant. The low tribes of the Babisa extend over the mountain tips and partly down the western slopes, carrying along their mean habits and showing the wreck occasioned by the Arab slave merchants. They could furnish only mushrooms and elephants to Livingstone, and these at fancy prices.

It was here that Livingstone met with that mishap which contributed to his untimely end. His two Waiyau guides deserted, taking along his medicine chest. He felt as if he had received his death sentence, like poor Bishop Mackenzie, for the forest was damp and the rain almost incessant. From this time on, Livingstone’s constitution was continually sapped by the effect of fever-poison, which he was powerless to counteract.

Livingstone was now clearly on the Congo water-shed and was making his way toward the Chambesi. The people were shrewd traders, but poorly off for food. Camwood and opal trees constituted the forests. There was an abundance of animal life. Pushing his way down the Movushi affluent, he at length reached the Chambesi, wending its way toward Lake Bangweola, in a westerly direction. It is a full running stream, abounding in hippopotami, crocodiles and lizards. A crossing was made with difficulty, and the journey lay through extensive flooded flats. The villages were now mostly in the lowlands and surrounded by stockades as a protection against wild beasts. Elephants and buffaloes were plenty. Lions frequently picked off the villagers, and two men were thus killed at the village of Molemba the day before Livingstone’s arrival. Forests were still deep and dark, but the gardens were large. At Molemba he met King Chitapangwa, who gave him the royal reception described elsewhere in this volume, and presented him with a cow, plenty of maize and calabashes and a supply of hippopotamus flesh. The king was one of the best natured men Livingstone had met. The huts literally swarmed with a bird, like the water wag-tail, which seemed to be sacred, as in the Bechuana country. Here too the boys were of a lively type and fond of sport. They captured smaller game and birds, but were not as skillful as the young people of Zulu and Bechuana land, where the kiri weapon is handled with so much skill. This kiri is made of wood or rhinoceros horn, and varies from a foot to a yard in length, having at one end a knob as large as a hen’s egg. It is often used in hand to hand conflicts, but is the favorite weapon of the hunter, who hurls it, even at game on the wing, with marvellous precision.

Livingstone did not descend into the lowlands on the lower Chambesi and about Lake Bangweola, but kept heading northward on the skirts of the Congo water-shed, in the direction of Tanganyika. He found about all the streams the spongy soil which so impeded his steps, the same alternations of hill and plain, forest and jungle. Everywhere were evidences of that gigantic and plentiful animal life which characterizes tropical Africa. To this wonderful exuberance was now added herds of wild hogs, whose leaders were even more formidable looking than the boars of the German forests.

PURSUIT OF THE WILD BOAR.

In his course toward Tanganyika he passed the people of Moamba who import copper from Kantanga and manufacture it into a very fine wire for ornaments and animal traps. The Babemba villages were passed, a tribe living within close stockades, and more warlike than those to the south. The banana now begins to flourish, and herds of cattle denote a pastoral life. Tobacco is grown in quantities sufficient for a home supply. Hunting is carried on by means of the hopo hedges, within whose bounds the wild beasts are frightened by circles of hunters.

In the Balungu country, Livingstone found Lake Liemba, amid a beautiful landscape. The chief, Kasongo, gave him a royal reception. He was gratified here to find men from Tanganyika. The lake is at the bottom of a basin whose sides are nearly perpendicular but tree-covered. Down over the rocks pour beautiful cascades, and buffaloes, elephants and antelopes wander on the more level spots, while lions roar by night. The villages are surrounded by luxuriant palm-oil trees, whose bunches of fruit grow so large as to require two men to carry them. The Balungu are an excessively polite people, but chary of information and loth to trade. This is because they have been so much raided by the Arabs and native Mazitu. The waters of this lake appeared to drain to the north into Tanganyika, but more probably by some other outlet to the Congo. Livingstone had never seen elephants so plenty as in this section. They came all about his camp and might be seen at any time eating reachable foliage, or grubbing lustily at the roots of small trees in order to prostrate them so as to get at their stems and leaves.

At Mombo’s village were found cotton fields and men and women skilled in weaving. Elephants abounded and did much damage to the sorghum patches, and corn-safes. Leopards were destructive to the goat-herds. Bird life was even more various than on the Zambesi.

Though weakened by fever, Livingstone determined to deflect westward toward Lake Moero, on the line of the Lualaba, and in the heart of the basin which gathers the Congo waters. The route lay through a prairie region, well watered by brisk streams. The Wasongo people have herds of cattle, which they house with care, and a plentiful supply of milk, butter and cheese. But they were frequently disturbed by Arab slave stealers, and their supplies of cattle were often raided by hostile neighbors.

RAIDING THE CATTLE SUPPLY.

It was here that Livingstone came upon the caravan of Tippoo Tib, who even at that date seems to have been a marauding genius, greatly feared by the natives for his craftiness and cruelty. The tribe of King Nsama proved to be an interesting one. “The people are regular featured and good looking, having few of the lineaments of their darker coast brethren. The women wear their hair in tasteful fashion and are of comely form.” King Nsama seemed to have been a Napoleon in the land, till about the time of Livingstone’s visit when he had received a Waterloo at the hand of the Arabs.

HUNTING ZEBRAS.

Livingstone now came to the Chisera river, a mile wide, and flowing into Lake Moero. The land on both sides of the stream sloped down to the banks in long, fertile stretches over which roamed elephants, buffaloes and zebras. The people were numerous and friendly. They find plenty of food in the large game which inhabits their district. There was the same plenty of zebras, buffalo and hippopotami over the flat stretch which brought him to the Kamosenga river. Crossing this stream he was in the country of the Karungu, who live in close stockades and are by nature timid. They were chary traders, though they had abundance of ivory and their granaries were filled with corn. It was all the result of intimidation by the Arab slavers; and, it must be remembered that Livingstone was following in the track of one of their caravans.

Bending a little to the southwest the country was well wooded and peopled. Large game was still plenty and the natives captured an abundant supply of food. The Choma river was reached, abounding in hippopotami and crocodiles. The natives fled on the approach of the party and it was with difficulty that a supply of food could be bought. Beyond, and over a long line of hills, the natives became less timid. Here the party met a large herd of buffaloes from which a supply of meat was obtained.

Their course now bore them to the Luao, flanked by granite hills which continue all the way to Moero. All the valleys in this part of the Congo basin are beautiful, reminding one of English or American scenery. The soil is very rich. The people live amid plenty, procured from their gardens and the chase. They would be friendly if left alone, but they can hardly be said to lead natural lives owing to the frequency and cruelty of Arab raids.

As the lake is neared, the villages become more frequent. The lake is reached at last. It is a large body of water flanked by mountains on the east and west. The immediate banks are sand, skirted by tropical vegetation, in the midst of which the fishermen build their huts. There are many varieties of fish in the waters, and some of them are large and fine. At the north end is the outflow of the lake into the Lualaba river, whose continuation becomes the Congo. The inflow at the south end, Livingstone calls the Luapula, which name, he says, it keeps up to Lake Bangweola. Beyond that it is the Chambesi whose head-waters he had already crossed. West of the lake is the Rua country. The people about the lake are Babemba, timid to a fault and hard to trade with.

Though reduced by fever, the infatuation of travel was so strong in Livingstone, that he turned southerly along the lake and struck for the unknown regions, about its southern end. He crossed an important tributary, the Kalongosi, whose waters were literally alive with fish, from the lake, seeking places to spawn. South of this stream the people are the Limda, not friendly disposed, yet not hostile. They are of the true negro type, and are great fishermen and gatherers of salt on the lake. The forests are not of rank growth, and the wood is chiefly bark-cloth and gum-opal, the latter exuding its gum in large quantities, which enters the ground and is preserved in large cakes for the use of future generations.

The streams are now very frequent, and difficult to cross when swollen. After crossing the Limda he was in the Cassembe country, which is very rich and populous, growing the finest of palm-oil and ground-nuts. The capital village is in the centre of a plain, and is more a Mohammedan than a native town. As neither goats, sheep nor cattle thrive, the people depend on fish and vegetables for food. Every hut had a cassava garden about it, and honey and coffee were plenty, as were maize, beans and nuts.

The Cassembe, take their name from the chief or ruler, who is a Pharaoh, or general, called the “Cassembe,” the ninth generation of which was on the throne when Livingstone was there. He gave him a royal reception, differing in many respects from all others which he had received. Cassembe had a dwarf, captured from some of the northern tribes, who figured as clown of the occasion. Then his wife appeared as a conspicuous mistress of ceremonies, preceded by men brandishing battle axes, beating on hollow instruments, and yelling at the crowd to clear the way. She was a comely looking personage of light color and regular features. In her hand were two enormous pipes filled ready for smoking. This procession was followed by the Cassembe, whose smile of welcome would have been captivating but for the fact that he was accompanied by his executioner, bearing a broad Limda sword and a large pair of scissors for cropping the ears of offenders. The queen is a thorough agriculturist, and pays particular attention to her fields of cassava, sweet-potatoes, maize, sorghum, millet, ground-nuts and cotton. The people as a whole are rough mannered and positively brutal among themselves. Livingstone spent a month among them, before he could get an escort to take him through the swamps to the southern end of Moero, which he was anxious to explore further.

The Cassembe, like many other tribes on the head waters of the Congo, procure copper ore from Kantanga, on the west, and work it into bracelets, anklets and fine wire for baskets and traps. They have been visited time and again by the Portuguese. By and by Livingstone bade Cassembe farewell and pushed for the southern and western shores of the lake. He took views from many points on the Rua mountains and approached its shores at many points. At every shore approach there was a profusion of moisture and of tropical forests abounding in buffaloes and elephants, while the open spaces gave views of pasturing zebras. The latter had not yet become an object of chase as in the lands south of the Zambesi, where they give great sport to both native and foreign hunters and where so much of the larger game has been swept away by inconsiderate sportsmen. Lions and leopards were also plenty, and the camps had to be guarded nightly against them. The population about the lake is everywhere dense, and the fish supply limitless. Livingstone found the lake, at his various points of observation from the Rua heights, to be from 30 to 60 miles wide, and the natives claimed that it was larger than Tanganyika. They do not pretend to cross the lake in boats, deeming it too long and dangerous a journey, in a country where storms are frequent and the waters are apt to be lashed into fury by the winds.

The circuit of Lake Moero, the almost continuous wading of swamps and crossing of swollen streams, the arrival at Cassembe again and the expression of a determination to go still further south into the swampy regions, to discover Lake Bemba, or Bangweola, instead of back to Tanganyika, where rest and medicine could be had, caused the desertion of Livingstone’s entire traveling force except his always faithful Chuma and Susi. But having attained the consent of Cassembe to proceed, and having re-equipped himself as best he could, he started for Bangweola, keeping parallel with the Luapula, but a day’s march away from its swamps. Even then, the crossing of the frequent tributaries made his journey tedious and dangerous. It was through a region of hill and vale, forest and plain, of varied geological formation. At many points he came upon developments of iron ore, which the natives worked and he had no doubt that this valuable mineral existed in abundance in this region. It ought to be remembered that the Kantanga copper region, whence all the eastern coast draws a supply, lies but a few days’ journey west of the Luapula, and in this part of the Congo basin.

The people were the Banyamwezi, smart traders and given to lying like Greeks. They are populous, but having been raided by the Mazitu, many of their villages were deserted. Passing through their country, the land becomes flat and forest covered, and so continues all the way to Bangweola. The streams are all banked by the juicy sponge, before described, which make traveling so treacherous and tiresome. All the forests are infested with lions and leopards, necessitating the greatest care at night.

It was January 18th, 1868, when Livingstone first set eyes on Lake Bangweola. The country around the lake is all flat and free from trees, except the mosikisi, which is spared for its dense foliage and fatty oil. The people have canoes and are expert fishermen. They are numerous, especially on the large islands of the lake. The variety of fish is numerous and some are taken which measure four feet in length. The bottom of the lake is sandy, and the shores reedy. During windy weather the waters become quite rough and dangerous. The islanders have herds of goats and flocks of fowls, and are industrious and peaceable, not given to curiosity, but sitting unconcernedly and weaving their cotton or knitting their nets, as a stranger passes by. According to Livingstone’s estimate this splendid body of water is some 150 miles long by 80 broad. The Lokinga mountains, extending from the southeast to the southwest are visible, and this range joins the Mokone range, west of Kantanga, which range is the water-shed between the Zambesi and Congo basins.

The people are still the Banyamwezi. Besides being skilled in weaving cotton and in net-making, they are expert copper workers. In forging they use a cone-shaped hammer, without a handle. They use bellows, made of goat skin and wood. With these they smelt large ingots of copper in a pot, and pour it into moulds, which give a rough shape to the article they wish to forge.

Livingstone’s observations in this section taught him that there was no such thing as a rainy zone, to account for the periodical rise of rivers like the Nile and Congo. From May to October is a comparatively dry season, and from October to May almost every day gave a thunder shower, but there is no such continuous down pour as has been imagined by meteorologists in Europe. He accounts for the humidity of both the Congo and Zambesi watersheds, by the meeting of the easterly and westerly winds in that section, thus precipitating the evaporations of both oceans in mid-Africa. It is certain that the Congo does not get its yellow hue from its head waters, for all the streams run clear even when swollen. The sponges, or bogs, which are so frequent are accounted for by the fact that some six to eight feet beneath the surface is a formation of sand which cakes at the bottom, thus holding up the saturated soil above and preventing the escape of the water. The same is true of large sections on the Zambesi, and especially in the Kalahari Desert, though the vegetable mould is wanting on the top. In that desert wells must be dug only so deep. If water does not come, they must be dug in another place. To puncture the substratum of caked sand is to make an escape for the water, and create a dearth in an entire drainage system. A peculiarity of the sponge everywhere is that it absorbs so much water as to keep the streams from flooding till long after the shower. Then they assume what would be an unaccountable flow, but for knowledge of the fact that it has taken several hours for the rain-fall to penetrate them. When traveling on the Limda, Livingstone had great trouble with his ox teams, which became invariably bogged in the sponges, and when they saw the clear sand in the centre of the streams, they usually plunged headforemost for it, leaving nothing in sight but their tails.

DANGEROUS FORDING.

Livingstone’s return from Bangweola to Cassembe gave him no opportunity for observation, owing to the fact that the tribes were at war with one another, instigated by the Arabs, who were gathering a rich crop of slaves. Yet this misfortune was compensated in part by a return of his deserters to his service, on his arrival at Cassembe, thereby enabling him to continue his northward journey more comfortably, and to run the gauntlet of the contending tribes with greater safety.

His journey to Tanganyika, arrival at Ujiji, sickness there, receipt of welcome stores from the coast, slow recovery, make a sad history, but does not add to our knowledge of the natural features and resources of the Congo region. However, our interest is again awakened in this heroic adventurer when we find him once more on his feet and resolved to visit the land of the Manyuema, off to the west and on the Lualaba, in the very heart of the Upper Congo valley, and the stamping ground of the now celebrated Tippoo Tib. The Manyuema country was then unknown, and Livingstone went in the trail of the first of those Arab hordes which ever visited it, but whose repeated visits in quest of ivory and slaves have carried murder, fire, theft and destruction to a once undisturbed, if not happy people.

The journey lay from Kasenge, on the west coast of Tanganyika, near its middle, in a north-west direction to the great market town of Nyangwe, on the Lualaba, or Upper Congo. He found the route hilly but comparatively open. Villages were frequent and the natives friendly, till the Manyuema themselves were reached. There was an abundance of elephants and buffaloes, which kept them supplied with meat. Where forests grew, the trees were of gigantic proportions, and very dense, affording a complete escape for wild animals when exhausted or crippled in the chase. The native huts were of a superior kind, with sleeping apartments raised from the ground. The soil was fertile, and the cultivation of vegetables was general. On the route they came into the region of the oil-palm, which does not flourish eastward of this, but assumes a more gigantic growth as the western coast is approached.

A little more than midway between Tanganyika and Nyangwe, is Bambarre, a flourishing village, surrounded by gardens, which the men help to cultivate, though all the other duties of farm and house are imposed upon the women, who are actual “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the tribe. They made willing carriers, and are of comely form. Here the soko is believed to be a charm for rain. One was caught for meteorological purposes, with the result that the captor had the ends of two fingers and toes bitten off. Livingstone saw the nest of a soko, or gorilla, and pronounced it a poor architectural contrivance. A young soko, however, he regarded as the most wonderful object in nature, so ugly as to excite astonishment, yet so quaint as to stimulate curiosity. Like the kangaroo, it leaves one in doubt whether repulsion or attraction is uppermost in the mind when viewing it. In the vicinity are hot springs, and earthquakes are common, passing from east to west. The tribes of Bambarre hold the Manyuema in great fear, regarding them as of man eating propensity.

Leaving Bambarre, Livingstone was soon in the extensive country of the famed Manyuema, a tribe, or rather an entire people, hardly surpassed for size and power by even the Zulus, Macololos, Ugandas or Niam-Niams, a tribe whose name is one of terror far below Stanley Falls and far above Nyangwe, and whose unamiable qualities have of late years been greatly increased by the hold which Tippoo Tib, the Arab imperator on Lualaba, has gotten upon them.

Livingstone’s journey toward their capital was through the most remarkable country he had seen in Central Africa. He had elephant and rhinoceros meat of his own shooting, and plenty to trade to the natives for other dainties. The land is a beautiful succession of hills and dales. The villages are frequent and perched on the slopes so as to secure quick drainage. The streets run east and west in order that the blazing sun may lick up the moisture. The dwellings are in perfect line, with low thatched roofs, and every here and there are larger establishments with grounds, which answer for public assemblages. The walls are of beaten clay, and the insides are cosy and clean. The clay walls are so compact as to stand for ages, and frequently men return, after a site has been deserted for generations, to repair and re-occupy their ancestral abodes. The people practice the rite of circumcision, after the manner of the Abyssinians or Hebrews. The women are good housekeepers, and preserve their food from the ants, which are in great numbers and of many varieties, by slinging it from the ceiling of their huts in earthen pots or neatly made baskets.

A YOUNG SOKO.

Palms crown the heights of all the mountains and hills, and the forests, usually of a width of five miles between the groups of villages, are indescribable for their luxuriance and beauty. Climbers fold themselves gracefully over the gigantic trees, wild fruit abounds, and monkeys and brilliant birds skip and flit from bough to bough, with continuous chatter and chirp. The soil is excessively rich and the people cultivate largely, even though they are much separated by feuds and dense forest reaches. Their maize bends its fruit stalk round like a hook. They insert poles in the ground for fences, and these soon sprout making substantial and impervious hedges. Climbing plants are trained from pole to pole, and to these are suspended the ears of corn to dry. This upright granary forms a wall around the entire village, and the women take down corn at their will and distribute it to the men. The women are very naked. They are thrifty, however, and may be seen on any market day carrying their produce to the villages on their heads, or slung in receptacles over their shoulders. No women could be fonder of beads and ornaments than they, and Livingstone found them easy to trade with, when at all friendly.

The receptions Livingstone met with in the various villages, as he neared the Lualaba, were as various as the humors of the people. Some received him gladly, others with suspicion, and still others with rudeness, saying, “If you have food at home, why come you so far and spend your beads to buy it here?” On the Luamo, a tributary of the Lualaba, two hundred yards broad and very deep, the chiefs proved so hostile as to refuse to lend their canoes to the party to cross over. The women were particularly outspoken, and claimed that the party were identical with the cruel strangers (Arabs) who had lately robbed them. At length the warriors of the place surrounded the party, with their spears and huge wooden shields, and marched them bodily out of the district.

Wherever the wood has been cleared in this section, the soil immediately brings a crop of gigantic grasses. These are burned annually. Livingstone’s way now deflected to the north, through kindlier villages, separated by damp forests. The rainy season was on and the streams were all swollen. Evidences of large game were all around him. He passed an elephant trap, which was made of a log of heavy wood twenty feet long, with a hole at one end through which a vine passed to suspend it. At the other end a lance of wood, four feet long, is inserted. A latch string runs to the ground, which, when touched by the animal’s foot, causes the log to fall, and its great weight drives the lance into the animal’s body.

The people here were more friendly and very curious as they never had seen a white man before. They have a terrible dread of the Arabs, and strange to say the Arabs feared them as much, for nothing could convince an Arab that the Manyuema are not cannibals. It must be remembered that Livingstone wrote some years ago and before the Arabs acquired supremacy over these natives. It is a peculiarity of African tribes that nothing can exceed the terror inspired by a reputation in another tribe for cannibalism. It was a common thing on the ShirÉ and Zambesi, for Livingstone to hear the natives there speak of tribes far away to the north—like diseases, they are always far away—who eat human bodies, and on every occasion the fact was related with the utmost horror and disgust. Livingstone never took stock in these stories, nor in the wilder ones of the Arabs, and he mentions no authenticated case of cannibalism in all his volumes. It is more than likely that African cannibalism exists only in the imagination of persons who prefer sensation to fact.

Livingstone seems to have become bewildered on this northward journey, and crossed his track with the intention of making more directly for the Lualaba. Though he found the people kind and the country indescribably rich in vegetation, the way was difficult owing to the softness of the ground and the swollen streams. He however succeeded, with much hardship, in getting back to the route direct from Bambarre to the river. On this route the villages were almost continuous, as many as nine being passed in a single day. The people were kindly disposed and very curious. They brought food willingly, traded eagerly, preferring bracelets to beads, and in one village he was received by a band, composed of calabashes. Goat and sheep herds were plenty, tended mostly by children, who lived among and loved their charges as if they were human beings.

A grass burning resulted in the capture of four sokos by the natives, besides other animals. The full grown soko would do well to stand for a picture of the devil. One of them, it appears, was a young one which gave Livingstone an opportunity for study. His light-yellow face showed off his ugly whiskers and faint apology for a beard. The forehead, villainously low, with high ears, was well in the back-ground of a great dog mouth. The teeth were slightly human but the canines showed the beast by their large development. The hands, or rather fingers, were like those of the natives. The flesh of the feet was yellow. The eagerness with which the Manyuema devoured it left the impression that eating sokos was a good way to get up a reputation for cannibalism.

The soko sometimes kills the leopard by seizing both paws and biting them, but often gets disemboweled in the attempt. Lions kill sokos with a bound, tear them to pieces, but seldom eat them. They live in communities of about ten, each male having a single wife. Interference with a wife is visited by the resentment of all the other males, who catch and cuff the offender till he screams for mercy.

Livingstone was now sorely detained by sickness and the desertion of his carriers. The delay gave him opportunity to note the characteristics of the Manyuema country with more particularity. It is not a healthy country, not so much from fever as from debility of the whole system induced by damp, cold and indigestion. This general weakness is ascribed by some to the free use of maize as food, which produces weakness of the bowels and choleraic purging. Rheumatism is common and cuts the natives off. The Arabs fear this disease, and when attacked come to a stand-still till it is cured. Tape worm is frequent, and the natives know no remedy for it.

The natives have wonderful stores of ivory which the Arabs are eager for. They cultivate the ground with the hoe, but their hoeing is little better than scraping the ground, and cutting through the roots of the grasses. This careless husbandry leaves the roots of maize, ground-nuts, sweet-potatoes and sorghum to find their way into the rich, soft soil, which they succeed in doing. The ground-nuts and cassava hold their own against the grasses for years. Bananas grow vigorously on the cleared spaces.

The great want of the Manyuema is national life. Of this they have none. Each head man is independent of each other. Of industry they have no lack and the villagers are orderly toward each other, but they go no further. If a man of another district ventures among them, he is not regarded with more favor as a Manyuema than one of a herd of buffaloes is by the rest, and on the slightest provocation he is likely to be killed. They buy their wives from one another. A pretty girl brings ten goats. The new wife is led to the new home by the husband, where five days are spent, then she is led back to her home for five days, after which she comes to her new home permanently. Many of the women are handsome, having perfect forms and limbs. The conviction of Livingstone, after his experience with these people, was that if a man goes with a good-natured and civil tongue, he may pass through the worst people in Africa unharmed. He also draws a fine line between the unmixed and mixed African races, by a narrative of experience on the ShirÉ river. One of a mixed race stepped into the water to swim off to a boat, and was seized by a crocodile. The poor fellow held up his hands and screamed for help. Not a man went to his help, but allowed him to perish. When at Senna, in the Makololo country, a woman was seized by a crocodile. Instantly four natives rushed unbidden and rescued her, though they knew nothing about her. These incidents are typical of the two races. Those of mixed blood possess the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.

The fact that there is no supreme chief among the Manyuema, makes it difficult to punish murder except by war, and the feud is made worse, being transmitted from generation to generation. This state of affairs, when it came to be understood by such a crafty statesman as Tippoo Tib, contributed to his victory over the people, and that peculiar sovereignty which he exercises.

Livingstone got away from this place of confinement, and crossed the Mamohela, on his journey to Nyangwe. The country was a fine grassy plain watered by numerous rills, and skirted by mountains on either side, on which perched the neat villages of the natives. Then forests intervene of even more luxuriant growth than before, to be again succeeded by plains. The people seem to grow more stately and shapely, the women being singularly perfect in hands, feet and limbs, and of light brown color, but all with the orifices of their noses enlarged by excessive snuff taking. The humor of the villagers depended on how lately they had been raided by the Arabs. They seemed also to grow more clever in art, for now many forges were seen in active operation where iron was being shaped into spears and utensils.

MANYUEMA WOMEN.

At length the Lualaba is reached at Nyangwe, the capital of the Manyuema country, and the greatest market town in Central Africa. Long before Livingstone reached it he met upon the route hundreds of women wending their way thither with their marketing in baskets on their heads or slung in receptacles on their shoulders. As they trudged cheerfully along full of thought as to what they would receive in exchange or what they would buy, he could not help contrasting their condition with that of the women bent on a like errand in his own country, where the labor might be the same, but where there was happy exemption from such scenes of bloodshed as he was forced to witness while there. But as these have been already narrated the reader is here spared their horrible review.

The Manyuema prefer to do all their business in open market. If one says, “Come, sell me that fowl, or cloth,” the reply is, “Come to the market place.” The values there are more satisfactory and the transaction is open. The people had a fear of Livingstone, because they could not disassociate him from the Arab half-castes who had brought upon them untold misery.

He found the Lualaba at Nyangwe to be twenty feet deep in mid stream and subject to annual overflow just like the Nile—a mighty river, he says, three thousand yards wide, with steep banks and full of islands. The current runs at the rate of two miles an hour. His greatest trouble was to get a canoe to take him across the river. The natives thought his request for a large canoe, with which he intended to explore the river, meant war upon them, so they sent only small ones, capable of carrying two or three men, and which were entirely unfit for his purposes. The Manyuema on the left bank of the Lualaba, opposite Nyangwe, are called Bagenya. There are salt springs in their district, and they manufacture the salt for the Nyangwe market, by boiling the brine.

The salutations of the Manyuema are the same as those of the Bechuana people of the Kalihari desert, and indeed many of their customs reminded Livingstone of what he had seen south of the Zambesi, among the respective tribes. The natives of Nyangwe denied to Livingstone the stories of cannibalism that had been circulated about them. They never eat human flesh, unless it be the bodies of enemies killed in war, and not then through any liking for the flesh, which is salty and unpalatable, but because it makes them “dream of the dead man,” and, as it were, kill them over in their sleep. This a very comfortable way of getting a second vengeance, and is nearly allied to the reasoning which is at the bottom of cannibalism in the South Sea Islands, to wit, belief that the blood of a brave and fallen enemy transplants his bravery to the veins of him who partakes of it. Cannibalism, for the sheer love of eating human flesh, don’t exist in the world. It is a creation of the imagination, a product of the tale telling spirit, and is not fair to the pagan races.

Livingstone seems never to tire of praising the physical proportions of the Manyuema and says, he would back a company of them, for shape of head and physical form, male and female, against the whole Anthropological Society. He was surprised at the extent of country embraced in the Arab incursions. On questioning the slaves brought to Nyangwe by these marauders, he found them members of tribes far up and down the Lualaba, and westward of it many days’ journey. The copper of Kantanga reaches the Nyangwe market, and is readily bought up at high figures, in barter.

The great market of Nyangwe is held every third day. It is a busy scene, and every trader is in dead earnest. Venders of fish run about with potsherds full of snails and small fishes, or with smoked fishes strung on twigs, to exchange for cassava, potatoes, grain, bananas, flour, palm-oil, fowls, salt, pepper, and various vegetables. Each is bent on exchanging food for relishes, and the assertions of quality are as strong as in a civilized mart. The sweat stands out on their faces, cocks crow briskly from the baskets, and pigs squeal from their inclosures. Iron utensils, traps and cages are exchanged for cloth, which is put away for carriage in their capacious baskets. They deal fairly, and when differences arise, they appeal to each other and settle things readily on a basis of natural justice. With so much food changing hands among a throng which frequently numbers 3,000 souls, much benefit is derived, for some of them come twenty-five miles afoot. The men flaunt about in a nervous and excited way, but the women are the hardest workers. The potters hold up their wares and beat them with their knuckles to prove their quality by the sound. It is all a scene of fine natural acting—the eagerness with which they assert the value of their wares, and the withering looks of disgust when the buyer sees fit to reject the proffered article. Little girls run about selling cups of water to the thirsty traders, just as lemonade or ice-water boys ply their art in London during a procession. They are close buyers and sellers, prone to exaggerate the merits of their articles, yet satisfied when a bargain is clinched. Honesty is a rule, and when anything is stolen among the Manyuema, they know that it is the work of the Arab slaves.

The Manyuema children do not creep as white children do, but begin by putting forward one foot and using one knee. The fish of the Lualaba are of the same variety as in Lake Nyassa. Cakes made of ground-nuts are a common fare, as on the west coast. All Livingstone’s persuasions could not induce the natives to hire him a canoe large enough to navigate the river with. The Arabs had inflamed their imaginations by painting him as an enemy in disguise, but their real purpose was to keep control of all the larger boats themselves to assist in their river forays. Baffled by both natives and Arabs, and after waiting for many weary weeks at Nyangwe, he resolved to return to Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika.

His return journey was a repetition of the sights and scenes already described, varied of course by new opportunities for observing natural features and events. On nearing the Mamohela, he passed through a most populous region, with well constructed villages, abounding in goats, fowls, dogs, and pigs, with vegetable food of every tropical variety in plenty, while palm toddy, tobacco and bangue (Indian hemp) furnished them the dainties. The soil was so fruitful that a mere scraping with a hoe rendered a generous return. The forests afforded elephants, zebras, buffaloes and antelopes, and in the streams were abundance of fish. The antelope species in Africa is rich in variety, stalwart in form, and heavy horned. Those of the Chobe river are dappled in color and very beautiful. The quichobo is a rare species, and is more of a goat than an antelope. It has amphibious qualities, and when frightened will jump into the water and remain beneath the surface till danger has passed. At this point Livingstone was given a secret which would have been worth a fortune to him had he possessed it in time to have saved the camels, mules and buffaloes with which he started on this journey from the coast. It was to the effect that lion’s fat was a cure for the bite of the tsetse fly. As he had never seen a fat lion, he was incredulous, till assured that the Basango lions, in common with all other beasts, actually took on fat. A vial of the precious stuff was handed him, a proof of the fact that such a thing as lion fat did really exist. The cattle raising tribes of the plains west of Tanganyika, know the virtue of this ointment, and use it when they drive their herds toward the markets on the eastern coast.

TYPES OF AFRICAN ANTELOPES.

Sickness on the rest of the route to Tanganyika impaired his powers of observation and description. In general he found the country beautiful and fertile, but much disturbed by raiders. On his arrival at Tanganyika he was ferried across to Ujiji. Sick and in despair, his faithful Susi came rushing at the top of his speed one morning and gasped out, “An Englishman!” This was Stanley, on his mission of rescue. This meeting, and how the two explorers navigated Tanganyika, together with other things that went to make up one of the most remarkable interviews in history, are described elsewhere in this volume.

One would have thought that Livingstone could not fail to accompany Stanley home. But he did not, and, weakened as he was by disease, proclaimed to his rescuer a programme which embraced a journey round the south end of Tanganyika, southward across the Chambesi, round the south end of Lake Bangweola, due west to the mythical ancient fountains and thence to the copper-mines of Kantanga. All this, he says, “to certify that no other sources of the Nile can come from the south without being seen by me.” What heroism was here, yet in his condition, what infatuation! Poor man, deluded, self-sacrificial traveler, illy-advised adventurer! All this long journey, from the time he struck the Chambesi, months and months before, to Moero, to Tanganyika, to Bambare, to the Lualaba and Nyangwe, had been through the water system of the Upper Congo, and had nothing at all to do with the Nile sources, and now, going back to Bangweola and to the Chambesi for the purpose of contributing further to knowledge of the ultimate Nile sources, discovery of which he regarded as worth the sacrifice of his life, he was but stamping through the Congo basin again, and revealing the sources of a river which found an outlet in the Atlantic. But such were the uncertainties which confronted all these early African explorers. Even Stanley was uncertain whither the Lualaba would lead when he embarked on its waters, and although is volume furnished proof that it could not be the Nile, he was still prepared, from its northern course, to accept it as such, till it took its westward turn and straightened out for its Atlantic exit.

Writing on African beliefs, he says: “The African’s idea seems to be that they are under control of a power superior to themselves—apart from and invisible; good, but frequently evil and dangerous. This may have been the earliest religious feeling of dependence on Divine power, without any conscious feeling of its nature. Idols may have come in to give definite ideas of superior power, and the primitive faith or impression obtained by Revelation seems to have mingled with their idolatry, without any sense of incongruity. The origin of the primitive faith in Africans and others seems always to have been a Divine influence on their dark minds, which has proved persistent in all ages. One portion of primitive belief—the continued existence of departed spirits—seems to have no connection whatever with dreams, or, as we should say, with ‘ghost seeing,’ for great agony is felt in prospect of bodily mutilation, or burning of the body after death, as that is believed to render a return to one’s native land impossible. They feel as if it would shut them off from all intercourse with relatives after death. They would lose the power of doing good to those once loved, and evil to those who deserved their revenge. Take the case of the slaves in the yoke, singing songs of hate and revenge against those who sold them into slavery. They thought it right so to harbor hatred, though most of the party had been sold for crimes—adultery, stealing etc,—which they knew to be sins.”

In Central Africa one is struck with the fact that children have so few games. Life is a serious business, and amusement is derived from imitating the vocations of their parents—hut building, making little gardens, bows and arrows, shields and spears. In Southern Africa boys are very ingenious little fellows and have several games. They shoot birds with bows and arrows, practice with the kiri, and teach linnets to sing. They are expert at making guns and traps for small animals, and in making and using bird-lime. They make play guns with a trigger which go off with a spring and have cotton fluff as smoke. They shoot locusts very cleverly with these toy guns.

DINKA CATTLE HERD. Larger.

Desperate as Livingstone’s last undertaking seemed, he was well equipped for it by the receipt of fifty-seven porters sent up from Zanzibar by Stanley and a supply of cattle and donkeys. He found that much cotton was cultivated on the shores of Tanganyika, that the highlands surrounding the lake are cut into deep ravines, and that game was plenty everywhere, elephants, buffaloes, water buck, rhinoceri, hippopotami, zebras. The lake puts off numerous arms or bays into the mountains, some of which are of great width, cutting off travel entirely except at a distance from its shores.

Even before he had rounded the southern end of Tanganyika, he was out of heart with the experiment of using donkeys as carriers. He had all along contended that this hardy animal could be taken through regions infested with the deadly tsetse fly, even though horses, mules, dogs and oxen might perish. But he, for a second time, witnessed the death of one donkey after another from the bites of the African pest-fly. His cattle fared somewhat better, this time, but even they proved a poor means of keeping up a food supply, being apt to wander, subject to swellings from fly-stings, and a constant invitation to raiders. True, he escaped this last calamity, but other travelers in different parts of Africa have been less fortunate, as their accounts show.

As he passed down into the section which furnishes the head-streams of Lake Moero, the rains descended in volumes, the streams were swollen, the people were unkind, and travel became dismal and difficult, beyond any former experience. He was troubled with sickness and the desertion of his men. A leopard broke into his camp, at night, and attacked a woman carrier. Her screams frightened his last donkey and it ran away. The slave traders had stirred up the villages, so that trade for the necessaries of life was always difficult. He found the country a succession of hills and plains, forests and high grasses, with every evidence of great fertility. Dura, or the flour of sorghum seed, furnishes the staple food. His narrative of the streams he crossed is bewildering, but it shows the great plentitude of these Congo sources and quite reconciles one to the mighty volume of that magnificent river. With such an abundance of lively sources it must very largely defy active Equatorial evaporation and be at all seasons a surely navigable and valuable commercial water-way.

The sponges were now all full from the continuous rains, so that a stream 100 feet wide, had to be approached through a bog of twice that width. His last cow died, and he was wholly dependent on the natives for food. Pushing on, and bearing gently westward, he came into the immediate region of Bangweola. All around was flat, water-covered plain, alive with elephants and other large game. Every camping place was infested with ants. Life was miserable for the entire party, and Livingstone himself was so weak as to be incapable of passing the river and swamps, except by being carried.

He entered the lake with canoes, and pushed off to one of its numerous islands, or at least what he supposed to be an island, though it afterwards turned out to be only a rise in the plain which surrounds the true lake, and which was then entirely water-covered. The Basiba people occupy the northern shore of the lake. They proved to be hospitable and supplied plenty of fish and fowls with an occasional sheep. At every village a party of male and female drummers and dancers turned up, who gave music and exhibitions in dancing.

Crossing the mouth of the Chambesi in canoes, and entering the Kabinga country, he found a cattle raising section, though the cattle are wild. Elephants were plenty and very destructive of crops. The entire country about the lake was reedy and flooded. Many of the depressions in the plain were now arms of the lake, extending for twenty or thirty miles and so wide as to be seen across with difficulty. The journey now was mostly by canoes, and the camps were on elevations in the plain, which were now islands. Lions made the night hideous with their roaring. Fish and other food was abundant. The mouth of river after river was passed as it debouched into the lake. Livingstone grows weaker with every days’ exertion. It is only by the most herculean effort that he reaches Chitambo on the south side of the lake. His ability to observe and note has passed away. His power as a traveler and explorer is gone. Death seized him in Chitambo’s village, and his faithful Chuma and Susi bore his remains to the coast for transport to England.

We know of the Chambesi, of Lake Bangweola, of the Luapula, of Lake Moero, of the Lualaba, and of this magnificent section of the Upper Congo basin, from Livingstone. True, we know little of it, because the heroic traveler was sick unto death while threading the mazes of forest and plain which give character to the section. But he has given such an inkling of its wonderful resources of soil, animal life and people as to create fresh interest in the region and furnish supplementary evidence to all that has been said or dreamed of the wealth of the Congo basin.

The last of the sections into which Stanley divides the Congo basin is that of Tanganyika. This great lake is 391 miles long and 24 broad, with an area of 9400 square miles. The territory about the lake, belonging to the Congo water system, embraces 93,000 square miles. It is thickly populated, and contains probably 2,500,000 persons. The lake itself is 2750 feet above the sea, and it is bounded by mountains, north and south, which rise from 1500 to 2500 feet above its surface. The slopes of these mountains lead to lofty plateaus, which are fertile, densely peopled, and well covered with cattle herds. The natives are of a superior type, peaceably inclined and much attached to their pastoral occupations, and to the raising of sorghum, millet and maize. At various towns on the lake are large communities of Arab traders, the most noted being at Ujiji, where Stanley met Livingstone on his celebrated journey of rescue. The International Association supports a flourishing mission on the east side of the lake, and others have been recently founded.

In general this section supports the natural products indigenous to the Congo basin, though the oil-palm is not seen east of Ujiji. Around the lake the natives make a larger use of the cereals, than further west, where the banana and manioc grow more luxuriantly. There is hardly any finer market in Africa than that of Ujiji, where may be seen for sale an intermixture of products such as would do credit to a first-class city, were it not for the fact that human beings often constitute one of the articles of merchandise. On any propitious market day may be seen a full supply of maize, millet, beans, ground-nuts, sugar-cane, wild-fruit, palm-oil, bananas, plantains, honey, ivory, goats, sheep, cattle, fowls, fish, tobacco, nets, copper and iron ware, cloth, barks, hoes, spears, arrows, swords, etc., etc. On the northwest side of this section, at Uvira, are iron works of no mean proportions, whose products are iron wire and various iron utensils for both household and agricultural purposes.

In his recapitulation of resources, Stanley estimates the Congo basin to contain as follows:—

The ownership of the great basin, as determined at the Berlin conference, is as follows:—

Countries. Areas. Population.
French Territory, 62,400 2,121,600
Portuguese Territory, 30,700 276,300
Unclaimed, 349,700 6,910,000
Congo Free State, 1,065,200 42,608,000

Inquiring, exacting commerce is ever ready with practical questions. When it has listened with attentive ear to Stanley’s bewildering estimates, astounding calculations and captivating statements, it coldly asks what return shall we find for our wares and for the expense and trouble of landing them in these tropical markets? He boldly replies, you cannot shut your eyes to the fact that Western Africa is already contributing her half of a trade with Europe, which already exceeds $150,000,000 a year. This comes almost exclusively from a coast line 2900 miles long. Enlarge this line, by adding the 6000 miles of navigable waters which are embraced in the Congo basin, and this trade by the products which would thereby find an outlet, and you would have a traffic equal to $500,000,000 annually. Improve this inland navigation by a railroad around the cataracts of the Congo, enlist the sympathies and energies of the 43,000,000 of people who inhabit the basin, or even of the 4,483,000 who dwell on navigable banks of the water-ways, give them some idea of the incomputable wealth that is over, around and under them, and which may be had by simply reaching for it, regard them as men and deal with them as such, and then you will soon realize that the Congo banks are worth far more to commerce, mile for mile, than the ocean shores. And well might he say this, for the banks of the Congo are a succession of villages, alive with people imbued with the trading spirit, well acquainted with the value of oils, rubber, dye-woods and gums, anxious for cloth, brass-rods, beads and trinkets. This cannot be said of all places on the sea-coast. Stanley narrates that eager natives have followed him for miles offering ivory and red wood powder for cloth, and that when they failed to effect a trade, they would ask in despair, “Well, what is it you do want? Tell us and we will get it for you.”

So sanguine was Stanley of the commercial situation on the Congo and in tropical Africa that he ventured to tell the practical merchantmen of Manchester how they could triple the commerce of the entire west coast of Africa by building two sections of narrow gauge railway, each 52 and 95 miles long, connected by steamboat navigation, or a continuous railway of 235 miles long, around Livingstone Falls, and thereby opening the Upper Congo to steamboats. Such a step would insure the active coÖperation of more than a million of native traders who are waiting to be told what they can furnish out of their inexhaustible treasures, besides those they have already set a value on, as iron, oil ground-nuts, gum, rubber, orchilla, camwood, myrrh, frankincense, furs, skins, feathers, copper, fibres, beeswax, nutmegs, ginger, etc.

Stanley showed how a few factories at available points for the conversion of cruder articles into those of smaller bulk, and how the trading posts which were sure to spring up on the site of every important village, would gather in sufficient wares to tax the capacity of such a railroad as he contemplated to the uttermost, and realize a handsome income on the investment. He even gave estimates of the cost of the enterprise, which have been borne out by the practical engineers who have since taken the work of building it in hand.

He showed further how human and animal carriers had failed to solve the problem of porterage around Livingstone Falls, although the interests beyond, identified with the work of the International Association and with Christian missions, were expending annually a sum equal to 51/2 per cent. on the estimated cost of a railway.

He eloquently concludes his survey of tropical African resources thus: “Until the latter half of the nineteenth century the world was ignorant of what lay beyond the rapids of Isangila, or how slight was the obstacle which lay between civilization and the broad natural highway which cleared the dark virgin regions of Africa into two equal halves, and how nature had found a hundred other navigable channels by which access could be gained to her latest gift to mankind. As a unit of that mankind for which nature reserved it, I rejoice that so large an area of the earth still lies to be developed by the coming races; I rejoice to find that it is not only high in value, but that it excels all other known lands for the number and rare variety of precious gifts with which nature has endowed it.

“Let us take North America for instance, and the richest portion of it, viz: the Mississippi basin, to compare with the Congo basin, previous to its development by that mixture of races called modern Americans. When De Soto navigated the Father of Waters, and the Indians were undisputed masters of the ample river basin, the spirit of enterprise would have found in the natural productions some furs and timber.

“The Congo basin is, however, much more promising at the same stage of undevelopment. The forests on the banks of the Congo are filled with precious red-wood, lignum vitÆ, mahogany and fragrant gum trees. At their base may be found inexhaustible quantities of fossil gum, with which the carriages and furnitures of civilized countries are varnished; their foliage is draped with orchilla, useful for dye. The red-wood when cut down, chipped and rasped, produces a deep crimson colored powder, giving a valuable coloring; the creepers which hang in festoons from the trees are generally those from which India rubber is produced, the best of which is worth fifty cents a pound in a crude state; the nuts of the oil palm give forth a butter which is a staple article of commerce; while the fibres of others will make the best cordage. Among the wild shrubs are frequently found the coffee-plant. In its plains, jungles and swamps, luxuriate the elephants, whose teeth furnish ivory worth from two to three dollars a pound in an unworked condition; its waters teem with numberless herds of hippopotami, whose tusks are also valuable; furs of the lion, leopard, monkey, otter; hides of the antelope, buffalo, goat and cattle, may also be obtained. But what is of more value, it possesses over 40,000,000 of moderately industrious and workable people, which the red Indians never were. And if we speak of prospective advantages and benefits to be derived from this late gift of nature, they are not much inferior in number or value to those of the well developed Mississippi valley. The copper of Lake Superior is rivalled by that of the Kwilu valley and of BembÉ. Rice, cotton, tobacco, maize, coffee, sugar and wheat thrive equally well on the broad plains of the Congo. This is only known after the superficial examination of a limited line which is not much over fifty miles wide. I have heard of gold and silver, but the fact of their existence requires confirmation and I am not disposed to touch upon what I do not personally know.

“For climate, the Mississippi valley is superior, but a large part of the Congo basin, at present inaccessible to the immigrant, is blessed with a temperature under which Europeans may thrive and multiply. There is no portion of it where the European trader may not fix his residence for years, and develop commerce to his own profit with as little risk as is incurred in India.

“It is specially with a view to rouse the spirit of trade that I dilate upon the advantages possessed by the Congo basin, and not as a field for the pauper immigrant. There are over 40,000,000 of native paupers within the area described, who are poor and degraded already, merely because they are compassed round by hostile forces of nature and man, denying them contact and intercourse with the elements which might have ameliorated the unhappiness of their condition. European pauperism planted amongst them would soon degenerate to the low level of aboriginal degradation. It is a cautious trader who advances, not without the means of retreat; the enterprising mercantile factor who with one hand receives the raw produce from the native, in exchange for the finished product of the manufacturer’s loom—the European middleman who has his home in Europe but his heart in Africa—is the man who is wanted. These are they who can direct and teach the black pauper what to gather of the multitude of things around him and in his neighborhood. They are the missionaries of commerce, adapted for nowhere so well as for the Congo basin, where are so many idle hands, and such abundant opportunities all within a natural “ring fence.” Those entirely weak-minded, irresolute and servile people who profess scepticism, and project it before them always as a shield to hide their own cowardice from general observation, it is not my purpose to attempt to interest in Africa. Of the 325,000,000 of people in civilized Europe, there must be some surely to whom the gospel of enterprise I preach will present a few items of fact worthy of retention in the memory, and capable of inspiring a certain amount of action. I am encouraged in this belief by the rapid absorption of several ideas which I have promulgated during the last few years respecting the Dark Continent. Pious missionaries have set forth devotedly to instil in the dull mindless tribes the sacred germs of religion; but their material difficulties are so great that the progress they have made bears no proportion to the courage and zeal they have exhibited. I now turn to the worldly wise traders for whose benefit and convenience a railway must be constructed.”


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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