[to be continued.]
[SOLVING A GEOGRAPHICAL CONUNDRUM.]
THE LONG-VEXED QUESTION OF THE MOBANGI-MAKUA RIVER.
BY CYRUS C. ADAMS.
f you were to select a bit of the earth's surface to illustrate the slow and painful steps by which geographical knowledge often grows, you could do no better than to point to the Mobangi-Makua River, the largest Congo tributary. No other subordinate river in Africa has ever been the theme of so much mistaken guess-work, or has cost the labor of so many explorers. For many years this was the largest river in the world that was in dispute. Even the name by which it was long known was a blunder. When Schweinfurth asked its name, the natives answered, "Welle." But Welle simply means "river," and is not the name of the stream.
If all African tribes were great travellers, as some of them are, and were gifted, like the Eskimos, with keen geographical instinct, they would save explorers no end of blunders, guess-work, and toil. But often they do not know rivers, lakes, or mountains beyond their own frontiers, and each tribe has its own names, or no names at all, for the geographical aspects around them. When an explorer asked the name of a great lake, the natives shouted, "Nyassa!" which means simply "lake": and so we have the name Lake Nyassa on the maps to-day. Nearly every tribe along the Mobangi-Makua has its own name for the river, which, being disguised as the Kibali, the Makua, the Dua, the Mobangi, and so on, was hard to recognize as one and the same great river under many aliases.
Schweinfurth says it was a thrilling moment when first he stood upon the bank of the "noble river, which rolled its deep dark flood majestically to the west." At a glance he settled one important question. He had heard of the river, and thought it might be a tributary of the Nile. But on that spring day in 1870 he saw its flood drifting into the great unknown to the west. One point was settled. It was not a Nile affluent; and the explorer, listening to all the natives could tell him, studying all our meagre information about water systems to the west, convinced himself that he had discovered the upper part of the Shari River, which pours into Lake Tchad, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. For years most geographers agreed with him, and map-makers traced the supposed course of Schweinfurth's Welle to the edge of the great northern desert.
But when Stanley floated down the Congo in 1877, he saw great rivers entering it from the north. It occurred to him, and to the explorers who followed him, that one of them was probably the lower course of Schweinfurth's Welle. For years this and that river was talked about as the possible outlet of the Welle.
Stanley thought it was very likely identical with the Aruwimi, and he published his hypothesis in his book The Congo in 1885. He had never seen the mighty flood that the Mobangi pours into the Congo, hundreds of miles below the Aruwimi confluence.
Nobody knew, until after Stanley's book was published, that one of the greatest and most modest of explorers, the late Dr. Wilhelm Junker, had already traced the Welle—or the Makua, as he called it—for hundreds of miles, to a point far west of the Aruwimi, proving that it could not possibly be that river. For nearly seven years (1879-86) this man of science lived alone near the upper waters of the mysterious river, studying Nature and Nature's children, eating the food his black friends sold him, including fried ants and other relishes and dainties not known in our cuisine, and wandering through the land with only a cane in his hand, and a few black servants to carry his baggage. At the frontier of a new district he always pitched his camp, sent his presents forward to the chief, made his peaceful purpose known, and asked permission to go on. In all these years he never fired a hostile shot; and late in 1882 he set out down the river to find if it really flowed to Lake Tchad.
But Junker's heart was heavy within him. How could he map the unknown region he was entering? His scientific equipment was worthless. Some instruments had been broken during mouths of incessant travel. Others had been ruined by the humid climate. He had absolutely nothing except a compass to aid in determining his positions. Destitute of scientific outfit he determined to make up for it, as far as he could, by scrupulous care, and the most minute exactitude he could attain in his route survey.
JUNKER TRUDGED ALONG, COMPASS IN HAND.
So Dr. Junker trudged along through the grass, that was often higher than his head, compass in hand, counting every step. Every fifteen minutes he stopped and jotted down in his note-book the distance and the mean direction travelled in the preceding quarter of an hour. He noted all the little streams, the names of villages, the hill features, and so on; and at night he drew on his route map, with the greatest care, the journey of the day, and all the data that may be recorded on a map. Geographers still examine with great interest these neat and methodical map sheets. But they did not know, till years after Junker had returned home, that he had achieved, as we shall see, one of the most remarkable geographical feats on record.
Junker kept up this trying routine through all the weeks of his long journey. Compelled at last to turn back, when nearly four hundred miles on his way, by news that the Mahdists might destroy all the collections he had left behind, he computed the latitude and longitude of his farthest point. All the facts for this computation were his note-book records and the known position of his starting-point. When he returned home, he and Dr. Hassenstein, a famous German cartographer, sat down and laboriously dug through Dr. Junker's records again. The result was almost the same that Junker himself had reached.
The time came when Lieutenant Le Marinel, ascending the great river from the Congo, reached Dr. Junker's farthest. With his instruments he fixed the geographical position of this point, and found that it was practically just where Junker and Hassenstein said it was. Junker's determination, made without instruments, at the end of a long journey, was not more than a mile or two out of the way.
Did you ever hear of a steamboat losing its way and getting into the wrong river by mistake? This actually happened on the Congo, and the blunder hastened the day when the world was to know all about the destination of the Makua River. One day, in 1885, Mr. George Grenfell was steaming along on the Peace, and thought he was making excellent progress up the Congo. But one thing perplexed him. He could not find Libongo, on the Congo's right bank. He had been there before, and knew where the town ought to be. He began to wonder if he was on the Congo, after all. He discovered that he had passed the first parallel of north latitude, and then he knew that he had ascended, for one hundred miles, a mighty tributary that seemed as large as the Congo itself. It was the Mobangi. Grenfell's mistake was not so absurd as it appears. The Mobangi has a very wide channel, is thickly strewn with islands, like the Congo, and its lower course, for many miles, runs nearly parallel with the greater river. Its mouth had been discovered the year before, but nothing was known of the river.
Grenfell had other work to do just then, and so he lost no time in getting out of the Mobangi; but later in the same year he entered its mouth again, determined to go wherever it led him. His little party on the steamer were in great straits for food one day, and they could not buy provisions. The Mobangi natives had decided that their strange visitors were ghosts, and who ever heard of ghosts needing food? As usual, Grenfell tried argument and persuasion instead of force.
"Look here," he said. "We are men like you. If we do not eat we cannot live. We sleep as you do. We have the same number of fingers and toes that you have. You never saw ghosts who were like you as we are."
It took a good deal of this sort of talk to convince the native mind, but at last the explorer went on his way, with as much food as his boat could carry, leaving friends behind.
THEY ASSAILED THE "PEACE" WITH FLIGHTS OF POISONED ARROWS.
Up the Mobangi steamed the Peace, over three hundred miles north of the equator, and Grenfell had travelled four hundred miles on the river, when rapids barred the way, and he turned back. It had been an exciting trip, for thousands of natives lined the banks, convinced that the times were out of joint indeed if these remarkable strangers with their puffing smoke boat must needs be inflicted upon them. Near the most northern point attained Grenfell saw houses built in the branches of tall straight-stemmed trees. The houses were forty to fifty feet in the air, and from them dangled rope-ladders reaching to the ground. A strange and animated spectacle was witnessed when these aerial structures came into view; for men, women, and children were clambering up the rope-ladders as fast as their arms and legs could carry them, and taking refuge in the houses. From these points of vantage they assailed the Peace with flights of poisoned arrows, which nobody on board minded a whit, for the party were well protected by the arrow-proof wire netting that shielded the deck. Savage fears were finally allayed, and the refugees sought terra firma again. Everybody welcomed Grenfell as he steamed down the river, and the only trouble was that he could not stay long enough to satisfy the newly made friends, who had been his enemies a little before.
Thus the mystery was gradually clearing up. Even before the news from Grenfell reached Europe, the Belgian geographer Wauters declared that Schweinfurth's Welle must be a Congo tributary, and the Mobangi its lower course. What a shout of protest the French geographers raised! They laughed at the idea, and said it was extremely absurd. The trouble with them was that if Schweinfurth's river was in the Congo basin, it could not belong wholly to France, and so they were determined that its waters should not join the Congo if they could help it. They wanted nearly every foot of the waterway to be traversed before they were willing to surrender. But as soon as Grenfell's great discovery was reported, all other theories melted into air, and Lake Tchad ceased to figure as the outlet of the Makua.
But poor Dr. Junker did not know how grandly he had helped to solve the problem. His letters had reached the outside world, but no letters from home had come to him. Months after Grenfell's ascent of the Mobangi, Junker reached the sea. "I still believe," he said, "that the Makua goes to Lake Tchad." He was told of Grenfell's discovery, and he thought it over for a while before he made reply. Then he simply said: "That settles it. The Makua goes to the Congo."
But several hundred miles of unexplored river still stretched between the points attained by Grenfell and Junker, and it was 1890 before this gap was completely filled by the expeditions of Van Gèle and Le Marinel. Time and again Van Gèle pulled his little steamer through the rapids that had barred Grenfell's advance. One of them will always bear the name of Elephant Rapid, because there the explorer killed an elephant, whose flesh was smoked, and supplied food to forty black helpers for two months. New vistas of Africa opened along the half-mile-wide river above the rapids. Plantations of maize and bananas stretched for miles away. Many villages dotted the hill-sides, posts of observation were seen high up in the branches of lofty cottonwood-trees, and, strange to relate, many women had black hair hanging down their backs in braids, some of which were so very long that they were tied around the arms to keep them from trailing on the ground. European anthropologists rubbed their eyes and read again. But how many stories are spoiled by a little investigation! It was discovered at last that all these tresses were false, and of vegetable origin.
Most of the natives were friendly, and their fleets of thirty or forty canoes, filled with food for sale, often surrounded the steamer; and so, after twenty years of theory, guess-work, discussion, and exploration, the great river was at last revealed, from the mountains near the Nile that gave it birth to the place where it mingles with the Congo.