Explorers and Travellers

by A. W. Greely

Leaving Bagamoyo, November 17, 1874, Stanley reached Lake Victoria Nyanza in March, 1875, his journey of seven hundred and twenty miles being marked by pestilential fevers, struggles through thorny jungles, and scant food and water. Circumnavigating the lake, he found it to be over four thousand feet above the ocean, while its proportions—nearly twenty-two thousand miles in area and in places over five hundred feet deep—assumed those of an inland sea. Here Mtesa, a powerful and able negro king, of Mohammedan faith, proved most friendly and greatly aided him, furnishing an escort, which enabled Stanley to explore a part of the adjacent mountain region. From Ujiji he then explored Lake Tanganyika, finding it to be about half the size of Victoria, with an elevation of about twenty-seven hundred feet.

Tippu-Tib.

Important as were these discoveries they paled before others, made in following the Lualaba River of Livingstone, which changed the map of Central Africa and altered the destiny of that vast and untraversed region. The journey to Nyangwe, Livingstone’s “farthest,” entailed horrible hardships on the carriers. This Arab village was reached via the Luama, which, of hitherto unknown course, was found by Stanley to be an affluent of the Lualaba. At Nyangwe Stanley felt that his accomplished journey of over eight hundred miles from the east coast promised well for his coming voyage to a known point on the other coast, nine hundred miles due west. He made an agreement with an Arab, Tippu-Tib, trader in human flesh or ivory as chance offered, to escort the expedition about six hundred miles west through the unknown regions. The country proved to be primeval forest, almost trackless, its tropical undergrowth a veritable jungle of thorns and vines. Game was scanty and other food equally so. Finally, progress was so slow and the path so devious that Stanley, yielding to his appeals, discharged Tippu-Tib and decided to descend the river by canoes and his frame boat. He embarked at Vinya Njara, with one hundred and fifty in his party, on December 28, 1876, intrusting himself with sublime audacity to a river flowing no one knew whither, save it was away from civilization, and with the knowledge that the country they were entering was peopled by tribes entirely hostile and intractable, as the slave-traders said. Day after day they drifted steadily to the north. Was it or was it not the Nile of Livingstone’s prediction? Then day by day the course trended to the east. Yes, it could only be the Nile. After two hundred and forty miles the trend was to the northwest, whither, week after week, for about three hundred miles it kept its puzzling flow toward a point of the compass where it could join no river known to man. It had, too, assumed proportions and volume truly Amazonic, filled with islands and swollen from one to seven miles in width. All efforts to gain a knowledge of its final course were then fruitless, for the few barbarous natives they could win to speech answered in uncouth jargon, scarcely intelligible to the interpreters: “It is the river—the river!” The terrors of the silent stream in its majestic solitude were almost preferable to the presence of populous villages, which here and there lined its banks, for the inhabitants, ferociously hostile for the greater part, refused trade and boldly assaulted them. Skilful canoemen and good archers, the savages slaughtered unwary stragglers, harassed the rear and attacked the front, while their horrible threats that the bodies of the slain should serve as food at their cannibalistic repasts instilled terror in the minds of many of Stanley’s followers. Skirmishes were frequent, and now and then a severe fight which taxed Stanley’s forces to the utmost. Again the river had here and there series of cataracts which caused no end of trouble, delay, and danger to the party, nine men being drowned in one day.

Fortunately the river had turned to the south, and then to southwest, where, after another thousand miles, it flowed through a narrow gorge, one hundred and fifty miles from the sea, so that no doubt longer obtained as to it being the Congo. The terrible falls near the gorge entailed enormous labor to pass them, and barely failed of destroying the party. In all twenty-eight cataracts were passed, and finally the river became so precipitous, the falls so high, that they had to abandon their boats and march overland to Boma, an English trading-post, five days’ journey distant. Fatigue, famine, and exposure further enfeebled them and now made daily inroads among the ranks of those who had so far survived, and the entire party would have perished on the very threshold of civilization and plenty had not Stanley’s messengers, sent on with urgent appeals, obtained help at Boma, where the expeditionary force arrived August 12, 1877. They had made a river journey of seven thousand miles, proved the Congo to be second only to the Nile, and crossed Africa.

When Stanley, in 1877, intrusting his life and fortunes to a mighty and unknown stream, voyaged toward the very heart of the Dark Continent, even his wildest dreams could not have foreshadowed results equal to the reality of a near future. His voyage in its potentiality was second only to that of Columbus, as the outcome of the succeeding five years plainly indicates. All Europe, alive to the commercial importance of the Congo Basin, hastened to reach its borders or encroach on its limits by means of enlarged dependent colonies; commerce and religion, hand in hand, traversed its rivers by steam and lined its banks with beneficent settlements, while the merciless Arab devastated its villages and dragged its decimated natives into slavery. Then came a political wonder—the peaceful creation of a vast tropical empire more than a million square miles in area, the Congo Free State, erected and admitted into the community of nations by act of an international conference, in which participated fourteen European powers and the United States, our own country being fittingly the first to officially acknowledge the existence of the new state its adventurous citizen had given to the world.

Emin Pasha.

The voyage through the Dark Continent was obviously potent of future results, and Gambetta, in 1878, clearly forecast the effects of Stanley’s journey. The great French statesman said: “Not only have you opened up a new continent to our view, but you have given influence to scientific and philanthropic enterprises which will have its effect on the progress of the world. What you have done has interested governments—proverbially so difficult to move—and the impulse you have imparted, I am convinced, will go on year after year.”

Slowly recovering from the effects of famine and fatigue incident to this arduous journey, Stanley returned to Europe in January, 1878, and was met, as he stepped out of the express train at Marseilles, by two commissioners of King Leopold of Belgium, who informed him that his Majesty contemplated a new enterprise in Africa and desired his assistance. While heartily indorsing the proposed work of Leopold his physical condition was such that active co-operation was impossible, and he was even unable to visit his Majesty. Five months later, with physical energies renewed, after a visit to Leopold, Stanley eventually agreed to the proposition which contemplated the establishment of a grand commercial enterprise for controlling the trade of the valley of the Congo. It involved the erection of commercial and military stations along the overland route and the establishment of steam communication wherever available. In short, a colony of Europeans was to be founded in the Congo Basin, whose great fertility, healthy climate, and enormous population seemed to especially favor the development of African civilization. The action of Leopold evidently grew out of Stanley’s declarations that “the question of this mighty waterway (the Congo) will become a political one in time,” and his conviction that any power possessing the Congo would absorb the whole enormous trade behind, as this river was and must continue to be, the grand commercial highway of West and Central Africa.

Stanley accepted the mission, visited Zanzibar, where he enlisted sixty-eight Zanzibari, mostly his old soldiers, and by sea reached Banana Point, on the west coast, August 14, 1879. Two years previous he had reached this place after descending the newly discovered Congo; now he was re-entering its fertile basin in order to establish civilized settlements, with the intention of subduing Central Africa by peaceful ways and to remould it into harmony with modern ideas, so that justice and order should ever obtain, violence and the slave trade forever cease.

Finding Nelson in Distress at Starvation Camp.