Stanley in Africa / The Wonderful Discoveries and Thrilling Adventures of the Great African Explorer, and Other Travelers, Pioneers and Missionaries

by James P. Boyd

Between the two sterile tracts of Africa lies the real Continent. All the coast lands are a shell. Egypt is but a strip on either side the Nile. Central Africa—the Lake regions which feed the Nile, Congo and Zambesi—is a great and grand section, where nature has been prodigal in all her gifts, and which invites a civilization as unique and strong as its physical features. We may wonder at the strange things revealed by Arctic research, but here are unrivalled chains of lake and river communication, and powerful states with strange peoples and customs, of which the last generation never dreamed. No spot of all the earth invites to such adventure as this, and none profiteth so much in the revelations which add to science and which may be turned to account in commerce and the progress of civilization.

We have read the roll of names rendered immortal by efforts to reach the two Poles of the earth. Africa’s list of explorers contains the names of Livingstone, Gordon, Cameron, Speke, Grant, Burton, Baker, Schweinfurth, Stanley, Kirk, Van der Decken, Elton, Pinto, Johnston, and others, some of whom have laid down their lives in the cause of science, and every one recalling memories of gigantic difficulties grappled with, of dangers boldly encountered, of sufferings bravely borne, of great achievements performed, and all within the space of twenty years.

Before entering these Lake Regions of Africa to see what they contain, it is due to the past to recall the fact that an old chart of the African Continent was published at Rome in 1591, which contains a system of equatorial lakes and rivers. It shows the Blue Nile coming out of Abyssinia, and the White Nile taking its rise in two great lakes under the equator—the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, and the Albert Nyanza of Baker. Due south from Albert Nyanza is another lake which is the equivalent of Tanganyika, and this is not only connected with the Congo but with the Nile and Zambesi. Cameron and Stanley have both shown that Tanganyika sends its surplus waters, if any it has, to the Congo, and Livingstone has proven that the head waters of these two mighty rivers are intimately connected.

Is this ancient map a happy guess, or does it present facts which afterwards fell into oblivion? Ere the slave trade put its ban between the coast traders and the dwellers of the interior, ere Portuguese influence ceased in Abyssinia, and the missions of the Congo left off communications with Rome, did these unknown regions yield their secrets to the then existing civilization? May not this geographic scrap, dug from among the rubbish of the Vatican library, be the sole relic now extant of a race of medieval explorers the fame of whose adventures has fallen dumb, and whose labors have to be gone over again?

The map of Africa, used in our school days, had a blank centre. No geographer had soiled its white expanse with lines and figures. It was the “happy hunting ground” of conjecture and fancy. The Zambesi and Congo were short stumps of rivers, with perhaps a dotted line to tell what was not known. When two traders—the Pombeiros—passed from Angola on the west to the Pacific, in the beginning of the present century, and wrote how they had crossed a hundred rivers, visited the courts of powerful negro kings, traversed countries where the people had made considerable progress in the industries and arts, their story, like that of other pioneers, was discredited and their information treated with contemptuous neglect.

But about thirty years ago the modern world was startled and gratified with its first glimpse at the Lake Regions of Africa. In 1849, Livingstone, Oswell and Murray, after weary marching across the Kalihari, or southern, desert, stood on the margin of Lake Ngami, the most southerly and first discovered of the great chain of equatorial lakes. They expected to find only a continuation of desert sands and desert hardships, but, lo! a mighty expanse of waters breaks on their vision, worth more as a discovery than a dozen nameless tribes or rivers. What could it mean? Was this the key to that mysterious outpour of rivers which, flowing north, east, and west, blended their waters with the Mediterranean, the Pacific and Atlantic? The discoverer could go no further then, but fancy was excited with the prospect of vague and limitless possibilities and speculation became active in every scientific centre. Back again into the

wilderness the discoverer is drawn, and a score of others plunge into the unknown to share his fame.

From the discovery of Ngami, a broad sheet into which the Cubango, south of the Zambesi and parallel with it, expands ere it plunges into the great central Salt Pan (a Great Salt Lake), may be dated the revival of modern curiosity in the secrets of the African Continent.

In the Portuguese colonies of Abyssinia, there were rumors that a great lake existed north of the Zambesi, called Maravi or Nyassa. Its outflow was unknown, and the theory was that it was one of a long chain which fed the Nile. They thought no other stream was worthy of such a source, but they did not ask, whence then the mightier volumes that pour through the Congo and Zambesi? Others said the Nile finds ample sources in the “Mountains of the Moon.” Nobody had seen these, but old Ptolemy, the geographer, had said so two thousand years ago, and hundreds of years before, Herodotus had written, in obedience to the dictates of two Egyptian priests, that “two conical hills, Crophi and Mophi, divided the unfathomable waters of the Nile from those which ran into Ethiopia.”

This is all the information we had of the sources of the Nile down to 1863—at least of the White, or Eastern, branch of the Nile. Then it was that Speke and Grant, coming from the south, and Baker following the valley of the river toward the equator, almost met on the spot which contains its true sources. Poor Livingstone could not be made to see the merit of their discovery. He clung to the story of Herodotus, amplified by that of Ptolemy, which fixed the head of the great river in two lakes some ten degrees south of the Equator. Livingstone believed that the high water-shed between the Zambesi and Congo would pass for the Mountains of the Moon, and that in the Lualaba, flowing northward (the Lualaba afterwards turned out to be the Congo, as Stanley showed) he had the track of the true Nile. Following this will-o-the-wisp into the swamps of Lake Bangweolo, he met a lonely and lingering death.