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.