Stanley's Adventures in the Wilds of Africa / A Graphic Account of the Several Expeditions of Henry M. Stanley into the Heart of the Dark Continent

by Joel Tyler Headley; Willis Fletcher Johnson

At first sight, it seems strange that Stanley should have selected this lake as the next scene of his explorations. He had previously, with Livingstone, explored thoroughly the upper half of it, and passed part way down the western side; Livingstone had been at the foot of it, and to crown all, Stanley had heard, before leaving Zanzibar, that Cameron had explored the entire southern portion, so that really there was nothing for him to do but follow a path which had been already trodden. To employ an expedition fitted out at so great a cost, and spend so much valuable time in going over old ground, seems an utter waste of both time and labor, especially when such vast unexplored fields spread all around him. But there was a mystery about Tanganika, which Stanley probably suspected Cameron had not solved, and which he meant to clear up. Here was a lake over three hundred miles long, with perhaps a hundred streams, great and small, running into it, and yet with no outlet, unless Cameron had found it, which he thinks he did. To find this was the chief object of the expedition Stanley and Livingstone made together to the north end of the lake. They had heard that the Rusizi River at that extremity was the outlet, but they found it instead a tributary. In fact, they proved conclusively that there was no outlet at the northern end. It therefore must be at the southern, and if so, it was the commencement of a river that would become a mighty stream before it reached the ocean. But no such stream was known to exist. The Caspian Sea has large rivers flowing into it, but no outlet, yet it never fills up. Evaporation, it is supposed, accounts for this. But the Caspian is salt, while the Tanganika is fresh water, and such a large body of fresh water as this was never known to exist without an outlet, and if it could be that evaporation was so great as to equal all the water that runs into it, it would not remain so fresh as it is.

We will let Cameron state his own case concerning the solution of this mystery. He started with two canoes and thirty-seven men, and sailed down the eastern shore of the lake, now ravished with the surpassing beauty of the scene composed of water and sky, and smiling shores, and again awed by beetling cliffs; one evening camping on the green banks and watching the sun go down behind the purple peaks, and another drenched with rain, and startled by the vivid lightning and awful thunder crashes of a tropical storm, yet meeting with no incident of any peculiar interest to the reader. The natives were friendly, and he describes the different villages and customs of the people and their superstitions, which do not vary materially from other native tribes. At last, on the 3d of May, he entered the Lukuga Creek, which a chief told him was the outlet of the lake. He says that the entrance was more than a mile wide, "but closed up by a grass sand-bank, with the exception of a channel three or four hundred yards wide. Across this there is a rill where the surf breaks heavily, although there was more than a fathom of water at its most shallow part." The next day he went down it four or five miles, until navigation was rendered impossible, owing to the masses of floating vegetation. Here the depth was eighteen feet, and breadth six hundred yards, and the current a knot and a half an hour. The chief who accompanied him said that it emptied into the Lualaba. He tried in vain to hire men to cut a passage through the vegetation that he might explore the river. This was all the knowledge he obtained by actual observation, the rest of his information being obtained from the natives.

Now, we must say, that this is a sorry exhibit for the outlet to a lake almost twice as long as Lake Ontario. That such an immense body of water should trickle away at this rate seems very extraordinary. Stanley at Ujiji started inquiries respecting this stream, and found Cameron's guide, who stoutly denied that the river flowed south from the lake. Another veteran guide corroborated this statement, while many others declared that before Cameron came, they had never heard of an outflowing river.

These contradictory statements, together with the universal testimony that the lake was continually rising (the truth of which he could not doubt, as he saw palm-trees which stood in the market-place when he was there in 1871, now one hundred feet out in the lake), made him resolve to explore this stream himself. He started on the 11th of June, and three days after landed to take a hunt, and soon came upon a herd of zebras, two of which he bagged, and thus secured a supply of meat.

On the 19th, on approaching a large village, they were astonished to see no people on the shore. Landing, they were still more astonished at the death-silence that reigned around, and advancing cautiously came upon corpses of men and women transfixed with spears or with their heads cut off. Entering into the village they found that there had been a wholesale massacre. A descent had been made upon the place, but by whom no one was left to tell. Its entire population had been put to death.

As Stanley proceeded, he found many evidences of the steady rise of the lake. He continued on his course, finding the same varied scenery that Cameron did, with nothing of peculiar interest occurring, except to the travelers themselves, and at length came to the Lukuga Creek. He found various traditions and accounts here—one native said the water flowed both ways. The spot on which Cameron encamped, some two years before, was now covered with water, another evidence that the lake was rising. Stanley very sensibly says, that the "rill," which Cameron states runs directly across the channel, is conclusive evidence that the Lukuga runs into the lake, not out of it; for it must be formed by the meeting of the inflowing current and the waves. An outpouring stream driven onward by waves would make a deep channel, not a dam of sand. He tried several experiments, by which he proved, to his entire satisfaction, that the stream flowed into the lake instead of being its outlet. Having settled this question he set about finding the other river, which the natives declared flowed out or westward. After traveling some distance inland he did find a place where the water flowed west; it was, however, a mere trickling stream. His account of his explorations here, and of the traditions of the natives, and his description of the formation of the country and of its probable geological changes, is quite lengthy, and possesses but little interest to the general reader.

The result of it all, however, is that he believes the Lukuga was formerly a tributary of the lake, the bed of which at some former time was lifted up to a higher level; that the whole stretch of land here has been sunk lower by some convulsion of nature, taking the Lukuga with it, and thus making a sort of dam of the land at the foot, which accounts for the steady rise of the river year by year; and that in three years the lake will rise above this dam, and, gathering force, will tear like a resistless torrent through all this mud and vegetation, and roaring on, as the Nile does where it leaves the Victoria Nyanza, will sweep through the country till it pours its accumulated waters into the Lualaba, and thus swell the Congo into a still larger Amazon of Africa. This seems to be the only plausible solution of the mystery attached to Tanganika. The only objection to it is, no such convulsion or change of the bed of the Tanganika seems to have occurred during this generation, and what has become, then, for at least seventy years, of all the waters these hundred rivers have been pouring into the lake? We should like the estimate of some engineer of how many feet that lake would rise in fifty years, with all its tributaries pouring incessantly such a flood into it. We are afraid the figures would hardly harmonize with this slow rise of the lake. It may be that there is a gradual filtering of the water through the ooze at the foot, which will account for the slow filling up of the great basin—a leakage that retards the process of accumulation. But if Stanley's explorations and statements can be relied upon, the mystery will soon solve itself, and men will not have to hunt for an outlet long. He makes the length of Tanganika three hundred and twenty-nine geographical miles, and its average breadth twenty-eight miles.

The wonderful influence of Livingstone over all African explorers is nowhere more visible than at Ujiji, on both Cameron and Stanley. Both of these set out with one object—to try to complete the work that the great and good man's death had left unfinished. His feet had pressed the shores of almost every lake they had seen, as well as of others which they had not seen. The man had seemed to be drawn on westward until he reached Nyangwe, where dimly arose before him the Atlantic Ocean, into which the waters flowing past his camp might enter, and did enter, if they were not the Nile. Discouraged, deserted and driven back, he could not embark on the Lualaba and float downward with its current till he should unveil the mystery that wrapped it. Cameron became filled with the same desire, but disappointed, though not driven back, he had pressed on to the ocean, into which he had no doubt the river emptied, though by another route. And now, last of three, comes Stanley, and instead of finishing Livingstone's work around the lakes, he, too, is drawn forward to the same point. It seemed to be the stopping-place of explorations in Africa; and although he knew that Cameron had not returned like Livingstone, and hence might have discovered all that was to be discovered, so making further explorations in that direction useless, still he felt that he must go on and find out for himself. True, there was an interesting district between Ujiji and the Lualaba. There was the beautiful Manyema region, about which Livingstone had talked to him enthusiastically, with its new style of architecture, and beautiful women and simple-minded people. But those did not form the attraction. He must stand on the spot where Livingstone stood, and look off with his yearning desire, and see if he could not do what this good man was willing to risk all to accomplish.