The discoveries in his last journeys, covering the periods from 1858 to 1864, and from 1866 to 1873, were as brilliant and fruitful as his earlier work, but not so astonishing, because his first years were given to revealing the broader aspects of Africa and its tribes, while his later labors were devoted to more detailed research in a smaller field. This region, about as large as Mexico and Central America, extends north and south, from Tanganyika to the Zambesi, and covers the wide region of the Congo sources between Nyassa and Lake Bangweolo. The greatest results were the discovery of Lake Nyassa and the Shire River, now the water route into East Central Africa; Lakes Bangweolo and Mwero; and the mapping of the eastern part of the sources of the Upper Congo, which Livingstone believed to the day of his death were the ultimate fountains of the Nile. Livingstone's "Last Journeys" was published from the manuscript which his faithful servants brought to the seacoast with the mortal remains of their gentle master.
Not far from the south coast of Bangweolo stands a wooden construction to which is affixed a bronze tablet bearing the simple inscription, "Livingstone died here. Ilala, May 1, 1873." It has taken the place of the tree under which he died, and where his heart, which had been so true to Africa, was buried. As the tree was nearly dead, the section bearing the rude inscription cut by one of his servants was carefully removed and is now in London.
Livingstone's geographical delineations were remarkably accurate, considering the inadequate surveying instruments with which he worked. Dr. Ravenstein, one of the greatest authorities on African cartography, has said: "I should be loath to reject Livingstone's work simply because the ground which he was the first to explore has since his death been gone over by another explorer." It would be marvellous, however, if in the course of twenty years of exploration he had not made some blunders. His map of Lake Bangweolo, for example, was very inaccurate. The Lokinga Mountains, which he mapped to the south of the lake, have not been found by later explorers. These imperfections resulted from the fact that his map of Bangweolo and its neighborhood was largely based upon native information. He knew that his map was inadequate, and as soon as he was able to travel he returned to Bangweolo to complete his survey. He was making straight for the true outlet of the lake, and was within thirty-five miles of it when one morning his servants found him in his lowly straw hut, dead on his knees. If Livingstone had lived a few weeks longer and been able to travel, he and not Giraud would have given us the true map of Bangweolo.
As a whole, Livingstone's work in geography, anthropology, and natural history, stands the test of time. No river in Africa has yet been laid down with greater accuracy than the Zambesi as delineated by this explorer.
The success of Livingstone was both brilliant and unsullied. The apostle and the pioneer of Africa, he went on his way without fear, without egotism, without desire of reward. He proved that the white man may travel safely through many years in Africa. He observed richness of soil and abundance of natural products, the guarantees of commerce. He foretold the truth that the African tribes would be brought into the community of nations. The logical result of the work he began and carried so far was the downfall of the African slave-trade, which he denounced as "the open sore of the world." What eulogy is too great for such a work and such a man?
In 1898, twenty-one journeys had been made by explorers from sea to sea. Livingstone completed the first journey, from Loanda to the mouth of the Zambesi, in one year, seven months, and twenty-two days. Nineteen years elapsed before Central Africa was crossed again, when Cameron gave two years and nearly eight months to the journey. It took Stanley two years and eight months to cross Africa, when he solved the great mystery, the course of the Congo; and when he went to the relief of Emin Pasha, in 1887, he was almost exactly the same time on the road. When Trivier crossed from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, in 1888-89, in nine days less than a year, the event was held as a remarkably rapid performance. A little later the journey was made by several travellers in from twelve to fifteen months. In 1898, the Englishman, Mr. Lloyd, crossed from Lake Victoria to the mouth of the Congo in three months, about thirteen hundred miles of the journey being by Congo steamboat and railroad. In 1902, the journey from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria is made by rail in two and one-half days,--a journey that occupied Speke for nine, and Stanley for eight months. With the present facilities, the continent may be crossed by way of the lake region and the Congo in about three months. The era of long and weary foot-marches has nearly ended; now succeeds travel by steam.
No influence has been so potent in improving the art of the explorer, or in raising the standard of the work required of him, as the enormous interest that for thirty years past has centred in African exploration. The larger part of the best achievements of the explorers of the present generation in scientific investigation, and in an approach to scientific map-making, are found in tropical Africa. Many of the hundreds of the route surveys are not unworthy to be compared with those of Pogge and Wissmann, when they laid down on their map every cultural and topographic feature for two miles on both sides of their route, from Angola to the Upper Congo. The extreme care with which some of the best explorers have performed their tasks is illustrated by the remarkable achievement of the late Dr. Junker along the Mobangi River. After years of service, his scientific equipment had become practically worthless. He started on his four-hundred-mile journey down the river through the jungle, with absolutely no instrument except a compass to aid him in determining his positions. Endeavoring, by the most scrupulous care, to make up as far as possible for his lack of scientific outfit, he trudged through the grass, compass in hand, counting every step. Every fifteen minutes he jotted in his notebook the distance and the mean direction travelled. At night he used these accumulated data to lay down on his route map the journey of the day. For many weeks he kept up this trying routine till he reached his furthest west, and again till he had returned to his starting-point, whose latitude and longitude he had previously determined. When he returned to Europe, Dr. Hassenstein and he made a map from the data Junker had collected, and fixed the position of his furthest west. This position was found later by the astronomical observations of Lieutenant Le Marinel to be less than two miles out of the way.
One of the latest to win a large prize in African discovery is Dr. A. Donaldson Smith, a young physician of Philadelphia, in the northeastern region known as Somaliland and Gallaland. His method may be mentioned here as an illustration of the kind of work that geographers now require. Before he began his explorations, he took a thorough course in the use of surveying instruments and the methods of accurately laying down his positions and making a route map. Many a cartographer, burning with desire to draw a good map of a newly explored region, has been driven to despair by the inadequacy of the route surveys in his hands. Not a few of these surveys have been unworthy of reproduction in the books of the explorers who made them, and the best that could be done was to generalize their information on maps of comparatively small scale. But Donaldson Smith's route-maps appear in his book on the comparatively large scale of 1:1,000,000 (about sixteen statute miles to the inch), and they are worthy of that treatment, for his surveys and observations for geographical positions were recorded in such a way that their value might be easily ascertained by any one familiar with such computations. His route-maps have been found to be admirable map-making material; thus, he has not only traversed a new region of great extent, but has given in his map ample materials which may be employed by any atlas-maker in the production of good maps of all the territory that came under his observation. When Sir Clements Markham presented to Dr. Smith the Patrons' Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, he said: "You have not, like an ordinary explorer, made a common route survey, but you have made a scientific survey, a triangulation frequently checked by astronomical observations with theodolite and chronometer."
Most African explorers have been painstaking, conscientious workers, eager in their quest for the truth, desirous to report nothing but the truth, and treating the lowly and ignorant they have met as men, with sensibilities like their own, capable of gratitude for a kindness and keenly sensitive to an outrage. The world has recognized and applauded such heroes of discovery,--the men who faced hardship and peril, enduring and sacrificing much that knowledge might grow; who had to conquer not only unkind Nature, but to overcome the ignorant violence of man. And not a few of the leaders in this work have carried it out with a degree of tactfulness, humanity, gentleness, and kindliness of spirit amounting to genius. Some of them spent months in disguise, collecting facts of the highest scientific value among fanatical Mohammedans who would have killed them if they had known their secret. Such men were Burton in Harrar, Dr. Lenz in Timbuctoo, and De Foucauld and Harris in Morocco, who, in stained skins and borrowed costumes, personated merchants and devotees and doctors and Jews; and most of whom have enriched the literature of discovery with valuable books. Men also such as Dr. Junker, who, rich as he was, left his home to spend eight years alone among the savages of the Welle Makua basin in Central Africa, living on their food and in their huts that he might minutely study the people in their country; or Grenfell, who has travelled far more widely in the Congo basin than Stanley or any of his followers except Delcommune, and revealed to the world more river systems and unknown peoples than they, and who, in his long career as an explorer, never fired a shot upon a native, though his life was often threatened. These men, and others like them, have exemplified the manysidedness of human resources against a great variety of peril and obstacle, as no other explorers in any other part of the world have had an opportunity to do in equal measure. Their work, with its environment of almost overwhelming difficulty, should be known to our youth as most forceful illustrations of what good men may dare and do in good causes and in a worthy manner.
There have been some exceptions to this rule. A few men have been less anxious to perform useful service than to figure in the newspapers and pose before their public. One day a man stood on the north shore of Victoria Nyanza, and looking south he saw land. When he returned to London he published a sensational book, in which he said it was ridiculous for Speke to assert that he had discovered a lake as large as Scotland, one of the greatest lakes in the world. "Why," said the writer, "I have stood on the north shore of the Victoria Nyanza and looked south and seen the southern shore. Lake Victoria is only an insignificant sheet of water, after all the talk of its being second only to Lake Superior."