THE SECOND LARGEST RIVER IN THE WORLD.
BY CYRUS C. ADAMS.
A NATIVE RIVER BRIDGE.
About a hundred years ago the school children of our country were reading in their Morse's Geography that there were no great mountains in North America, and that our largest mountains were the Alleghanies, which were supposed to be a continuation of the Andes, interrupted by the Gulf of Mexico. Teachers in those days edified boys and girls with more or less amusing misinformation such as this about the land they lived in. It was three hundred years after Columbus had discovered America, and such blunders in the text-books show how very slowly geographical knowledge had grown in those centuries.
But there has been a revolution. For over fifty years men and women have been eagerly studying this great house where we abide, with its five big rooms and its thousands of little ones. No one ever saw before such zeal for geographical discovery. Africa heads the list, for that continent, a fourth larger than our own, which was scarcely known a century ago, except in its outlines and along some of its rivers, has been thrown open to our gaze in nearly every corner; and the part of Africa where the greatest amount of work, the largest interest, and the most surprising discoveries have centred is the basin of the Congo, the second largest of the world's river systems.
Europe knew of this mighty river before she ever heard of Columbus. For four centuries sailors of various lands saw the Atlantic tinted for forty miles from the shore by the yellow Congo tide; but no one knew till Stanley told, eighteen years ago, where this mighty flood came from. Livingstone lived and travelled for many months along the far upper Congo, but the great old man died in the belief that he had traced one of the sources of the Nile. It was the Niger problem reversed. Nobody knew for centuries where the Niger River reached the sea. Nobody knew where the Congo gathered its great floods. One river needed a mouth, and the other a fountainhead, and so some wise geographers united the two, making the Niger the upper part of the Congo. Mungo Park, who traced the upper Niger for a thousand miles, believed it was a Congo tributary, if not the Congo itself; and the Tuckey expedition perished of fever among the lower Congo cataracts in 1816, while bravely trying to fulfil their mission to ascend the Congo to the Niger, if the two rivers were really one.
Eighteen years ago Stanley traced the Congo from central Africa over 1500 miles to the ocean. His great discovery made him famous, but other men who followed him, some of whose names are hardly known, except to geographers, have travelled far more widely in the Congo basin than Stanley was able to do. He led the way, and forty or fifty followers, scattering all over the Congo basin, which is half as large as the United States, have been revealing this land to us; and students of the ocean have been studying the sea-bed off its mouth. Let us glance at a few facts that have been learned about this mighty river system.
It is found that more water pours into the ocean through the Congo's mouth, which is six miles wide, than from all the other rivers in Africa put together. The soft, dark-colored mud brought down by the river has been distinctly traced on the ocean bottom for six hundred miles from the land. In no other part of any ocean do the influences of the land waters make themselves felt so far out to sea.
But it is not the deep lower Congo, which large steamers from Europe ascend to the foot of the rapids, nor the roaring torrents along the 235 miles of the cataract region, that have attracted most attention. It is the placid upper Congo, with its few reaches of rapids, and its many tributaries, stretching away to far-distant parts of inner Africa, that has kept the map-makers busy. This is the part of the continent where explorers have been most active and the results most remarkable. No part of the world of the same extent ever yielded so many geographical surprises as did this region from 1885 to 1890. It was simply impossible for the cartographers to keep their maps abreast of the news as it came from the upper Congo.