BOMA, THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO STATE. STANLEY'S BOAT IN THE FOREGROUND.
In January, 1885, the missionary George Grenfell started from Stanley Pool on his little steamboat in quest of villages of friendly natives where mission stations might be planted with good prospects of success. He had previously been far up the river, and thought he knew it very well; but on this trip he accidentally got out of the Congo, and did not discover his mistake until he had steamed along a whole day, and found that his little craft was pushing into a region where no white man had ever been before. Grenfell had stumbled into the mouth of the Mobangi-Makua River. For more than two years Stanley and his followers had been travelling up and down the Congo, but they never saw—or at least they never recognized—this great affluent, which is larger than any European river except the Volga and the Danube. Grenfell forgot his missions for the time, became the zealous explorer, and kept on his course up the wide river until he was stopped by rapids, having left the Congo about 400 miles behind; and while he was threading the virgin stream Stanley was in England making his large map of the Congo, on which not a trace of its greatest tributary appeared. The distinguished explorer was the first victim of the swarm of discoveries which from that day for years made every new map of the Congo behind the times as soon as the next mails arrived from the river.
Perhaps some of the other white men had seen the mouth of the Mobangi-Makua, and thought it merely an arm of the Congo enclosing an island; for this is the region of the sealike expansion of the river, where only a water horizon could be seen from either shore if it were not for the myriad islands that cut the river into scores of tortuous channels. There were white men on these Congo banks who neither saw nor heard of the fleet of vessels that passed them a few miles away, carrying the hundreds of men of the Emin relief expedition. Before Stanley came whole tribes on one shore had never seen the people who lived across the river.
A little later in 1885 a steamboat was sent up the Congo to the mouth of the big river that enters it at Equatorville. No vessel could have a more pleasant mission, for this steamer was the bearer of loving letters from home and fresh supplies of European food for Wissman's party of explorers, who had been in the African wilderness for many months, and might be in sore need of succor. It was thought the party was quite certain to emerge from the great unknown region south of the Congo at Equatorville, and the reason for this belief is interesting.
NATIVE VILLAGE WHERE WISSMAN STARTED DOWN THE KASSAI.
Many years before, Livingstone had crossed the upper waters of a river, the Kassai, now known as the second largest Congo tributary. Stanley believed the Kassai emptied into the Congo at Equatorville, and all the map-makers adopted his hypothesis. Captain Wissman and his comrades were sent from Germany to march inland from the Atlantic to the upper waters of the Kassai, and then to follow it to its mouth; and as this point was supposed to be at Equatorville, the mails and supplies for Wissman were sent there, and the officers of the steamer expected any day to see his expedition float into view.
Wissman reached the upper Kassai, and discovered there a remarkable tribe, the Baluba, whose chief had cut down all the palm-trees in his country to keep his people from getting drunk on palm wine. This chief helped Wissman to hollow big canoes out of tree-trunks, and then he and many of his subjects, who engaged with the explorer as paddlers, set out with the white men down the unknown stream.
Wissman expected that the river would carry him far to the north, but in a few days he was much surprised to find that he was travelling much further west than north. Day after day he floated further and further to the west, and after many weeks, and some curious adventures that cannot be told in this chapter, he reached the Congo. A few days later another stern-wheeler ascended the Congo, and at Equatorville pulled up to the shore alongside the waiting vessel.