[to be continued.]
[SOLVING A GEOGRAPHICAL CONUNDRUM.]
THE LONG-VEXED QUESTION OF THE MOBANGI-MAKUA RIVER.
BY CYRUS C. ADAMS.
f you were to select a bit of the earth's surface to illustrate the slow and painful steps by which geographical knowledge often grows, you could do no better than to point to the Mobangi-Makua River, the largest Congo tributary. No other subordinate river in Africa has ever been the theme of so much mistaken guess-work, or has cost the labor of so many explorers. For many years this was the largest river in the world that was in dispute. Even the name by which it was long known was a blunder. When Schweinfurth asked its name, the natives answered, "Welle." But Welle simply means "river," and is not the name of the stream.
If all African tribes were great travellers, as some of them are, and were gifted, like the Eskimos, with keen geographical instinct, they would save explorers no end of blunders, guess-work, and toil. But often they do not know rivers, lakes, or mountains beyond their own frontiers, and each tribe has its own names, or no names at all, for the geographical aspects around them. When an explorer asked the name of a great lake, the natives shouted, "Nyassa!" which means simply "lake": and so we have the name Lake Nyassa on the maps to-day. Nearly every tribe along the Mobangi-Makua has its own name for the river, which, being disguised as the Kibali, the Makua, the Dua, the Mobangi, and so on, was hard to recognize as one and the same great river under many aliases.
Schweinfurth says it was a thrilling moment when first he stood upon the bank of the "noble river, which rolled its deep dark flood majestically to the west." At a glance he settled one important question. He had heard of the river, and thought it might be a tributary of the Nile. But on that spring day in 1870 he saw its flood drifting into the great unknown to the west. One point was settled. It was not a Nile affluent; and the explorer, listening to all the natives could tell him, studying all our meagre information about water systems to the west, convinced himself that he had discovered the upper part of the Shari River, which pours into Lake Tchad, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. For years most geographers agreed with him, and map-makers traced the supposed course of Schweinfurth's Welle to the edge of the great northern desert.