Did you ever hear of a steamboat losing its way and getting into the wrong river by mistake? This actually happened on the Congo, and the blunder hastened the day when the world was to know all about the destination of the Makua River. One day, in 1885, Mr. George Grenfell was steaming along on the Peace, and thought he was making excellent progress up the Congo. But one thing perplexed him. He could not find Libongo, on the Congo's right bank. He had been there before, and knew where the town ought to be. He began to wonder if he was on the Congo, after all. He discovered that he had passed the first parallel of north latitude, and then he knew that he had ascended, for one hundred miles, a mighty tributary that seemed as large as the Congo itself. It was the Mobangi. Grenfell's mistake was not so absurd as it appears. The Mobangi has a very wide channel, is thickly strewn with islands, like the Congo, and its lower course, for many miles, runs nearly parallel with the greater river. Its mouth had been discovered the year before, but nothing was known of the river.
Grenfell had other work to do just then, and so he lost no time in getting out of the Mobangi; but later in the same year he entered its mouth again, determined to go wherever it led him. His little party on the steamer were in great straits for food one day, and they could not buy provisions. The Mobangi natives had decided that their strange visitors were ghosts, and who ever heard of ghosts needing food? As usual, Grenfell tried argument and persuasion instead of force.
"Look here," he said. "We are men like you. If we do not eat we cannot live. We sleep as you do. We have the same number of fingers and toes that you have. You never saw ghosts who were like you as we are."
It took a good deal of this sort of talk to convince the native mind, but at last the explorer went on his way, with as much food as his boat could carry, leaving friends behind.
THEY ASSAILED THE "PEACE" WITH FLIGHTS OF POISONED ARROWS.
Up the Mobangi steamed the Peace, over three hundred miles north of the equator, and Grenfell had travelled four hundred miles on the river, when rapids barred the way, and he turned back. It had been an exciting trip, for thousands of natives lined the banks, convinced that the times were out of joint indeed if these remarkable strangers with their puffing smoke boat must needs be inflicted upon them. Near the most northern point attained Grenfell saw houses built in the branches of tall straight-stemmed trees. The houses were forty to fifty feet in the air, and from them dangled rope-ladders reaching to the ground. A strange and animated spectacle was witnessed when these aerial structures came into view; for men, women, and children were clambering up the rope-ladders as fast as their arms and legs could carry them, and taking refuge in the houses. From these points of vantage they assailed the Peace with flights of poisoned arrows, which nobody on board minded a whit, for the party were well protected by the arrow-proof wire netting that shielded the deck. Savage fears were finally allayed, and the refugees sought terra firma again. Everybody welcomed Grenfell as he steamed down the river, and the only trouble was that he could not stay long enough to satisfy the newly made friends, who had been his enemies a little before.
Thus the mystery was gradually clearing up. Even before the news from Grenfell reached Europe, the Belgian geographer Wauters declared that Schweinfurth's Welle must be a Congo tributary, and the Mobangi its lower course. What a shout of protest the French geographers raised! They laughed at the idea, and said it was extremely absurd. The trouble with them was that if Schweinfurth's river was in the Congo basin, it could not belong wholly to France, and so they were determined that its waters should not join the Congo if they could help it. They wanted nearly every foot of the waterway to be traversed before they were willing to surrender. But as soon as Grenfell's great discovery was reported, all other theories melted into air, and Lake Tchad ceased to figure as the outlet of the Makua.
But poor Dr. Junker did not know how grandly he had helped to solve the problem. His letters had reached the outside world, but no letters from home had come to him. Months after Grenfell's ascent of the Mobangi, Junker reached the sea. "I still believe," he said, "that the Makua goes to Lake Tchad." He was told of Grenfell's discovery, and he thought it over for a while before he made reply. Then he simply said: "That settles it. The Makua goes to the Congo."
But several hundred miles of unexplored river still stretched between the points attained by Grenfell and Junker, and it was 1890 before this gap was completely filled by the expeditions of Van Gèle and Le Marinel. Time and again Van Gèle pulled his little steamer through the rapids that had barred Grenfell's advance. One of them will always bear the name of Elephant Rapid, because there the explorer killed an elephant, whose flesh was smoked, and supplied food to forty black helpers for two months. New vistas of Africa opened along the half-mile-wide river above the rapids. Plantations of maize and bananas stretched for miles away. Many villages dotted the hill-sides, posts of observation were seen high up in the branches of lofty cottonwood-trees, and, strange to relate, many women had black hair hanging down their backs in braids, some of which were so very long that they were tied around the arms to keep them from trailing on the ground. European anthropologists rubbed their eyes and read again. But how many stories are spoiled by a little investigation! It was discovered at last that all these tresses were false, and of vegetable origin.