Lake regions of central Africa.

Part Third. The Zambesi

I. FROM LAKE DILOLO TO LAKE NGAMI, II. THE VICTORIA FALLS AND THE LOWER ZAMBESI, III. THE SHIRE AND LAKE NYASSA,

J^bt of ^EHustvation^.

THE "lady Alice" shooting the rapids, .. .. Frontisincce

CARAVAN crossing THE NUBIAN DESERT, . . . . . . . 12

KOROSKO, THE STARTING-PLACE FOR THE DESERT, . . . . .30

SIR SAMUEL AND LADY BAKER ON THE MARCH, . . . . . . 30

SCENE ON THE ATBARA, . , . . . . . . . . 31

MADEMOISELLE TINNE, .. .. .. .. ..38

SWAMPS OF THE WHITE NILE, . . . . . . . . . 43

PREPARATION.S FOR A .START, . . . . . . . . 47

THE MURCHISON FALLS, .. .. .. .. . ..53

STANLEY ON THE MARCH, . . . . . . . . CO

RUBAGA, KING MTE.SA's CAPITAL, .. .. .. .. .79

OUTLET OF THE VICTORIA NYANZA, . . . . . . . . 105

SIR SAMUEL BAKER SHOOTING A RHINOCEROS, .. .. .. 112

EMBARKING AT ZANZIBAR, .. .. .. • • ..117

L.A.N DSC APE IN US AGAR 4, .. .. •■ ..117

BURTON AND SPEKB ON TANGANYIKA, .. .. .. .,121

LIVINGSTONE AND STANLEY ON TANGANYIKA, .. 125

THE "bET.SY" on TANGANYIKA, .. .. .. •• 127

CROSSING A SPONGE, .. .. .. ..151

ASSEMBLING TO MARKET, KYANGWE, .. •• •• 158

ATTACK BY THE ARUAVIMl CANNIBALS, .. .. •• 178

A NYAM-NYAM VILLAGE, . . . . . . - . - ■ ■ 179

DEATH OF FRANK POCOCK,. *. . .. • 187

GAME ON THE ZAMBESI, .. .. .. •■ ..215

VICTORIA FALLS, .. .. •• 232

CHARGED BY A BUFFALO, .. .. . - 242

THE DENIZENS OF THE SWAMP, .. .. .. 250

THE SLAVE-HUNTER AND HIS VICTIMS, .. .. .. 262

thsolo'gi

LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA.

Itttrabttctorj) mh historical.

*' Pistol. A foutra for the world and worldlings base ! I speak of Africa and golden joys."

2 Henry IV.

FRICA is the continent with which man — civilized man — has had perhaps the longest acquaintance, and concerning which he still knows least. It has been a mystery to him since the earliest ages, and he is only now beginning to penetrate the real heart of the secret. Probably it was on the rich soil of Egypt that the first geographer traced the first chart, and the first astronomer began to take observations of the sun, moon, and stars ; and it may have been on the flood of the Nile that the first mariner dared to trust himself on the fickle bosom of the waters. Since then the searchers after knowledge have gone far afield, and learned much. New worlds have been discovered and peopled, and the whole face of nature has been changed. But it was only the

THE MYSTERIOUS CONTINENT.

other day that the hoary secret of the Nile — the distant and hidden sources from which Egypt draws its life-blood — was revealed ; and it is around these very sources that the geographer and the naturalist have still the largest field for discovery, where the fairest promise is held out to the traveller and the hunter for " hm frame," and where a little romance continues to linger in a work-a-day world. It is strange that this should be so, — that the Nile, the water of which was used to knead the bricks of ancient Egypt, and that witnessed the rise of the pyramids, whose shapes can be seen glimmering in the gray dawn of history, should have been so long shrouded in mystery, while the course of the Mississippi, the existence of which was only ascertained some three and a half centuries ago, should be as familiarly known as that of the Rhine. On the whole, perhaps, it is fortunate that the secret has been so well kept. It will only be after everything has been " found out " that people will begin to understand the value of the unknown, and to sigh because there are no new lakes, rivers, and mountain ranges to discover. Meanwhile there is still a great deal that we should like to know, and cannot. Within the four corners of Africa, and more especially in the great equatorial Lake Region, there is a vast storehouse of unrevealed facts — an almost exhaustless possibility of discovery and adventure. So recently have the physical conditions of its interior been revealed, that Europe is still but half awake to the fact that Africa is green and flourishing at the heart, however uninvitmg in the rind ; that

THE "burned side'' OF AFRICA.

away in its centre, beyond the pestilential mangrove swamps and tracts of arid sand that almost everywhere girdle its coasts, there are high and delightful countries, full of running streams and far -stretching lakes, of rich tropical verdure and abundant animal life. It is too soon yet to pronounce an opinion on the capabilities of Central Africa for supporting a peaceful, industrious, and civilized population. The climate of its uplands is no doubt more cool and healthy than that of the coast, but its suitability for European constitutions is at least doubtful. Still, it is impossible not to believe that its magnificent lake system, its mighty rivers, and its vast and fertile plains will be employed for the uses of commerce and agriculture, and that its future will be as brilliant as its past has been dark.

The truth is that our ideas of Africa are still coloured with the old impressions of it which we find in books and in the popular memory. The sunburned and dusty face which it presented towards the Mediterranean photographed itself, as it were, on the imagination of Europe, Our ancestors knew only one side of it — the burned side — and they judged of the whole from what they .saw. To them Africa was the "Desert," with a narrow fringe of vegetation along its seaboard and in the Valley of the Nile, and its " burning sand " was the image that presented itself most naturally to the average mind. Now a desert is all very well in its way — in the way, that is, of thrilling adventure and hairbreadth escape ; and Africa is especially well provided in the matter of

SIGHTS IN THE SAHARA.

deserts. The Sahara is the greatest, the most unmitio-ated desert in the world. It stretches from Tunis to Lake Chad; and from the Atlantic to the Nile — nay, it may be said to extend to the banks of the Tigris, for the Red Sea is only a depression in its surface that happens to be below the sea -level. There are other portions of its area which are supposed to be below the level of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and which science may one day transform into a new " Lake Region." Geologists indeed inform us that the Sahara is the bed of an ancient sea, and its whole appearance and condition bear out the theory. There is no regular rainfall or perennial streams ; there are mountains, but no mountain systems ; and there are, as has been said, depressions, but no permanent lakes. Lastly, in the Sahara proper there are no stationary habitations, and few traces of animal or vegetable life. In all these respects it not only differs from, but is a complete contrast to, the high, luxuriant, well -watered table-land below the Equator.

The picturesque sights of the desert have been made familiar enough to us by description : the long line of laden camels threading their way across the level waste, between the white blaze of the sun and the yellow glare of the sand, past the bleached skeletons of man and beast that strew the track ; the vivid contrast of the flowing white robes and tawny faces of the Arab drivers and the ebony limbs of the negro slaves and attendants ; the flight of a party of Moorish horsemen with their gay caparisons and glittering

A TERRA INCOGNITA.

spears ; the sand pillars, " leagued to fight with warring winds ; " the oases with their green palm-groves and cool fountains ; and the brilliant hues of a stormy sunset. These, however, are but the accidents of desert-life. Its characteristic aspect is silence, monotony, desolation. Even the beasts of prey avoid it. Only for man, who finds an intellectual pleasure in overcoming difficulty and facing Nature in her sternest mood, can it have attractions ; and the edge of his appetite for travel is soon blunted by actual experience of desert dangers and fatigues, when there is no hope ahead to allure his steps forward.

Such was the main cause that discouraged African exploration down to about the middle of the fifteenth century. A new motive then came strongly into play, — the rivalry of the European nations for the trade of the East. There is a circumstantial ancient story of a Phoenician vessel, sent out by Pharaoh Necho, that sailed from the Red Sea, and appeared three years later at the Pillars of Hercules — our Strait of Gibraltar — having circumnavigated the African continent. It is the fact, however, that about the middle of the fifteenth century nothing was known — in Europe at least — of the African coast-line beyond Cape Bojador on the west side, or Cape Guardafui on the east. From Morocco round the Cape of Good Hope to the entrance of the Red Sea was a complete temxt incognita. It was the Portuguese who took up the quest for a sea-passage to India, and after eighty years of glorious effort they carried their flag triumphantly to the goal. The

PRINCE HENRY, THE NAVIGATOR.

man to whom, above all others, Europe is indebted for the discovery of the pathway to the East, and for the revival of modern commercial enterprise, is Prince Henry of Portugal, named the Navigator, son of King John I. of " good memory." Prince Henry had gained renown by fighting the Moors in Africa, and was high in the counsels of his own country ; but it is as the first great promoter of the spirit of maritime discovery that he has won imperishable fame. His motives were partly patriotic , he wished to see his countrymen outstrip the Genoese and Venetians in the race to the markets of the East ; but he had also an ardent and unquenchable love of knowledge for its own sake. " Until his day," says Mr. Major of the British Museum, in his admirable Life of the hero, " the pathways of the human race had been the mountain, the river, and the plain, the strait, the lake, the inland sea ; but he it was who first conceived the thought of opening up a road through the unexplored ocean — a road replete with danger, but abundant in promise."

It was in the year 1415 that Prince Henry sent out his first expedition to trace the African coast. From that date till his death in 1460 no year passed in which he did not send forth a vessel — often more than one — to follow up the quest and push a little further to the southward. Abandoning the royal court, and taking up his residence on the bare and storm-swept promontory of Sagres, the extreme south-western corner of Europe, he devoted himself heart and soul to his work. Never was a purpose

A "CENTUEY OF DISCOVERY."

followed up with such heroic and unflinching resolution, and never has success been more magnificent and far-reaching in its results. For years he had to fight against failure and ridicule, and not till 1435 was Cape Bojador rounded ; and twenty years more elapsed ere the Venetian Cadamosto doubled Cape de Verd and sighted the mouth of the Gambia. But by years of unwearying endeavour Prince Henry at length succeeded in breathing his spirit into Europe. He fashioned a race of intrepid seamen, and inspired not his countrymen alone but other nations with the passion for adventure and the thirst for new knowledge. The Portuguese explorers, taught and encouraged by experience, took wider flights. No longer crawling along the coasts of the desert, exposed to the fiery breath of the Sahara and the countless dangers from shoals, currents, and storms, and the inveterate hostility of the barbarous Moors, they ventured boldly into mid-ocean. Within little more than a quarter of a century after Prince Henry's death, Diego Cam had discovered the mouth of the Congo, and traced the African coast almost to the Orange Kiver ; Bartholomew Diaz had doubled that " Cape of Storms " which succeeding voyagers rechristened " of Good Hope ; " and twelve years later Vasco da Gama had fulfilled the long-delayed hope of accomplishing the sea-passage to India. In another direction, but originating in the same impulse, Columbus had discovered a new world in the west ; and a few years later Australia had been visited, and Magellan's battered vessel and the remnants of his crew arrived at

(658) 2

VERDANT AFRICA.

San Lucar, having completed the circumnavigation of the world. All this, as Mr. Major points out, had been the work of " one century of continuous and connected discovery," and it may all be traced back to the far-seeing thought and indomitable will of one man.

There are two points especially worthy of notice in the early history of the Portuguese exploration of Africa. One of these is the discovery of the mouth of the Senegal, the first permanent stream of any consequence met with on the southward voyaging. Prince Henry and the other geographical experts of his day considered it to be the "western outlet of the Nile ; " and their conclusion was not so utterly ridiculous and far from the mark as appears to us at first sight. If it has no connection with the Nile system, it belongs at least to the same class of streams, utterly distinct from those of the desert, and draws its waters from the same region of regular and abundant rainfall. It was here, in fact, where Europe first set eyes on that moist, luxuriant, intertropical Africa which is still being unfolded before it, and which at that time was so completely at variance with preconceived ideas. Here, too, the African elephant was again seen in its wild state — a glorious promise of the sport that lay in store for the hunter of a later era. Cadamosto was wonderfully struck with the sudden change, not only in the country, but in the inhabitants. " On the south side of the river the people were very black, stout, and well made, and the country verdant, woody, and fertile ; while

THE WEST COAST SLAVERS.

on the north side the men were thin, tawny, and short, and the country dry and sterile." The races of mixed Moorish and Arab blood and Mohammedan religion were about to be left behind, and acquaintance made for the first time as a people — individual specimens had of course been seen scattered throughout the eastern countries — with the NegTo. In the quaint language of these old voyagers it was the borderland of the Tawny Moors and the Black Moors (" black-a-moors").

Unhappily the wrongs of the negro began with his first contact with Europeans. The first idea that occurred to the Portuguese mariners on seeing this new black race was to capture specimens and bring / them home. The practice, there can be little question, was the first beginnings of the west coast slave-trade. All the maritime nations of Europe fastened themselves like leeches on the side of Africa and sucked her life-blood, and none more greedily, as we should blush to remember, than the English. Millions literally of her children were carried ofif to the plantations of Brazil, the West Indies, the Spanish Main, and the British Colonies ; and as many more died in mid -passage. Slavery, which may be said to have been the staple trade of Africa during three centuries, was fatal to that spirit of research and discovery which the " Navigator " had called into life. The slaver cared not, because he dared not, to venture far from the rendezvous in the lagoon or the barracoons on the river where his victims were collected ; and he did all in his power to hide his haunts

THE EQUATORIAL LAKE REGION.

and close the doors of ingress to all who would be likely to interfere with his gains. The slave-trade, more than any impediments offered by nature, has stood chiefly in the way of the opening up of the African continent ; and it was not until it received its death-blow early in the present century that explorers began to make their way into the interior, and map out its blank spaces with magnificent lakes and rivers.

With the great work done by Caille, Barth, Richardson, Overweg, Eohlfs, Vogel, Nachtigal, and other discoverers, along the margin and occasionally through the heart of the great northern desert, we shall in this place have nothing to say ; it lies quite beyond the region of the great equatorial lakes. N either can we enter on the stirring narrative of the travels of Mungo Park, Landers, Clapperton, and other investigators of the course of the Niger, or seek to trace the northward march of that army of colonists, Dutch and English, who have carried cultivation and civilization from the Cape Mountain to the limit of the Kalihari Desert, the southern equivalent of the Sahara. But between these two sterile tracts lies a vast expanse of Africa, the exploration of which, if it does not call forth greater powers of endurance or more heroic courage, promises at least to yield incomparably greater results than can be looked for to the northward. It is a region whose physical features are homogeneous and unique and on the grandest scale, where Nature has been most prodigal in all her gifts. It contains the reservoirs and upper courses

MODERN EXPLORERS.

of the three great African streams — the Nile, the Congo, and the Zambesi — whose waters afford an unrivalled chain of lake and river communication, and on whose banks have been found powerful states and strange peoples and customs of which the last generation never dreamed. The roll of travellers who have penetrated into it contains such names as Livingstone, Speke and Grant, Burton, Baker, Schweinfurth, Gordon, Cameron, Stanley, Kirk, Van der Decken, Elton, Keith J ohnston, Pinto, and others of hardly lesser note, some of whom have laid down their lives in witness of their devotion in the cause of science ; and every one of these names recalls memories of gigantic difficulties grappled with, of dangers boldly encountered, of sufferings bravely borne, of great achievements performed, and nearly all within the short space of twenty years. Surely the record of such a work could be made interesting.

Before, however, proceeding to describe the region of the great equatorial lakes, and to narrate the experiences of recent explorers, it might be well to refer to another trophy of research, which seems to hint that all these are but a modern revelation of what was known three hundred years ago to the Portuguese colonists of Angola. In an old chart of the African continent, published at Rome in 1591, along with a " Description of the Kingdom of Congo"' by one Duarte Lopez, who had spent nine years in that country, there is shown, in a wonderfully complete and accurate shape, the system of the equatorial lakes and the rivers connected with them. We have,

A MEDIEVAL MAP.

for instance, the Blue Nile, flowing through a " Lago Barcena," in Abyssinia, as the Bahr-el-Azrek does throuo'h Lake Dembea. Then the White Nile is seen taking its rise in two great lakes on the equator, which might easily represent the Victoria Nyanza of Speke and Albert Nyanza of Sir S. Baker. Due south of what we will say is the Albert Lake is another great fresh-water sea, the equivalent, in the ancient chart, to Tanganyika ; and this is connected not only with the " Rio Congo," but with the Nile and the Zambesi. We know from Stanley's and Cameron's travels that the Tanganyika sends its surplus water to the Congo, and Livingstone has shown that there is continuous water communication between the latter river and the Zambesi. We are not yet in a position either to affirm or deny that a similar connecting link exists between it and the Nile. In fact, in a rough-and-ready way, this map represents pretty correctly the main features of the Lake Region as revealed by the investigations of the last few years ; while in regard to other particulars in it, our knowledge is not yet so far extended that we can put our finger on them and say that they do not represent facts. Does the delineation of these remarkable -lookinof lakes and interlinked river-systems represent a bold and happy guess on the part of the sixteenth century chartographer ? or does it preserve a record of facts, familiar in his day, that afterwards fell into oblivion ? Ere the slave-trade had put its ban of hatred between the coast-dweller and the inhabitant of the interior, when Portuguese

UNRECORDED DISCOVERY.

influence was predominant in Abyssinia, and a native Christian kingdom of Congo sent missions to the Pope,, it is quite conceivable that the true facts concerning the Nile and Congo sources may have come to light. This scrap, then, dug from among the rubbish of the Vatican Library, may possibly be the sole relic now extant of a race of medieval explorers, the fame of whose adventures has "fallen dumb," and whose labours have had to be done over again.

Chapter I. The Secret Of The Nile

When geographers on Afric maps "With savage pictures filled the gaps , O'er uninhabitable downs Placed elephants instead of towns."

Swift.

OME thirty years ago the modern world was startled and gratified with its first glimpse at the Lake Region of equatorial Africa. Pigafetta's map was still covered with the thick dust of centuries ; it had to be " discovered " like the lakes themselves. Or, if any one in these days had glanced at its wild complication of inland seas and lake-like rivers, he would have been vastly amused. The more he knew, or thought he knew, of geography, the louder he would have laughed. The maps which our fathers used at school showed as a rule a great blank occupying the interior of Africa, from the Abyssinian mountains to the Orange River, and from the coast ranges on the west side to the corresponding face of the table-land

FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE CENTRAL LAKES.

on the east. No geographer had soiled the pure white expanse with his lines and figures ; it was the happy hunting-grounds of conjecture and fancy. The Zambesi and the mighty Congo itself were represented as short stumps of rivers, with perhaps a dotted prolongation into the interior, drawn according to the geographer's fancy. A couple of native traders — ^the Pombeiros — had, indeed, early in the present century, passed from the Portuguese colony of Angola to the eastern side of the continent, and told how, on their journey, they had crossed a hundred rivers, visited the courts of powerful negro kings, and traversed countries where the inhabitants had made considerable progress in arts and industry. Their story, like that of other pioneers, was generally discredited, and themselves and their stores of information treated with contemptuous neglect.

But about thirty years ago authentic intelligence began to be received of the existence of great lakes in the interior. On the 1st of August 1849 Livingstone, Oswell, and Murray, after weary marching across the Kalihari Desert, stood on the margin of Lake Ngami, the most southerly and the first discovered of the great chain of equatorial lakes. As we shall often have occasion to notice, there is no sight so animating and at the same time so tantalizing to the traveller through unknown countries as the sudden glimpse of a grand expanse of water stretching away to the horizon. He expected to find dry land, and, lo ! an apparently illimitable sea bars

THE "mountains OF THE MOON."

his further journey, and warns hmi that he must return. But he has made a discovery worth that of scores of nameless rivers and unpronounceable tribes. The fancy is excited with the prospect of vague and almost limitless possibilities, and speculation and conjecture become violently active. The discoverer is drawn back to complete his work, and a score of others plunge into the unexplored to share in his fame.

From the discovery of Ngami probably may be dated the revival of modern curiosity in the secrets of the African continent. Rumours were rife in the Portuguese colonies of the existence of a large lake to the north of the Zambesi, known as Maravi, or Nyassa. Its outflow was unknp\vn, and a favourite theory was that it belonged to the system of the Nile, and was part of a long chain of reservoirs from which the river of Egypt drew its exhaustless store of water. Only the Nile, said these speculators, who, like all their contemporaries, had formed a most inadequate idea of the volume and character of the other two great streams of Central Africa, was worthy of such a magnificent gathering -ground. There were others who believed they confuted this view by pointing to the " Mountains of the Moon." This was a venerable geographical fiction which, like a huge caterpillar, had sprawled for centuries across the breadth of Africa, somewhere about the neighbourhood of the equator. Nobody had penetrated their mysterious recesses, or could even say he had sighted their peaks on the horizon , but there lay the " fountains of the Nile," according to Ptolemy and

AN ANTIQUE HOAX.

other ancient geographers, whose authority on this point, if it could be questioned, at least could not be contradicted. There is reason to believe that in this story of the Nile fountains, tirst told by Herodotus^ on the authority of the " Secretary of Minerva at Sais/' survives a venerable practical joke played by a party of facetious Egyptian priests on the geographer more than two thousand three hundred years ago. This worthy but credulous old Greek gentleman visited the land of the Pharaohs, then a great seat of learning and art, and the scholarly ecclesiastics naturally paid their distinguished visitor a good deal of attention, pointing out to him with just national pride the vast monuments of Egyptian industry and ingenuity, whose ruins are still the astonishment of the world. At length the stranger put a "poser." " Whence comes this great flood that issues from the desert where there is neither rainfall nor running stream except itself ? and what is the secret of that periodical rise in its waters by which Egypt is kept continually green and fertile ? " The Egyptian priests of 450 B.C. could no more answer than could the Egyptians of last generation ; but they had observed how ready their visitor was to produce his tablets, and the air of complete sincerity with which he jotted down in them the most astounding particulars; so, winking slyly to one another, they told him the cock-and-bull stoiy of the " two conical hills, named Crophi and Mophi," midway between which were " the unfathomable fountains of the Nile, half the water running northward into Egypt, and half

THE SEARCH FOR THE NILE FOUNTAINS, southward into Ethiopia." No doubt when his back was turned tlie rogues poked one another in the ribs — if that was one of the fashions in which an ancient Egyptian testified his delight in the arts of deceit — and chuckled at the manner in which the representative of this new-fangled Greek culture and civilization had been befooled. It is only justice to Herodotus to say, however, that he seems more than half to suspect that his informants were amusing themselves at his expense.

This piece of ancient Egyptian pleasantry represents the only positive statement which we possessed regarding the sources of the White Nile down to 1861, w^hen Speke and Grant coming from the^south, and Baker following the valley of the river towards the equator, almost simultaneously solved the mystery of its flow. The story too has its tragic side ; for, as we shall see, poor Livingstone, pinning his faith resolutely by Herod - «otus, and believing that he had discovered the veritable fountains of the Nile and Mountains of the Moon far away to the south in the water-shed between the Congo and Zambesi, turned his back on the glimpse of home and country which the sight of Stanley afforded him, and followed this Will-o'-thewisp into the swamps of the Bangweolo, to meet his lonely and lingering death. In Ptolemy's time, six hundred years after Herodotus, some genuine information regarding the Nile sources must have filtered through to Egypt ; for he tells us that the great river takes its rise, some ten degrees south of the equator,

CONQUERORS AND DISCOVERERS.

in many streams that converge into two lakes, situated east and west of each other, from which issue two rivers that join and form the Nile.

The unravelling of the problem of the Nile has been a favourite dream of the conquerors of Egypt since and probably long before Homer sang of its " heaven-descended stream," whose mythical head-waters were a favourite haunt of Jove himself when the king of the celestials wished to revel and disport himself in absolute seclusion from the children of men. In the days especially when cultivation and a settled population extended far to the south of their present limits, and a powerful state flourished at Meroe, near the junction of the White and Blue Niles, the tramp of armed hosts on the %iarch for the mythical ' fountains " has often resounded deep into the African interior. Sesostris, the first king who patronized map-making, made attempts to discover these springs, Alexander of Macedon, Cambyses the Persian, and the Roman Caesars wereinspired with the same wish. We are told by Lucan that Julius Caesar said he would give up civil war could he but look on the sources of the Nile; and Nero despatched a party of centurions, who returned with wonderful stories of cataracts and marshes that compelled them to return. The measure of success indeed that attended these renowned warriors and hectoring heroes was poor in proportion to the vast means they set in motion to gain it. Their first motive was plunder and conquest, and the long trains of laden camels and captives that followed