Stanley in Africa

Much more serious is the danger arising from the sudden and furious storms that sweep down upon the lake from the gullies of its encircling hills. Livingstone narrowly escaped shipwreck on its waters, and from his experiences of it proposed to have Nyassa named the “Lake of Storms.” An old seaman of his party, who had been over the world, and at home had spent many a squally night off the wild coasts of Connaught and Donegal, said he had never encountered such waves as were raised in a few minutes by the tornadoes on the Nyassa. Succeeding voyagers – Young, Elton, Cotterill, Drs. Laws and Stewart, of the Scottish missions – report similar experiences. Mr. Cotterill’s little craft, the Herya, a present from the Harrow boys, was driven ashore on the western coast, June 1877, and he lost his journals, goods, and medical stores, saving only one bottle of quinine, which, remembering the fate of Livingstone and Mackenzie, he threw ashore as he neared the breakers in the darkness. The most dreaded waves on the Nyassa come rolling on in threes, “with their crests,” says Livingstone, “streaming in spray behind them.” A short lull follows each charge; and then another white-maned trio come rushing on and threaten to ingulf the voyagers and their frail bark.

A curious natural phenomenon has been noticed by most observers on the Nyassa. A light blue cloud will be observed floating for many miles over the surface of the lake, like the trailing smoke of some distant fire. When it is reached, we discover that it consists of nothing else but myriads of insects, of a species peculiar to the region, and known as the “kungo fly.” So dense is the mass that immense quantities of them are caught by the natives and pounded into cakes, resembling in size and shape a “Tam o’Shanter” bonnet. They are not particular as to what they eat, these hunger-bitten natives of the Nyassa shores. Neither are they unreasonably extravagant in the matter of dress, some of the tribes absolutely dispensing with clothes. Their notion of making up for their scanty attire by liberally anointing their bodies with rancid fish oil and hippopotamus fat, and smearing themselves with fancy designs in red and white clay, does not recommend them to the European eye and nostril. From our point of view, too, their attempts at decoration by means of tattooing are in nowise improvements, the result being to give their faces and limbs the appearance of being thickly studded with pimples. The most hideous device of all, however, is the “pelele,” or lip ring, an ornament without which no Nyassa belle would dream of appearing in public. This consists of a broad ring of tin or stone, an inch or more in diameter, inserted by slow degrees into the upper lip, causing it to stand out at right angles to its natural direction, and revealing beneath the rows of teeth sharpened to fine points like those of a saw. The native ladies of rank sometimes have a corresponding ring in the under lip, with the result that while the wearers of the single “pelele” can only lisp, the ladies of fashion are scarcely able to speak at all. Considering that these poor people have not been lavishly endowed with natural charms, the effect of their duck-like mouths may be imagined. Some handsome faces may, however, be seen among the natives of the Nyassa, and many of them, it has been observed, have regular Jewish or Assyrian features. Dr. Livingstone saw one man who bore a striking resemblance to a distinguished London actor in the part of the “Moor of Venice,” while another was the exact counterpart, in black, of the late Lord Clyde.

The magnificent alpine country at the north end of the lake is, as yet, comparatively unknown. The sole spot where there is any level ground is a great elephant marsh. Here Elton and his companions counted no fewer than three hundred of these noble animals standing knee-deep in the swamp, the elders lazily swinging their trunks and fanning themselves with their huge ears; while the juniors of the herd disported themselves in their elephantine way, rolling luxuriously in the mud, or tearing down branches of trees in the riotous enjoyment of their enormous strength.

Elton’s party enjoyed several days of most exciting elephant-stalking in the neighboring hills. Sallying out one morning into a part of the forest where the great brutes were known to abound, the herd was at length sighted; two or three of the elephants dozing under the shade of some trees, others engaged in munching branches, or shaking the boughs and picking up one by one with their trunks the berries that were scattered below. They were soon aroused from this delightful Elysium of rest and enjoyment by the hunters, who had crept up to within ten or fifteen yards unseen. Singling out the biggest elephant, a huge tusker, who stood blinking contemplatively under the shadow of a tree, Elton and his companion, Mr. Rhodes, each planted a bullet behind his shoulder. He trumpeted, staggered forward, tripped over into the rocky bed of a “nullah,” scrambled out on the other side, and there receiving another two shots, crashed down lifeless into a second dry water-course.

Chase was then given up a mountain gorge to the next largest elephant which deliberately charged back at Elton, the nearest of her pursuers. Allowing her to approach to within about three yards, he gave her a forehead shot, which turned her round; and then Rhodes “doubled her over like a rabbit.” The retreating herd were pursued to the top of the pass, where the last of the line, a big bull elephant, receiving a shot, stumbled and fell, while Elton, with “the pace on,” nearly fell on the top of him; “and,” he says, “holding my Henry rifle like a pistol, I shot him again at the root of the tail. The shock was irresistible; over the edge of the ravine he went, head foremost, the blood gushing out of his trunk, and his fall into space only broken by a stout acacia, in which he hung suspended, his fore and hind legs on either side – dead.” Still the hunt was continued, and on a second rocky slope a wounded elephant was found laboring up, supported and helped on by a friend on either side, while a fourth urged him on from behind with his forehead. This last faced round, and stood defiantly at bay, his ears “spread-eagled.” Elton’s last cartridge missed fire; Rhodes shot; a tremendous report followed; the elephant, with a groan, plunged over a cliff, and hung suspended by a thorn-tree in mid-air, like his predecessor; while Mr. Rhodes, casting his gun from him, ran down the declivity to the river, his face streaming with blood; and the survivors of the herd, toiling painfully up the mountain-side, disappeared over the sky-line, “uttering loud grumblings of disapprobation and distress.” The chamber of the rifle had burst, cutting Mr. Rhodes severely in the face; and his companion endeavored to console him by telling him that many a man at home would have given one thousand pounds for such a day’s sport, and suffered the cut in the forehead into the bargain.

Such sport is, however, getting every day more difficult to obtain; for this lordly animal, the true “king of beasts,” is retreating before the march of civilization, and becoming gradually more scarce even in the African solitudes. This is not to be wondered at, considering the vast numbers – probably from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand – that are killed annually for the sake of their ivory.

It may be remarked that Elton’s escape from the elephant’s charge was a remarkably close one. There is only one other instance known of the “forehead shot” being effectual in stopping the course of an African elephant. This adventure happened in the Abyssinian highlands to Sir Samuel Baker. That mighty hunter was at the time new to African sport, and imagining that planting a bullet in the forehead, the favorite method with hunters of the wild elephant of India and Ceylon, would be equally effectual in the case of his big-eared kinsman of Central Africa, he awaited the charge of an elephant until she was within five yards of the muzzle of his rifle. The bullet happened to strike a vulnerable spot in the skull, and dropped the animal dead; but the lookers-on for several moments regarded the hunter as a dead man.

In both these cases the elephant shot was a female, which possesses in a less marked degree than the male the solid structure of skull that, along with their immense ears, convex foreheads, and greater size, distinguish the African from the Asiatic variety. When not struck in a vital spot, the elephant is remarkably tenacious of life; and Livingstone tells how he fired twelve bullets into one that had fallen into a hole, and had about a hundred native spears sticking in him, and next morning found that the animal had scrambled out and escaped into the forest. Perhaps the most perilous experience that ever befell a white hunter when after elephants occurred to Mr. Oswell, far to the southward, on the banks of the Zouga. Chasing an elephant through a thorny thicket on horseback, he suddenly found the animal had wheeled round and was bearing straight down upon him. Attempting to turn his horse, he was thrown, face downwards, before the elephant. Twisting round, he saw the huge fore foot about to descend on his legs, parted them, and drew in his breath, expecting the other foot to be planted on his body; but saw the whole of the “under-side” of the huge creature pass over him, and rose unhurt to his feet, saved almost by miracle.

But this has carried us far away from the elephant marsh, from the borders of which Messrs. Elton, Cotterill, Rhodes, and Hoste made their ascent of the mountain barrier of Nyassa. The lowest pass over the Konde, or Livingstone range, is eight thousand eight hundred feet above sea-level; and the ascent embraces every variety of climate and scenery, from stifling tropical swamp to breezy moorlands of fern and bracken, carpeted with wild thyme, daisies, dandelions, and buttercups, like our hills at home. From the top a magnificent landscape is viewed. Elton says: “The country we have passed through is without exception the finest tract in Africa I have yet seen. Towards the east we were walled in with mountains rising to a height of from twelve to fourteen thousand feet, inclosing undulating, well-watered valleys, lovely woodland slopes, hedged-in fields, and knolls dotted with native hamlets. There is nothing to equal it either in fertility or in grazing land in Natal, the reputed ‘garden of South Africa.’ It is the most exceptionally favorable country for semi-tropical cultivation I have ever seen.”

A serious obstacle to the development of this beautiful highland region is probably the exceptionally deadly climate of the country through which it must be approached. Already many precious lives have been sacrificed in the attempt to open up the Nyassa. Livingstone got here his “death-sentence.” The German Roscher, who, travelling in the guise of an Arab from the east coast, viewed the lake only two months later than the great missionary, was basely murdered at a little village near its shores. Bishop Mackenzie is buried in the Shiré swamps; and near him lie nearly the whole staff of the University Mission to this region, all stricken down with marsh fever. Thornton, the intrepid companion of Livingstone on his first visit to the Nyassa, after having ascended half-way up the snow-capped mountain Kilimandjaro, far to the northward, returned to this quarter, only to die at the foot of the Murchison Rapids. Mrs. Livingstone, the devoted wife of the missionary, rests under a gigantic baobab tree a little way below the Shiré mouth; and near her grave is that of Kirkpatrick, of the Zambesi Survey Expedition of 1826. Another baobab, in Ugogo, shades the resting-place of Consul Elton, whom we have just seen full of life and hope, at the head of the pass overhanging the north end of the lake. Only a few marches to the northward of the pass, while toiling across a droughty plain, and weak from hunger and fever, he succumbed to sunstroke, and a most useful and promising career closed at the early age of thirty-seven. Still younger was Mr. Keith Johnston, who died from dysentery, while leading an expedition from Zanzibar territory to Nyassa. Dr. Black is buried on Cape Maclear, the rocky promontory cleaving the southern end of the lake, where the Free Church of Scotland Mission Station of Livingstonia has been planted; and the little cemetery contains many other graves of white persons.

The Scottish mission stations on the Shiré and Lake Nyassa are not the only outposts which Christianity has planted in the far interior of the “Dark Continent.” Similar colonies, for the moral improvement and industrial training of the natives of Africa, have been placed on the shores of the Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika by the London and University Missionary Societies. The example is being followed by similar associations in France and America; and the Zambesi country has been mapped out for a renewal of the long-abandoned work of the Jesuit fathers. Science, commerce, and philanthropy have enlisted by the side of religion in the task of opening up Africa. The chief outlets of the slave-trade have at length, it is hoped, been closed, thanks mainly to the efforts of England, and the hearty co-operation of the government of Portugal, Egypt and Zanzibar.

AFRICAN RESOURCES

Though the coasts of Africa lie within sight of the most civilized countries, its depths are still mysteries. Though the valley of the Nile was, in the earliest ages of history, the seat of commerce, the arts and sciences, it is only now that we read of a new source for that sacred stream in Lake Edward Nyanza.

This wonderful continent, the Negroland of our school books, the marvel of modern times as the light of exploration pierces its forests and reveals its lakes, rivers and peoples, is a vast peninsula, triangular in shape, containing 12,300,000 square miles. This vast area renders a conception of its geographic details difficult, yet by taking several plain views of it, the whole may be brought out so that one can grasp it with a fair degree of intelligence. One way to look at it is to regard the entire seacoast as the rind of the real Africa. Follow its Mediterranean boundary on the north, its Red Sea and Indian Ocean boundary on the east, its Atlantic Ocean boundary on the south and west, and the lowland rind is always present, in some places quite thin, in others many miles thick.

This rind, low, swampy, reedy, channeled by oozy creeks, or many mouthed rivers, is the prelude to something wholly different within. On the north, north-east and north-west, we know it introduces us to the barren Sahara. In all other parts it introduces us to an upland Africa, which, for height and variety of plateaus, has no equal in the world. These plateaus are variegated with immense mountain chains, like those of the Atlas, the Moon, the Kong, the Gupata, and those just revealed by Stanley extending between the two great lakes Albert Nyanza and Victoria Nyanza, and to a height of 18,000 feet, fully 6,000 of which are clad in perpetual snow, even though lying under the Equator. Here too are those vast stretches of water which vie in size and depth with the lake systems of any other continent, and which feed mighty rivers, even though evaporation be constantly lifting their volume into the tropical air. No traveler has ever looked with other than awe upon those superb lakes Albert Nyanza, Edward Nyanza, Victoria Nyanza, Tanganyika, Leopold II., Nyassa, Bangweola, and dozens of smaller ones whose presence came upon him like a revelation. And then out of these plateaus, thousands of feet high, run all those mighty rivers which constitute the most unique and mightiest water system in the world – the Zambezi, the Congo, the Niger, the Senegal and the Nile.

This would be Africa in a general sense. But in view of the importance of this opening continent, we must get a fuller view of it. The Africa of antiquity and of the Middle Ages extended from the Red Sea to the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean to the land of the Berbers, and other strange, if not mythical peoples. It embraced Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia on the east. On the north it was skirted by the Barbary States. But its great, appalling feature was the great desert of Sahara, forbidden to Greek or Roman, Persian or Egyptian, till the Arab came on his camel, and with the flaming sword of Mohammed in hand, to pierce its waste places and make traffic possible amid its sandy wastes.

South of the Western Sahara is a fairly defined section extending from Timbuctoo to the Gulf of Guinea, or in other words nearly to the Equator. It is divided by the Kong chain of mountains, and embraces the water systems of the Senegal and Niger Rivers. This was the part of Africa which first drew European enterprise after Portugal and Spain became the world’s sailors, and began to feel their way toward the Cape of Good Hope. Three hundred years ago it was what Central Africa is to-day, a wonderland full of venturesome travelers, a source of national jealousy, a factor in European politics, a starting point for a thousand theories respecting colonization and of as many enterprises having for their object the introduction of commerce, the arts and Christianity among the natives, who were by no means as peaceably inclined as in the present day. As other natives came to find out something of the commercial value of the Senegal and Niger countries, they stepped in to get their share of the honor and profit of possession, and so this part of Africa was partitioned, till we find on the Atlantic, south of the Niger, the British colony of Sierra Leone, the kingdoms of Ashantee and Dahomey, the republic of Liberia, the coast towns of the Bight of Benin, and the strong French possessions lying just north of the Congo and extending indefinitely inland.

Back of this section, and extending south of the Sahara, to the head-waters of the Nile, is the great central basin whose waters converge in the vast estuary known as Lake Tchad. It may be somewhat vaguely termed the Soudan region, which is divided into Northern and Equatorial Soudan, the former being the seat of the recent uprising of the Mahdi, and the latter the center of the kingdom which Emin Pasha sought to wrest from Mohammedan grasp. Along the Indian Ocean coast, from Cape Guardafui to Mozambique, is a lowland stretch from two to three hundred miles wide, watered by small, sluggish rivers which find their way into the Indian Sea.

Passing down the eastern side of the continent, we come to the immense basin of the Zambezi, second only in extent to that of the Congo, stretching almost to the Atlantic coast, seat of mighty tribes like the Macololos, teeming with commercial possibilities, and even now a source of such envy between England and Portugal as to raise a question of war. South of the Zambezi comes the great Kalahari desert as a balance to the northern Sahara, and then that fringe of civilization embraced in Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Cape Colony, and so around till the Portuguese kingdoms of Benguela and Angola are reached, all of whose waters run by short courses to the sea. These great natural divisions comprise the entire area of the African continent except that vast equatorial basin drained by the Congo.

This mighty region, the Central Africa of to-day, is now largely embraced in the new Congo Free State. To the south of the mouth of the Congo is the State of Angola, and to the north, the State of Congo, claimed by the French. The great river was originally called the Zaire, and by some the Livingstone. Its first, or ocean, section extends from Banana Point to Boma, a distance of 70 miles, and is in fact an arm of the sea. Thence, upward to Vivi, a distance of 40 miles, there is a deep, broad channel, with a moderate current. Vivi is the head of the lower river navigation, being at the foot of the cataracts, which extend for over 200 miles through a system of cañons, with more than fifty falls of various heights. They are known as Livingstone Falls, and have stretches of navigable water between them. After the cataracts are passed, Stanley Pool is reached, where are the towns of Leopoldville, Kinshassa and others, founded recently as trading or missionary stations. The vertical descent of the river from the broad, tranquil expanse of Stanley Pool to the level at Vivi, is about 1,000 feet, and from thence to the sea fully 250 feet more. Stanley Pool, or basin, is about 20 miles long and nearly 10 broad, and is filled with low wooded islands, natural homes for hippopotami, crocodiles, elephants, and all tropical animals. From Leopoldville to Stanley Falls there is uninterrupted navigation, and the distance is 1,068 miles, with a comparatively straight course and a vertical descent of four inches to the mile. Stanley Falls 1,511 feet above the sea level. The affluents of the river below Stanley Falls present a navigable surface estimated at 4,000 miles. In the wide and elevated portion of the river above Stanley Falls it is known as the Lualaba. Its course is now nearly north, and it was this fact that deceived Livingstone into the belief that he was on the Nile. This portion, though abounding in vast lake stretches and rich in affluents, is navigable only for shallow craft. It drains a fertile country whose centre is Nyangwe, the best-known market town of Central Africa and the capital of Tippoo Tib’s dominions, the conqueror of the Manyuema, and the craftiest of all the Arab potentates in Central Africa.

To the east of the Upper Congo, or Lualaba, is a magnificent stretch of grass country, extending to Lake Tanganyika, whose waters flow into the Congo, making a descent of 1,200 feet in 200 miles. As the western shores of that lake rise fully 2,500 feet, this region becomes a sort or Switzerland in tropical Africa. North and east of Tanganyika, are the Nile sources, in Lakes Albert, Edward and Victoria Nyanza – a fertile and populous region, fitted by nature for her thriftiest and best peoples. Thus we have Africa again mapped, and her grandest portion embraced in the Congo State, with its 1,500,000 square miles, its countless population, its abundance of navigable streams, its remarkably fertile soil, its boundless forests, all its requisites for the demands of an advanced civilization.

To the naturalist Africa opens a field for research equalled by no other continent. The whole organic world offers no such number of giant animal and plant forms. It unfolds five times as many quadrupeds as Asia, and three times as many as the Americas. Its colossal hippopotami, huge giraffes, infinite variety of antelopes, and water-bucks, the curious diving sheep, or goat, called the Quichobo, long armed apes, fierce sokos, and swarms of sprightly monkeys, excel those of Asia in size. That mammoth bird, the ostrich, whose feathers delight our modern slaves of fashion, is exclusively indigenous to Africa. The Arab may have brought the camel from the deserts of Sinai, but Africa has made a home for it. Africa is the habitat of the rhinoceros, elephant, lion, panther, leopard, ounce, jackal, hyena, wolf, fox, dog, cat, bat, rat, hare, rabbit, bear, horse, ass, zebra, sheep, with wool and without, goat, buffalo, gazelle, cattle of all kinds, some of them the finest specimens in nature, deer of the fallow type, which put to shame the sleek breeds of European parks.

The birds are equally numberless as to variety. There are eagles, hawks, flamingoes, kingfishers, many varieties of parrots, peacocks, partridges, pheasants, widow and cardinal birds, weavers, cuckoos, doves, pigeons, ducks, geese, and crown-birds, the plumage of the last being the most beautiful of the feathered tribe. The reptilia embraces crocodiles, the python, the boa and hundreds of smaller snakes, some harmless and some highly venomous. The rivers and lakes swarm with fish, though the variety is not so great as in more northern waters. The forests and the earth swarm with termites and ants of great variety, which draw after them a host of ant-eaters of the armadillo type; and at times spiders, caterpillars, and armies of locusts infest the trees or darken the sun. Insect life knows no limit in Africa – some the most beautiful, some the most horrid. The tsetse fly is no less a torment to cattle than the “devil of the road” is to the woe-begone traveler. And everywhere, especially in tropical Africa, vegetation has a force and vigor peculiar to that continent. Nature seems to rejoice in unfolding her strength through the seeds deposited in the soil. “Some fifty and some an hundred fold” is the law of increase, when the least care is given to planting and cultivation. Maize produces two crops a year. Tree life is gigantic, and the variety of wood infinite. Of the picturesque trees, the boabab, or monkey bread-fruit tree, whose crown of green sometimes forms a circle of over 100 feet, takes a front rank, followed by the ceiba, with its stem of 60 feet and its rich crown of foliage extending fully 60 feet further.