Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa Part 42

Elands, springbucks, koodoos, and ostriches somehow seem to get along very well without any moisture, except that contained in the gra.s.s which they eat. They appear to live for months without drinking; but whenever rhinoceroses, buffaloes, or gnus are seen, it is held to be certain proof that water exists within a few miles.

The pa.s.sage of the Kalahari was effected, not without considerable difficulty, in two months, the expedition reaching Lake Ngami on the 1st of August. As they approached it, they came upon a considerable river.

"Whence does this come?" asked Livingstone.

"From a country full of rivers," was the reply; "so many that no man can tell their number, and full of large trees."

This was the first actual confirmation of the report of the Bakwains that the country beyond was not the large "sandy plateau" of geographers. The prospect of a highway capable of being traversed by boats to an unexplored fertile region so filled the mind of Livingstone that, when he came to the lake, this discovery seemed of comparatively little importance. To us, indeed, whose ideas of a lake are formed from Superior and Huron, the Ngami seems but an insignificant affair. Its circ.u.mference may be seventy or a hundred miles, and its mean depth is but a few feet. It lies two thousand feet above the level of the sea, and as much below the southern border of the Kalahari, which slopes gradually toward the interior.

Their desire to visit Sebituane, whose residence was considerably farther in the interior, was frustrated by the jealousy of Lechulatebe, a chief near the lake, and the expedition returned to the station at Kolobeng. The attempt was renewed the following year. Mrs. Livingstone, their three children, and Sechele accompanied him. The lake was reached.

Lechulatebe, propitiated by the present of a valuable gun, agreed to furnish guides to Sebituane's country; but the children and servants fell ill, and the attempt was for the time abandoned.

A third expedition was successful, although the whole party came near peris.h.i.+ng for want of water, and their cattle, which had been bitten by the 'Tsetse', died.

This insect--the 'Glossina moritans' of the naturalists--deserves a special paragraph. It is a brown insect about as large as our common house-fly, with three or four yellow bars across its hinder part.

A lively, buzzing, harmless-looking fellow is the tsetse. Its bite produces a slight itching similar to that caused by the mosquito, and in the case of men and some species of animals no further ill effects follow. But woe to the horse, the ox, and the dog, when once bitten by the tsetse. No immediate harm appears; the animal is not startled as by the gad-fly; but in a few days the eyes and the nose begin to run; the jaws and navel swell; the animal grazes for a while as usual, but grows emaciated and weak, and dies, it may be, weeks or months after. When dissected, the cellular tissue seems injected with air, the fat is green and oily, the muscles are flabby, the heart is so soft that the finger may be pushed through it. The antelope and buffalo, the zebra and goat, are not affected by its bite; while to the ox, the horse, and the dog it is certain death. The mule and donkey are not troubled by it, nor are sucking calves, while dogs, though fed upon milk, perish. Such different effects produced upon animals whose nature is similar, const.i.tute one of the most curious phenomena in natural history.

Sebituane, who had heard of the approach of his visitors, came more than a hundred miles to meet them. He was a tall, wiry, coffee-and-milk colored man, of five-and-forty. His original home was a thousand miles to the south, in the Bakwain country, whence he had been driven by the Griquas a quarter of a century before. He fled northward, fighting his way, sometimes reduced to the utmost straits, but still keeping his people together. At length he crossed the desert, and conquered the country around Lake Ngami; then having heard of white men living on the west coast, he pa.s.sed southwestward into the desert, hoping to be able to open intercourse with them. There suffering from the thirst, he came to a small well; the water was not sufficient for his men and his cattle; one or the other must perish; he ordered the men to drink, for if they survived they could fight for more cattle. In the morning his cattle were all gone, and he returned to the north. Here a long course of warfare awaited him, but in the end he triumphed over his enemies, and established himself for a time on the great river Zambesi. Haunted with a longing for intercourse with the whites, he proposed to descend the river to the eastern coast. He was dissuaded from this purpose by the warnings of a native prophet. "The G.o.ds say, Go not thither!" he cried; then turning to the west, "I see a city and a nation of black men--men of the water; their cattle are red; thine own tribe are peris.h.i.+ng, and will all be consumed; thou wilt govern black men, and when thy warriors have captured the red cattle, let not their owners be killed; they are thy future tribe; let them be spared to cause thee to build." So Sebituane went westward, conquered the blacks of an immense region, spared the lives of the men, and made them his subjects, ruling them gently. His original people are called the Makololo; the subject tribes are styled Makalaka.

Sebituane, though the greatest warrior in the south, always leading his men to battle in person, was still anxious for peace. He had heard of cannon, and had somehow acquired the idea that if he could only procure one he might live in quiet. He received his visitors with much favor.

"Your cattle have all been bitten by the tsetse," he said, "and will die; but never mind, I will give you as many as you want." He offered to conduct them through his country that they might choose a site for a missionary station. But at this moment he fell ill of an inflammation of the lungs, from which he soon died.

"He was," writes Mr. Livingstone, "the best specimen of a native chief I ever met; and it was impossible not to follow him in thought into the world of which he had just heard when he was called away, and to realize somewhat of the feeling of those who pray for the dead. The deep, dark question of what is to become of such as he must be left where we find it, believing that a.s.suredly the Judge of all the earth will do right."

Although he had sons, Sebituane left the chieftains.h.i.+p to his daughter Mamochisane, who confirmed her father's permission that the missionaries might visit her country. They proceeded a hundred and thirty miles farther, and were rewarded by the discovery of the great river Zambesi, the very existence of which, in Central Africa, had never been suspected. It was the dry season, and the river was at its lowest; but it was from three to six hundred yards broad, flowing with a deep current toward the east.

A grander idea than the mere founding of a missionary station now developed itself in the mind of Mr. Livingstone. European goods had just begun to be introduced into this region from the Portuguese settlements on the coast; at present slaves were the only commodity received in payment for them. Livingstone thought if a great highway could be opened, ivory, and the other products of the country, might be bartered for these goods, and the traffic in slaves would come to an end.

He therefore resolved to take his family to Cape Town, and thence send them to England, while he returned alone to the interior, with the purpose of making his way either to the east or the west coast.

He reached the Cape in April, 1852, being the first time during eleven years that he had visited the scenes of civilization, and placed his family on board a s.h.i.+p bound for England, promising to rejoin them in two years.

In June he set out from Cape Town upon that long journey which was to occupy five years. When he approached the missionary stations in the interior, he learned that the long-threatened attack by the Boers had taken place. A letter from Sechele to Mr. Moffat told the story. Thus it ran:

"Friend of my heart's love and of all the confidence of my heart, I am Sechele. I am undone by the Boers, who attacked me, though I had no guilt with them. They demanded that I should be in their kingdom, and I refused. They demanded that I should prevent the English and Griquas from pa.s.sing. I replied, These are my friends, and I can not prevent them. They came on Sat.u.r.day, and I besought them not to fight on Sunday, and they a.s.sented. They began on Monday morning at twilight, and fired with all their might, and burned the town with fire, and scattered us.

They killed sixty of my people, and captured women, and children, and men. They took all the cattle and all the goods of the Bakwains; and the house of Livingstone they plundered, taking away all his goods. Of the Boers we killed twenty-eight."

Two hundred children, who had been gathered into schools, were carried away as slaves. Mr. Livingstone's library was wantonly destroyed, not carried away; his stock of medicines was smashed, and his furniture and clothing sold at auction to defray the expenses of the foray. Mr.

Pretorius, the leader of the marauding party, died not long after, and an obituary notice of him was published, ending with the words, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord."

Leaving his desolate home, Livingstone proceeded on his journey. On the way he met Sechele, who was going, he said, to see the Queen of England.

Livingstone tried to dissuade him.

"Will not the Queen listen to me?" asked the chief.

"I believe she would listen, but the difficulty is to get to her."

"Well, I shall reach her."

And so they parted. Sechele actually made his way to the Cape, a distance of a thousand miles, but could get no farther, and returned to his own country. The remnants of the tribes who had formerly lived among the Boers gathered around him, and he is now more powerful than ever.

It is slow traveling in Africa. Livingstone was almost a year in accomplis.h.i.+ng the 1500 miles between Cape Town and the country of the Makololo. He found that Mamochisane, the daughter of Sebituane, had voluntarily resigned the chieftains.h.i.+p to her younger brother, Sekeletu.

She wished to be married, she said, and have a family like other women.

The young chief Sekeletu was very friendly, but showed no disposition to become a convert. He refused to learn to read the Bible, for fear it might change his heart, and make him content with only one wife, like Sechele. For his part he wanted at least five.

Some months were pa.s.sed in this country, which is described as fertile and well-cultivated--producing millet, maize, yams, sweet potatoes, ca.s.sava, beans, pumpkins, water-melons, and the like. The sugar-cane grows plentifully, but the people had never learned the process of making sugar. They have great numbers of cattle, and game of various species abounds. On one occasion a troop of eighty-one buffaloes defiled slowly before their evening fire, while herds of splendid elands stood, without fear, at two hundred yards' distance. The country is rather unhealthy, from the ma.s.s of decayed vegetation exposed to the torrid sun.

After due consideration, Livingstone resolved to make his way to Loanda, a Portuguese settlement on the western coast. Sekeletu, anxious to open a trade with the coast, appointed twenty-seven men to accompany the traveler; and on the 11th of November, 1853, he set out on his journey.

Three or four small boxes contained all the baggage of the party. The only provisions were a few pounds of biscuits, coffee, tea, and sugar; their main reliance being upon the game which they expected to kill, and, this failing, upon the proceeds of about ten dollars' worth of beads. They also took with them a few elephants' tusks, which Sekeletu sent by way of a trading venture.

The river up which they paddled abounds in hippopotami. These are in general harmless, though now and then a solitary old bull who has been expelled from the herd vents his spleen by pitching into every canoe that pa.s.ses. Once their canoe was attacked by a female whose calf had been speared, and nearly overturned. The female carries her young upon her back, its little round head first appearing above the surface when she comes up to breathe.

By the order of the chief the party had been furnished with eight oxen for riding, and seven intended for slaughter. Some of the troop paddled the canoes, while others drove the cattle along the bank.

African etiquette requires that a company of travelers, when they come in sight of a village, shall seat themselves under a tree, and send forward a messenger to announce their arrival and state their object.

The chief then gives them a ceremonious reception, with abundance of speech-making and drumming. It is no easy matter to get away from these villages, for the chiefs esteem it an honor to have strangers with them. These delays, and the frequent heavy rains, greatly r.e.t.a.r.ded the progress of the travelers.

They had traveled four months, and accomplished half of their journey before encountering any show of hostility from the tribes through which they pa.s.sed. A chief, named Njambi, then demanded tribute for pa.s.sing through his country; when this was refused he said that one of Livingstone's men had spit on the leg of one of his people, and this crime must be paid for by a fine of a man, an ox, or a gun. This reasonable demand was likewise refused, and the natives seemed about to commence hostilities; but changed their minds upon witnessing the determined att.i.tude of the strangers. Livingstone at last yielded to the entreaties of his men and gave them an ox, upon the promise that food should be sent in exchange. The n.i.g.g.ardly chief sent them only a small bag of meal, and two or three pounds of the meat of their own ox.

From this time they were subject to frequent attempts at extortion. The last of these was made on the banks of the River Quango, the boundary of the Portuguese possessions. A Bas.h.i.+nje chief, whose portrait is given by Mr. Livingstone, made the usual demand of a man, a gun, or an ox, otherwise they must return the way they came. While negotiations were in progress the opportune arrival of a Portuguese sergeant freed the travelers from their troubles. The river was crossed, and once on Portuguese territory their difficulties were over.

At Ca.s.sange, the frontier settlement, they sold Sekeletu's ivory. The Makololo, who had been accustomed to give two tusks for one gun, were delighted at the prices they obtained. For one tusk they got two muskets, three kegs of powder, large bunches of beads, and calico and baize enough to clothe all the party.

On the 31st of May, after more than six months' travel, Livingstone and his companions reached the Portuguese sea-port of Loanda. The Makololo were lost in wonder when they first caught sight of the sea. "We marched along," they said, "believing that what the ancients had told us was true, that the world has no end; but all at once the world said to us, I am finished, there is no more of me." Still greater was their wonder when they beheld the large stone houses of the town. "These are not huts," they said, "but mountains with caves in them." Livingstone had in vain tried to make them comprehend a house of two stories. They knew of no dwellings except their own conical huts, made of poles stuck into the ground, and could not conceive how one hut could be built on the top of another, or how people could live in the upper story, with the pointed roof of the lower one sticking up in the middle of the floor. The vessels in the harbor were, they said, not canoes, but towns, into which one must climb by a rope.

At Loanda Livingstone was attacked by a fever, which reduced him to a skeleton, and for a while rendered him unable to attend to his companions. But they managed very well alone. Some went to the forest, cut firewood, and brought it to town for sale; others unloaded a coal-vessel in the harbor, at the magnificent wages of a sixpence a day.

The proceeds of their labor were shrewdly invested in cloth and beads which they would take home with them in confirmation of the astounding stories they would have to tell; "for," said they, "in coming to the white man's country, we have accomplished what no other people in the world could have done; we are the true ancients, who can tell wonderful things."

The two years, at the close of which Livingstone had promised to rejoin his family, had almost expired, and he was offered a pa.s.sage home from Loanda. But the great object of his expedition was only partially attained. Though he had reached the west coast in safety, he had found that the forests, swamps, and rivers must render a wagon-road from the interior impracticable. He feared also that his native attendants would not be able to make their way alone back to their own country, through the unfriendly tribes. So he resolved, feeble as he was, to return to Sekeletu's dominions, and thence proceed to the eastern coast.

In September he started on his return journey, bearing considerable presents for Sekeletu from the Portuguese, who were naturally anxious to open a trade with the rich ivory region of the interior. The Board of Public Works sent a colonel's uniform and a horse, which unfortunately died on the way. The merchants contributed specimens of all their articles of trade, and a couple of donkeys, which would have a special value on account of their immunity from the bite of the tsetse. The men were made happy by the acquisition of a suit of European clothes and a gun apiece, in addition to their own purchases.

In the Bas.h.i.+nje country he again encountered hostile demonstrations. One chief, who came riding into the camp upon the shoulders of an attendant, was especially annoying in his demands for tribute. Another, who had quarreled with one of Livingstone's attendants, waylaid and fired upon the party. Livingstone, who was ill of a fever, staggered up to the chief, revolver in hand. The sight of the six mouths of that convenient implement gaping at his breast wrought an instant revolution in his martial ideas; he fell into a fit of trembling, protesting that he had just come to have a quiet talk, and wanted only peace.

These Bas.h.i.+nje have more of the low negro character and physiognomy than any tribe encountered by Livingstone. Their color is a dirty black; they have low foreheads and flat noses, artificially enlarged by sticks run through the septum, and file their teeth down to a point. A little further to the south the complexion of the natives is much lighter, and their features are strikingly like those depicted upon the Egyptian monuments, the resemblance being still further increased by some of their modes of wearing the hair. Livingstone indeed affirms that the Egyptian paintings and sculptures present the best type of the general physiognomy of the central tribes.

The return journey was still slower than the advance had been; and it was not till late in the summer of 1855 that they reached the villages of the Makololo, having been absent more than eighteen months. They were received as men risen from the dead, for the diviners had declared that they had perished long ago. The returned adventurers were the lions of the day. They strutted around in their gay European suits, with their guns over their shoulders, to the abounding admiration of the women and children, calling themselves Livingstone's "braves", who had gone over the whole world, turning back only when there was no more land. To be sure they returned about as poor as they went, for their gun and their one suit of red and white cotton were all that they had saved, every thing else having been expended during their long journey. "But never mind," they said; "we have not gone in vain, you have opened a path for us."

There was one serious drawback from their happiness. Some of their wives, like those of the companions of Ulysses of old, wearied by their long absence, had married other husbands. They took this misfortune much to heart. "Wives," said one of the bereaved husbands, "are as plenty as gra.s.s--I can get another; but," he added bitterly, "if I had that fellow I would slit his ears for him." Livingstone did the best he could for them. He induced the chiefs to compel the men who had taken the only wife of any one to give her up to her former husband. Those--and they were the majority--who had still a number left, he consoled by telling them that they had quite as many as was good for them--more than he himself had. So, undeterred by this single untoward result of their experiment, the adventurers one and all set about gathering ivory for another adventure to the west.

Livingstone had satisfied himself that the great River Leeambye, up which he had paddled so many miles on his way to the west, was identical with the Zambesi, which he had discovered four years previously. The two names are indeed the same, both meaning simply "The River", in different dialects spoken on its banks. This great river is an object of wonder to the natives. They have a song which runs,

"The Leeambye! n.o.body knows Whence it comes, and whither it goes."

Livingstone had pursued it far up toward its source, and knew whence it came; and now he resolved to follow it down to the sea, trusting that it would furnish a water communication into the very heart of the continent.