Stanley's Adventures in the Wilds of Africa Part 15

They attack in such numbers and so sudden, that our repeating rifles and Sniders have to be handled with such nervous rapidity as will force them back before we are forced to death; for if we allow them to come within forty yards, their spears are as fatal as bullets; their spears make fearful wounds, while their contemptible-looking arrows are as deadly weapons. * * * Since I left Zanzibar, I have traveled seven hundred and twenty miles by land and a thousand miles by water. This is a good six months' work."

CHAPTER XVIII.

EXPLORATIONS OF LAKE TANGANIKA.

It was with strange feelings that Stanley caught from the last ridge the sparkling waters of Tanganika. Sweet a.s.sociations were awakened at the sight, as he remembered with what a thrilling heart he first saw it gleam in the landscape. Then it was the end of a long, wasting and perilous journey--the goal of his ambition, the realization of his fondest hopes; for on its sh.o.r.es he believed the object for which he had toiled so long was resting. No more welcome sight ever dawned on mortal eye than its waters as they spread away on the horizon; and though he should see it a hundred times, it will never appear to him like any other sheet of water. He has formed for it an attachment that will last forever; and whenever in imagination it rises before him, it will appear like the face of a friend.

As he now descended to Ujiji, it was with sensations as though he were once more entering civilized life, for there was something almost homelike about this Arab colony. People dressed in civilized garments were moving about the streets, cattle were coming down to the lake to drink, and domestic animals scattered here and there made quite a homelike scene.

At first sight, it seems strange that Stanley should have selected this lake as the next scene of his explorations. He had previously, with Livingstone, explored thoroughly the upper half of it, and pa.s.sed part way down the western side; Livingstone had been at the foot of it, and to crown all, Stanley had heard, before leaving Zanzibar, that Cameron had explored the entire southern portion, so that really there was nothing for him to do but follow a path which had been already trodden.

To employ an expedition fitted out at so great a cost, and spend so much valuable time in going over old ground, seems an utter waste of both time and labor, especially when such vast unexplored fields spread all around him. But there was a mystery about Tanganika, which Stanley probably suspected Cameron had not solved, and which he meant to clear up. Here was a lake over three hundred miles long, with perhaps a hundred streams, great and small, running into it, and yet with no outlet, unless Cameron had found it, which he thinks he did. To find this was the chief object of the expedition Stanley and Livingstone made together to the north end of the lake. They had heard that the Rusizi River at that extremity was the outlet, but they found it instead a tributary. In fact, they proved conclusively that there was no outlet at the northern end. It therefore must be at the southern, and if so, it was the commencement of a river that would become a mighty stream before it reached the ocean. But no such stream was known to exist. The Caspian Sea has large rivers flowing into it, but no outlet, yet it never fills up. Evaporation, it is supposed, accounts for this. But the Caspian is salt, while the Tanganika is fresh water, and such a large body of fresh water as this was never known to exist without an outlet, and if it could be that evaporation was so great as to equal all the water that runs into it, it would not remain so fresh as it is.

We will let Cameron state his own case concerning the solution of this mystery. He started with two canoes and thirty-seven men, and sailed down the eastern sh.o.r.e of the lake, now ravished with the surpa.s.sing beauty of the scene composed of water and sky, and smiling sh.o.r.es, and again awed by beetling cliffs; one evening camping on the green banks and watching the sun go down behind the purple peaks, and another drenched with rain, and startled by the vivid lightning and awful thunder crashes of a tropical storm, yet meeting with no incident of any peculiar interest to the reader. The natives were friendly, and he describes the different villages and customs of the people and their superst.i.tions, which do not vary materially from other native tribes. At last, on the 3d of May, he entered the Lukuga Creek, which a chief told him was the outlet of the lake. He says that the entrance was more than a mile wide, "but closed up by a gra.s.s sand-bank, with the exception of a channel three or four hundred yards wide. Across this there is a rill where the surf breaks heavily, although there was more than a fathom of water at its most shallow part." The next day he went down it four or five miles, until navigation was rendered impossible, owing to the ma.s.ses of floating vegetation. Here the depth was eighteen feet, and breadth six hundred yards, and the current a knot and a half an hour.

The chief who accompanied him said that it emptied into the Lualaba. He tried in vain to hire men to cut a pa.s.sage through the vegetation that he might explore the river. This was all the knowledge he obtained by actual observation, the rest of his information being obtained from the natives.

Now, we must say, that this is a sorry exhibit for the outlet to a lake almost twice as long as Lake Ontario. That such an immense body of water should trickle away at this rate seems very extraordinary. Stanley at Ujiji started inquiries respecting this stream, and found Cameron's guide, who stoutly denied that the river flowed south from the lake.

Another veteran guide corroborated this statement, while many others declared that before Cameron came, they had never heard of an outflowing river.

These contradictory statements, together with the universal testimony that the lake was continually rising (the truth of which he could not doubt, as he saw palm-trees which stood in the market-place when he was there in 1871, now one hundred feet out in the lake), made him resolve to explore this stream himself. He started on the 11th of June, and three days after landed to take a hunt, and soon came upon a herd of zebras, two of which he bagged, and thus secured a supply of meat.

On the 19th, on approaching a large village, they were astonished to see no people on the sh.o.r.e. Landing, they were still more astonished at the death-silence that reigned around, and advancing cautiously came upon corpses of men and women transfixed with spears or with their heads cut off. Entering into the village they found that there had been a wholesale ma.s.sacre. A descent had been made upon the place, but by whom no one was left to tell. Its entire population had been put to death.

As Stanley proceeded, he found many evidences of the steady rise of the lake. He continued on his course, finding the same varied scenery that Cameron did, with nothing of peculiar interest occurring, except to the travelers themselves, and at length came to the Lukuga Creek. He found various traditions and accounts here--one native said the water flowed both ways. The spot on which Cameron encamped, some two years before, was now covered with water, another evidence that the lake was rising.

Stanley very sensibly says, that the "rill," which Cameron states runs directly across the channel, is conclusive evidence that the Lukuga runs into the lake, not out of it; for it must be formed by the meeting of the inflowing current and the waves. An outpouring stream driven onward by waves would make a deep channel, not a dam of sand. He tried several experiments, by which he proved, to his entire satisfaction, that the stream flowed into the lake instead of being its outlet. Having settled this question he set about finding the other river, which the natives declared flowed out or westward. After traveling some distance inland he did find a place where the water flowed west; it was, however, a mere trickling stream. His account of his explorations here, and of the traditions of the natives, and his description of the formation of the country and of its probable geological changes, is quite lengthy, and possesses but little interest to the general reader.

The result of it all, however, is that he believes the Lukuga was formerly a tributary of the lake, the bed of which at some former time was lifted up to a higher level; that the whole stretch of land here has been sunk lower by some convulsion of nature, taking the Lukuga with it, and thus making a sort of dam of the land at the foot, which accounts for the steady rise of the river year by year; and that in three years the lake will rise above this dam, and, gathering force, will tear like a resistless torrent through all this mud and vegetation, and roaring on, as the Nile does where it leaves the Victoria Nyanza, will sweep through the country till it pours its acc.u.mulated waters into the Lualaba, and thus swell the Congo into a still larger Amazon of Africa.

This seems to be the only plausible solution of the mystery attached to Tanganika. The only objection to it is, no such convulsion or change of the bed of the Tanganika seems to have occurred during this generation, and what has become, then, for at least seventy years, of all the waters these hundred rivers have been pouring into the lake? We should like the estimate of some engineer of how many feet that lake would rise in fifty years, with all its tributaries pouring incessantly such a flood into it. We are afraid the figures would hardly harmonize with this slow rise of the lake. It may be that there is a gradual filtering of the water through the ooze at the foot, which will account for the slow filling up of the great basin--a leakage that r.e.t.a.r.ds the process of acc.u.mulation.

But if Stanley's explorations and statements can be relied upon, the mystery will soon solve itself, and men will not have to hunt for an outlet long. He makes the length of Tanganika three hundred and twenty-nine geographical miles, and its average breadth twenty-eight miles.

The wonderful influence of Livingstone over all African explorers is nowhere more visible than at Ujiji, on both Cameron and Stanley. Both of these set out with one object--to try to complete the work that the great and good man's death had left unfinished. His feet had pressed the sh.o.r.es of almost every lake they had seen, as well as of others which they had not seen. The man had seemed to be drawn on westward until he reached Nyangwe, where dimly arose before him the Atlantic Ocean, into which the waters flowing past his camp might enter, and did enter, if they were not the Nile. Discouraged, deserted and driven back, he could not embark on the Lualaba and float downward with its current till he should unveil the mystery that wrapped it. Cameron became filled with the same desire, but disappointed, though not driven back, he had pressed on to the ocean, into which he had no doubt the river emptied, though by another route. And now, last of three, comes Stanley, and instead of finis.h.i.+ng Livingstone's work around the lakes, he, too, is drawn forward to the same point. It seemed to be the stopping-place of explorations in Africa; and although he knew that Cameron had not returned like Livingstone, and hence might have discovered all that was to be discovered, so making further explorations in that direction useless, still he felt that he must go on and find out for himself.

True, there was an interesting district between Ujiji and the Lualaba.

There was the beautiful Manyema region, about which Livingstone had talked to him enthusiastically, with its new style of architecture, and beautiful women and simple-minded people. But those did not form the attraction. He must stand on the spot where Livingstone stood, and look off with his yearning desire, and see if he could not do what this good man was willing to risk all to accomplish.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SETTING OUT TO CROSS LAKE TANGANIKA.]

At all events, he must move somewhere at once, and westward seemed the most natural direction to take, for if he stayed in Ujiji much longer the expedition would break up. He found on his return that the small-pox had broken out in camp, filling the Arabs with dismay. He had taken precaution on starting to vaccinate every member of his party, as he supposed, and hence he felt safe from this scourge of Africa. He did not lose a single man with it on his long journey from the sea to the Victoria Nyanza. But it had broken out in Ujiji with such fury that a pall was spread over the place, and it so invaded his camp that in a few days eight of his men died.

This created a panic, and they began to desert in such numbers that he would soon be left alone. Thirty-eight were missing, which made quite a perceptible loss in a force of only one hundred and seventy men. The chiefs of the expedition were thoroughly frightened, but they told him that the desertions would increase if he moved westward, for the men were as much afraid of the cannibals there, as of the small-pox in their midst. They were told horrible stories of these cannibals till their teeth chattered with fear. Besides there were hobgoblins--monsters of every kind in the land beyond the Tanganika. Stanley saw, therefore, that prompt measures must be taken, and he at once clapped thirty-two of the discontented in irons, drove them into canoes, and sent them off to Ukurenga. He with the rest followed after by land to Msehazy Creek, where the crossing of the lake was to be effected. Reaching the other side he proceeded to Uguha, where, on mustering his force, he found but one hundred and twenty-seven out of one hundred and seventy, showing that one-third had disappeared. Among the last to go, and the last Stanley expected would leave him, was young Kalulu, whom he had taken home to the United States with him on his return from his first expedition. He had him placed in school in England for eighteen months, and he seemed devoted to Stanley. A gloom hung over the camp, and desertion was becoming too contagious. If such men as Kalulu could not be trusted, Stanley knew of no one who could be, and with his usual promptness he determined to stop it. He therefore sent back Poc.o.ke and a faithful chief with a squad of men to capture them.

Paddling back to Ujiji, they one night came upon six, who, after a stout fight, were secured and brought over to camp. Afterward young Kalulu was found on an island and brought in. This desertion is a chronic disease among the Arabs. Their superst.i.tious fears are quickly aroused, and they are easily tempted to break their contract and leave in the lurch the man to whom they have hired themselves.

Stanley's march to Manyeme was noticeable only for the curious customs or habits of the people, and on the 5th of October he reached the frontier of this wonderful country. Livingstone had halted here several months, and this was an inducement for Stanley to stop a few days. The weapons of the natives were excellent, and there was one custom that attracted his particular attention--the men wore lumps in various forms of mud and patches of mud on their beard, hair and head, while the women wove their front hair into head-dresses, resembling bonnets, leaving the back hair to wave in ringlets over their shoulders. He, as well as Cameron, was amazed at their villages, which, usually had one or more broad streets running through them, each being from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet wide, and along which are ranged the square huts, with well-beaten, cleanly-kept clay floors, to which they cheerfully invite strangers.

On the 12th he reached the village on the Luma which he had been following, where both Livingstone and Cameron left it and turned directly west to Nyangwe. He, however, determined to follow it till it reached the Lualaba, and then proceed by this stream to the same place.

He found the natives kind but timid, with many curious traditions and customs. The expedition at last reached the Lualaba, and moving majestically through the forest and making rapid marches, it arrived on the next day at Tubunda.

CHAPTER XIX.

NYANGWE AND ITS HISTORY.

Nyangwe is the farthest point west in Africa ever reached by a white man who came in from the east. It is about three hundred and fifty miles from Ujiji, or a little over the distance across New York State, but the journey is not made in one day--Stanley was forty days in accomplis.h.i.+ng it. Here he found that Livingstone, the first white man ever seen there, must have remained from six to twelve months. Livingstone had made a profound impression on the natives of this region. "Did you know him?"

asked an old chief, eagerly. Stanley replying in the affirmative, he turned to his sons and brothers, and said: "He knew the good white man.

Ah, we shall hear all about him." Then turning to Stanley, he said: "Was he not a very good man?" "Yes," replied the latter, "he was good, my friend; far better than any white man or Arab you will ever see again."

"Ah," said the old negro, "you speak true; he was so gentle and patient, and told us such pleasant stories of the wonderful land of the white people--the aged white was a good man indeed."

Livingstone made a strong impression on Stanley also, who, speaking of him says: "What has struck me while tracing Livingstone to his utmost researches--this Arab depot of Nyangwe,--revived all my grief and pity for him, even more so than his own relation of sorrowful and heavy things, is, that he does not seem to be aware that he was sacrificing himself unnecessarily, nor to be warned of the havoc of age and that his old power had left him. With the weight of years pressing upon him, the shortest march wearying him, compelling him to halt many days to recover his strength, and frequent attacks of illness prostrating him, with neither men nor means to escort him and enable him to make practical progress, Livingstone was at last like a blind and infirm man moving aimlessly about. He was his own worst taskmaker."

Whether Stanley's views of the mental condition of Livingstone--growing out of his sickness and want of money while in Nyangwe--are correct or not, one thing is true: that after the great explorer had seemingly reached the very point when the problem was to be solved as to where the mysterious Lualaba flowed, he waited there till he found a caravan going east, and then returned to Ujiji "a sorely tried and disappointed man."

Standing on the last point which this intrepid explorer reached, Stanley is reminded of his own earnest efforts to induce that worn hero to return home and recruit, to which the invariable answer was: "No, no, no; to be knighted, as you say, by the Queen, welcomed by thousands of admirers, yes--but impossible, must not, can not, will not be."

Stanley, on this outmost verge of exploration, remembered the words of Livingstone when speaking of the beauties of the region lying west of the Goma Mountains, and says, "It is a most remarkable region; more remarkable than anything I have seen in Africa. Its woods, or forest, or jungles, or brush--I do not know by what particular term to designate the crowded, tall, straight trees, rising from an impenetrable ma.s.s of brush, creepers, thorns, gums, palm, ferns of all sorts, canes and gra.s.s--are sublime, even terrible. Indeed, nature here is remarkably or savagely beautiful. From every point the view is enchanting--the outlines eternally varying, yet always beautiful, till the whole panorama seems like a changing vision. Over all, nature has flung a robe of varying green, the hills and ridges are blooming, the valleys and basins exhale perfume, the rocks wear garlands of creepers, the stems of the trees are clothed with moss, a thousand streamlets of cold, pure water stray, now languid, now quick, toward the north and south and west. The whole makes a pleasing, charming ill.u.s.tration of the bounteousness and wild beauty of tropical nature. But, alas! all this is seen at a distance; when you come to travel through this world of beauty, the illusion vanishes--the green gra.s.s becomes as difficult to penetrate as an undergrowth, and that lovely sweep of shrubbery a ma.s.s of thorns, the gently rolling ridge an inaccessible crag, and the green mosses and vegetation in the low grounds that look so enchanting, impenetrable forest belts."

Stanley once penetrated into one of these great forests and was so overwhelmed by the majesty and solemn stillness of the scene, that he forgot where he was, and his imagination went back to the primeval days when that great, still forest was sown, till the silent trees seemed monuments of past history. But still, this district of Manyema (p.r.o.nounced in various ways), he does not think so interesting as that of Uregga. In speaking of the Lualaba, after describing the various ways in which it is spelled and p.r.o.nounced, he says if he could have it his own way he would call it "Livingstone River, or Livingstone's Lualaba,"

to commemorate his discovery of it and his heroic struggles against adversity to explore it. The letter in which he thus speaks of this region is dated November 1st, 1876. In three days he says he is going to explore this mysterious river to the utmost of his power. Two days previous to this letter, he wrote a long one on the horrors of the slave-trade that casts a pall as black as midnight over all this tropical beauty. He says that from Unyanyembe to Ujiji one sees horrors enough, but in this region they are multiplied tenfold. The traffic in slaves is so profitable and keeps up such a brisk trade with Zanzibar and the interior of Africa, that the native chiefs enter into it on the grandest scale, or rather it is more accurate to say, banditti under the leaders.h.i.+p of so-called chiefs enter into it thus, and carry it on with remorseless zeal.

Raids are made on small independent villages, the aged are slain and hung up to terrify other villages into a meek acquiescence in their demands, and young men, young women, and children are marched off to Ujiji, from whence they are taken to Zanzibar, becoming, by their cruel treatment on the route, living skeletons before they reach their destination. Gangs, from one hundred to eight hundred, of naked, half-starved creatures Stanley met in his travels, and he wonders that the civilized world will let insignificant Zanzibar become the mart of such an accursed, cruel traffic.

There are regular hunting-grounds for slaves. When the business is dull, the inhabitants are left to grow and thrive, just like game out of season in a gentleman's park; but when the business begins to look up, the hunt begins, and the smiling villages become arid wastes. The country, long before he reached Nyangwe, was a wilderness, where a few years before dwelt a happy population. Stanley gives extracts from his diary, showing up the horrors of this system, which make the heart sicken as it thinks of what is daily transpiring in this unknown land.

Livingstone saw enough when he was at this place to awaken his deepest indignation, but since that time the Arabs have pushed further inland, and swept, with the besom of destruction, districts that in his time had been but slightly touched.

The trade in ivory is but another name for trade in human beings, and the only real commerce this vast, fruitful region has with Zanzibar is through its captured inhabitants, while the slain equal the number sent into captivity. But, while Mr. Stanley feels keenly the disgrace to humanity of this accursed traffic, he evidently does not see so clearly the way to put a stop to it. He is opposed to filibustering of all kinds, and to the interference of strong powers to coerce weak ones on the ground of humanity or Christianity, because it opens the door too wide to every kind of aggression. In fact, this makes it only necessary to use some philanthropic catch-word, in order to justify the annexation of any feeble territory.

Stanley evidently thinks there is some limit to the Monroe doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of other nations, as the following extract from one of his letters shows, in which, after discussing the whole matter carefully, he says he writes, "hoping he may cause many to reflect upon the fact that there exists one little State on this globe, which is about equal in extent to one English county, with the sole privilege of enriching itself by wholesale murder, and piracy and commerce in human beings, and that a traffic forbidden in all other nations should be permitted, furtively monopolized by the little island of Zanzibar, and by such insignificant people as the subjects of Prince Burghosh." Mr. Stanley is entirely opposed to filibustering and encroachments of strong powers on feeble ones, under the thousand and one false pretences advanced in support of unrighteous conquests, yet he evidently thinks little Zanzibar should be wiped out, or cease to be the source and centre of this cruel traffic in human beings. One has to travel, he says, in the heart of Africa to see all the horrors of this traffic.

The buying and selling of a few slaves on the coast gives no idea of its horrors. At Unyambembe, sometimes a sad sight is seen. At Uganda the trade begins to a.s.sume a wholesale character, yet it wears here a rather business aspect; the slaves by this time become hardened to suffering, "they have no more tears to shed," the chords of sympathy have been severed and they seem stolid and indifferent. At Ujiji, one sees a regular slave-market established. There are "slave-folds and pens," like the stock-yards of railroads for cattle into which the naked wretches are driven by hundreds, to wallow on the ground and be half-starved on food not fit for hogs. By the time they reach here they are mere "ebony skeletons," attenuated, haggard, gaunt human frames. Their very voices have sunk to a mere hoa.r.s.e whisper, which comes with an unearthly sound from out their parched, withered lips. Low moans, like those that escape from the dying, fill the air, and they reel and stagger when they attempt to stand upright, so wasted are they by the havoc of hunger.

They look like a vast herd of black skeletons, and as one looks at them in their horrible sufferings he cannot but exclaim, "how can an all-merciful Father permit such things?" No matter whether on the slow and famis.h.i.+ng march or crowded like strayed pigs in the overloaded canoes, it is the same unvarying scene of hunger and horror, on which the cruel slave-trader looks without remorse or pity.

It may be asked how are these slaves obtained. The answer is, by a systematic war waged in the populous country of Marungu by banditti, supported by Arabs. These exchange guns and powder for the slaves the former capture, which enables them to keep up the war. These Arabs, who sell the slaves on the coast, furnish the only market for the native banditti of the interior. These latter are mostly natives of Unyamwege who band together to capture all the inhabitants of villages too weak to resist them. Marungu is the great productive field of their Satanic labors. Here almost every small village is independent, recognizing no ruler but its own petty chief. These are often at variance with each other, and instead of banding together to resist a common foe, they look on quietly while one after another is swept by the raiders. In crossing a river, Stanley met two hundred of these wretches chained together, and, on inquiry, found they belonged to the governor of Unyambembe, a former patron of Speke and Burton, and had been captured by an officer of the prince of Zanzibar. This prince had made a treaty with England to put a stop to this horrible traffic, and yet here was one of his officers engaged in it, taking his captives to Zanzibar, and this was his third batch during the year.

There are two or three entries in Stanley's journal which throw much light on the way this hunt for slaves is carried on.

"October 17th. Arabs organized to-day from three districts, to avenge the murder and eating of one man and ten women by a tribe half-way between Ka.s.sessa and Nyangwe. After six days' slaughter, the Arabs returned with three hundred slaves, fifteen hundred goats, besides spears, etc."

"October 24th. The natives of Kabonga, near Nyangwe, were sorely troubled two or three days ago by a visit paid them by Uanaamwee in the employ of Mohommed el Said. Their insolence was so intolerable that the natives at last said, 'we will stand this no longer. They will force our wives and daughters before our eyes if we hesitate any longer to kill them, and before the Arabs come we will be off.' Unfortunately, only one was killed, the others took fright and disappeared to arouse the Arabs with a new grievance. To-day, an Arab chief set out for the scene of action with murderous celerity, and besides capturing ten slaves, killed thirty natives and set fire to eight villages--'a small prize,'

the Arabs said."

"October 17th. The same man made an attack on some fishermen on the left bank of the Lualaba. He left at night and returned at noon with fifty or sixty captives, besides some children."

"Are raids of this kind frequent?" asked Stanley.