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Читать книгу: «Explorers and Travellers», страница 17
XIV
STANLEY AFRICANUS AND THE CONGO FREE STATE
The largest, the richest, and the least known of the great continents is Africa. Despite its vast area, numerous tribes, and complicated interests it may be said that its potential influences as regards the rest of the world have been alternately retarded and advanced through the efforts of four individuals. The jealousy of Rome, excited to its highest pitch by the eloquence of the elder Cato, resulted, 146 B.C., in the annihilation of Carthage, an industrial centre whence for five centuries had radiated toward the interior of Africa peaceful and commercial influences. Eight centuries later the hordes of the Arabian Caliph Omar in turn overwhelmed the Roman colony at Alexandria, destroying forever its literary influence by the burning of its great library.
Conversely the missionary labors of David Livingstone, from 1849 to 1873, inculcated peaceful methods and cultivated moral tendencies destined to introduce Christianity and develop civilization. Not only did Livingstone, in the eloquent words of Stanley, “weave by his journeys the figure of his Redeemer’s cross on the map of Africa, but, scattering ever his Master’s words and patterning his life after the Master stamped the story of the cross on the hearts of every African tribe he visited.”
Initiating routes of travel, suggesting new commercial fields, and organizing stable forms of government, came a man of harder metal, of indomitable will and courage, Henry M. Stanley, who merits the title of Stanley Africanus.
A Welshman by nativity, born near Denbigh, in 1840, he came to the United States at the age of sixteen and thenceforth cast his lot with America, and as a citizen of this country made his explorations under its flag. It is reputed that he exchanged his natal name of Rowlands for that of Henry M. Stanley, for a merchant of New Orleans who adopted him; but in any event his early life was passed without the loving and modifying influences of a home, his youth almost equally destitute of those adventitious surroundings that properly mould the character and insure opportunities for success to young men. Thus he stands forth a self-made man to whom strength has been accorded to develop the manhood that God implanted in his soul.
Stern experiences in the American civil war, brief life in the far West, and special service in Turkey had shaped Stanley into a reliant, self-contained man when his first African journey came to him, in 1868, through assignment as newspaper correspondent to accompany the British army in its invasion of Abyssinia. He participated in this wonderful campaign, which led him four hundred miles through a country of indescribable wildness and grandeur, across rugged mountains, along deep valleys, up to the fortress-crowned crest of Magdala, ten thousand feet above the sea.
Difficult as were the mountains of Abyssinia, they were less dangerous than the African region later to be traversed by him; a journey unsought, but which came to him as the fittest man for the time and service.
A telegram and five hours’ preparation carried Stanley from the blood-red fields of revolutionary Spain into the famous search journey that gave to an anxious world news of the long-lost Livingstone. For twenty years this great Scotch missionary had carried the gospel of Christ and its civilizing influences from one end of Africa to the other; once he had crossed the continent in its greatest breadth, and now, vanished from the sight of the civilized world in his renewed missionary labors, for two years his very existence had been problematical.
The search expedition owed its inception and maintenance to James Gordon Bennett, Jr., whose brief orders to Stanley were: “Find Livingstone and bring news of his discoveries or proofs of his death, regardless of expense.” The personnel, methods, and arrangements devolved entirely on Stanley, but his preliminary route was to lie through certain countries. It thus occurred that between Madrid, his starting point, and Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, the camp of Livingstone, he saw the gayties of Paris; was present at the eventful opening of the Suez Canal that revolutionized Eastern commerce; ascended the Lower Nile to scrutinize with interested eye Baker’s prospective expedition to the Soudan; divined under the mosques of the Bosphorus the political riddles of Sultan and Khédive; examined the uncovered foundations of Solomon’s Temple in the Holy City; meditated over the historic battle-grounds of the Crimea; penetrated the Caucasus to Tiflis for news of the Russian expedition to Khiva; and, traversing Persia through the Euphratan cradle of the human race, entered India, whence his route lay to Zanzibar and the dark beyond. What a contrast those preliminary journeys afforded, across effete countries whose varying and recorded phases of civilization are contemporaneous with the history of the human race, to the threshold of a vast region whose barbaric freshness is such that its entire history lies within the memory of living man.
Stanley landed at Zanzibar, January 10, 1871, and, fortunately, was at once impressed with his ignorance of outfitting, which he thought he had learned from books. Resorting to the Arab traders he proved such an apt pupil and skilful organizer that he enlisted twenty-seven soldiers, gathered one hundred and fifty-seven carriers and five special employees, which, with two white assistants, Farquhar and Shaw, made his aggregate force one hundred and ninety-two. He had his African money – beads as copper coins, cloth as silver, and brass rods as gold; canvas-covered boats for navigation; asses and horses for special work; fine cloth for tribute to local chiefs, which, with tentage, medicine, etc., made some six tons of freight.
March 21, 1871, the rear guard marched out of Bagamoyo, the town on the mainland opposite Zanzibar, and taking a route never before travelled by a white man, Stanley reached Simbamwenni in fourteen marches, the journey of one hundred and nineteen miles having occupied twenty-nine days, during which the commander came to fully realize the difficulty of his undertaking, the inefficiency of unpractised subordinates, and the uncertain loyalty of carriers.
The onward march resembled all in Africa: thorns and jungle to wound the naked carriers, rivers to be forded or crossed on almost impracticable bridges, swamps many miles in length and so miry as to tax the utmost strength and energy of man and ass, insolence and exactions of local potentates, thefts by natives, desertions of carriers, the oft-recurring fever, and occasionally a death.
The 20th of May, Stanley was at Mpwapwa (Mbambwa), delighted physically at its fair aspect and upland picturesqueness, but mentally anxious over Farquhar, whom he left here sick, and the loss of his asses, which he fortunately was able to replace by twelve carriers. He reached, on June 22d, Unyanyembe, after a devious journey of five hundred and twenty miles to cover an air-line distance of one hundred and fifty. Here had just arrived a relief caravan for Livingstone, which had left Zanzibar four months prior to Stanley’s. Near by, at Tabora, the chief Arabian town of central Africa, Stanley was surprised to find the Arabs at war with a savage chief, Mirambo, thus barring the usually travelled road to Ujiji.
Here Stanley lost three months, and participated in an unsuccessful campaign with the Arabs against Mirambo, vainly hoping that thus his road would be opened. Five of his men were killed in the war, others deserted, so that only eleven carriers remained, and altogether his prospects of success steadily diminished.
Despairing of the old route, Stanley, having with great difficulty recruited his force of carriers, decided to try a circuitous trail to the south in order to reach Ujiji, which lay to the northwest. Failure and destruction were predicted, but with confidence in himself Stanley, on September 20th, marched on with Shaw and fifty-six others. Illness caused him to soon send back Shaw, his only white companion; frequent desertions weakened his force; an incipient mutiny of his panic-stricken men on the Gombe River threatened complete destruction to the party; insolent chiefs exacted extortionate tribute; desert marches without water and scant food discouraged and weakened the men; but the leader pushed on with unflagging energy despite every obstacle. His route lay through Igonda, Itende, the beautiful country of Uvinsa, across rocky Uhha to the Malagarazi River, where his heart was gladdened by rumors from the natives that a white man had lately arrived at Ujiji from Manyuema.
Pushing on with feverish haste, on November 9, 1871, he had the indescribable joy of looking down on magnificent Lake Tanganyika, and on the following day, with his gigantic guide, Asmani, proudly striding in advance with the Stars and Stripes as his standard, Stanley marched into Ujiji, and there accomplished his mission by meeting Livingstone and ascertaining the results of his late labors. Livingstone’s primary mission – the suppression of the slave trade by means of civilizing influences – had not materially progressed, but he had strong hopes of the future. Geographically, however, he had been most successful, having made important discoveries in the water-sheds of Lakes Tanganyika and the Nyanzas, and found an unknown river, the Lualaba, which in a later exploration Stanley proved to be the Upper Congo.
Stanley found Livingstone with only five carriers and without means of trade. Supplying all deficiencies from his own stores, he assisted Livingstone in his exploration of Lake Tanganyika, and the twain returned together to Unyanyembe. In the meantime both Farquhar and Shaw died, and Stanley, turning over his surplus stores to Livingstone, bade him farewell and Godspeed, and started for Zanzibar. On March 14, 1872, eight weeks later, Stanley was again enjoying civilization at Bagamoyo, while Livingstone was awaiting means of returning to his life-task, soon to be ended by his death among the tribes he loved, for “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Over four months of intercourse with Livingstone steadily increased Stanley’s admiration for this great man. He describes him as a high-spirited, brave, impetuous, and enthusiastic man, with these qualities so tempered by his deep, abiding spirit of religion as to make him a most extraordinary character. In all his relations with his servants, with the natives, and with Mohammedans, Christianity appeared in its loveliest and most potent forms, constant, sincere, charitable, loving, modest, and always practical. It was this abiding faith in God which made Livingstone a man of unfailing devotion to his sense of present duty, of wondrous patience, unvarying gentleness, constant hopefulness, and unwearied fidelity – qualities which made his missionary work in Africa unprecedentedly successful.
Abuse, misrepresentation, and incredulity from geographic societies, critics, and press greeted Stanley’s account of his discovery of Livingstone, and only gradually did his traducers yield to the convincing evidences of his astonishing success.
Turning to his old work, Stanley, in the winter of 1873-74, again entered Africa, accompanying as newspaper correspondent the British army, which invaded to a distance of one hundred and forty miles the deadly marshes of the Ashantee Kingdom, and destroyed its capital city, Coomassie.
When the death of Livingstone brought Africa into prominence again, Stanley, believing he could complete so much of the missionary’s work as concerned exploration, turned thither at the head of an expedition under the auspices of the London Telegraph and the New York Herald, the object being the survey of the lacustrine system at the head of the White Nile and a journey thence westward across the continent.
Leaving Bagamoyo, November 17, 1874, Stanley reached Lake Victoria Nyanza in March, 1875, his journey of seven hundred and twenty miles being marked by pestilential fevers, struggles through thorny jungles, and scant food and water. Circumnavigating the lake, he found it to be over four thousand feet above the ocean, while its proportions – nearly twenty-two thousand miles in area and in places over five hundred feet deep – assumed those of an inland sea. Here Mtesa, a powerful and able negro king, of Mohammedan faith, proved most friendly and greatly aided him, furnishing an escort, which enabled Stanley to explore a part of the adjacent mountain region. From Ujiji he then explored Lake Tanganyika, finding it to be about half the size of Victoria, with an elevation of about twenty-seven hundred feet.
Important as were these discoveries they paled before others, made in following the Lualaba River of Livingstone, which changed the map of Central Africa and altered the destiny of that vast and untraversed region. The journey to Nyangwe, Livingstone’s “farthest,” entailed horrible hardships on the carriers. This Arab village was reached via the Luama, which, of hitherto unknown course, was found by Stanley to be an affluent of the Lualaba. At Nyangwe Stanley felt that his accomplished journey of over eight hundred miles from the east coast promised well for his coming voyage to a known point on the other coast, nine hundred miles due west. He made an agreement with an Arab, Tippu-Tib, trader in human flesh or ivory as chance offered, to escort the expedition about six hundred miles west through the unknown regions. The country proved to be primeval forest, almost trackless, its tropical undergrowth a veritable jungle of thorns and vines. Game was scanty and other food equally so. Finally, progress was so slow and the path so devious that Stanley, yielding to his appeals, discharged Tippu-Tib and decided to descend the river by canoes and his frame boat. He embarked at Vinya Njara, with one hundred and fifty in his party, on December 28, 1876, intrusting himself with sublime audacity to a river flowing no one knew whither, save it was away from civilization, and with the knowledge that the country they were entering was peopled by tribes entirely hostile and intractable, as the slave-traders said. Day after day they drifted steadily to the north. Was it or was it not the Nile of Livingstone’s prediction? Then day by day the course trended to the east. Yes, it could only be the Nile. After two hundred and forty miles the trend was to the northwest, whither, week after week, for about three hundred miles it kept its puzzling flow toward a point of the compass where it could join no river known to man. It had, too, assumed proportions and volume truly Amazonic, filled with islands and swollen from one to seven miles in width. All efforts to gain a knowledge of its final course were then fruitless, for the few barbarous natives they could win to speech answered in uncouth jargon, scarcely intelligible to the interpreters: “It is the river – the river!” The terrors of the silent stream in its majestic solitude were almost preferable to the presence of populous villages, which here and there lined its banks, for the inhabitants, ferociously hostile for the greater part, refused trade and boldly assaulted them. Skilful canoemen and good archers, the savages slaughtered unwary stragglers, harassed the rear and attacked the front, while their horrible threats that the bodies of the slain should serve as food at their cannibalistic repasts instilled terror in the minds of many of Stanley’s followers. Skirmishes were frequent, and now and then a severe fight which taxed Stanley’s forces to the utmost. Again the river had here and there series of cataracts which caused no end of trouble, delay, and danger to the party, nine men being drowned in one day.
Fortunately the river had turned to the south, and then to southwest, where, after another thousand miles, it flowed through a narrow gorge, one hundred and fifty miles from the sea, so that no doubt longer obtained as to it being the Congo. The terrible falls near the gorge entailed enormous labor to pass them, and barely failed of destroying the party. In all twenty-eight cataracts were passed, and finally the river became so precipitous, the falls so high, that they had to abandon their boats and march overland to Boma, an English trading-post, five days’ journey distant. Fatigue, famine, and exposure further enfeebled them and now made daily inroads among the ranks of those who had so far survived, and the entire party would have perished on the very threshold of civilization and plenty had not Stanley’s messengers, sent on with urgent appeals, obtained help at Boma, where the expeditionary force arrived August 12, 1877. They had made a river journey of seven thousand miles, proved the Congo to be second only to the Nile, and crossed Africa.
When Stanley, in 1877, intrusting his life and fortunes to a mighty and unknown stream, voyaged toward the very heart of the Dark Continent, even his wildest dreams could not have foreshadowed results equal to the reality of a near future. His voyage in its potentiality was second only to that of Columbus, as the outcome of the succeeding five years plainly indicates. All Europe, alive to the commercial importance of the Congo Basin, hastened to reach its borders or encroach on its limits by means of enlarged dependent colonies; commerce and religion, hand in hand, traversed its rivers by steam and lined its banks with beneficent settlements, while the merciless Arab devastated its villages and dragged its decimated natives into slavery. Then came a political wonder – the peaceful creation of a vast tropical empire more than a million square miles in area, the Congo Free State, erected and admitted into the community of nations by act of an international conference, in which participated fourteen European powers and the United States, our own country being fittingly the first to officially acknowledge the existence of the new state its adventurous citizen had given to the world.
The voyage through the Dark Continent was obviously potent of future results, and Gambetta, in 1878, clearly forecast the effects of Stanley’s journey. The great French statesman said: “Not only have you opened up a new continent to our view, but you have given influence to scientific and philanthropic enterprises which will have its effect on the progress of the world. What you have done has interested governments – proverbially so difficult to move – and the impulse you have imparted, I am convinced, will go on year after year.”
Slowly recovering from the effects of famine and fatigue incident to this arduous journey, Stanley returned to Europe in January, 1878, and was met, as he stepped out of the express train at Marseilles, by two commissioners of King Leopold of Belgium, who informed him that his Majesty contemplated a new enterprise in Africa and desired his assistance. While heartily indorsing the proposed work of Leopold his physical condition was such that active co-operation was impossible, and he was even unable to visit his Majesty. Five months later, with physical energies renewed, after a visit to Leopold, Stanley eventually agreed to the proposition which contemplated the establishment of a grand commercial enterprise for controlling the trade of the valley of the Congo. It involved the erection of commercial and military stations along the overland route and the establishment of steam communication wherever available. In short, a colony of Europeans was to be founded in the Congo Basin, whose great fertility, healthy climate, and enormous population seemed to especially favor the development of African civilization. The action of Leopold evidently grew out of Stanley’s declarations that “the question of this mighty waterway (the Congo) will become a political one in time,” and his conviction that any power possessing the Congo would absorb the whole enormous trade behind, as this river was and must continue to be, the grand commercial highway of West and Central Africa.
Stanley accepted the mission, visited Zanzibar, where he enlisted sixty-eight Zanzibari, mostly his old soldiers, and by sea reached Banana Point, on the west coast, August 14, 1879. Two years previous he had reached this place after descending the newly discovered Congo; now he was re-entering its fertile basin in order to establish civilized settlements, with the intention of subduing Central Africa by peaceful ways and to remould it into harmony with modern ideas, so that justice and order should ever obtain, violence and the slave trade forever cease.
He returned to Europe in 1882, his success far exceeding the expectations of the committee. In this time, with the aid of sixty-eight Zanzibari and a few Europeans, he had constructed three trading-stations, launched a steamer on the Upper Congo, established steam communication between Leopoldville and Stanley Pool, and also constructed wagon-roads between Vivi and Isangila, Manyanga and Stanley Pool. He pointed out to the committee the imperative necessity of a railroad between the Lower and Upper Congo in order to preserve uninterrupted communication, which scheme was approved by the committee provided Stanley would take charge of the work. Although his health was impaired, he agreed to return to the Congo and complete the establishment of stations as far as Stanley Falls, which he duly accomplished, not leaving Africa until there were five promising trading-posts – Vivi, Leopoldville, Kinshassa (Stanley Pool), Equator, and Stanley Falls, the last about two thousand miles inland from the west coast.
On Stanley’s return to Europe the question of organizing the basin of the Congo into an independent state was agitated. As a result fourteen of the European powers and the United States united in a conference at Berlin and formally agreed, on February 26, 1885, that the entire Congo Basin should be erected into a nation to be known as the Congo Free State. Thus less than eight years after Stanley’s famous journey he beheld the country that his genius had rescued from oblivious darkness erected into a new state and admitted into the community of nations.
The last journey of Stanley into Africa was for the rescue of the Egyptian governor of Equatoria, Edward Schnitzer, a German by birth, better known as Emin Pasha. On the death of General Gordon, by whom he was appointed governor, Emin had been left to his fate at Wadelai by the Egyptian authorities, from which point he wrote on December 31, 1885, saying that for nineteen months he had been forgotten and abandoned. On July 6, 1886, he wrote beseeching help. In this contingency the sum of £21,500 was raised – £10,000 from the Egyptian Government, the rest subscribed in England – for the expenses of a relief party, and all eyes turned to Stanley as the natural leader. He was engaged in a very profitable lecturing tour in the United States when the expedition was finally decided on. Three days after the receipt of a cablegram that his plans were accepted, Stanley sailed for Africa via England, using such despatch that he had his expedition of 680 men, 61 being Soudanese soldiers, ready to leave Zanzibar on February 25, 1887.
Stanley decided to make the journey by vessel around the Cape of Good Hope to the Congo, by which river he expected to get within 200 miles of Lake Albert. The co-operation of the infamous Arab trader, Tippu Tib, the most powerful trader in Africa, was obtained by making him governor of Stanley Falls, in the Congo Free State.
Following the Congo to the Aruwimi, Stanley turned up that stream and camped at Yambuya, about sixty miles above the mouth and over one thousand three hundred miles from the sea. To this point he had lost 57 men, and now divided his forces as follows: Advance guard, under himself, 389; Yambuya garrison, 129, under Major Barttelot; other supporting guards in rear, 131; original force, 706.
On January 28, 1887, Stanley started for Lake Albert, 330 miles distant in an air line, through an entirely unknown country. It proved to be a virgin forest, the greatest of the world, through which a path had to be cut almost the entire distance. For one hundred and sixty days they marched through an almost unbroken forest-bush, jungle, marsh, and creek. The scattered villages, filled with barbarous and hostile tribes, were abandoned at their approach; poisoned skewers, covered with green leaves, were planted in the paths, and twice the party was attacked.
On October 6th affairs came to a crisis, as provisions had failed, save scanty wild plants; many, stricken with disease, including Stairs, one of the officers, could go no farther. No less than one hundred and twenty-six men had been lost by death and desertion, about half from each cause, and all must perish unless the party divided. Stanley left Nelson and 52 men in camp on Ituri River, about 1° 5´ N., 28° 30´ E., and started ahead for relief. After terrible privation, and nearly perishing of starvation on the way, they reached Ipoto, October 17th, where food was purchased from the natives. As soon as possible Jephson, Stanley’s able and loyal assistant, returned to Nelson’s relief and brought him and three men to Ipoto, nine carriers having died and forty deserted. December 4th, Stanley with 175 men emerged from the forest and nine days later reached Lake Albert, whence Wadelai, Emin’s station, was distant four days’ journey by water, or twenty-five by land.
Finding no boats on Lake Albert, Stanley was obliged to retreat from its desolate shores westward to a fertile region, where he built Fort Bodo and planted crops, while a detachment brought up his steel boat, in which Jephson reached M’swa and was met, on April 26, 1888, by Emin, who had been notified by Stanley’s native courier. Two days later Emin and Stanley met at Lake Albert, when propositions and plans as to Emin’s movements were made and discussed with no definite results.
The equation of Emin’s character seems to have been best stated by Vita Hassan, his friendly subordinate for twenty years, who considers Emin’s many virtues as those of a missionary rather than of a governor or commander, and attributes his infirmity of indecision to innate goodness of heart. It was nine months before Emin, his army mutinous, himself and Jephson imprisoned, with death as an alternative, decided to return with Stanley to Zanzibar.
In the meanwhile Stanley, anxious as to his rear guard, returned through the dreaded forest hoping from day to day to meet it, but saw no signs until he reached Banalya, on the Aruwimi, a few miles from where he had left it. Here he found it in a state of inactivity and disorganization, its chief, Major Barttelot, murdered by a native, Jameson and one hundred and two out of the original two hundred and seventy-six dead, and twenty-six deserted. Again the journey through the forest and its hostile tribes to Lake Albert, where Stanley with the hesitating Emin Pasha and his followers started for Zanzibar on April 1, 1889.
The return journey, made as far as Lake Victoria Nyanza over unknown ground, resulted in the discovery of Mount Ruwenzori, a snow-clad peak under the Equator, estimated to be seventeen thousand feet high. Moreover, of vastly more importance, Stanley ascertained that Lake Albert Nyanza through the Semliki River, drained a large lake, named Albert Edward, thus determining the secret of the long-sought and ever retreating source of the White Nile. Small streams feed Lake Albert Edward from the south, whose extreme limit is placed by Stanley in 1° 10´ S. latitude.
December 4, 1889, found the party arrived at Bagamoyo, the coast town opposite Zanzibar. The work which Stanley was sent to do, as all other tasks assumed by this great explorer, was ended, and Emin Pasha once more looked on the faces of his countrymen.
Crowned with highest honors from all the powers of Europe, no tribute, as Stanley has said, gave such gratification as that from the United States, which, proud of the achievements of its great citizen, extended to him the unprecedented honors of its official, well-considered, and merited commendation, wherein, under date of February 7, 1878, it was “Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled, That, regarding with just pride the achievements of their countryman, Henry M. Stanley, the distinguished explorer of Central Africa, the thanks of the people of the United States are eminently due and are hereby tendered him as a tribute to his extraordinary patience, prudence, fortitude, enterprise, courage, and capacity in solving by his researches many of the most important geographical problems of our age and globe, problems of a continental scope, involving the progress of our kind in commerce, science, and civilization.”
