Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era — David Livingstone, Part 2

During his two years at home, Livingstone wrote his "Missionary Travels."

He returned to England once more (1864-65), when he published "A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi," and in 1866 went back to Africa to resume the explorations which ended only with his death.

Between 1849 and 1873 he was four years in Europe and twenty years in the field, eating native food, sleeping in straw huts (in one of which he died), lost to view for many years at a time because he had no means of communication with the coasts.

It was this fact that led to Stanley's successful search for Livingstone in 1871. Perhaps no other explorer ever gave so many years to continuous field-work.

In this respect he far surpassed the record of any other of the African pioneers.

The discoveries in his last journeys, covering the periods from 1858 to 1864, and from 1866 to 1873, were as brilliant and fruitful as his earlier work, but not so astonishing, because his first years were given to revealing the broader aspects of Africa and its tribes, while his later labors were devoted to more detailed research in a smaller field.

This region, about as large as Mexico and Central America, extends north and south, from Tanganyika to the Zambesi, and covers the wide region of the Congo sources between Nyassa and Lake Bangweolo.

The greatest results were the discovery of Lake Nyassa and the Shire River, now the water route into East Central Africa; Lakes Bangweolo and Mwero; and the mapping of the eastern part of the sources of the Upper Congo, which Livingstone believed to the day of his death were the ultimate fountains of the Nile.

Livingstone's "Last Journeys" was published from the manuscript which his faithful servants brought to the seacoast with the mortal remains of their gentle master.

Not far from the south coast of Bangweolo stands a wooden construction to which is affixed a bronze tablet bearing the simple inscription, "Livingstone died here.

Ilala, May 1, 1873." It has taken the place of the tree under which he died, and where his heart, which had been so true to Africa, was buried.

As the tree was nearly dead, the section bearing the rude inscription cut by one of his servants was carefully removed and is now in London.

Livingstone's geographical delineations were remarkably accurate, considering the inadequate surveying instruments with which he worked.

Dr. Ravenstein, one of the greatest authorities on African cartography, has said: "I should be loath to reject Livingstone's work simply because the ground which he was the first to explore has since his death been gone over by another explorer."

It would be marvellous, however, if in the course of twenty years of exploration he had not made some blunders.

His map of Lake Bangweolo, for example, was very inaccurate.

The Lokinga Mountains, which he mapped to the south of the lake, have not been found by later explorers.

These imperfections resulted from the fact that his map of Bangweolo and its neighborhood was largely based upon native information.

He knew that his map was inadequate, and as soon as he was able to travel he returned to Bangweolo to complete his survey.

He was making straight for the true outlet of the lake, and was within thirty-five miles of it when one morning his servants found him in his lowly straw hut, dead on his knees.

If Livingstone had lived a few weeks longer and been able to travel, he and not Giraud would have given us the true map of Bangweolo.

As a whole, Livingstone's work in geography, anthropology, and natural history, stands the test of time.

No river in Africa has yet been laid down with greater accuracy than the Zambesi as delineated by this explorer.

The success of Livingstone was both brilliant and unsullied.

The apostle and the pioneer of Africa, he went on his way without fear, without egotism, without desire of reward.

He proved that the white man may travel safely through many years in Africa.

He observed richness of soil and abundance of natural products, the guarantees of commerce.

He foretold the truth that the African tribes would be brought into the community of nations.

The logical result of the work he began and carried so far was the downfall of the African slave-trade, which he denounced as "the open sore of the world."

What eulogy is too great for such a work and such a man?

In 1898, twenty-one journeys had been made by explorers from sea to sea.

Livingstone completed the first journey, from Loanda to the mouth of the Zambesi, in one year, seven months, and twenty-two days.

Nineteen years elapsed before Central Africa was crossed again, when Cameron gave two years and nearly eight months to the journey.

It took Stanley two years and eight months to cross Africa, when he solved the great mystery, the course of the Congo; and when he went to the relief of Emin Pasha, in 1887, he was almost exactly the same time on the road.

When Trivier crossed from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, in 1888-89, in nine days less than a year, the event was held as a remarkably rapid performance.

A little later the journey was made by several travellers in from twelve to fifteen months.

In 1898, the Englishman, Mr. Lloyd, crossed from Lake Victoria to the mouth of the Congo in three months, about thirteen hundred miles of the journey being by Congo steamboat and railroad.

In 1902, the journey from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria is made by rail in two and one-half days,--a journey that occupied Speke for nine, and Stanley for eight months.

With the present facilities, the continent may be crossed by way of the lake region and the Congo in about three months.

The era of long and weary foot-marches has nearly ended; now succeeds travel by steam.

No influence has been so potent in improving the art of the explorer, or in raising the standard of the work required of him, as the enormous interest that for thirty years past has centred in African exploration.

The larger part of the best achievements of the explorers of the present generation in scientific investigation, and in an approach to scientific map-making, are found in tropical Africa.

Many of the hundreds of the route surveys are not unworthy to be compared with those of Pogge and Wissmann, when they laid down on their map every cultural and topographic feature for two miles on both sides of their route, from Angola to the Upper Congo.

The extreme care with which some of the best explorers have performed their tasks is illustrated by the remarkable achievement of the late Dr. Junker along the Mobangi River.

After years of service, his scientific equipment had become practically worthless.

He started on his four-hundred-mile journey down the river through the jungle, with absolutely no instrument except a compass to aid him in determining his positions.

Endeavoring, by the most scrupulous care, to make up as far as possible for his lack of scientific outfit, he trudged through the grass, compass in hand, counting every step.

Every fifteen minutes he jotted in his notebook the distance and the mean direction travelled.

At night he used these accumulated data to lay down on his route map the journey of the day.

For many weeks he kept up this trying routine till he reached his furthest west, and again till he had returned to his starting-point, whose latitude and longitude he had previously determined.

When he returned to Europe, Dr. Hassenstein and he made a map from the data Junker had collected, and fixed the position of his furthest west.

This position was found later by the astronomical observations of Lieutenant Le Marinel to be less than two miles out of the way.

One of the latest to win a large prize in African discovery is Dr. A.

Donaldson Smith, a young physician of Philadelphia, in the northeastern region known as Somaliland and Gallaland.

His method may be mentioned here as an illustration of the kind of work that geographers now require.

Before he began his explorations, he took a thorough course in the use of surveying instruments and the methods of accurately laying down his positions and making a route map.

Many a cartographer, burning with desire to draw a good map of a newly explored region, has been driven to despair by the inadequacy of the route surveys in his hands.

Not a few of these surveys have been unworthy of reproduction in the books of the explorers who made them, and the best that could be done was to generalize their information on maps of comparatively small scale.

But Donaldson Smith's route-maps appear in his book on the comparatively large scale of 1:1,000,000 (about sixteen statute miles to the inch), and they are worthy of that treatment, for his surveys and observations for geographical positions were recorded in such a way that their value might be easily ascertained by any one familiar with such computations.

His route-maps have been found to be admirable map-making material; thus, he has not only traversed a new region of great extent, but has given in his map ample materials which may be employed by any atlas-maker in the production of good maps of all the territory that came under his observation.

When Sir Clements Markham presented to Dr. Smith the Patrons' Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, he said: "You have not, like an ordinary explorer, made a common route survey, but you have made a scientific survey, a triangulation frequently checked by astronomical observations with theodolite and chronometer."

Most African explorers have been painstaking, conscientious workers, eager in their quest for the truth, desirous to report nothing but the truth, and treating the lowly and ignorant they have met as men, with sensibilities like their own, capable of gratitude for a kindness and keenly sensitive to an outrage.

The world has recognized and applauded such heroes of discovery,--the men who faced hardship and peril, enduring and sacrificing much that knowledge might grow; who had to conquer not only unkind Nature, but to overcome the ignorant violence of man.

And not a few of the leaders in this work have carried it out with a degree of tactfulness, humanity, gentleness, and kindliness of spirit amounting to genius.

Some of them spent months in disguise, collecting facts of the highest scientific value among fanatical Mohammedans who would have killed them if they had known their secret.

Such men were Burton in Harrar, Dr. Lenz in Timbuctoo, and De Foucauld and Harris in Morocco, who, in stained skins and borrowed costumes, personated merchants and devotees and doctors and Jews; and most of whom have enriched the literature of discovery with valuable books.

Men also such as Dr. Junker, who, rich as he was, left his home to spend eight years alone among the savages of the Welle Makua basin in Central Africa, living on their food and in their huts that he might minutely study the people in their country; or Grenfell, who has travelled far more widely in the Congo basin than Stanley or any of his followers except Delcommune, and revealed to the world more river systems and unknown peoples than they, and who, in his long career as an explorer, never fired a shot upon a native, though his life was often threatened.

These men, and others like them, have exemplified the manysidedness of human resources against a great variety of peril and obstacle, as no other explorers in any other part of the world have had an opportunity to do in equal measure.

Their work, with its environment of almost overwhelming difficulty, should be known to our youth as most forceful illustrations of what good men may dare and do in good causes and in a worthy manner.

There have been some exceptions to this rule.

A few men have been less anxious to perform useful service than to figure in the newspapers and pose before their public.

One day a man stood on the north shore of Victoria Nyanza, and looking south he saw land.

When he returned to London he published a sensational book, in which he said it was ridiculous for Speke to assert that he had discovered a lake as large as Scotland, one of the greatest lakes in the world.

"Why," said the writer, "I have stood on the north shore of the Victoria Nyanza and looked south and seen the southern shore.

Lake Victoria is only an insignificant sheet of water, after all the talk of its being second only to Lake Superior."

What he really saw was the chain of the Sesse Islands extending far out into the lake.

His book was scarcely off the press when the letters describing Stanley's boat journeys around the shores of Victoria Nyanza began to be published in London and New York; and the foolish fellow was compelled to recall all the copies of his book that had not passed beyond his reach, and eliminate the statements that made him so ridiculous.

Fortunately, there are not many explorers of this stripe.

All who watched the progress of African discovery were constantly reminded that geographical progress is usually made only by slow and painful steps.

They saw an explorer emerge from the unknown with his notebooks and route maps replete with most interesting facts for the student and the cartographer.

Then another explorer would enter the same region, discover facts that had escaped the notice of the pioneer, correct blunders his predecessor had made and perpetrate blunders of his own; so explorer followed explorer, each adding something to geographical knowledge, each correcting earlier misconceptions, till the total product, well sifted by critical geographers, gave the world a fair idea of the region explored; but not the best attainable idea, for scientific knowledge of a region comes only with its detailed exploration by trained observers, equipped with the best appliances for use in their special fields of research.

This is the advanced stage of geographical study, which is now being reached in many parts of Africa.

It was Livingstone's task, in 1859, to inform us that there was a great Lake Nyassa.

It was Rhoades's task, in 1897-1901, to make a careful and accurate survey of its coast-lines, and to sound its depths, so that we now have an excellent idea of the conformation of the lake bottom.

Between Livingstone and Rhoades came many explorers, each adding important facts to our knowledge of this great sheet of water nearly twice as large as New Jersey.

As each explorer came from the wilds, our maps were corrected to conform with the new information he supplied; and if we should examine the maps of Africa in school geographies, atlases, and wall maps, from the time of Livingstone to the present day, we should see that, as relates to nearly every part of Africa, they have been in a continual state of transition.

For years our only map of Victoria Nyanza was that which Speke made on his second journey to the lake, in 1860-62; but Speke saw the great lake only at one point on its south shore, and along its northwest and north central coasts.

His map, being based very largely upon native information, was in many respects most incomplete and erroneous.

Then came Stanley's survey of the lake, made in a boat journey around its coasts, and for years his map supplanted that of Speke.

But he was not able to follow the shore-line in all its intricate details.

His mapping was a great advance upon that of Speke, but it was necessarily rough and imperfect.

He missed entirely the deep indentation of Baumann Gulf and the southwestern prolongation of the lake, surveyed by Father Schynse, in 1891. Stanley's map, modified by the partial surveys of various explorers, is still our mapping of the lake; but if the reader will watch the maps for the next year or so, he will doubtless observe important changes in the contours of Victoria Nyanza; for all the maps, from Speke to those of 1902, will be placed on the shelf to serve only as the historical record of the good, honest work which a number of explorers have done.

Commander Whitehouse has recently spent thirteen months surveying with infinite pains these coasts and islands.

"I seem to see," writes Stanley of this important service, "the sailor, with his small crew and his little steel boat, wandering from point to point, crossing and recrossing, going from some island to some headland, taking his bearings from that headland back again to the island, and to some point far away."

Commander Whitehouse has made a new delineation of the entire 2,200 miles of coasts, and the results of his survey will be used in making all the maps of the lake.

His map in turn will undoubtedly be replaced some day by detailed topographic surveys of the best quality, such as the British already contemplate making of that entire region.

A wall map recently in use in one of the public schools of New York City was a curious example of ignorant compilation.

It exhibited the Victoria Nyanza of Speke, the Bangweolo of Livingstone, and the Upper Congo of Stanley, all obsolete for practical purposes years before this map was printed.

Most of our home map-makers were very slow in availing themselves of the rich materials constantly supplied for the maps by the army of explorers in Africa.

But the most alert cartographers, particularly between 1880 and 1895, could not keep their maps abreast of the news of discovery as it came to Europe.

More men and energy and money were utilized in those fifteen years of African discovery than in the first century and a half of American exploration.

The route or mother-maps, some covering a wide extent of country, others devoted to a small area, or a short line of travel, were going to Europe for the improvement of atlas sheets by nearly every steamer.

Father Schynse's chart of the southwest extension of Victoria Nyanza had hardly been utilized in European map-houses before it was replaced by Dr. Baumann's more accurate survey.

Mr. Wauters of Belgium withdrew his large map of the Congo Basin from the printer four times, in order to include fresh information before it was finally issued to the public.

This process is still going on, though more slowly.

The mapping we see of Lake Tanganyika, one of the longest lakes in the world, has been in use for seventeen years since missionary Hore made his boat journey of one thousand miles around its coasts, but the new map of the Moore expedition now being introduced gives the main axis of the lake a more northeast and southwest direction.

The Hore map has met the fate that usually overtakes the early surveys of every region.

It rendered good service as long as it was the best map; but the Moore expedition had first-rate appliances for computing longitudes, and as Captain Hore lacked these, it is not strange that his map has been found to be defective.

The world has been treated to many geographical surprises in the course of this incessant transformation of the map of the continent.

Many of us may remember in our school geographies, the particular blackness and prominence of the Kong Mountains, extending for two hundred miles parallel with the Gulf of Guinea.

They were accepted on the authority of Mungo Park, Caillié, and Bowditch, all reputable explorers who had not seen the mountains, but believed from native information that they existed.

The French explorer, Binger, in 1887 sought in vain for them.

Later explorers have been unable to find them.

They are, in fact, a myth, and will be remembered chiefly as a conspicuous instance of geographic delusion.

It had long been supposed that the navigation of the Niger River, the third largest river in Africa, was permanently impaired by the Bussa Rapids, about one hundred miles in length, where Mungo Park was wrecked and drowned.

But Major Toutée, a few years ago, when assailed by hostile natives, made a safe journey with his boats through the rapids; and Captain Lenfant, in 1901, carried 500,000 pounds of supplies up the river and through the rapids to the French stations between Bussa and Timbuktu.

He had a small, flat-bottomed steamboat and a number of little boats propelled by fifty black paddlers.

He says that by the land route he would have required 12,000 porters, and they would have been one hundred and thirty days on the road.