Up Two Great Rivers in the Asthmatic

UP TWO GREAT RIVERS IN THE ASTHMATIC “ We are working hard at what some can see at a glance the importance of; while to others we appear following after the glory of discovering lakes, mountains, jenny-nettles and puddock-stools.” (Livingstone to his mother in 1859.)

WO months later and Livingstone and

his expedition were at one of the many mouths of the great Zambesi. Only two of his party were missing, and they were his wife and little Oswell. Mrs Livingstone had insisted on coming to Africa with her husband, although she was in very poor health, and she pluckily kept to her purpose until they came to Cape Town. But there even she had to acknowledge that it would be madness to travel farther, and she had to let the expedition go on without her. It was “ like tearing the heart out of one,” Livingstone said, to leave her, but it had to be done.

The first difficulty was to decide which muddy mouth of the River Zambesi was the best one to enter. No wonder it was a puzzling question, for a ship might easily waste weeks in sailing up a waterway like “ the Luawe ” and then find it led somewhere else altogether Livingstone’s surveyor unfortunately missed 16S

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the best entrance to the Zambesi—the mouth now generally used, called the Nanombe. He decided on the Kongone waterway, and accordingly the bits of the Ma Robert were all taken out of the Pearl and were put together at the entrance to the river. There was a “ secret canal ” leading into the Zambesi which Livingstone guessed the Portuguese were not keen about other people discovering. The truth was that the slave ships used this “ Tshinde Creek,” and their captains had to avoid being seen and held up by British men-o’-war.

When the river became too shallow for the Pearl, they all embarked on the little Ma Robert. Livingstone in his time had played a good many parts, but this was the very first time he had been the captain of a ship. Most unluckily, the naval commander who had come out with them had left the expedition, so “ Captain David Livingstone ” took his place. He knew a good deal about navigation, but nothing whatever about the proper technical terms to use in giving his commands; so there were sometimes rather amusing moments. He declared himself that he would far rather drive a London cab through a November fog than navigate the Ma Robert up the very “ tricky ” course of that river; but in spite of mistakes he did the apparently impossible, and brought her one thousand six hundred miles up-stream in safety. The poor little paddle boat was really a

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terrible disappointment. She consumed an exorbitant amount of fuel, and panted along so fussily and yet so slowly that they christened her at last the Asthmatic. This was all the more exasperating because they were most anxious to get along as quietly and quickly as possible. The Portuguese were at war with a half-caste leader named Matakenya, whose descendants still worry that Government a good deal. Near the mouth of the River Shire the enemy had built a stockade, and it looked as though the Ma Robert might be in for serious trouble. However, after an exciting half-hour under fire in which Livingstone rescued the Portuguese Governor, they “ won through,” and stopped at Shupanga.

At Shupanga one sees the real Africa, as one stands under a huge baobab-tree by the reedy bank, near the solitary bungalow of the Governor, and sees the evening sun set on the far-away Morumballa Mountains. The River Shire is like a great lake at one’s feet, its water a deep brownish-yellow. Low, sandy banks lie ahead, with sprawling alligators everywhere, and here and there the great head of a hippo. Behind stretches the vast African plain, a waste of sad-coloured, sun-tanned reeds; and over all the monotonous blue dome of the sky, a sort of “ veiled blue,” with a dull, deadly suggestion of malaria about it.

Livingstone meant to explore that river. He

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wanted to find the great lake from which it came. But first of all he must go and see his former Makololo followers at Tete. He only consented to leave those faithful creatures after his former great journey because Major Sicard, his Portuguese host, had promised to look after them at Tete. So with much panting and snorting the little Ma Robert churned her way up the Zambesi once more, and Livingstone had a grand welcome from his black boys. Some of them had died of small-pox, and some had been killed in a raid, but the others were all as jolly as could be, and crowded round Baba Baud. “ The Tete people often taunted us,” said they, “and told us, ‘Your Englishman will never return.’ But we trusted you and now we shall sleep.”

After two useless attempts to get the Ma Robert farther up the Zambesi, Livingstone acknowledged that the Kebrabasa rapids were too much for him, and turned back again to the mouth of the Shire River. He was quite disgusted with his noisy little leaking paddle boat, and he wrote home begging the Government to send him another vessel. Knowing the ways of governments, however, he wrote at the same time to his friend, “ Sir Paraffin ” Young, asking him to buy him, if necessary, a new ship, and the profits of his book would no doubt pay for it. As a matter of fact, that ship, the Lady Nyassa, cost Livingstone about

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£6000, which must have been most of his fortune.

Sailing up the Shire River was at first much better fun than the Zambesi. It is a beautiful river, and the wild African life one passes on its banks is of never-ending interest. It is not so very often, even in the wildest parts of Africa, that the traveller sees elephants. When Stanley, for instance, crossed Africa to search for Livingstone, it was ten months before he saw a single tusk. But on the banks of the Shire in former days the boat or canoe would quite frequently come upon the great beasts, flapping their huge ears down by the waterside. Livingstone knew that those elephants, or their tusks, rather, were at the bottom of half poor Africa’s troubles. Ivory is tremendously valuable. An elephant’s two tusks may be worth from £80 to £100. The Arab traders would give anything for ivory, and the price they generally did pay was—slaves! Besides, of course, the ivory had to be carried to the coast, so again the Arab had to steal slaves to do it.

The Shire valley, when Livingstone saw it, was inhabited by a war-like race, the Mananja, and when the Ma Robert arrived at some rapids (which Livingstone named after Sir Roderick Murchison) they saw crowds of these people on the banks, with bows and poisoned arrows. They evidently took Livingstone and his party for slave traders, and were prepared to fight

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for their lives. The river was full of rather thick weed, which made it difficult going, but they managed to forge through it for about two hundred miles, and then Livingstone reluctantly gave the order to return.

Livingstone and Doctor Kirk were determined to find “ the great lake,” as the natives called it; and, next time, they left the Ma Robert and set out in what they thought might be the right direction by land. Lake Shirwa, when they did find it, was rather a disappointment. It was a big, reedy stretch of water, full of crocodiles and hippos. The water, Livingstone said, tasted like a weak solution of Epsom salts. The country was beautiful enough, but this route led nowhere; it was not part of that great waterway for which Livingstone was searching.

“ Three times for luck,” runs the proverb, and the third attempt they made ended in the discovery of Lake Nyassa. Livingstone and his brother, with Kirk and Rae, the engineer, crossed the beautiful Shire highlands, came once more upon the upper river, and it led them to the great lake. They were the first white men that had ever stood by that inland sea, and when Livingstone saw it, it must have seemed one of the loneliest and vastest lakes in all the world. Standing on its beach, with the wind blowing strong across the waters from the great eastern mountains, it must have been difficult to realise it was a fresh-water lake in

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the heart of the African continent. Livingstone guessed its length to be at least a hundred and fifty miles, but we know nowadays that it is quite two hundred miles longer still, and sixty miles across. Such wild “ seas ” spring up on the lake that Livingstone called it “the Lake of Storms,” and sometimes a steamer even in the last few years has taken as long to reach the head of the lake as it takes a modern vessel to get from England to America.

The tribes who lived along the west side of the lake were some of the most delightful people Livingstone came across in his travels. They lived in little well-kept villages among banana groves; the men a fine, manly set of fellows, noted hunters; and the women would have been good-looking if they had not worn a sort of table-napkin ring in their upper lips, which pulled the lip out into a dreadful deformity. Above all, they were a very clean people; they knew the value of lake water. The country, Livingstone saw, was an ideally rich one, and the climate quite healthy; and he sent home glowing prophecies of what this lake district might one day become under British control, and with energetic mission stations. Only a few years were to pass before those lake villages were burnt by the Arab slave hunter, the lovely groves cut down, and whole tribes wiped out of existence, or taken into slavery.

Then a year after Livingstone’s death the

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new era began which has changed the whole country. People at home were roused, colonists and missionaries set out for the great lake, and one has only to look at two maps—one drawn in 1869 and the other in 1916—to realise what Livingstone’s spirit has brought about in British Central Africa.

Livingstone’s faithful Makololo settled along the banks of the Shire River, and in course of time some of them became chiefs and reigned over a very much more peaceable folk than those Bishop Mackenzie and the Doctor had had to encounter. The country had been almost emptied of its old inhabitants, and refugees from the Yao raiders came pouring in and became subjects of these new chieftains. Before parting with them Livingstone had made his men swear on the Bible that they would “ keep the road open for the British,” and that they would never sell into slavery any man, woman or child. This oath they kept most faithfully, and when in 1876 the first Scottish missionaries came to the Shire they gave them a warm welcome. “ Our fathers have come back! ” was the message carried from village to village. The first little Christian church was built of wattle and daub, like those made by the early missionaries to our own heathen ancestors. Now the whole of that vast district is dotted with mission stations, and the country has a wonderful future before it.