at Leopoldville, and the huge caravan started on its long journey over hills and prairie stretches, through dales and across streams, skirting forests here and piercing them there, past happy, peaceful villages, too far from the Congo to be annoyed by its ravines. The promising uplands of Ngombe are passed, ruled by Luteté, he who in 1882 requested the gift of a white man that he might have the pleasure of cutting his throat! But Luteté has been transformed from a ferocious chief into quite a decent citizen. Ngombe Station is a peaceable one, and Luteté furnishes the servants and carriers for it, besides sending his children to the Baptist school. The caravan then passes the Bokongo and Iyenzi people, noted for their good behaviour. All the land is fertile and the valleys exceedingly rich. Manyanga is reached. The station has not advanced, but is confused and ruinous, though probably a cool $100,000 has been expended upon it by the Association of the Congo.
Again the caravan takes up its march through the Ndunga people and thence down into the broad valley of the Lukunga, where Stanley is hospitably received by Mr. and Mrs. Ingham of the Livingstone Mission, at their pretty little cottage and school, surrounded by a spacious and well tended garden. Westward of the Lukunga are plateau lands, like the American prairies, covered with tall grass, and capable of raising the richest crops of wheat and corn. The plateaus passed, a descent is made into the valley of the Kwilu, and then into those of the Luima and Lunionzo, where the Station of Banza Manteka is reached, close by which is a Livingstone Mission house. The prospect from the hilltops here is a grand, embracing sight of nearly a dozen native villages whose dwellers are devoted to the cultivation of ground-nuts.
In six hours the caravan is at Isangila, sight of which station filled Stanley with grief, so backward had improvement been. Hundreds of bales of stock were rotting there through neglect of the commandant to keep the thatched roofs of the houses in repair. The country now becomes broken and rugged, and the way obstructed with large boulders. All nature here is a counterpart of that rough tumultuous channel where thunders the Congo in its last furious charges to the sea. It is now five miles to Vivi. The height is 1700 feet above the sea. The air is cool and delicious. The natives are peaceful and industrious. There is an English mission on those highlands, in the midst of peace and plenty.
Once at Vivi, Stanley is again grieved, for the commandants had done nothing to make it either ornamental or useful. All is barren, like the surrounding hills. Not a road had been cut, not a cottage thatched. The gardens were in waste, the fences broken. The twenty-five whites there were lazily indifferent to their surroundings, and without any energy or vivacity except that inspired by European wine. The native sick list was fearfully large and there was a general demand for medicines, till Stanley made an inspection and found that they were only feigning sickness as an excuse for idleness. Shocked at all this Stanley resolved to move the station up and away to the larger plateau. He did so, and left it with a reorganized staff and force, writing home, meanwhile, an account of his work. The old and new Vivi stations were connected by a railroad, and by June 1884, the new station had five comfortable houses, surrounded by a freshly planted banana orchard.
On June 6th Stanley left Vivi for Boma, and took passage on the British and African steamer Kinsembo, on the 10th, for an inspection of the West African coast. The steamer stopped at Landana, a factory town, with a French mission peeping out of a banana grove on an elevation. It next touched at Black Point to take on produce, and then at Loango and Mayumbo. It then entered the Gaboon country, and stopped off at the town of that name, which is the seat of government of the French colony. At Gaboon are several brick buildings, stores, hotels, a Catholic and American Protestant mission, ten factories and a stone pier. It is a neat place, and almost picturesque with its hill-dotted houses and tropical vegetation.
The steamer then passed the Spanish town of Elobey, on an island of that name, off the mouth of the Muni river. Rounding Cape St. Juan, it next touched at the celebrated island of Fernando-Po, whose centre is a peak 10,000 feet high. The country of the Cammaroons now begins – a people even more degraded than those of the Congo. Skirting this country, Duke Town, or old Calabar, was reached on June 21st. This is the “Oil river” region of Africa and 300 barrels of palm-oil awaited the Kinsembo. Stanley took a trip inland to Creek Town, where is a Scottish mission. He was struck with the similarity of what he saw to scenes on the Congo – the same palms, density of forest, green verdure, reddish loam, hut architecture. Only one thing differed, and that was that the residences of the native chiefs were of European manufacture. Palm-oil has brought them luxurious homes, modernly furnished. The ivory, oil, rubber, gum, camwood powder, orchilla, beeswax, grains and spices would do the same for Congo at no distant day.
The steamer next anchored in Bonny river, off the town of Bonny, where there is a well-to-do white population and an equally well-to-do native population, with many factories and a large traffic. These people seem to have solved the difficult problem of African climate, and to have dissipated much of the fear which clung to a residence on and about the rivers which find their way to the sea in the Bight of Benin. Passing New Calabar, anchor is cast off the Benin river, in a roadstead where clustered ships from all the principal ports of Europe. The Kinsembo is now fully loaded and makes for Quettah and then Sierra Leone. Thence sail was set for London. Stanley got off at Plymouth on July 29th, 1884, and four days later presented a report of his expedition and his mission to the king of Belgium at Ostend.
Some part of the work of founding the Congo Free State had now been done. Stanley and his expedition had been instrumental in clearing ground, leveling sites, reducing approaches, laying foundations and building walls. The Bureau of the Association had contributed means and supplied tools and mortar. But windows were now to be placed and roofs put on. Then the fabric must be furnished and equipped within. The finishing work could only be done through the agency of its royal founder. He took it up where Stanley laid it down, and applied to the Governments of Europe and America for recognition of what had been done, and for a guarantee of such limits as were foreshadowed by the new State. The border lands were those of France and Portugal. Treaties, fixing boundaries, were made with these countries. Precedents were formed in the case of the Puritan Fathers, the New Hampshire Colonists, the British East India Company, the Liberian Republic, the Colonists of Borneo, establishing the right of individuals to build States upon cessions of territory and surrenders of sovereignty by chiefs and rulers who hold as original owners.
Stanley’s present to the Association was a series of treaties duly ratified by 450 independent African chiefs, who held land by undisturbed possession, ancient usage and divine right. They had not been intimidated or coerced, but of their own free will and for valuable considerations had transferred their sovereignty and ownership to the Association. The time had now come for cementing these grants and cohering these sovereignties, so that they should stand forth as a grand entirety and prove worthy of the name of solid empire.
And just here occurs one of the most interesting chapters in the founding of the Congo Free State. As it was to the Welsh-American Stanley, that the initial work of the grand enterprise was due, so it was to his country, the United States of America, that that work was preserved and its results turned to the account of the world. England, with her usual disregard of international sentiment, and in that spirit which implies that her ipse dixit is all there is of importance in diplomacy, had made a treaty with Portugal, signed February 26th, 1884, recognizing the mouth of the Congo as Portuguese territory, and this in the face of the fact that the mouth of that great river had been regarded as neutral territory, and of the further fact that for half a century England herself had peremptorily refused to recognize Portuguese claims to it.
This action on the part of England awakened emphatic protest on the part of France and Germany, and commercial men in England denounced it through fear that Portuguese restrictions on trade would destroy Congo commerce entirely. It remained for the United States to speak. Her Minister to Belgium, General H. S. Sanford, had all along been a faithful coadjutor of the Committee of the International Association, and he began to call attention to the danger of the step just taken by England. He also reminded the American people that to their philanthropy was due the Free States of Liberia, founded at a cost of $2,500,000, and to which 20,00 °Colored Americans had been sent. He also reminded them that one of their citizens
