Political interest in the Gaboon languished so much on the part of France that the country was once or twice offered to England in exchange for the Gambia. However in 1880, the awakening desire to found a great colonial empire urged France to extend her Gaboon possessions up the coast, towards the Cameroons, and southward in the direction of the mouth of that great river, the Congo, the course of which the explorer H. M. Stanley had just succeeded in tracing. Even before Stanley’s return, the King of the Belgians had summoned a number of geographers to Brussels to discuss the possibility of civilizing Africa by an International African association. This conference brought about the creation of national committees, which were to undertake on behalf of each participating nation a section of African exploration. The French committee sent De Brazza to explore the hinterland of the Gaboon. While Stanley was commencing his second Congo expedition for the King of the Belgians and slowly working his way up the lower river, De Brazza had made a rapid journey overland to Stanley Pool and the upper Congo, making treaties for France and planting the French flag wherever he went. Soon afterwards an English missionary, George Grenfell, discovered the lower course of the great Mubangi, and French explorers promptly directed their steps thither. For some years there was keen and even bitter rivalry between Stanley’s expedition, which gradually became a Belgian enterprise, and the French explorers under De Brazza; and when, at the Conference of Berlin in 1884-5, it was sought to create the Congo Independent State under the sovereignty of the King of the Belgians, the adhesion of France to this scheme could only be obtained by handing over to her much of the western and northern watershed of the Congo, besides giving her a promise that, if the Congo State were ever to be transferred from the Belgian sovereign to another Power, France should have the right of preemption. Before the French had been many years on the Mubangi River (which is one of the few means of communication between the southern, Bantu part of Africa, and the northern regions, the “Sudan,” populated by non-Bantu Negroes, Negroids, Hamites, and Semites[130]), they had very naturally conceived the idea of pushing northwards to the Shari river and Lake Chad. In 1890 Paul Crampel was the first European to cross this mysterious Bantu boundary, to leave the forest regions of the Congo and lower Mubangi, and enter the more open park-lands of the central Sudan. But he was attacked and killed (1891) by suspicious Muhammadan raiders on the river Shari. Another Frenchman, of Polish descent, M. Dybowski, succeeded in chastising the murderers of Crampel, and further exploring the Shari. A further