How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
The distance from Bagamoyo to Simbamwenni we found to be 119 miles,
and was accomplished in fourteen marches. But these marches, owing to
difficulties arising from the Masika season, and more especially to the
lagging of the fourth caravan under Maganga, extended to twenty-nine
days, thus rendering our progress very slow indeed--but a little more
than four miles a-day. I infer, from what I have seen of the travelling,
that had I not been encumbered by the sick Wanyamwezi porters, I could
have accomplished the distance in sixteen days. For it was not the
donkeys that proved recreant to my confidence; they, poor animals,
carrying a weight of 150 lbs. each, arrived at Simbamwenni in first-rate
order; but it was Maganga, composed of greed and laziness, and his
weakly-bodied tribe, who were ever falling sick. In dry weather the
number of marches might have been much reduced. Of the half-dozen
of Arabs or so who preceded this Expedition along this route, two
accomplished the entire distance in eight days. From the brief
descriptions given of the country, as it day by day expanded to our
view, enough may be gleaned to give readers a fair idea of it. The
elevation of Simbamwenni cannot be much over 1,000 feet above the level,
the rise of the land having been gradual. It being the rainy season,
about which so many ominous statements were doled out to us by those
ignorant of the character of the country, we naturally saw it under its
worst aspect; but, even in this adverse phase of it, with all its depth
of black mud, its excessive dew, its dripping and chill grass, its
density of rank jungle, and its fevers, I look back upon the scene with
pleasure, for the wealth and prosperity it promises to some civilized
nation, which in some future time will come and take possession of it. A
railroad from Bagamoyo to Simbamwenni might be constructed with as
much ease and rapidity as, and at far less cost than the Union Pacific
Railway, whose rapid strides day by day towards completion the world
heard of and admired. A residence in this part of Africa, after a
thorough system of drainage had been carried out, would not be attended
with more discomfort than generally follows upon the occupation of new
land. The temperature at this season during the day never exceeded 85
degrees Fahrenheit. The nights were pleasant--too cold without a pair
of blankets for covering; and, as far as Simbamwenni, they were without
that pest which is so dreadful on the Nebraska and Kansas prairies,
the mosquito. The only annoyances I know of that would tell hard on the
settler is the determined ferocity of the mabungu, or horse-fly; the
chufwa, &c., already described, which, until the dense forests and
jungles were cleared, would be certain to render the keeping of domestic
cattle unremunerative.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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