Stanley in Africa: The Wonderful Discoveries and Thrilling Adventures of the Great African Explorer, and Other Travelers, Pioneers and MissionariesBoyd, James P. (James Penny)
History
Stanley in Africa: The Wonderful Discoveries and Thrilling Adventures of the Great African Explorer, and Other Travelers, Pioneers and Missionaries
Boyd, James P. (James Penny)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton), 1841-1904
It would not do to close any account of Stanley’s brilliant career
without noting the fact that Emin Pasha, in one of his last published
letters, written after he was beyond all danger from Mahdi vengeance and
African climate, fully acknowledges the value of the aid sent him, and
makes it clear that his hesitation at availing himself of it was due
to that high sense of duty which had gained him the name of Emin, or
the Faithful One. The last and most trusted of Gordon’s lieutenant’s,
he regarded it as his “bounden duty” to follow up the road the General
showed him; and it must have been a wrench to tear himself away from the
life-work to which he had in a measure consecrated himself——to see the
labors of years thrown away, and all his endeavors come to naught. But it
could not be helped under the circumstances, and Emin, like many before
him, has had to succumb to the force of fate. And so ends for the present
the attempt to civilize the equatorial Provinces of Egypt. The ruler
of Egypt has formally renounced them, Gordon is dead, and his trusted
lieutenant has at last thrown up the sponge. It has been a strange and
eventful story, in which the heroes have been of the race which has done
so much for the regeneration of the dark places of the world. For a time
the dark and turbid waves of ignorance, of slavery, and of cruelty will
roll back over this part of the Dark Continent and pessimists will say
that nothing more can be done. But it is only for a time. The day will
surely come when the dreams of Gordon and of Emin will become actual
realities; and when that time comes we may be sure that the name of Henry
M. Stanley will be remembered and honored.
EGYPT AND THE NILE.
The historic approach to “The Dark Continent” is by way of storied Egypt
and its wonderful river, the Nile. In making this approach we must not
forget the modern commercial value of the route from Zanzibar, pursued
by Stanley (1871-72) while hastening to the rescue of Dr. Livingstone,
the great English explorer, nor of that other, by way of the Congo, which
bids fair to prove more direct and profitable than any thus far opened.
[Illustration: LIVINGSTONE AND STANLEY AT UJIJI.]
It was an enterprise as bold as any of those undertaken by hardy mariners
to rescue their brother sailors who had met shipwreck while striving
to unfold the icy mysteries which surround the North Pole. And, unlike
many of these, it was successful. The two great explorers shook hands
in October 1871, at Ujiji, on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, in the very
heart of the great forest and river system of Africa, and amid dark
skinned, but not unkind, strangers, who constitute a native people as
peculiar in all respects as their natural surroundings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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