Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, West -- Description and travel; Congo River -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Africa, West
The article proves hypsometrically that the Lualaba, in which the
explorer found the head waters of the Egyptian river, cannot feed
the Tanganyika nor the Lake Nzige (N'zíghe, Mwutan, Chowambe, or
Albert Nyanza Lake), nor even the Bahr el Ghazal, as was once
suspected. From the latter, indeed, it is barred by the water
parting of the Welle, the "Babura" of Jules Poncet (1860), in the
land of the Monbuttú; whose system the later explorer, Dr.
Schweinfurth, is disposed to connect with the Shari.
Hydrometrically considered, the Lualaba, which at Nyangwe, the
most northerly point explored by Dr. Livingstone (1870), rolls a
flood of 124,000 cubic feet per second in the dry season, cannot
be connected either with the Welle (5,100 cubic feet), nor with
the Bahr el Ghazal (3,042 to 6,500 cubic feet), nor with the Nile
below the mouth of the Bahr el Ghazal (11,330); nor with the
Shari (67,500); nor with the shallow Ogobe, through its main
forks the Rembo Okanda and the Rembo Nguye.
But the Lualaba may issue through the Congo. The former is made
one of the four streams ferried over by those travelling from the
Cazembe to the Mwata ya Nvo, and Dr. de Lacarda[FN#22] records it
as the "Guarava," probably a dialectic form of Lualava. It is the
Luapula of the "Geographer of N'yassi," who, with his usual
felicity and boldness of conjecture (p. 38), bends it eastward,
and discharges it into his mythical Central Sea.
Dr. Behm greatly under-estimates the Congo when he assigns to it
only 1,800,000 cubic feet per second. He makes the great artery
begin to rise in November instead of September and decrease in
April, without noticing the March-June freshets, reported by all
the natives to measure about one-third of the autumnal floods.
His elements are taken from Tuckey, who found off the "Diamond
Rock" a velocity of 3.50 knots an hour, and from Vidal's Chart,
showing 9,000 English feet or 1.50 nautical miles in a Thalweg
fifty fathoms deep. Thus he assumes only two nautical miles for
the current, or sixty inches per second, which must be
considerably increased, and an average depth of ten fathoms,
which again is too little. For 1,800,000 cubic feet of water per
second, which Tuckey made 2,000,000, we may safely read
2,500,000.
Dr. Livingstone himself was haunted by the idea that he was
exploring the Upper Congo, not the Nile. From a Portuguese
subordinate he "learned that the Luapula went to Angola." He asks
with some truth, "Who would care to risk being put into a
cannibal pot, and be converted into blackman for anything less
than the grand old Nile?" And the late Sir Roderick I. Murchison,
whose geographical forecasts were sometimes remarkable, suspected
long ago[FN#23] that his "illustrious friend" would follow the
drainage of the country to the western coast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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