Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/462





THE GABOON AND OGOWAY BASINS.

ILL recently most of the seaboard stretching for about 900 miles between the mouths of the Rio del Campo and Congo was left to its native inhabitants, the European Powers confining themselves to a few points on the coast, such as Corisco, Libreville, and Kabinda. At present there is scarcely a desert strand or a single mangrove thicket that is not claimed as an integral part of some political domain, and fanciful frontiers have even been traced across remote, unexplored, or at least little-known regions of the interior. Were priority of discovery the only title to possession, the rights of Portugal could not be questioned, for the Lusitanian mariners had already crossed the line in 1470, and many of the headlands and inlets along the seaboard still bear Portuguese names. Thus the most advanced promontory, Cape Lopez, recalls the navigator Lopo Gonçalvez, while the neighbouring estuary of Fernão Vaz is named from another sailor of the same nationality. It is also certain that the Portuguese formed permanent settlements at several points along the coast, and the remains have even been discovered of buildings and of rusty guns in the island of Coniquet (Koniké), towards the centre of the Gaboon estuary. But for over three hundred and fifty years after the first discoveries, European commercial relations were mainly confined to the slave trade, those engaged in this nefarious business maintaining a studied silence, and screening from the eyes of the outer world the scenes of their profitable operations.

The work of exploration, properly so-called, was not seriously undertaken before the middle of the present century, after the acquisition by France of a strip of land on the north side of the Gaboon estuary as a depôt for revictualling her cruisers. The first station was founded in 1842, and soon after the whole estuary was surveyed, and expeditions sent to explore the Komo and Ramboé affluents. Then followed Du Chaillu's excursions to the interior, and his sensational accounts of the gorilla, the terrible "man of the woods," after which the Ogoway basin was thrown open and largely explored by Braouezec, Serval, Griffon du Bellay, Aymès, De Compiègne and Marche, Walker and Oscar Lenz. The systematic