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 THE DARK CONTINENT. 245 nîneteen boats. Difficulties arose from the very outset, and not only had he to contend with the cannibals of Ugusu, but, in order to avoîd many unnavigable cataracts, he had to convey hîs boats many miles by land. Near the equator, just at the point where the Lualaba turns north- north-west, Stanley's little convoy was attacked by a fleet of boats, manned by several hundred natives, whom, how- ever, he succeeded in putting to flight. Nothing daunted, the resolute American pushed on to lat. 20** N. and ascer- tained, beyond room for doubt, that the Lualaba was really the Upper Zaire or Congo, and that, by following its course, he should come dîrectly to the sea. Beset with many périls was the way. Stanley was in almost daily collision with the various tribes upon the river-banks ; on the 3rd of June, 1877, he lost one of his companions, Frank Pocock, at the passage of the cataracts of Massassa, and on the i8th of July he was himself carried în hîs boat into the Mbelo Falls, and escaped by little short of a miracle. On the 6th of August the daring adventurer arrived at the village of Ni Sanda, only four days from the sea ; two days later he received a supply of provisions that had been sent by two Emboma merchants to Banza M^buko, the little coast-town where, after a journey of two years and nine months, fraught with every kind of hardship and pri- vation, be completed his transit of the mighty continent. His toil told, at least temporarily, upon his years, but he had the grand satisfaction of knowing that he had traced the whole course of the Lualaba, and had ascertained, beyond reach of question, that as the Nile is the great artery of the north, and the Zambesi of the east, so Africa possesses in the west a third great river, which in a course of no less than 2900 miles, under the names of the Lualaba, Zaire, and Congo, unîtes the lake district with the Atlantic Océan. In 1873, however, the date at which the "Pîlgrim" foundered upon the coast, very little was known of the province of Angola, except that it was the scène of the western slave-trade, of which the markets of Bihe, Cassanga,