Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/398

 In the autumn of 1874, after elaborate and expensive preparations in London and Zanzibar, he was able to begin his march from the coast. He was in his thirty-fourth year, with a store of invaluable experience, and a fund of dauntless energy. The expedition he commanded was probably the best equipped which had ever accompanied a white traveller into the interior of Africa, and it did more to open up the heart of the continent and to elucidate its geography than any other before or since. Stanley with two white companions, Francis and Edward Pocock, a white servant, and 356 native followers, left Zanzibar on 11 Nov. It was nearly three years before he emerged upon the shores of the Atlantic, having in the interval crossed Africa from ocean to ocean, determined the limits, area, and northern river connections of Lakes Nyanza and Tanganyika, examined the interesting kingdom of Uganda, and laid the foundations for its conversion to Christianity by his conversations with King Mtesa, and his communications to the Church Missionary Society. From the lake region he struck west for the Lualaba, worked down it till he reached its confluence with the Congo, and then traced the course of that river along its immense curve to the sea. The difficulties of this amazing march through lands unknown even to the Arab traders and slave-hunters were prodigious. Stanley triumphed over them by the exercise of that indomitable resolution, invincible patience, and sagacious judgment which entitle him to a place in the very front rank of the world's greatest explorers. This journey of 1874-7 left an enduring impress upon history: for out of it grew the Congo State and the Anglo-Egyptian dominion on the Upper Nile; and its direct result was to embark the nations of the West upon that 'scramble for Africa' which created new dominions, protectorates, and spheres of influence in the dark continent, and new rivalries and alliances in Europe. Incidentally Stanley solved a geographical problem of the first importance, and revealed the estuary of the Congo as the entrance to one of the mightiest rivers of the earth. It was on 9 Aug. 1877 that Stanley's wearied column staggered into Boma. His three white companions were dead; he himself had suffered severely from the strain and solitude of the prolonged marches. With that solicitude for his native followers which he always exhibited, in spite of stories to the contrary effect, his first care was to convey them to their homes on the shores of the Indian ocean. He took them round to Zanzibar by sea, and thence made his own way back to England. The full account of his expedition was published in 'Through the Dark Continent' (1878), and the book was read with avidity in every civilised country. Its author threw himself into the task of bringing commercial enterprise and civilised government into the vast regions he had disclosed to the world. He lectured to interested audiences in the great manufacturing and trading centres, corresponded with merchants and financiers, and approached the British government; but he met with no effective support in England for his project of bridging the rapids of the Lower Congo by a road and railway from the sea to the navigable portion of the river. He was reluctantly compelled to obtain assistance from another quarter. King Leopold II of Belgium, a monarch of many faults, but with some large and imaginative ideas, was alive to the possibilities of equatorial Africa. In August 1878 Stanley met King Leopold's commissioners in Paris, and in November he was the king's guest at Brussels, and assisted in the formation of the 'Comité d'Études du Haut Congo,' which was intended to prove the capabilities of the Congo territory, and to lay the basis for its systematic exploitation. And it was as the representative of this committee, which afterwards changed its name to that of 'Association Internationale du Congo,' and with funds supplied by its subscribers, that Stanley again set out for Central Africa. As before he recruited his immediate followers in Zanzibar, taking some of his old faithful retainers who had served with him through the great trans-continental march. He brought them by sea to the mouth of the Congo, where he arrived on 15 Aug. 1879, just two years after he had reached it on his descent of the great river. He remained in the Congo region for nearly five years, and they were years of arduous and fruitful labour. Their story is told in 'The Congo and the Founding of its Free State,' which Stanley published in 1885. The explorer and adventurer had now to act as pioneer, town-builder, road-maker, administrator, and diplomatist. M. de Brazza, a French traveller who had heard of Stanley's projects, made a rapid dash for the Upper Congo, and just forestalled its discoverer in obtaining from the native chiefs the cession of a long strip of territory on the north bank of the river. Thus was Stanley indirectly responsible for endowing France with a great tropical