Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/399

 dominion. He secured for the Association Internationale the whole south bank of the river and the north and west shores as well beyond the confluence with the Mobangi. Then he began the work of establishing a chain of trading stations and administrative stations along the course of the Congo, making treaties with the native chiefs, buying land, building fortified block-houses and warehouses, choosing sites for quays, river-harbours, streets, European settlements, even gardens and promenades. The work was all done under his personal superintendence, and some of it with his own hand; for he often toiled in the midst of his assistants with axe and hammer under the blazing African sun, and his energy in roadmaking through the boulder-strewn valley of the Lower Congo caused the natives to call him Bula Matari, the Breaker of Rocks, a name which appealed to his imagination and was recalled by him with satisfaction to the end of his life. He was frequently prostrated by fever, and in 1882 he was compelled to make a trip to Europe. He returned after a few weeks' absence and went on steadily with his political and pioneering work along the thousand miles of the navigable Congo from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls, laying the foundations of that vast administrative system, extending from the Atlantic to the great lakes, and from the Sudan to Barotseland, which became the Congo State. By the summer of 1884 he felt that the initial stage in the establishment of the State was finished, and it only remained for him to hand over his functions to a competent successor. He returned to Europe, having given to the huge tract of the dark continent which he had opened to the fight, definite boundaries, and the elements of what he hoped might develop into an organised system of government under European direction. He had shown high administrative talent, and on the whole a just and liberal conception of the principles by which European rule over Africans should be inspired. If his counsels had been followed, the abuses which overtook the Congo administration some years later would have been avoided. For these scandals of the Belgian regime Stanley was in no way responsible, and they caused him much chagrin and vexation, which he sometimes revealed in private, though his loyalty to his former employer, the king of the Belgians, restrained him from any public expression of opinion on the subject, The king frequently invited him to return to the Congo; but he declined, having no desire (so he wrote in 1896) 'to see mistakes consummated, to be tortured daily by seeing the effects of an ignorant and erring policy,' or to be tempted to 'disturb a moral malaria injurious to the re-organiser.' But for some time after his return to Europe in 1884 he continued to be closely interested in Congo affairs. He attended the Berlin Conference, in which he gave his services to the American delegation as an expert adviser on geographical and technical questions. He lectured in Germany on the commercial possibilities of the newly discovered region, and did much to rouse German interest in Central African trade and exploitation. In England, by lectures and by personal communication with influential groups of financiers and merchants, he endeavoured to promote enterprise in the equatorial regions, and he tried hard to get his scheme for a Congo railway carried out by Engfish capitalists. He regretted that England had allowed the first-fruits of the harvest he had sown to be reaped by others; but he was anxious that she should still obtain the advantage of being the pioneer in that portion of the African continent which was still unappropriated. It was in pursuance of these ideas that he undertook his next and final mission to the lands of the equator. The expedition was indirectly due to the catastrophe of 26 Jan. 1885, when Khartoum fell into the hands of the Mahdists and Gordon was killed. The Sudan was submerged by the dervish hordes and the only organised Egyptian force left was that under Emin Pasha in Wadelai on the left bank of the Nile, about 25° north of Lake Nyanza. Emin, a German naturafist whose real name was Eduard Sclinitzer, had been appointed by Gordon to the governorship of the equatorial province, and was understood to be in a very precarious situation. His difficulties aroused much sympathy in England; Sir William Mackinnon [q. v. Suppl. I], chairman of the British India Steam Navigation Company, raised a fund for his relief, and received a grant for the same purpose from the Egyptian government. To Stanley was entrusted the organisation and leadership of the rescue expedition. Sufficient funds were in the hands of Mackinnon's committee by the end of 1886; and in December of that year Stanley, who had gone to America on a lecturing tour, was recalled to England by cable to begin his preparations for the adventure.