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Updated: July 19, 2025
I found that this particular concession was well known, because, unlike the land given to the Forestry and Mines Company, it is not an inaccessible tract, but is situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language, that is about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street.
They can trace us up the Congo from Leopoldville, if you like, by the villages we stopped at one, we'll say, every two hundred miles but then we find this new river, and where are we?
They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real base of the expedition, leaving La Joconde behind at Matadi. The yacht would return to France.
When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach his home in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he brought letters were a three months' journey from the coast and from each other, his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe. His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer was ready to start for Leopoldville.
The original capital of the Congo was Vivi, established by Stanley at a point not far from Matadi. It was abandoned some year ago on account of its undesirable location. There is a strong sentiment that Leopoldville and not Boma should be the capital and it is not unlikely that this change will be made.
A kind of fete is held in the evening and a procession passes with lanterns on poles, but there is very little singing or noise of any kind and the whole affair is rather ghostly. On January 2nd we leave Leopoldville by train and remembering the amount of the fare coming up, I was careful to reduce my baggage to the minimum.
A caravan route runs from Matadi to Leopoldville, and it was during the march of twenty days over the mountains that in the early days, so much trouble was occasioned by the native porters. All this is abolished now by the railway. The town itself stands on the side of a steep hill and consists of narrow streets paved with cobbles.
The line runs along the bank all the way from Leopoldville to Coquilhatville and was very difficult to erect. A space had to be cleared in the forest nearly two hundred feet wide and the line erected in the centre on iron posts, so that any falling trees would not destroy it.
The work was pushed with indomitable energy. In 1894 a vigorous campaign against the Arab slave-traders was brought to a successful conclusion. In 1898 the first railway connecting Matadi, on the Lower Congo, with Leopoldville, on the Stanley Pool, opened the great waterway as far as the Stanley Falls.
He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and a box of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had forgotten to enclose any directions for their use. We were as ignorant of medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible to move him, we were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the row of bottles and tiny boxes, that might have given him life, unopened at his elbow.
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