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I left Leopoldville in the Deliverance. Some of the State boats that make the long trip to Stanleyville are very large ships. They have plenty of deck room and many cabins. With their flat, raft-like hull, their paddle-wheel astern, and the covered sun deck, they resemble gigantic house-boats.
At sunset we arrived at Lisala, which is a large military training camp, well constructed and managed. In it about a thousand savages are being converted into clean, smart-looking soldiers. Next day we passed the Kintamo., which was forcing its way up against the stream with a cargo of rails directed to Stanleyville.
The ordinary price is about forty. One trader at Stanleyville cleaned up a profit of 3,000,000 francs in three months. Then came the inevitable reaction and with it a unique situation. In their mad desire to corral ivory the traders ran up the normal price that the native hunters received. The moment the boom burst the white buyers sought to regulate their purchases accordingly.
In the matter of transportation Kinshassa is really the key to the heart of the Congo. It is the rail-head of the narrow-gauge line from Matadi and all merchandise that comes from Europe is transshipped at this point to the boats that go up the Congo river as far as Stanleyville. Thus every ton of freight and every traveller bound for the interior must pass through Kinshassa.
Thirty miles south of Stanleyville is the State Experimental Coffee Farm of three hundred acres, which produces fifteen different species of the bean. This institution is one evidence of a comprehensive agricultural development inaugurated by the Belgian Government. The State has about 10,000 acres of test plantations, mostly Para rubber, cotton, and cacao, in various parts of the Colony.
I then continued northward, down the Lualaba River, Livingstone thought it was the Nile then by rail, and again on the Lualaba through the posts of Kongolo, Kindu and Ponthierville to Stanleyville on the Congo River. This is the second stage of the Cape-to-Cairo Route and knocks off an additional 890 miles and another twelve days.
It is also the southern rail-head of the Chemin de Fer Grands Lacs, which extends to Stanleyville. Early in the morning I boarded what looked to me like a toy train, for it was tinier than any I had ever seen before, and started for Kindu. The journey occupies two days and traverses a highly Arabized section.
His wife was with him and she was the only white woman within two hundred miles. Campbell is a link with one of the new Congo industries, which is cotton cultivation. The whole area between Kongolo and Stanleyville, three-fourths of which is one vast tropical forest, has immense stretches ideally adapted for cotton growing.
One reason why the Bangalas take positions as firemen and woodboys on the river boats is that it enables them to go into business. The price of food at the small settlements up river is much less than at Kinshassa, where navigation from Stanleyville southward ends.
Hence the blacks acquire considerable stores of palm oil and dried fish at the various stops made by the steamers and dispose of it with large profit when they reach the end of the journey. I have in mind the experience of a capita on the "Comte de Flandre." When we left Stanleyville his cash capital was thirty-five francs.
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