PREFACE. vil 
_ distance of Bangweolo. Mr. Stanley, after completing his 
gigantic work in founding the Congo Free State, traversed 
that unknown country between the Congo and the Nile 
in his search for Emin Pasha, and then returned to 
England to marry and settle down in the enjoyment of a 
reputation which will be found in future centuries scarcely 
second to that of Columbus. 
I myself have never set eyes on the Lower Congo since I 
left it in June 1883, though I have since travelled over 
that plateau in East Central Africa which gives rise to the 
main stream of this greatest of African rivers. A con- 
siderable portion of the Upper Congo has been placed 
under the British Flag and is now administered by the 
British South Africa Chartered Company. Our interests 
in this great river and in the welfare of the Congo Free 
State are now not only geographical but political. The 
Anglo-Congo Agreement has set at rest any rivalry or 
differences of opinion between the British and Belgian 
Authorities who are cordially working side by side in the 
suppression of the Slave Trade. By this Agreement the 
British are given a right to carry their Trans-Continental 
Telegraph line along the west shore of Lake Tanganyika 
and thence up to the British Protectorate on the Upper 
Nile. 
This remarkable development, which has taken place in ~ 
what is after all only a small slice of my own lifetime, 
may interest some few of my readers in this old record of 
my experiences on the Congo at a time when Stanley’s 
work was first beginning. I have left this record but 
little altered, preferring that the public should read the 
somewhat artless descriptions of a very young man, rather 
than a remodelled and more staid treatise which might — 
lose its sense of actuality. I have, of course, corrected all 
