A Great African- Lake 



171 



the west coast ; I seemed to hear church 

 bells ringing at a great distance away, 

 and I hoped and prayed that some day 

 that vision might be realized. 



Twenty-seven years have passed, and 

 I think it will be admitted that we are on 

 the eve of the realization of that vision. 

 In those days Mtesa, of Uganda, impaled 

 his victims and clubbed his women to 

 death upon the slightest provocation ; 

 the slingers of the islands stood ready 

 to welcome the wayfarer or the traveler 

 with showers of stones, and along all 

 the shores described by Commander 

 Whitehouse there was a group here and 

 there, or an army at another place doing 

 all the tricks common to barbarous 

 people, and sighing and thirsting for 

 blood. Those days have passed by. 

 The missionaries have been laboring 

 since 1877 in Uganda, and as the result 

 of their labors can show 90,000 Chris- 

 tian people. Three hundred and twenty 

 churches have been established there, 

 and there are many thousands of chil- 

 dren at school. It was only the other 

 day I received a letter from a man at 

 Mengo saying there were 500 children 

 in the Mengo school every day. The 

 converts of Uganda are now actually 

 carrying the gospel to the distant lands 

 of the west. Toro has been made ac- 

 quainted with the gospel. Usongora, 

 which was a wild and devastated coun- 

 try only twelve years ago, now welcomes 

 the white traders ; at Kavalli, where I 

 rested some months, the people are be- 

 ginning to take a strong interest in the 

 white man's religion. 



Such has been the change wrought in 

 twenty-seven years. Though it has been 

 slow work; though missionaries have 

 often felt depressed, broken-hearted, 

 and dispirited, suffered persecution and 

 been expelled from Uganda; though the 

 native converts have suffered torture 

 and death, still the missionaries have 

 persevered, and in the end they have 

 received their reward. They now know 

 that the terminus of the great railway 



is built on the very shore of the lake, 

 while one steamer, the William Mac- 

 kinnoti, is daily trafficking between Port 

 Florence, on the east, and Entebbe, on 

 the northwest. She is but the precur- 

 sor of a fleet of such steamers. 



In 1880, 1881, and 1882 I carried 

 three small steamers on to the Upper 

 Congo ; today there are eighty, with a 

 tonnage of about 10,000 tons. Today 

 there is only one steamer of seventy-five 

 feet in length on the Victoria Nyanza ; 

 in ten years hence there will very likely 

 be fifty, in twelve years one hundred, 

 in fifty years two hundred, and that is 

 the way civilization will go on spread- 

 ing out and stirring the dark peoples to 

 activity. 



There are two main motives for which 

 the British nation voted the money for 

 the construction of the Uganda Rail- 

 way. The first is the suppression of the 

 slave trade, and the second was to effect 

 an uninterrupted and speedy communi- 

 cation between the sea and what is called 

 the " Pearl of Africa," and today those 

 two objects have been accomplished. 

 The slave-trader cannot now be found 

 in those regions, otherwise the very 

 sight of a white man would be fatal to 

 him, while as for the uninterrupted 

 and speedy communication, it only now 

 requires two and a half days to reach 

 Uganda from the sea, whereas it pre- 

 viously occupied months. Speke took 

 nine months to reach Uganda ; it took 

 me eight ; but two or three years ago 

 it took the missionaries generally six 

 months. One brave and energetic trav- 

 eler takes three months. Now it can 

 be done in two and a half days. 



If the lake region has advanced so 

 marvelously as it has done during the 

 slow period, when the laden porters car- 

 ried the loads of the missionan', the 

 sugar chest of the trader, and the 

 weights of the steamer up to Uganda, 

 what will be its rate of progress now 

 that Uganda is brought within two and 

 a half days of the sea? While con- 



