442 DA VID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. xxii. 



sons to the chieftainship, instead of the heir-apparent. Food was 

 not to be had for either love or money. 



" I was at the mercy of guides who did not know their own 

 country, and when I insisted on following the compass, they threatened, 

 ' no food for five or ten days in that line.' They brought us 

 down to the back or north side of Bangweolo, while I wanted to 

 cross the Chambeze and go round its southern side. So back again 

 south-eastwards we had to bend. The Portuguese crossed this Chambeze 

 a long time ago, and are therefore the first European discoverers. 

 We were not black men with Portuguese names like those for whom 

 the feat of crossing the continent was eagerly claimed by Lisbon states- 

 men. Dr. Lacerda was a man of scientific attainments, and Governor 

 of Tette, but finding Cazembe at the rivulet called Chungu, he unfor- 

 tunately succumbed to fever ten days after his arrival. He seemed 

 anxious to make his way across to Angola. Misled by the similarity 

 of Chambeze to Zambesi, they all thought it to be a branch of the river 

 that flows past Tette, Senna, and Shupanga, by Luabo and Kongone to 

 the sea. 



" I rather stupidly took up the same idea from a map saying 

 ' Zambesi ' (eastern branch), believing that the map printer had some 

 authority for his assertion. My first crossing was thus as fruitless as 

 theirs, and I was less excusable, for I ought to have remembered that 

 while Chambeze is the true native name of the northern river, Zambesi 

 is not the name of the southern river at all. It is a Portuguese cor- 

 ruption of Dombazi, which we adopted rather than introduce confusion 

 by new names, in the same way that we adopted Nyassa instead of 

 Nyanza ia Nyinyesi =r Lake of the Stars, which the Portuguese, from 

 hearsay, corrupted into Nyassa. The English have been worse propa- 

 gators of nonsense than Portuguese. ' Geography of Nyassa ' was 

 thought to be a learned way of writing the name, though ' Nyassi ' 

 means long grass and nothing else. It took me twenty-two months to 

 eliminate the error into which I was led, and then it was not by my own 

 acuteness, but by the chief Cazembe, who was lately routed and slain 

 by a party of Banyamwezi. He gave me the first hint of the truth, 

 and that rather in a bantering strain : ' One piece of water is just like 

 another ; Bangweolo water is just like Moero water, Chambeze water 

 like Luapula water ; they are all the same ; but your chief ordered you 

 to go to the Bangweolo, therefore by all means go, but wait a few days, 

 till I have looked out for good men as guides, and good food for you to 

 eat,' etc. etc. 



" I was not sure but that it was all royal chaff, till I made 

 my way back south to the head-waters again, and had the natives of 

 the islet Mpabala slowly moving the hands all around the great ex- 

 panse, with 183° of sea horizon, and saying that is Chambeze, forming 

 the great Bangweolo, and disappearing behind that western headland 

 to change its name to Luapula, and run down past Cazembe to Moero. 

 That was the moment of discovery, and not my passage or the Portu- 



