climate— Long after I had constructed Leopoldville’s block
house, the natives of Kintambu district informed me
that a village once stood on the same spot. A few oil
palms and pieces of crockery had caused me to suspect
this. Since I have been enlightened by my sick lists,
and followed up this interesting research into the
causes of the disastrous sickness experienced there, I
have often condemned myself for m y ' remarkable
blindness. As an excuse I could only plead that I was
•searching after a totally different cause in a diametrically
opposite direction. I was searching for things and
places that bred miasma, such as decaying vegetable
bodies, deposits of ooze, stagnant creeks, flat-bottomed
gullies, fat with damp alluvium, quick breeding hollows,
rank masses of vegetation, that I might avoid them, if
possible; for doctors, by their many books, of which I
had a store, gave me the benefit of their collective
wisdom-—and what is wisdom but aggregate experience?—
and pointed out to me that such places were
productive of malaria. I wished to avoid the sources
of malaria, and at Yivi I built, 340 feet above the
river, on a solid concrete platform of rock, and dared
to defy the tropic heat. I constructed Manyanga on
the crown of a hill, and nothing stagnant or malarious
could possibly exist within several days’ journey of the
station. But when my white comrades began to droop
and fade away, when their strength, their youth, their
morality, and their unimpeachable virtue seemed of no
avail, and death claimed its victims one after another,
I must admit that utter bewilderment took possession
of me. At length the upper station’s extraordinary climate—
i . . , Part I.
good sanitary condition awoke? my interest, while the
station of Kinshassa, only five miles from Leopoldville,
seemed also to afford me a clue; and passing rapidly
through the entire lines of the stations, obtaining from
each officer in charge his reports, and noting clearly as
I went the position of each, I saw that our stations
were in a strange comminglement of the healthy and
unhealthy. By arranging these in tabular order, a
clearer idea of the truth flashed upon me. This I
have endeavoured in plain simple language to convey
to the general understanding of such men as may now
reside on the Congo, or may choose in future time to
emigrate there, whether as agents of the new State,
missionaries, traders, tourists, explorers, agriculturists,
or miners.
Added to the victims of these cold draughts, which
greatly outnumber all others,_ were those whose*' constitutions
failed by living in malarious hollows, followed
by those who led impure and intemperate lives, next
by those who required more nourishing pabula than
our present circumstances would enable us to supply
them with, and lastly, those who fell through accidents,
caused by carelessness, indolence of mind, unreasoning
rashness, natural helplessness, and constitutional physical
weakness.
I t is satisfactory to know that there has been a remarkable
improvement in the health of the Europeans
who have during the last six years resided on the
Congo. In glancing over the lists of names on the
VOL. II. x