He thought that it
might be the upper reaches of the Nile, which had been sought by men
through thousands of years, but which none had ever explored.
Livingstone died in that hut (1873) and never knew what Stanley,
following in his footsteps, discovered later (1876-7), viz., that the
Luapula was really the upper stretch of the Congo, the second largest
river in the world (3000 miles long), flowing into the Atlantic. The
basin of the Congo would cover the whole of Europe from the Black Sea
to the English Channel.
In the year when Livingstone died, and before Stanley started to
explore the Congo, a young man, who had been thrilled by reading the
travels of Livingstone, sailed to the West Coast of Africa to the
Kameruns.
His name was George Grenfell, a Cornish boy (born at Sancreed, four
miles from Penzance, in England), who was brought up in Birmingham.
He was apprenticed at fifteen to a firm of hardware and machinery
dealers. Here he picked up, as a lad, some knowledge of machinery that
helped him later on the Congo. He had been thrilled to meet at Bristol
College, where he was trained for his missionary work, a thin, worn,
heroic man of tried steel, Alfred Saker, the great Kamerun missionary,
and Grenfell leapt for joy to go out to the dangerous West Coast of
Africa, where he worked hard, teaching the Africans to make tables and
bricks and to print and read, healing them and preaching to them.
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