Being Persuaded That Mr. Oswell And Myself
Were The Very First Europeans Who Ever Visited The Zambesi
In The Centre
Of the country, and that this is the connecting link
between the known and unknown portions of that river, I
Decided to use
the same liberty as the Makololo did, and gave the only English name
I have affixed to any part of the country. No better proof
of previous ignorance of this river could be desired than that
an untraveled gentleman, who had spent a great part of his life
in the study of the geography of Africa, and knew every thing
written on the subject from the time of Ptolemy downward,
actually asserted in the "Athenaeum", while I was coming up the Red Sea,
that this magnificent river, the Leeambye, had "no connection
with the Zambesi, but flowed under the Kalahari Desert, and became lost;"
and "that, as all the old maps asserted, the Zambesi took its rise
in the very hills to which we have now come." This modest assertion
smacks exactly as if a native of Timbuctoo should declare
that the "Thames" and the "Pool" were different rivers, he having seen
neither the one nor the other. Leeambye and Zambesi mean the very same thing,
viz., the RIVER.
Sekeletu intended to accompany me, but, one canoe only having come
instead of the two he had ordered, he resigned it to me.
After twenty minutes' sail from Kalai we came in sight,
for the first time, of the columns of vapor appropriately called "smoke",
rising at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when
large tracts of grass are burned in Africa.
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