Note 545 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

The quieter water of rivers and lakes offered the most favorable conditions for the feeble beginnings of navigation, but the step from inland to marine navigation was not always taken. The Egyptians, who had well-constructed river and marine boats, resigned their maritime commerce to Phoenicians and Greeks, probably, as has been shown, because the silted channels and swamps of the outer Nile delta held them at arm's length from the sea. Similarly the equatorial lakes of Central Africa have proved fair schools of navigation, where the art has passed the initial stages of development. The kingdom of Uganda on Victoria Nyanza, at the time of Stanley's visit, could muster a war fleet of 325 boats, a hundred of them measuring from fifty to seventy feet in length; the largest were manned by a crew of sixty-four paddlers and could carry as many more fighting men.545 The long plateau course of the mighty Congo has bred a race of river navigators, issuing from their riparian villages to attack the traveler in big flotillas of canoes ranging from fifty to eighty-five feet in length, the largest of them driven through the water by eighty paddlers and steered by eight more paddles in the stern.546 But the Congo and lake boats are barred from the coast by a series of cataracts, which mark the passage of the drainage streams down the escarpment of the plateau.