The Stanley expedition reaches the Lualaba after…

The Stanley expedition reaches the Lualaba after fory-three days and three hundred and fofry miles (five hundred and fifty kilometers), on October 17, 1876.

Overland they reach Nyangwe, where Tippu Tip has his slave trading center.

Tippu Tip is warlord and master of the area, where tribes are ferociously fighting any intruder, for fear of enslavement or for a meal: cannibalism thrives in this area.

Livingstone had not succeeded getting through (neither had Vernon Cameron in 1874, as Stanley had heard in Ujiji), so they both had turned south into lesser relevant researches, but Stanley convinces Tippu Tip, and hires from him a force to guard him for the next hundred or so miles (one hundred and fifty kilometers).

The deal is to have protection for ninety days, for four hours each day.

One of Stanley’s missions is to solve a last great mystery of African exploration by tracing the course of the Congo River to the sea.

The difficulty of this expedition is hard to overstate.

His first encounter with local tribes is with the Wenya, who are cannibals.

In total, Stanley will report thirty-two unfriendly meetings on the river, sometimes including shootings and killings.

He prefers trading and negotiating a peaceful thoroughfare, but the tribes are wary of slave traders.

The fact that he has not come to steal people, but is just traveling the river, is difficult to explain.

Also, trading and dealing for peace and food would take several days, and would cost him trading goods, so speeding along, with the flow, is preferable.