...bringing some eight hundred loads of stores…

...bringing some eight hundred loads of stores and ammunition to Leopoldville on the Stanley Pool.

Progress is slow, since the rainy season is at its height, and food is short—a problem that is to be persistent throughout the expedition (as a subsistence economy, the area along the route rarely has spare food for one thousand hardworking men).

The expedition arrives at Leopoldville on April 21.

Although King Leopold had promised a flotilla of river steamers, only one (the Stanley) works; Stanley requisitions two (Peace and Henry Reed) from missionaries of the Baptist Mission and the Livingstone Inland Mission, whose protests are overridden, and the Florida, which is still under construction and so used as a barge.

Even these are insufficient, so many of the stores are left at Leopoldville and more at Bolobo.

At this point Stanley also announces the division of the expedition into a "Rear Column" and an "Advance Column", the former to encamp at Yambuya on the Aruwimi, while the Advance Column presses on to Equatoria.