ield. I determined to see the undertaking at
first hand.

My experience with it proved to be the most exciting of my whole African
adventure. All that I had hitherto undergone was like a springtime
frolic compared to the journey up the Kasai and through the jungle that
lurks beyond. I saw the war-like savage on his native heath; I travelled
with my own caravan through the forest primeval; I employed every
conceivable kind of transport from the hammock swung on a pole and
carried on the shoulders of husky natives, to the automobile. The
primitive and modern met at almost every stage of the trip which proved
to be first cousin to a thriller from beginning to end. Heretofore I had
been under the spell of the Congo River. Now I was to catch the magic of
its largest tributary, the Kasai.

Long before the Forminiere broke out its banner, America had been
associated with the Congo. It is not generally known that Henry M.
Stanley, who was born John Rowlands, achieved all the feats which made
him an international figure under the name of his American benefactor
who adopted him in New Orleans after he had run away to sea from a Welsh
workhouse. He was for years to all intents and purposes an American, and
carried the American flag on two of his famous expeditions.

President Cleveland was the first chief dignitary of a nation to
recognize the Congo Free State in the eighties, and his name is
perpetuated in Mount Cleveland, near the headwaters of the Congo River.
An American Minister to Belgium, General H. S. Sanford, had a
conspicuous part in all the first International African Associations
formed by King Leopold to study the Congo situation. This contact,
however, save Stanley's share, was diplomatic and a passing phase. It
was the prelude to the constructive and permanent part played by the
American capitalists in the Forminiere, chief of whom is Thomas F. Ryan.

The reading world associates Ryan with the whirlpool of Big Finance. He
ruled New York traction and he recast the tobacco world. Yet nothing
appealed to his imagination and enthusiasm like the Congo. He saw it in
very much the same way that Rhodes viewed Rhodesia. Every great American
master of capital has had his particular pet. There is always some
darling of the financial gods. The late J. P. Morgan, for example,
regarded the United States Steel Corporation as his prize performance
and talked about it just like a doting father speaks of a successful
son. The Uni