I rather stupidly took up the same idea from a map saying
'Zambesi' (eastern branch), believing that the map printer
had some authority for his assertion. My first crossing was
thus as fruitless as theirs, and I was less excusable, for I
ought to have remembered that while Chambeze is the true
native name of the northern river, Zambesi is not the name of
the southern river at all. It is a Portugese corruption of
Dombazi, which we adopted rather than introduce confusion by
new names, in the same way that we adopted Nyassa instead of
Nyanza ia Nyinyesi == Lake of the Stars, which the
Portuguese, from hearsay, corrupted into Nyassa. The English
have been worse propagators of nonsense than Portuguese.
'Geography of Nyassa' was thought to be a learned way of
writing the name, though 'Nyassi' means long grass and
nothing else. It took me twenty-two months to eliminate the
error into which I was led, and then it was not by my own
acuteness, but by the chief Cazembe, who was lately routed
and slain by a party of Banyamwezi. He gave me the first hint
of the truth, and that rather in a bantering strain: 'One
piece of water is just like another; Bangweolo water is just
like Moero water, Chambeze water like Luapula water; they are
all the same; but your chief ordered you to go to the
Bangweolo, therefore by all means go, but wait a few days,
till I have looked out for good men as guides, and good food
for you to eat,' etc. etc.

"I was not sure but that it was all royal chaff, till I made
my way back south to the head-waters again, and had the
natives of the islet Mpabala slowly moving the hands all
around the great expanse, with 183 deg. of sea horizon, and
saying that is Chambeze, forming the great Bangweolo, and
disappearing behind that western headland to change its name
to Luapula, and run down past Cazembe to Moero. That was the
moment of discovery, and not my passage or the Portuguese
passage of the river. If, however, any one chooses to claim
for them the discovery of Chambeze as one line of drainage of
the Nile Valley, I shall not fight with him; Culpepper's
astrology was in the same way the forerunner of the
Herschels' and the other astronomers that followed."

To another old friend, Mr. James Young, he wrote about the same time:
"_Oper