THE FOUNDING OF THE CONGO INDEPENDENT STATE 41
same year — 1894 — Great Britain signed a boundary
convention with the Congo State by which, in exchange
for leaseholds on a part of Bahr-el-Ghazal and on the Lado
Enclave, she was to receive a recognition of her claims to
the rest of the Sudan, a piece of land at the southwest corner
of Lake Tanganyika, and a narrow strip of territory con-
necting Uganda with the lake. Unfortunately this agree-
ment aroused such lively protests from Germany that Eng-
land was forced to give up the small piece of land between
Ankole and Tanganyika, which would have allowed the
completion of a British-Belgian Cape to Cairo route; and the
Congo State was compelled by France to limit her territory
on the northeast at the Mbomu River. The Belgians, how-
ever, leased Lado from the British and went ahead with its
occupation; and, after defeating the followers of the Mahdi
in two important engagements, Captain Chaltin, in Febru-
ary, 1897, raised the Congo flag at Rejaf, opposite Gondo-
koro.
The work of exploring the Congo Basin was greatly fur-
thered and well-nigh completed through the efforts of George
Grenfell,! who spent twenty-six years on the Congo in the
service of the Baptist Missionary Society, dying at Basoko
on July 1, 1906. He traveled thousands of miles on the main
stream and its great tributaries, making an accurate topo-
graphical study of the country as he proceeded. He made a
fine detailed map of the Congo from Stanley Pool to Stan-
ley Falls; and, from May, 1892, to June, 1893, he led the
Lunda Expedition which met the Portuguese commission
on the Kwango and delimited the Congo-Portuguese bound-
ary line. Beginning with the Ubangi, the Mongala, and the
Lomami in 1884, he explored one after the other the ex-
tensive water-courses that feed the Congo until he reached
1 The best account of the life and work of Grenfell is Sir Harry Johnston’s
George Grenfell and the Congo. 2 vols. D. Appleton & Co., 1910.
