Returning home by the Zouga, they had better opportunity to mark the extraordinary richness of the country, and the abundance and luxuriance of its products, both animal and vegetable.  Elephants existed in crowds, and ivory was so abundant that a trader was purchasing it at the rate of ten tusks for a musket worth fifteen shillings.  Two years later, after effect had been given to Livingstone’s discovery, the price had risen very greatly.

Writing to his friend Watt, he dwells with delight on the river Zouga: 

“It is a glorious river; you never saw anything so grand.  The banks are extremely beautiful, lined with gigantic trees, many quite new.  One bore a fruit a foot in length and three inches in diameter.  Another measured seventy feet in circumference.  Apart from the branches it looked like a mass of granite; and then the Bakoba in their canoes—­did I not enjoy sailing in them?  Remember how long I have been in a parched-up land, and answer.  The Bakoba are a fine frank race of men, and seem to understand the message better than any people to whom I have spoken on Divine subjects for the first time.  What think you of a navigable highway into a large section of the interior? yet that the Tamanak’le is....  Who will go into that goodly land?  Who?  Is it not the Niger of this part of Africa?...  I greatly enjoyed sailing in their canoes, rude enough things, hollowed out of the trunks of single trees, and visiting the villages along the Zouga.  I felt but little when I looked on the lake; but the Zouga and Tamanak’le awakened emotions not to be described.  I hope to go up the latter next year.”

The discovery of the lake and the river was communicated to the Royal Geographical Society in extracts from Livingstone’s letters to the London Missionary Society, and to his friend and former fellow-traveler, Captain Steele.  In 1849 the Society voted him a sum of twenty-five guineas “for his successful journey, in company with Messrs. Oswell and Murray, across the South African desert, for the discovery of an interesting country, a fine river, and an extensive inland lake.”  In addressing Dr. Tidman and Alderman Challis, who represented the London Missionary Society, the President (the late Captain, afterward Rear-Admiral, W. Smyth, R.N., who distinguished himself in early life by his journey across the Andes to Lima, and thence to the Atlantic) adverted to the value of the discoveries in themselves, and in the influence they would have on the regions beyond.  He spoke also of the help which Livingstone had derived as an explorer from his influence as a missionary.  The journey he had performed successfully had hitherto baffled the best-furnished travelers.  In 1834, an expedition under Dr. Andrew Smith, the largest and best-appointed that ever left Cape Town, had gone as far as 23 deg. south latitude; but that proved to be the utmost distance they could reach, and they were compelled to return.  Captain Sir James E.