Pioneer (steam launch, Lake Malawi)

[john sefton]

PIONEER (Photograph taken about 1895 at Old Fort Johnston (now Mangochi)) The early history of the PIONEER is similar to that of her sistership the ADVENTURE. She was named after Livingstone's paddle steamer PIONEER which was used on the Zambezi and Shire by his Expedition between 1861-4.
At some point after WWI the gunboat PIONEER was made over to commercial use but for some reason she was never registered and it is therefore difficult to trace what happened.
In 1946 she was bought by a hotel company. Her steam engine was replaced by a petrol one three years later, when she began operating for a fishing concern.
Today (1997) the hull of the PIONEER, many of its side plates stripped off, is beached a few miles north of Mangochi. Length 75'. Beam 12'. Displacement 35 tons. 1 screw.
The information used in this article was reproduced from the -Stamp Bulletin' No 47, of the Malawi Post Office of October 1994.
Log Book May 1997
Malawi SG933


SHIPS OF LAKE MALAWI
It was David Livingstone who first showed the possibilities for missionary and trade enterprise 01 the waterway to Lake Malawi. via the Zambezi and Shire rivers. during his Zambezi expedition. 1858-64. He also suggested ways of overcoming the barrier to navigation presented by the forty miles of cataracts between the lower and upper Shire. Following his lead European missionaries, traders and settlers began to come to the land which is now Malawi. making use 01 the waterway and bringing with them a variety of boats. Those for use on the lake and the upper Shire, which are dealt with in this Guide, had one thing in common, they had to be dismantled into loads small enough to be carried or dragged by porters overland past the cataracts.
By 189'1, when a British Protectorate was declared over the country, the waterway was well established. From ocean liners passengers and goods were transferred, at the mouth 01 the Zambezi. to shallow draught river steamers which took them up that river and along the lower Shire to the foot of the cataracts. After a land journey of some sixty miles through Blantyre they reached Matope or Mpimbi on the upper Shire and from there went by river steamer again as far as Fort Johnston where they transferred to a lake steamer. Navigation on the rivers was always erratic, depending on the depth of water, at bad times the journey might take weeks or be quite impossible. at good times lake steamers of seventy tons or so could get down as far as Matope.
The Zambezi and lower Shire route was gradually phased out from 1908 by the building and subsequent extension of the Shire Highlands Railway, and the upper Shire route by the development of an effective road system to Fort Johnston during the first World War, which coincided with a period of such low water level that the river became at times little more than a swamp. Lake Malawi has continued throughout to be a well used waterway. In the years 1935, when the railway was extended to Chipoka, Nyasaland Railways, now Malawi Railways, took over goods and passenger services on the lake and made Monkey Bay its lake service headquarters. Fort Johnston, which was the chief port for the lake in the earlier years, has now been renamed Mangochi.