Another favorite topic of early postcards is industry - the colonial enterprise of creating a transportation network, raising cities, and shipping natural resources back to Europe. Much of this was achieved through forced labor. The large numbered panels in this view might have been sections of a riverboat. Because of rapids above the mouth of the Congo, steam-driven boats had to be dismantled and carried hundreds of miles by hand, before the construction of a railway in 1898. (Nels; mailed 1905)