Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (39 page)

Livingstone had little or no control over these new arrivals who absented themselves for days at a time and even murdered three Manyema villagers, apparently in emulation of the slave traders. It horrified Livingstone that the Indian owners of these murderers were British subjects.
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The Arabs also did their best
to thwart Livingstone by buying up all the available canoes, to stop him going downstream and reporting on the mayhem they were causing to the north of Nyangwe. This did not stop him hoping that he would soon manage to buy a canoe from one of these slave traders.

Then, on 15 July, Livingstone witnessed the massacre of over 400 African residents of Nyangwe, some shot down in the market place and others drowned in a nearby creek in their panic to escape. After that, Livingstone’s will to continue down the river collapsed. He could no longer bring himself to beg Dugumbé and other leading Arabs to sell him the canoes he so desperately needed. So his only option was to return to Ujiji on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, where he expected to find fresh stores sent from the coast by Kirk. He turned his back on the river on 20 July 1871, and in deep depression began the 200-mile march to the east. His fourteen men included the ten
banian
slaves, and he was also accompanied by an unknown number of women with whom they cohabited.
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During the next three months, he survived two attempts to kill him by African spearmen, who took him for a slave trader. By 7 August he was ‘ill and almost every step in pain’. He suffered not just from bleeding piles but also from chronic diarrhoea which left him thin and very weak.
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He ought to have been operated on in England, but had been too busy raising funds for his expedition and had never found the time. Sorghum flour, which he had been unable to buy from villagers before mid-September, now became available and strengthened him a little. But his condition remained parlous.

I felt as if dying on my feet. Almost every step I was in pain, the appetite failed, and a little meat caused violent vomiting, whilst the mind, sorely depressed, reacted on the body. All the traders were returning successful: I alone had failed and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in sight of the end towards which I strained.
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He crossed Lake Tanganyika in a hired canoe, and reached Ujiji on 23 October ‘now reduced to a skeleton’. After a couple of hours, he discovered that the supplies which Kirk had sent
from the coast had arrived but been stolen and sold off by the man who had brought them, and by other Arab traders in the town. The goods had been worth £600 and all were gone. All Livingstone had left with which to buy food was a few yards of calico. After fleeing from Nyangwe to avoid depending on Arabs, it was horribly ironic that he seemed doomed to have to beg from Arab slave traders in Ujiji in order to survive. To make matters worse, Sherif Bosher, who had sold off all the goods, had used the proceeds to buy ivory which was still in the town under lock and key. But none of Ujiji’s three principal men would allow Livingstone to reclaim what had been bought with his stolen property. There seemed no realistic hope now that he would be able to pay for the milch goats, wheaten flour and fish needed for his recovery. As for returning to the Lualaba – that had become a pipe-dream. He admitted in a letter to a friend: ‘I was like the man who went from Jerusalem to Jericho, but no Good Samaritan would come the Ujijian way.’
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Incredibly, he was wrong. Less than a week later a young Welshman, masquerading as an American, was camped on a hillside a few miles from Ujiji, gazing down ‘as in a painted picture, at the vast lake … set in a frame of dimly blue mountains’. It was an ecstatic moment for him.
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How this man came to be an explorer and then to change David Livingstone’s life, and even his place in history, is a very strange story indeed. It is also an essential strand in the saga of how the Nile mystery finally came to be solved.

NINETEEN

Never to Give Up the Search Until I Find Livingstone

John Rowlands, who would one day be known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley, was born in the small market town of Denbigh in north Wales in 1841. He was the firstborn of a feckless eighteen-year-old barmaid, Elizabeth Parry, who deserted him as a very young baby, and would go on to have five more children – by two, or possibly three other men – only the last being born in wedlock. John never knew his father, whose identity remains uncertain. He was reputed to have been either a local solicitor, or a farm labourer, both of whom became alcoholics and died prematurely.
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John Rowlands was brought up by his maternal grandfather, a retired butcher, who had a fatal heart attack when his grandson was five. For six months after this disaster, John was boarded out with a middle-aged couple near his old home, but his two uncles, who were prosperous local tradesmen, suddenly stopped paying for his keep, and the couple told their eldest son, Dick, to take little John Rowlands to St Asaph Workhouse. During the eight-mile walk Dick told John that he was being taken to live with an aunt, whose farm lay in the same direction. When they arrived at the doors of the workhouse, Dick rang a bell that clanged deep within the building, and then turned to leave, saying sheepishly, when asked where he was going: ‘To buy cakes for you.’
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‘Since that dreadful evening,’ Stanley wrote fifty years later, ‘my resentment has not a whit abated … It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than me, had employed compulsion, instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child’s heart.’
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This day of betrayal was the most formative in Rowlands’s young life, since it seemed
to echo that earlier abandonment by his parents, reinforcing his conviction that his family thought him worthless. Certainly, nobody could possibly have imagined that this deserted, penniless boy would one day be able to attract the substantial sums required for African exploration. As a workhouse boy for nine years, Rowlands knew that in a cruelly snobbish society he was the lowest of the low but, instead of being crushed by it, this knowledge fired him with fierce determination to prove wrong all those who had rejected him.

In December 1850, when he was not quite ten, the master took him aside during the dinner-hour and, ‘pointing to a woman with a coil of dark hair behind her head’, asked him if he knew her.

‘No, sir,’ I replied.

‘What, do you not know your own mother?’

I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed as with a snap.
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His mother had not come to the workhouse to see him, but had been admitted herself as a destitute pauper with two of her other children. Yet, far from freezing out every fond feeling for her, John vowed that he would win this aloof woman’s love. As the cleverest boy in the workhouse school, this should have been possible, but his mother after her discharge a few days later never returned to see him. Even the fact of his being picked out by the master as a future trainee-teacher made no difference.

Workhouse inmates wore suits made from fustian (rough flannel); they rose at six, washed in cold water, performed menial tasks, and if admitted with parents or brothers and sisters were immediately separated from them. However, some of the abler children learned to read, write, and do simple sums. While at the workhouse, John read David Livingstone’s first book,
Missionary Travels,
which made a lasting impression on him.
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Very few of his fellow pupils could have mastered a book like that. Educational standards had been very low when Rowlands had arrived at St Asaph, but improved steadily during his long residence.
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People shut up for years in institutions often harbour fantasies of escape, of climbing over walls, living in woods and
walking for miles towards far horizons. It is not fanciful to suppose that John’s virtual imprisonment as a boy predisposed him to explore a limitless continent.
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John was discharged from St Asaph aged fifteen, and two years later was working as a butcher’s boy in Liverpool where an aunt and uncle had taken him in. They were so poor that they took his savings of a guinea and pawned his only suit. One day, when delivering meat to an American packet-ship in the docks, he decided to emigrate. He was not quite eighteen and it was one of the bravest decisions of his life.

Although Stanley would later claim that in New Orleans -where he jumped ship – he was adopted by a wealthy cotton broker called Henry Stanley, in reality he never met the man.
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Ever since his arrival at St Asaph Workhouse, Rowlands had longed to be part of a functioning family. In America he simply pretended that his longstanding fantasy had come true. This was no ordinary lying. John’s parents had denied him an identity and he had felt an overwhelming need to invent one.

On first arriving in New Orleans in February 1859, he worked in a wholesale warehouse, which supplied goods to Mississippi riverboats for delivery to upriver towns and settlements. When the owner of this business died suddenly eight months later, Rowlands lost his job, and briefly became an assistant cook on riverboats, before finding employment in an upriver store at Cypress Bends, near Little Rock, Arkansas. Here he started calling himself Henry Stanley, which was a name he had first seen printed on sacks of cotton in the wholesale warehouse. He must have liked the way it looked and sounded. Henry Hope Stanley – to give that prosperous New Orleans businessman his full name – owned most of the machinery used to compress and bag raw cotton in the city. It clearly appealed to John Rowlands to assume the name of a rich cotton broker and factory owner, partly in the belief that the name itself had the power to confer on its new user some of its original possessor’s glamour. It had long been Rowlands’s desire, he wrote later, to ‘rid myself of the odium attached to an old name and its dolorous history’.
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So how did he do it? Initially, by introducing himself as Henry Stanley when applying for that job at Cypress Bends. Then, in August 1860, a census-taker called at the store, and nineteen-year-old John Rowlands gave his name as William Henry Stanley. William would be dropped within a year, but Henry Stanley would survive, only finally to be augmented with Morton as a second name in 1872.
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When the American Civil War started, the other shop boys at Cypress Bends at once enlisted to fight for the South. Being a foreigner, Stanley did not think of it as his war, but the arrival of an anonymous gift of female underwear – the equivalent of a white feather – changed his mind. In April 1862, he fought in the bloody battle of Shiloh, was captured, and taken to a federal prison camp outside Chicago. Large numbers of men were dying of typhoid. So when the camp commandant offered to release him on condition that he joined the Union Army, Stanley changed sides to save his life. But after a spell in hospital recovering from dysentery, he deserted once more.

Sick and penniless, he headed east, intent on working his passage back to Britain. He had heard that his mother was now the licensee of two public houses, and so was in a position to help him at last. On docking in Liverpool, he walked fifty miles to the village where his mother kept one of her pubs. On arriving, worn out and emaciated, Stanley knocked on the side door.

My mother opened it, aghast at seeing me. She said little – but what she did say will never be forgotten … ‘Never come back to me again unless you are in far better circumstances than you seem to be in now.’
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Back in America, Stanley risked joining the Union Navy, calling himself Henry Stanley, under which name he had deserted from the Union army. Captured deserters were imprisoned, or even shot or hanged. On board ship, he made friends with a sixteen-year-old ship’s messenger, Lewis Noe, who remembered that Stanley spent many hours every day reading travel books by authors like Richard Burton and Alexander Kinglake, and said that he would have adventures of his own. As the navy’s part in the Civil War fizzled out, Noe and Stanley deserted and
set about saving money from a bizarre assortment of temporary jobs – including gold prospecting and clerking for a judge – so they could go travelling. Stanley’s aim was to journey through Turkey, then on to India and China. On his return he meant to write a bestselling book. But nothing went to plan. From the day of their arrival in Turkey, they were short of money and equipment. After attempting to steal a horse from a Turkish merchant, the adventurers were themselves robbed, kidnapped, beaten up, and in Noe’s case raped. They would have been destitute and helpless had not the American consul in Constantinople lent them money.

Their expedition had failed spectacularly, but Stanley still meant to impress his mother. Before leaving Turkey, he paid a tailor with part of the consul’s money to make a copy of a US naval officer’s uniform which, on arrival in Denbigh, he wore for the best part of a month.
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Now that he appeared to have money and rank, his mother, Elizabeth Jones, invited him to spend Christmas at the larger of her two pubs with his half-siblings and with the man she had recently married. These were the first days Stanley had ever spent with his mother, and his family.
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