Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (42 page)

Stanley and Livingstone at the mouth of the Rusizi (from
How I Found Livingstone).

So, back at Ujiji, on 13 December, after a trip of 300 miles that had taken just under a month, the two men decided that they would march together to Kazeh. From there, Stanley would return to the coast and send back to Livingstone supplies and picked men, who would accompany the doctor to the Lualaba and trace it downstream with him until he had proved it to be the Nile.
¹⁷

Even as they had started their trip on the lake, Stanley had written in his diary that Livingstone’s manner towards him was
‘benevolently paternal’ and had enabled him ‘to think [himself] somebody, though [he] never suspected it before’. During the voyage Stanley became seriously ill with fever and noted that ‘had he been my father, he could not have been kinder’.
¹⁸
This father and son aspect of their relationship was of immense importance to Stanley, but affected Livingstone too. ‘That good brave fellow has acted as a son to me,’ he would tell his daughter, Agnes.
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Livingstone’s son Robert had fallen out with him, and gone to live in America under an assumed name. In the Civil War, Robert had fought for the Union and had been killed in the battle of Gettysburg. Moved to hear that Stanley had also fought for the Union in the same war (he did not of course mention his desertions), Livingstone asked him to find his son’s grave and place a headstone on it. The doctor also confided how despairing he had felt after his wife’s death.
²⁰
He did not admit that Mary had become an alcoholic during her years in Britain when she had been separated from him during his major African journeys. But even this degree of self-revelation was very rare for Livingstone.

Having grown so fond of his father figure, Stanley did his best to persuade him to come home with him before returning to the Lualaba. The doctor would be able to see his children – his youngest, Anna Mary, being only twelve – and also catch up with old friends. Then there would be a chance to get his teeth fixed and have an operation to remove his piles. But Livingstone was not impressed with these arguments. If he stuck it out for another eighteen months in Africa, he would be able to sort out the Nile’s watershed. His determination and his willingness to risk his life without complaint or self-pity were virtues which Stanley revered. Yet he was horrified when Livingstone told him that he did not intend to go straight to Nyangwe, but to trek hundreds of miles south instead and make a circuit around Lake Bangweulu and all the Lualaba’s sources, such as the Lomani, before following the main river downstream to the north. Stanley had noticed that Livingstone suffered his worst ‘dysenteric attacks’ when he got wet. So wading through the Bangweulu swamps in the rainy season would be the most dangerous course open to him.
²¹

After they reached Unyanyembe, and as the time for leaving grew closer, Stanley feared that he would never see his friend again after they parted. He knew that Livingstone would die in the attempt rather than turn back. ‘I am not made for an African explorer … I detest the land most heartily,’ Stanley confessed in his diary in November 1871, and three months later admitted to fearing that he would end up ‘under the sable soil’ of Africa if he returned there.
²²
So why did Stanley, who was not conventionally religious and had suffered attacks of fever at a rate of almost one a week since mid-November, come to feel soon after returning to Britain that, if Livingstone were to die, it would be his duty to finish the dead man’s work? The answer was his love and admiration for Livingstone. The impact on Stanley of this idealist with a philanthropic vision for a whole continent – for which he was ready to give up his life – was overwhelming. To be treated like a son by such a famous and unusual man was the crowning experience of Stanley’s life.

Not that he suspended his critical faculties entirely. Shortly before Stanley marched for the coast, he admitted in his diary that Livingstone was ‘not of such an angelic temper as I believed him to be during my first month with him’. The doctor had shocked him by expressing ‘a strong contempt’ for the missionaries who had come out to the Shire Highlands at his behest, and six of whom had died.
²³
Yet Stanley realised that the man’s weaknesses made his strengths the more remarkable – his bravery, his idealism, his struggle on behalf of victims of the slave trade, his lack of interest in money and social status. Though inclined to be dismissive towards other explorers, Livingstone treated Stanley, the journalist, as an equal. ‘As if,’ marvelled Stanley, ‘I were of his own age or of equal experience.’
²⁴
Stanley adored this lack of condescension. When Livingstone told him about his armchair critics within the RGS and said: ‘If some of them came to Africa they would know what it costs to get a little accurate information about a river,’ Stanley fumed on Livingstone’s behalf.
²⁵

The doctor did have a saintly side to his character, as his diaries undoubtedly prove, and Stanley sensed ‘something seerlike
in him’, as well as his ‘Spartan heroism’.
²⁶
When Livingstone told him sadly: ‘I have lost a great deal of happiness I know by these wanderings. It is as if I had been born to exile,’ Stanley felt a strong bond. His own peripatetic life as a journalist had been a kind of exile and had cost him the love of the woman he had hoped to marry. He also empathised with Livingstone’s dedication to his work, feeling the same need in himself: ‘It is in my nature to toil as it is in the other’s nature to enjoy.’
²⁷

For all these reasons, and because the grief he experienced on parting was, in his own words, ‘greater than any pains I have endured’, he would represent Livingstone as a near saint in his bestseller
How I Found Livingstone,
and
this
would be the image that would go down in history. Livingstone is faultless in the book, as are his adoring longest-serving followers, despite Stanley’s knowledge of their whoring, stealing and drug-taking. Fondness for Livingstone made him turn a blind eye to such things, and he also knew that it made a better story to have found a forgotten saint in Africa than an embittered recluse.

On the evening of 13 March 1872, the day before Stanley left for the coast, Livingstone poured out his thanks ‘with no mincing phrases’, and this caused Stanley to ‘sob [like] a sensitive child of eight’. Though Stanley had suffered ‘successive fevers [and] the semi-madness with which they often plagued [him]’, he sensed strongly, on leaving Livingstone, that he would be the doctor’s ‘obedient and devoted servitor in the future, should there be an occasion when I could prove my zeal’.
²⁸
So, already, Livingstone’s personal influence had led the journalist and fame-seeker to discover within him a need to follow in his hero’s footsteps -even though, when Stanley arrived safely at the coast, he was not yet fully aware of this fact. Whether he would have any chance to play his own part in the Nile quest would depend upon his reception in London.

TWENTY-ONE

Threshing Out the Beaten Straw

On his return to Britain on 1 August 1872, Stanley expected to receive the unstinting praise and admiration of the British people for having rescued their hero. In fact he would soon learn that ‘fame’ was something to ‘detest & shrink from’.
¹
He was met at Dover, not by cheering crowds but by a first cousin and by a half-brother, both embarrassingly drunk. He would find, waiting for him at his London hotel, his Welsh step-father who had come to hound him for a pension.
²
If his family shocked him, so too did his fellow journalists. Many mocked in print the absurd formality of the first words he claimed to have addressed to Livingstone, and their mirth was infectious. Dressmakers’ dummies in shopwindows asked one another: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ and complete strangers roared at him: ‘Stanley, I presume?’
³
More upsetting still was the way in which some newspapers made out that his claim to have found the explorer was fraudulent. Until Livingstone’s journals, which Stanley had brought back from Africa, could be authenticated by the Foreign Office and the family, the press hinted that he might only have pretended to have found the doctor.
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But most serious of all – because it would affect his future prospects of getting back to Africa – was the hostility of the Royal Geographical Society. Because the RGS had despatched a ‘Livingstone Relief Expedition’, which had only just landed at Bagamoyo when Stanley had swept through in triumph, the council of that august body ignored the recently arrived ‘American penny-a-liner’ out of pique.
En route
to London, Stanley had foolishly attacked John Kirk, the British Consul in Zanzibar, in a speech he gave at a Paris banquet given for him by the American ambassador.

John Kirk.

Although Kirk had been helpful to Stanley before he began his journey, the traveller had spotted at Bagamoyo a large quantity of stores, bought for Livingstone with British government funds, which had evidently been dumped there and plundered by the men engaged to carry the sacks and boxes into the interior. According to Stanley, Kirk should have checked up at intervals, rather than discovered the situation by chance on a hunting trip to the mainland. Stanley also mentioned that the US Consul, Francis Webb, had sent him eleven packets of mail while he was with Livingstone, but that the doctor had received nothing at all from Kirk during the same period.
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John Kirk was related by marriage to Horace Waller, who had been in the Shire Highlands with Livingstone and was on the main committee of the RGS. Unfortunately for Stanley, Sir Roderick Murchison had died a few months earlier, and the new President, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, was a close friend of Waller and was horrified to be told by him that Stanley had slandered Kirk. Rawlinson
trumpeted for the benefit of journalists: ‘If there has been any discovery and relief it is Dr Livingstone who has discovered and relieved Mr Stanley.’
⁶

The publication of Livingstone’s grateful letters put a stop to such nonsense, but when Stanley addressed the geography section of the British Association on 16 August in Brighton, the eugenicist, traveller and RGS committee member, Francis Galton, who was in the chair, insulted him by describing his speech as ‘sensational stories’. He also asked Stanley directly whether he was Welsh.
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Stories to this effect had appeared in the Welsh press, and Stanley had denied them all with such vigour that he was already being described as ‘a Missourian’ in various papers.
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Yet he knew that he might in the end fail to conceal his workhouse origins and his illegitimacy, when men like Galton were so determined to discredit and belittle him. At least Livingstone stuck by him. When Livingstone heard that Kirk had been saying that Stanley was going ‘to make his fortune out of him’, he told his son, Oswell, that Stanley was ‘heartily welcome for he saved me a wearisome tramp … and probably saved my life’. Nor did Livingstone ever forgive Kirk for having sent Banian slaves to Manyema rather than free men.
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Meanwhile Stanley lived in fear of what his enemies, and his family, might do to him. ‘I am constantly apprehensive as though some great calamity impended over me … I have smacked my lips over the flavour of fame – but the substance is useless to me – as it may be taken away at any time.’
¹⁰
Already an enterprising London publisher, John Camden Hotten, was preparing a biography of him for the press, and had interviewed his mother and other relations. Stanley wrote at once to
The Times
to repudiate ‘anything and everything he [Hotten] may relate concerning me and mine’.
¹¹
He did make two good friends at this unhappy time: Edwin Arnold, editor of the
Daily Telegraph,
and Edward Marston, his publisher. Through Arnold’s influence he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria and this late show of royal favour led the RGS
to award him, albeit grudgingly, their Patron’s Gold Medal for his trip with Livingstone to the Rusizi.

But the attacks in the press and the constant efforts he had been forced to make to preserve his American identity made him feel tense and unhappy. He saw more clearly than ever that Africa had actually been a sanctuary, and so might become one again.