Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (43 page)

What a contrast this world [fashionable London] is to the sinless peaceful life that I enjoyed in Africa. One brings me an inordinate amount of secret pain, the other sapped my physical strength but left my mind expanded and was purifying.
¹²

In the vastness of Africa, as ruler of his small party – away from the social pettiness of north Wales, from the greed and cruelty of the slave-owning Deep South – he had felt freed from everything he had been. Hundreds of miles from any other white person, surrounded by the endless bush, with Kalulu, the African youth he had rescued from Arab slavers, and Selim, his young Syrian interpreter, and Uledi and Bombay and his other servants lying sleeping around the large campfire every night, he had felt at peace. With them he had known that he ‘could talk without a chance remark being flung & broadcast before readers’.
¹³
They had driven him mad at times, and as was the practice of all European travellers of the period, he had beaten them for theft and attempted desertion. But when he had sailed from Bagamoyo, he had written in his diary: ‘I felt strange and lonely, somehow. My dark friends, who had travelled over so many hundreds of miles, and shared so many dangers with me, were gone, and I – I was left behind.’
¹⁴
The thought of returning to Africa became increasingly attractive to him as his disillusionment with metropolitan life deepened.

Yet some good did undoubtedly come from Stanley’s time in London. He had brought to England Livingstone’s journals and his despatches, including his description of the Nyangwe massacre, just when a House of Commons Select Committee was considering whether to recommend abolition of the seaborne Arab trade. It did so in September 1872 in no small measure
due to the arrival of Livingstone’s evidence. Under threat of bombardment by the Royal Navy, the Sultan would close the Zanzibar slave market forever on 5 June 1873. This was a great step towards curing what Livingstone had described as ‘this open sore of the world’.
¹⁵

But that triumph lay many months ahead, and in October 1872, eight weeks after his return to Europe, Stanley was beginning to feel that he had made a serious mistake not to accept Livingstone’s invitation to navigate the Lualaba with him. He approached Clements Markham, the secretary of the RGS, who only weeks earlier had tried, unsuccessfully, to deny him the Society’s Gold Medal. Now, Markham rejected his offer to return to Africa and sort out the Nile’s watershed, and purposely neglected to tell him that the RGS was about to send a young naval officer, Lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron, to assist Livingstone. Stanley found out anyway and felt desperate enough to write humbly to Cameron offering his services. Like Markham, Cameron rebuffed ‘the American’.
¹⁶

Stanley knew that the
New York Herald
would not send him back to Africa while it was on the cards that Livingstone might solve the mystery singlehandedly, or with Cameron’s help. Indeed, after Stanley had enjoyed a prolonged rest and had given some lectures in America, Gordon Bennett sent him to report on a minor British military campaign in West Africa. To be an ordinary war correspondent again came as a painful anticlimax.

The memory of his happiness with Livingstone haunted Stanley. ‘I seem to see through the dim, misty, warm, hazy atmosphere of Africa, always the aged face of Livingstone, urging me on in his kind, fatherly way.’
¹⁷
Yet Stanley could see no way to help his friend again. On the sea voyage back to Britain, it seemed that all he could do was wait impotently until Livingstone or Cameron solved the mystery of the Nile. Stanley’s own career as a Nile explorer seemed to be over. While lecturing in America, he had written to Louis Jennings, editor of the
New York Times,
imploring him to send him back to Africa to sort out the Central African watershed. Jennings’s reply felt like the
coup de gracâ
to his hopes: ‘We think on careful reflection that another African expedition would be like threshing out the beaten straw. A second enterprise of that sort could not possibly equal the success of the first.’
¹⁸

TWENTY-TWO

Nothing Earthly Will Make Me Give Up My Work

Before Stanley had left Zanzibar on his homeward journey to England, he had taken immense pains to choose for David Livingstone fifty-six men, twenty of whom had served on his journey to Ujiji. He had equipped each man with a musket and ammunition, and had also provided flour, sugar, coffee, tea, numerous varieties of tinned food, hundreds of yards of cloth, and two riding donkeys. Stanley sent to his friend a letter, which reflected the sharp contrasts of the man himself, juxtaposing in a single paragraph affection, self-interest and exhortation for the success of his Nile mission.

My dear Doctor, very few amongst men have I found I so much got to love as yourself … England and America expect their people to do their duty. Do yours as persistently as heretofore & come back to your friends and country to be crowned with the laurel, and I will go forth to do mine … Do not forget the Herald please. The Herald will be grateful to me for securing you as a Correspondent.
¹

Livingstone had to wait almost six months for Stanley’s men and goods to arrive. But on 9 August 1872 an advance party of carriers marched into Tabora. ‘How thankful I am I cannot confess,’ the doctor wrote in his journal.
²
With the five followers, who had been with him since 1866 – Abdullah Susi, James Chuma, Hamoydah Amoda, Mabruki (Nathaniel Cumba) and Edward Gardner – he had sixty-one men now, some of them accompanied by wives, mistresses, and even by slaves. But despite his disapproval, he knew that he had never been better supplied. In fact he felt optimistic enough about his chances of completing his work to write to a friend, asking him to find rooms for him
near Regent’s Park in London – ‘comfortable and decent, but not excessively dear’ – and to speak to a dentist ‘about a speedy fitting of artificial teeth’.
³

On his fifty-ninth birthday, 19 March, Livingstone had reaffirmed his faith in his journal:

My Jesus, my King, my life, my all; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, O Gracious Father, that ere this year is gone I may finish my task. In Jesu’s name I ask it. Amen, so let it be. David Livingstone.
⁴

His task was to reach the southern foot of Lake Tanganyika – about 450 miles away to the south-west – then march around Lake Bangweulu and the other ‘four fountains of Herodotus’ -another 500 miles – and finally, having pinpointed and mapped all of the river’s sources, navigate the Lualaba northwards wherever it might go.

On 25 August 1872, he started on his journey, heading towards Lake Tanganyika. It was blisteringly hot, and almost at once a series of mishaps occurred. His best donkey was killed by the tsetse, which also accounted for his ten cows after they had been allowed to stray into a belt of the dreaded fly. Since milk was the only food that restored his health when he had diarrhoea, these misfortunes did not augur well. In the heat his porters became exhausted while climbing in and out of valleys, as they hugged the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Soon their feet were burned and blistered by the soil. Livingstone himself was ill with fever and with dysentery by mid-October and three weeks later he was suffering from anal bleeding. With the rains approaching, he should have abandoned his plan to make a circuit of Lake Bangweulu and its surrounding swamp, but he had been as sick as this before and had suffered far worse conditions in the past, so he saw no reason not to press on.

Serious food shortages in November obliged him to abandon his attempt to pass to the east and then the south of Bangweulu, since local Africans reported even less food in that direction. So he followed his local guide directly to the northern side of the lake as the rains broke. This journey of 170 miles took a month,
and with streams bursting their banks and canoes being needed to cross the larger rivers, he was lucky that it did not take longer. Unfortunately, when he had visited the lake in 1868, a damaged chronometer had led him to take inaccurate longitudes, making the lake appear far bigger than it actually was. He therefore believed he was far to the east of the position to which the guide said he had brought him, so he decided that the man was lying and refused to take his advice about the best way round the lake. So instead of heading south-west as advised (which would have taken him rapidly along the western side of the lake directly to the outflowing Luapula), he headed east, determined in future to ignore African advice. It would prove to be a fatal decision.

Four years earlier, he had decided that the lake was 150 miles from east to west, whereas in fact it was only twenty-five, with a huge area of marshland to its east, measuring about a hundred miles across. The longer he went on in an easterly direction, the more confused he became. Expecting water, he found only endless reeds and mud. When he managed to take new and accurate observations, with his undamaged chronometer, he refused to believe them because they were so different from those taken in better weather conditions in 1868. He concluded that the water had wrecked the reflectors of his sextant.
⁵

They struggled on eastwards through January 1873 before turning south towards the Chambesi – the party rarely managing more than a couple of miles a day. Livingstone’s health was worsening with the cold and wet and lack of decent food. Already he was too weak to ford rivers and streams. On the 24th, he wrote:

Carrying me across one of the broad deep sedgy rivers is really a very difficult task …The first part, the main stream came up to Susi’s mouth, and wetted my seat and legs. One held up my pistol behind, then one after another took a turn, and when one sank into a deep elephant’s footprint, he required two to lift him.
⁶

Not long afterwards, Livingstone was attacked by leeches, which clung to his body ‘as close as smallpox’, yet, as a naturalist, he used the experience to note the shape and size of
their mandibles.
⁷
His diary entries at this harrowing time contain no self-pity and no complaint. The natural descriptions were as detailed as at any time in his life.

Caught in a drenching rain, which made me fain to sit, exhausted as I was under an umbrella for an hour … As I sat in the rain a little tree frog about half an inch long, leaped on to a grassy leaf and began a tune as loud as that of many birds, and very sweet; it was surprising to hear so much music out of so small a musician. I drank some rainwater as I felt faint – in the paths it is now calf deep.
⁸

From now on loss of blood began to affect his thinking. He became more and more obsessive about the Nile and the four fountains of Herodotus, even writing draft despatches to the Foreign Secretary as if he had found them – only dates and geographical positions being omitted. ‘I have the pleasure of reporting to your Lordship that on the [blank] I succeeded at last in reaching your four remarkable fountains, each of which, at no great distance off, become a large river …’
⁹
But, as he listened to the falling rain and the screams of the fish eagle, old doubts assailed him, to do with the height of the Lualaba at Nyangwe. Might he be at the source of the Congo rather than the Nile? He soon dismissed the thought and gave all his remaining energy to acquiring canoes to take him south through the marshes. At night, in the pouring rain the doctor and his men sheltered under their upturned canoes after the wind had torn their tents from their hands. ‘A man put my bed into the bilge, so I was safe for a wet night.’
¹⁰

On 25 March he wrote: ‘Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair. I encourage myself in the Lord my God and go forward.’ The following day they crossed the Chambesi, which flowed from the east into Lake Bangweulu and would one day be confirmed to be the most remote headstream of the Lualaba. A slave girl, belonging to Livingstone’s long-serving follower Hamoydah Amoda, was drowned during the crossing. On 10 April, Livingstone at last admitted the gravity of his position: ‘I am pale, bloodless and weak from bleeding profusely ever since the 31st of March last: an artery gives off a copious stream
and takes away my strength. Oh! how I long to be permitted by the Over Power to finish my work.’
¹¹

At last they were on firmer ground beyond the immense marsh, travelling south-west. Though Livingstone had been content to be carried across streams, he hated being carried over land, but there was no hiding the fact that any exertion made him dizzy, so there was no help for it. He recorded how ‘unearthly’ he found the voice of the fish eagle. ‘It is pitched in a high falsetto key, very loud and seems as if he were calling to someone in the other world.’
¹²