Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (44 page)

Livingstone travelling through marshes weeks before his death
(from his published
Last Journals
).

He was now south of Bangweulu and travelling, as he had hoped to do in November, in a broad arc around the lake‘s southern shore. But then he had had the strength to achieve something, whereas now everything was irretrievably changed. He was very ill and in pain all the time, which he put down to fever. ‘Bleeding and most other ailments in this land are forms of it.’ On 19 April, although ‘excessively weak’ and unable to walk, he managed to ride his last surviving donkey for an hour and a half. That evening he wrote a sublime understatement: ‘It is not all pleasure this exploration.’
¹³

The following day he made his last detailed observations, though he was still noting down the number of hours marched each day. On 21 April he fell from his donkey and had to be carried to a hut in the nearby village. Even so he sent men to ask the chief for guides for the following day. Death was now near but he still refused to recognise it. Twenty years earlier, he had written: ‘If God has accepted my service, then my life is charmed till my work is done.’
¹⁴
And his work was definitely not yet completed. On the 25th, after four days of being carried in a litter, the dying man summoned a number of local men and asked if any knew about a hill and four adjacent fountains. To his great disappointment, all shook their heads. The last entry in his diary was written on 27 April: ‘Knocked up quite and remain: recover, sent to buy milch goats. We are on the banks of the R Molilamo.’
¹⁵
But the goats could not be found, and he could not eat the pounded mapira corn offered to him.

Amazingly on the 29th, he told his men to dismantle his hut, so that the litter could be brought right up to his bed. He could not have walked to the door of the hut and yet, while life remained, was determined to continue his search for the sources. As yet, his men were prepared to carry him. Yet crossing a river on that day, he had to be transferred into a canoe and the pain in his back, caused by the pressure of his men’s hands as they lifted him, was excruciating. As would be seen later, there was a blood clot the size of a man’s fist obstructing his lower intestine.
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They were now seventy miles south of Bangweulu at the village of a chief called Chitambo. This was journey’s end, and here his followers built a hut, and raised his grass and sacking bed from the floor on a frame of sticks, placing his medicine chest on a packing case by his bed.

Livingstone dozed through much of the 30th, but that evening the Nile still dominated his thoughts. ‘Is this the Luapula?’ he asked Susi suddenly. The Luapula is the river joining Bangweulu with Lake Moero and the Lualaba. Susi told him that they were still three days from the Luapula. ‘Oh dear, dear!’ he sighed and then fell asleep. That night, Majwara, the boy left to watch
over Livingstone, fell asleep and did not wake for three or four hours.

At four in the morning, he burst into Susi’s hut and begged him to come at once. A dim glow came from the entrance of the hut. A candle stuck with its own wax on to the top of a box was still burning. Livingstone was half-dressed and kneeling on his bed with his head resting on the pillow. It looked as though he was praying. Susi and the others did not go in at once but waited for some movement. When it did not come, they went in and one of them touched the kneeling man’s cheek. It was almost cold. David Livingstone had been dead for several hours.
¹⁷

Few if any of Livingstone’s followers would have understood why he had risked his life, and indeed sacrificed it, in a vain attempt to establish the relationship of widely separated rivers and lakes to the distant River Nile. They, like the chief who had ridiculed Livingstone, by replying pityingly, when asked by him insistently about the Lualaba, ‘It is only water,’ would have found his obsession incomprehensible given the agony it caused him.
¹⁸
But his men knew extraordinary courage and determination when they saw them and respected him as a great man.

The legend would grow up that Chuma and Susi, two of his longest-serving men, would persuade the others to help them carry his body to the coast. This version of events owes a lot to their being brought back to Britain at the expense of a rich philanthropist to help Horace Waller edit
The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa.
The truth seems to have been more remarkable. The decision to risk carrying Livingstone’s body to the coast – despite the high possibility of accusations of witchcraft being made
en route -
appears to have been made as a result of a much larger number of Africans achieving a consensus. Chuma’s name would not be among those carved on the tree near which Livingstone’s African servants buried their master’s heart and organs. But the names of Chowpereh and Manwa Sera, who had both accompanied Stanley to Ujiji, and had been chosen by him to serve Livingstone on his last journey, were on the tree, along with Susi’s. These three men had been made ‘heads of
department’ by Livingstone. Chowpereh and Manwa Sera would go on and serve Stanley, as outstanding captains on his great trans-Africa journey a decade later, and Susi would work for him on the Congo in the early 1880s. The names of the three of them were carved by Jacob Wainwright, who had been educated at Nasik, along with the five other pupils of the Bombay mission school chosen by Stanley to travel with Livingstone. These men were Christians – at least by education – unlike Chuma and Susi, who were Muslims – and they would have played a significant part in the discussions that took place. Uledi and Mabruki were also senior men. They had already served Grant and Speke, and Stanley and would serve Stanley again. So the group of Africans who gathered around the hut they had built at Chitambo’s village included some of the most experienced caravan leaders and captains in Africa, who would prove their outstanding abilities again and again. Given the extraordinary hardships of Livingstone’s last journey through the swamps of Bangweulu, it is a striking fact that none of these men deserted.
¹⁹

Perhaps self-interest and the hope of a reward played some part in the decision they made, but it seems more likely that their principal motivation was to honour a great man by taking his body back to his own people along with the diaries and notebooks which he had kept with such care. Their first step, after his death, was to hide from Chief Chitambo the fact that their master was dead, and to gain the chief’s consent to build a hut within a palisade outside the village. The new structure was open to the sky so they could use the sun to dry out their master’s body, once they had removed and buried his organs. It was while doing this grim work that they found a blood clot of several inches diameter in his lower intestine – an obstruction that must have caused him appalling pain. The rains had just ended so they were able to make use of sunlight to dry the body for two weeks, having placed salt in the open trunk. Eventually the body was encased in bark and sewn into a large piece of sailcloth. The odour of putrefaction made it hard for them to eat, so in an attempt to stop the smell, they tarred the whole bundle.
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Livingstone’s men reached Zanzibar in the remarkable time of five months. By then ten men had died of disease, and they had once been obliged to fight their way out of a hostile village.
²¹
In Unyanyembe they met Lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron, who had been chosen by the RGS, in preference to Stanley, to lead an expedition intended to assist Livingstone and solve the Nile mystery. Blind to the magnificence of what Livingstone’s carriers were doing, Cameron advised them to take no further risks with superstitious chiefs along the route and to bury the body at once. This they politely refused to do. Cameron then urged them to part with Livingstone’s geographical instruments, so his party could use them. To prevent any thefts, Jacob Wainwright had written out a long and accurate inventory of all Livingstone’s possessions. None of the men wished to hand over their master’s sextants and chronometers, but the white man was insistent, so they did as he asked.

At Zanzibar, John Kirk was away, and the acting consul, Captain W. F. Prideaux, paid them their wages but gave them no additional reward. For men like Susi, Chuma, Gardner and Amoda, this was a disillusioning conclusion to eight years’ service. It would be a year till the RGS struck a medal for these men, but by then they would have dispersed, and very few ever received it. Of those who did, it cannot have meant as much to them as a gift of cloth, beads and cattle would have done.
²²
By the time Chuma and Susi arrived in England, thanks to the generosity of Livingstone’s friend, James Young – the inventor of paraffin – his burial in Westminster Abbey had already taken place. Only the comparative newcomer Jacob Wainwright, whose passage was paid by the Church Missionary Society, arrived in time for the funeral.

TWENTY-THREE

Where Will You Be?
Dead or Still Seeking the Nile?

Stanley first heard of Livingstone’s death at the island of St Vincent during his voyage back to England from West Africa, and received official confirmation when he reached London on 17 March 1874. His mentor’s body was even now on its way to Southampton. Grief-stricken at the news, Stanley wrote to Livingstone’s 27-year-old daughter, Agnes, assuring her that ‘no daughter was ever beloved so deeply as you were … How I envy you such a father. The richest inheritance a father can give his children is an honoured name.’ Yet Stanley believed that the doctor had also bequeathed something of immense importance to him as well. ‘The completion of your father’s discoveries,’ he told Agnes, ‘[is] like a legacy left me by Livingstone.’
¹
The story of Livingstone’s lonely death and his refusal to give up his work after months of anguish and struggle conjured up powerful images of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. In Stanley’s eyes the geographical task of opening Africa was also part of a wider moral obligation which he described with feeling in the obituary he wrote for the
Graphic:

Though the heart of Livingstone … has ceased to beat, his voice rings out loud … He has bequeathed a rich legacy to fight the evil horror of the slave trade … and left an obligation on the civilized nations of Europe and America, as the shepherds of the world, to extend their care and protection over the oppressed races of Africa.
²

Although Stanley grieved as he sat in the
New York Herald’s
London office, poring over the coverage of Livingstone’s death, he was stirred by the thought that the doctor’s unfinished work was newsworthy again. Here then was Stanley’s great opportunity to
escape from the dismissive snobs of the RGS, from his grasping mother and step-father, from Katie Roberts, who for cash had shown his love letters to an unscrupulous publisher, and most of all from the delusion that fame and wealth could make him happy. His hope of future happiness lay in striving for some great purpose, ‘for my own spirit’s satisfaction’, as he put it. At the heart of the Nonconformist Christian education of the workhouse had been the idea of redemption through suffering -becoming a new man. And what would be more likely to achieve this re-fashioning than the isolation, the hardships and the pain he would endure while completing the work of his hero, David Livingstone? ‘I was not sent into this world to be happy; I was sent for a special work,’ he would write twenty years later.
³

While Livingstone’s death – and his burial in Westminster Abbey at which Stanley was a pall-bearer – did not determine the future course of Stanley’s life, they certainly strengthened his existing determination to solve the Nile problem. He approached the proprietors of the
Daily Telegraph
and the
New York Herald
in such a positive spirit that they each offered £6,000 towards the cost of solving the age-old mystery. The journey he outlined to them would be the most ambitious ever attempted by a land explorer. First he intended to circumnavigate Lake Victoria in a portable boat to see if it was a single body of water and the primary source of the river that flowed out at Speke’s Ripon Falls. It might turn out to be, as Burton had predicted, three or more lakes of little individual consequence. Then he meant to sail around Lake Tanganyika to see what other rivers – apart from the Rusizi – flowed into and out of it. This, he expected, would establish once and for all whether Tanganyika was part of the Nile’s system. Then, finally, he would attempt to navigate the Lualaba from where Livingstone had left it at Nyangwe, to see whether it was the upper Nile or the Congo – potentially a 7,000-mile journey dwarfing all earlier African expeditions.

Just as he began the detailed planning of his epic journey, Stanley fell in love with a spoilt young heiress. Alice Pike was the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of America’s richest men,
who owned real estate, distilleries and two opera houses. Stanley met Alice while they were both staying at London’s exclusive Langham Hotel. Although twice her age, the infatuated explorer soon proposed and was accepted, although he thought Alice ‘the very opposite of my ideal wife … However pretty, elegant etc. she may be, she is heartless and a confirmed flirt.’
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Given his sensitive nature, Stanley was risking emotional catastrophe and knew it.