Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (15 page)

Empire building was a calling Murchison came to by accident. He was born in 1792, into a family of Scottish highlanders disenfranchised by their pro-Jacobite leanings. His father, Kenneth, was a surgeon, philanderer and duellist. He recouped the family wealth by taking work in India, where he was paid a substantial reward for curing the sick child of a prince. Kenneth fathered five children. Three of them, however, were illegitimate. As his father’s oldest legitimate heir, it was four-year-old Roderick who inherited Tarradale, the family estate, when his father died of natural causes in 1796. Roderick went on to become an army officer, fought in the Napoleonic Wars,
then resigned his commission. In 1815 he married Charlotte, the intellectual, dynamic only child of a wealthy general. They lived in Switzerland, France and Italy from 1816 to 1818. The time was notable for long Alpine walks and Murchison’s first concerns about the United States’ growing international presence.

Murchison sold Tarradale after returning to England. Lacking a career, he spent the next several years living aimlessly, a sporting squire who devoted himself so thoroughly to the outdoors that he was considered ‘one of the greatest fox hunters in the north of England’. By the time Roderick was thirty-three, however, the Murchisons were in the advanced stages of squandering his inheritance. Idle living and bad investments had taken their toll. Roderick and Charlotte moved to London to start over. He took her advice and settled down to the life of a gentleman scientist. ‘She had studied science, especially geology, and it was chiefly owing to her example that her husband turned his mind to those pursuits in which he afterwards obtained such distinction,’ said her friend, physicist Mary Somerville.

Science was considered a glamorous way for a man of means to pass his days. Geology allowed him to indulge his passion for the outdoors at the same time. He attacked it with the obsessive ferocity that was becoming his calling card. Beginning with explorations of the Thames Valley, Murchison began roving into Scotland and Russia to examine new rock formations. He was credited with defining the Silurian, Devonian and Sedgwick geological periods. His understanding of the earth’s structure grew so profound that though he never set foot in Australia, he predicted that a massive vein of gold would be discovered there. It was.

Science changed Murchison. He was still capable of great arrogance, but his focus shifted from glorifying himself to serving his country. At some point in his education Murchison developed a prescient vision of what was right for Great Britain. On 24 May 1830 he became a charter member of something called the Geographical Society of
London. Soon after, the name was changed. The Royal Geographical Society’s charter was to further scientific exploration worldwide and accumulate a geographical library of books and charts. It was a body whose time had come. Exploration needed a firm hand to guide it through a time of transition.

Prior to the turn of the nineteenth century, exploration was primarily a naval endeavour. Expeditions were government financed. Commissioned officers were in command. The focus was oceanic, the goal conquest. The great geographical questions revolved around finding undiscovered landmasses in the southern hemisphere and vetting them for potential settlement. With rare exceptions, only the ships and officers of the Royal Navy were capable of the complex global circumnavigation necessary to do the job properly.

By the time Captain James Cook was murdered by Hawaiian natives in 1779, each and every continent had been sketched, and most of the Pacific islands had been plotted. Two years later, the British Government ceased funding all voyages of exploration. France, the world’s other great exploration power, became embroiled in revolution and war soon after. The French set aside exploration, as well.

But the pursuit of exploration did not stop. The call to adventure is genetic in a handful of men and women, not quieted by something as mundane as lack of bureaucratic interest. These private citizens began mapping the unknown world on their own. The focus switched from sea to land. The Amazon, the Indian Subcontinent and the Australian Outback called to men with courage and initiative. But the area with the greatest allure, perhaps because it was the most terrifying and closest to Europe, was Africa. The animals were carnivorous and prehistoric. It was a land in which human beings could easily become prey. Mysterious diseases, theoretically caused by bad air —
mal aria
to Italians, hence malaria — brought on fever, chills, madness and death. The inhabitants were considered cannibals or emasculants.

Playboy botanist Joseph Banks had formed the African Association in 1788 to foster exploration of what was popularly known as ‘the Dark Continent’. While the term later took on racial overtones, it came about because cartographers coloured the unknown regions of Africa black — which, at the time, meant almost everything south of Cairo and north of Cape Town. The African Association commissioned American adventurer John Ledyard to lead their first expedition, a journey up the Nile. Ledyard died in Cairo before the journey began. The mysterious nature of his illness only added to Africa’s cachet.

Banks had sailed with Cook and been a fishing companion of Sandwich’s. When the Royal Geographical Society (then the London Geographical Society) absorbed the African Association shortly after their founding, the botanist became the bridge from one generation of explorers to another. Murchison quickly took up where Banks left off. His showmanship meant he once arrived for a public rock-gathering trek dressed in white breeches, white shooting jacket and white top hat. And because he was a bastion of London society, Murchison could be shameless in using his high-level political connections to obtain expedition funding. That faculty was much-needed: global exploration was an expensive undertaking and the RGS was continually short of funds.

‘Industry and energy, a clear head, a strong will and great tenacity of purpose’ defined Murchison’s character, marvelled friend Henry Rawlinson. As did ‘kindness of manner, his entire absence of jealousy, his geniality, fine temper, tact and firmness’.

In time Murchison and the RGS became synonymous, just as RGS explorations became synonymous with Britain’s global expansion into an empire. The RGS gold medal for achievement became one of the world’s most prized decorations. Generals, statesmen and scientists from both Britain and Europe clamoured to join so they could affix ‘FRGS’ — Fellow, Royal Geographical Society — to their signature and dine at the exclusive Geographical Club on Whitehall Place. In all, RGS memberships rose
from the founding five to a select 2,300 in Murchison’s lifetime.

In the early 1850s Murchison set geology aside to focus on imperial expansion. The introduction of disciplines such as organic chemistry was making science too complex for him to keep pace. Even geology began requiring physics, chemistry and mathematical skills, so he became the ‘gentleman geologist’ in name only. Enhancing the link between exploration and global power became his speciality.

By a twist of fate, it was during this period that Livingstone entered Murchison’s life. An evangelical revival had swept through England. Groups like the London Missionary Society, mindful that Britain had been a pagan nation until missionaries arrived on her shores in the sixth century, were returning the favour by sending men and women around the world to proselytize. They were not explorers in the traditional sense, but the missionaries caught Murchison’s eye because they were venturing far into the wilderness to spread their faith. They set up schools and churches on the frontier, and lived among the natives of Polynesia, Asia, South America and Africa. They learned the local languages. The missionaries ate the local food. Sometimes, as in the case of one New Zealand tribe whose favourite recipe called for Anglicans, the locals ate the missionaries. On all levels, the missionary connection with the local peoples and cultures was deeper than anything a passing explorer might experience.

To Murchison, Livingstone was the perfect hybrid of explorer, missionary and scientist. Livingstone’s Christianity was muscular, which was appealing to an empire claiming the faith as its official religion. His travels, though he was far from perfect and certainly not a saint, had a righteous heft. When word of the young Scot’s early, relatively tentative, explorations trickled back to London in the late 1840s, Murchison took note. They finally met in 1856, when Livingstone returned to London after sixteen years away. Their friendship blossomed. When Livingstone was
mobbed in the streets and even churches of London because of his bold walk across Africa, it was due to Murchison organizing a massive public relations campaign. When Livingstone received the Society’s gold medal for excellence in exploration, it was Murchison who presented it. And when a middle-aged Livingstone needed funding for his Zambezi expedition, it was Murchison who handled negotiations with the Foreign Secretary. Murchison not only wangled the money, he convinced the government to fund a river steamer, as well.

Owing in great part to Livingstone’s unrelenting travels, Murchison ‘adopted and made his own the great field of African discovery’, in Rawlinson’s words. His focus became finding the Source of the Nile. Thus Murchison gave his greatest encouragement to those travellers wishing to investigate Africa. In time Murchison’s African explorers developed into his core group of ‘lions’, as Burton called them. The pride was Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Grant, Baker, the French-American gorilla expert Paul du Chaillu, and the British authority on Ethiopia, Charles Beke. But it was Livingstone, of Scottish Highland origin, who received Murchison’s greatest attention. For even though Murchison lived in London for over fifty years, he always carried a powerful sense of Scottish clan loyalty.

Admiration between the two men flowed both ways. It also seemed as though Livingstone worshipped Murchison. He ‘was the best friend I ever had — true, warm and abiding’, the searcher wrote. He once lugged a portmanteau full of Central African rocks home as a gift for his geographer friend. But while Livingstone did the hard work of exploration, there was no doubt the elder Murchison held the upper hand in their partnership. Their relationship was not a son to a father, but of ‘a highlander to his chief’. The two shared many a private hour walking the countryside, hunting rocks and talking Africa. Each man benefited from the other’s prominence: Murchison revelled in the worldwide interest in himself and the RGS that came with Livingstone’s discoveries, while
the explorer received government assistance, public subscriptions to fund further expeditions and the fame he quietly coveted.

It was Murchison who sheltered Livingstone from the fallout of the failed Zambezi trip, instructing the explorer to avoid all media and public appearances for two months after arriving home, knowing any negative editorials would be forgotten over time. It was Murchison who, knowing that his friend’s finances were dwindling, introduced Livingstone’s speech at the British Association’s conference in Bath on the night of Monday, 19 September, just three short days after Speke’s suicide, publicly alluding to the explorer’s financial situation in the hopes that Her Majesty’s Government would step forward and offer a pension. ‘Dr Livingstone has had honours in abundance showered upon him, but he cannot live nor provide for his family on honours merely. I think he is entitled to public and national recompense,’ Murchison said. Murchison was such a stirring speaker that he was interrupted for applause three times during the introduction alone. By the time Livingstone took the stage the audience was at fever pitch. The pairing of Murchison’s display of affection and Livingstone’s earnest, adventurous remarks rendered Livingstone’s Bath speech the highlight of the 1864 British Association meetings.

As the summer of 1869 arrived, however, and with his annual president’s address behind him, Murchison was coming to the end of methods to help his friend. He became obsessive in pondering the vagaries of African travel and how they might be slowing Livingstone’s return. For instance, he noted that if Livingstone was following the Nile from Lake Victoria north to the Mediterranean, he would have to catch the boat from Gondokoro to Khartoum that left each April. From there it was twenty-five days to Alexandria. That would place Livingstone home by the end of June — but only if he made the Gondokoro boat. Otherwise he might have to wait a year for another.

In April it had been reported that Livingstone was in Zanzibar en route to Europe. A July article in the
Medical Times and Gazette
said Livingstone was somewhere in the region of Lake Victoria. Livingstone rumours ran in
The Times
on average once a week. Murchison immediately wrote rebuttals to any mentioning his friend’s death. He cautioned the public against despondency.

The social season ended quietly in late July without sign of Livingstone. The landed gentry returned to their estates. August passed, and still no word. The question of his whereabouts lurked beneath the veneer of daily English life. The mystery threatened to go unsolved and taunt the curious for ever. No one, however, took action. Like the boy who cried wolf, Livingstone had been reported overdue and dead, only to reappear, one too many times in his career. Based on what E. D. Young had seen and written, the British Government had begun an unspoken policy of not funding Livingstone search expeditions. Not even Murchison was stepping forth to suggest differently.

Then, on 28 August, a tragic occurrence cast a shadow over all African exploration. In their ‘Deaths’ section,
The Times
reported that Alexandrine Tinne, the Belgian heiress and veteran African explorer, was attempting to become the first woman ever to cross the Sahara when she was murdered by robbers in Northern Africa. They had ridden into her camp and slaughtered her companions. Then, as the men charged their horses at Tinne, she held up her hand as if to halt them. One of the intruders quickly pulled his sword and cut the hand off as he galloped past. Another Arab then shot her in the heart. Alexandrine Tinne was thirty-three.

Miss Tinne’s explorations and bravery were well known to Britons. She had explored the upper Nile at the same time as Speke and Grant, and was respected as a very capable explorer, regardless of her gender. The manner of her death was unsettling, as was its timing.