Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (48 page)

Henry Morton Stanley’s
reportage defined his era: from the Civil War to the American Indian Wars to the British invasion of Abyssinia to Livingstone to the Scramble for Africa. By inserting himself into the story during the Livingstone search, he began a new tradition of first-person adventure journalism.

Though Stanley always swore he uttered the words ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ the journal page pertaining to that specific moment was torn out, so there is nothing in
Stanley’s journals stating that he ever asked the question. It is possible that the missing page was an act of sabotage, likely perpetrated by a far-sighted collector. But if Stanley didn’t make the statement, and tore out the page to cover his tracks, it would be in keeping with his character. He may have fabricated the quote when writing his
Herald
stories (he mentions the quote in two separate dispatches: the first was published on 15 July 1872, the other 10 August 1872). However, what began as a self-professed attempt to sound eloquent became the journey’s defining moment. The line would become the standard greeting for later generations of African explorers when encountering one another on the trail.

By the time Stanley returned to London, then America, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ was so well known that recanting would have caused considerable loss of face and further corroborated the public perception created by the RGS and Bennett’s rivals that the journalist’s credibility was dubious. He continued using the quote in
How I Found Livingstone
. To the day he died, Stanley maintained he uttered the famous line.

More germane to the discussion are the heights to which Stanley soared after Livingstone died. Not only did he assume Livingstone’s mantle of African explorer extraordinaire, he surpassed his mentor.

Stanley returned to Africa in 1874 to find the Source of the Nile. The expedition was funded jointly by James Gordon Bennett, Jr and the London
Daily Telegraph
. In one of the most incredible achievements in the history of exploration, he marched inland from Bagamoyo, travelled the circumference of Lake Victoria seeking confirmation of Speke’s theories, continued his travels inland to circumnavigate Lake Tanganyika, then pushed even further inland to the Congo River, which he followed all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. His reputation later in life, however, was besmirched when Stanley was paid a substantial sum by the King of Belgium to colonize Western Africa. Leopold II was a manipulative man who had long sought ways to expand the size of his tiny country in order to
increase his personal wealth. With Stanley’s help, the Free Congo State came into being. Sadly, and contrary to Livingstone’s legacy, Stanley would unwittingly help found one of the greatest slave-trading nations in history. Even after Stanley left Leopold’s employ, the stench of that period hung about him.

Later in life he turned his back on America and lived out his days as a British citizen. He married one Dorothy Tennant, and successfully ran for Parliament. Stanley’s legacy, however, could not shake the stigma of his association with slavery. When Stanley died from complications of a stroke and pleurisy on 10 May 1904, the funeral service was held in Westminster Abbey, just like Livingstone’s. But the Dean of Westminster, the Reverend Joseph Armitage Robinson, refused to allow the interment of Stanley’s remains in the cathedral. Instead, the body was cremated. The ashes were buried twenty-five miles south-west in Pirbright’s village churchyard. A more fitting site would have been outside his house in Tabora, which still stands. Shaw’s clearly marked grave lies just beyond its walls.

In 2002, almost a thousand of Stanley’s artefacts from his African travels were discovered in a descendant’s attic. These items, which included Stanley’s annotated manuscript of
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
, his Winchester, his compass and a personally inscribed map of his Congo expedition from 1874 to 1878 were auctioned at Christie’s on 23 September 2002. ‘Never before’, a Christie’s representative noted, ‘has such a large collection of artefacts relating to one explorer been offered at auction.’

James Gordon Bennett
and the
Herald
saw their heyday in the 1870s. In addition to Stanley finding Livingstone, Stanley tracing the path of the Congo and assorted other expeditions Bennett funded, the
Herald
had its second great scoop of the decade in July 1876. Acting on information wired to New York from, coincidentally, Fort McPherson, Nebraska, the
Herald
broke the story of the massacre of General George Custer and his cavalry at
the Little Big Horn. That would be the end of Bennett’s New York triumphs. He moved to Paris in 1877 after disgracing himself before New York society by drunkenly urinating in a fireplace during a formal dinner with his fiancée. By 1900 he was dividing his time between an apartment on the Champs-Élysées and a mansion near Versailles, and owned a 301-foot yacht with a crew of one hundred. Bennett died in Paris on 14 May 1918. His body was interred in an unmarked mausoleum in the Cemetery of Passy. The New York
Herald
spawned a Paris edition, merged with the New York
Tribune
, and is known today as the
International Herald Tribune
.

Sidi Mubarak Bombay
crossed Africa as Cameron’s caravan leader between January 1874 and November 1875. Upon reaching Luanda, on the Atlantic coast, Bombay sailed home to Zanzibar. On 5 May 1876, just two months after his return, the Reverend W. Salter Price of the Church Missionary Society approached Bombay about leading a caravan into Uganda. Bombay accepted. But in August of that year, while concluding final preparations in Bagamoyo, word reached Bombay that the Royal Geographical Society was awarding him a lifetime pension as thanks for his many years of service. He immediately announced his retirement and returned to Zanzibar, where he died on 12 October 1885. Between 8 February 1857, when Burton and Speke plucked him from the obscurity of the Chokwe garrison, and the day he died, Bombay was a member of the Burton and Speke, Speke and Grant, Stanley, and Cameron expeditions. He travelled the Nile from Lake Victoria all the way to Cairo, and from Bagamoyo to the Atlantic coast. The former slave died as one of the most accomplished African travellers in history.

David Susi
and
James Chuma
travelled to England shortly after Livingstone’s funeral. Their fare was paid for by Livingstone’s friend, James Young. Another Livingstone associate, Horace Waller, would rely upon their insights and geographical expertise while compiling Livingstone’s final journals for publication. At a Royal
Geographical Society meeting on 1 June 1874, Chuma and Susi were presented with special medals by the Society. They returned to Africa in October of that year. Chuma died on 12 September 1882, at the mission hospital in Zanzibar. Susi died on 5 May 1891 of ‘creeping paralysis’.

John Kirk
remained British Consul in Zanzibar until 1884. He endured a major investigation into his mishandling of Livingstone’s relief supplies, and was exonerated of all charges of neglect. When the Zanzibar slave trade came to an end in the late 1870s, Kirk claimed credit for the accomplishment, and was knighted.

Sir Samuel White Baker
left Gondokoro for England on 26 May 1873, just over three weeks after Livingstone’s death. He died at home in Florence’s arms on 30 December 1893.

E. D. Young
returned to Eastern Africa in 1875, leading a group of missionaries sent by the Free Church Mission of Scotland to establish a new site known as the Livonstonia Mission, site of present-day Blantyre. He launched the first steamship ever to navigate Lake Nyassa. A warrant officer all his life, Young was officially bumped into a higher social standing when he was promoted to the rank of honorary lieutenant upon his retirement in June 1891.

F. R. Webb
transferred from Zanzibar to become American Consul in New Zealand.

Buffalo Bill Cody
and
Wild Bill Hickok
were invited to New York by James Gordon Bennett, Jr at the conclusion of their 1871 hunting trip. Cody, in particular, was the toast of the town. As a result of his newfound fame he abandoned life on the plains and became a successful and extremely wealthy entertainer, circus owner and movie producer. He owed that prosperity to a combination of dime-store novels about his exploits by writer Ned Buntline, and also to Bennett’s ten-day journey across the plains. A series of business setbacks cost Cody his fortune. At the end of his life he was almost destitute. He died in Denver on 10 January 1917.

Hickok, who didn’t share Cody’s passion for New York, returned to the west after his visit. He became Mayor of Hays, Kansas, but was run out of town on a rail for trying to arrest George Custer’s brother, Tom. Hickok died on 2 August 1876 in Deadwood, South Dakota. He was shot in the back while playing cards in a saloon.

King of Wall Street and Bennett hunting companion
Leonard Jerome
was famous in his own right. It was his vivacious daughter Jenny, however, who left the greater mark on history. Named after an actress with whom Jerome was infatuated, Jenny Jerome was almost killed as a teenager when James Gordon Bennett, Jr crashed a coach in which she was riding. She was seventeen when her father went hunting buffalo in the American West. Three years later she married a member of the British nobility, Lord Randolph Churchill. Their son Winston, born that year, would become Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II.

In the days after Livingstone’s death, there was still the matter of his children’s financial security to be resolved. In September 1874, just five months after Livingstone’s funeral, Agnes Livingstone discovered a legacy that might ironically have diminished her father’s desire to find the Source (and therefore be found by Stanley) if he had known of it during his lifetime. As executor of his estate, Agnes was reviewing Livingstone’s accounts when she discovered a forgotten sum of two thousand pounds still gathering interest in a local bank. Accounting for interest on that money, and from the posthumous publication of his Source journals, Livingstone left his children a nine-thousand-pound estate. They split it equally.

Livingstone’s children
led varied lives.
Tom
died in Egypt in 1876 at the age of twenty-seven. Cause of death was the blood and tissue affliction bilharzia, carried by parasitic trematode worms. The disease was contracted during his African childhood.
Oswell
moved to Trinidad, where he practised medicine until his death in 1892.
Anna
, Livingstone’s youngest child, lived until 1893. Her son John became an African missionary.
Agnes
,
Livingstone’s oldest daughter and the child to whom he was closest, married A. L. Bruce, a wealthy Scottish brewery executive. She died in 1912 at the age of fifty-five, the mother of two sons and the owner of a coffee plantation near the Zambezi.

The Source of the Nile
, that single element emanating from the earth, was a mystery which was eventually solved — albeit a century later. Stanley’s later journeys suggested Lake Victoria as the Source, though it was not. The Source was also not the Lualaba River. And there were no Fountains of Herodotus. Rather, satellite photography would show that the Nile bubbles from the ground high in the mountains of Burundi, halfway between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria. In their own unique ways, the theories of Burton, Speke, Baker and Livingstone were all partially correct.

FROM A RESEARCH
point of view, Stanley and Livingstone’s era was ideal. The days of nautical exploration had largely passed, and with them the sailor’s crisp, mostly emotionless, journal entry. Stanley, Livingstone, Burton (and, to a lesser extent, Speke), Baker and Cameron wrote lengthy daily passages that provided a glimpse of the land around them and of their inner emotions. Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
,
Zambezi Expedition of Dr David Livingstone
and
The Last Journals of Dr David Livingstone
allowed me to express Livingstone’s feelings, thoughts and heartfelt prayers in his words. The same was true of Stanley’s
How I Found Livingstone
,
My Early Travels and Adventures in America
,
Through the Dark Continent
and
The Autobiography of Henry Morton Stanley
. In Stanley’s case, the emotions set forth in his books were often revised from his more honest journal entries. When given a choice between Stanley’s public accounts and his private journals, I relied on the latter. In all chapters referencing Stanley or Livingstone, their own writing was the primary source. For this reason, I have used their spellings (for place names, tribes, etc.) in lieu of colloquial spellings.

Another great bastion of research was newspapers. Thanks to the proliferation of daily papers during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and also to Stanley’s profession, it was possible to trace the story’s arc through the pages of
The Times
of London, New York
Herald
, Bath
Chronicle
,
The New York Times
, Manchester
Guardian
and assorted other publications.