Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (14 page)

UJIJI REPRESENTED LIFE
itself to Livingstone, and by the time he began his rugged overland journey to the inland trading Mecca, almost two long years had passed since that horrible rainy night when his medicines were stolen. Despite the Arabs’ great kindness in that time, Ujiji also represented a return to independence. Fully resupplied with the cloth, gunpowder, brandy, cheeses and vital medicines awaiting him there, Livingstone would once again be able to sally forth into the wilderness at his own pace — and without compromise.

The journey to Ujiji, however, which should have seemed like a triumphal march, was almost the death of Livingstone. He celebrated New Year’s Day, 1869 fording rivers in a driving rainstorm, wishing he could stop for a rest but fearing the Lofuko River might flood in the meantime, then block his path to Ujiji. Two days later, on 3 January, he collapsed. Pneumonia had set in. His attendants were forced to carry him in a litter. He was too feeble even to sit, and the only food he could keep down was a spoonful of gruel. ‘Can not walk,’ he wrote on
7 January. ‘Pneumonia of right lung, and I cough all day and all night: sputa rust of iron and bloody, distressing weakness. Ideas flow through the mind with great rapidity and vividness, in groups of twos and threes. If I look at any piece of wood, the bark seems covered with the figures and faces of men, and they remain, though I look away and turn to the same spot again. I saw myself lying dead in the way to Ujiji.’

In his thoughts of death, Livingstone also pondered home, and the desire that his loved ones felt comfort in his pending demise. ‘When I think of my children and friends, the lines ring through my head perpetually:

‘Mohammed Bogharib offered to carry me. I am so weak I can barely speak,’ Livingstone wrote on 9 January. ‘I am carried four hours each day on a kitanda, or frame, like a cot. Then sleep in a deep ravine … Mohammed Bogharib is very kind to me in my extreme weakness, but carriage is painful. Head down and feet up alternates with feet down and head up. Jolted up and down and sideways — changing shoulders involves a toss from one side to the other of the kitanda. The sun is vertical, blistering any part of the skin exposed, and I try to shelter my face and head as well as I can with a bunch of leaves, but it is dreadfully fatiguing in my weakness.’

He was too sick to write another word for five weeks. Livingstone finally reached the western shore of Lake Tanganyika on 14 February 1869. Ujiji and his medicines lay just sixty miles across on the other side. However, there was a shortage of canoes for ferrying men and material, and the lake’s waves were too high for easy paddling. Livingstone was forced to wait. He extracted ‘twenty funyes, an insect like a maggot’ from large pimples on his arms and legs on 25 February. These
subcutaneous maggots were feeding on his flesh. In addition, Livingstone was suffering from an anaerobic streptococcus bacterial infection on his feet, causing bone-eating tropical ulcers.

On 26 February canoes finally became available. The agonized Livingstone and his men, along with Bogharib’s caravan, began paddling for Ujiji. They stayed close to Lake Tanganyika’s shores, preferring the safety of the longer path along its coast to the large swells of the tempestuous direct route across the middle. As Chuma and Susi paddled, Livingstone lay in the bottom of the broad dugout canoe. Finally, on 14 March, a shattered and emaciated Livingstone arrived in the village of Ujiji for the first time. He rose and walked into the Arab trading post, brimming with satisfaction and happy anticipation of receiving his new supplies.

To Livingstone’s horror, almost nothing remained. His supplies had reached Ujiji, but his stores had subsequently been plundered. The medicines, food and mail were gone. Of the eighty pieces of cloth — so vital for bartering with native tribes for food — just eighteen were still there.

Livingstone was devastated and destitute, and in his anguish once again threw himself on the mercy of the slavers. They found him a small lean-to in which he could sleep. A salve of butter, beeswax, copper sulphate and coconut oil was procured to heal his sores. Rest and hygienic improvements banished the maggots. The Arabs taught Livingstone the revolutionary concept of boiling his drinking water as protection against parasites and bacteria, decreasing the risk of dysentery. However, fearful he would reveal insider’s truths about the slave trade, they rarely carried his letters back to Zanzibar.

By 1 June, Livingstone’s strength was returning. He became fluent in the Masai language. He ate. He moved into a small home the Arabs rented for him. He planned the continuation of his journey. He studied algae growth along the shoreline and determined that the current flowed north out of Lake Tanganyika, meaning his
theories about the Nile were likely correct. And slowly, very slowly, he regained the ability to wander.

Livingstone’s health was still frail as he made plans to bid Ujiji farewell, but an Arab caravan led by Mohammed Bogharib was assembling on Lake Tanganyika’s north-west shore. Lacking supplies of his own, Livingstone had no choice but to join the slavers once again. Their path was due west into Africa’s heavily forested Manyuema region, an area that would later be named the Congo. Bogharib had little to gain by assisting Livingstone — indeed, taking the explorer into one of the slaving industry’s most bountiful and relatively untapped new territories could endanger Bogharib’s future ability to harvest slaves there — but the Muslim was a compassionate man. Despite their profound religious differences, he liked the ailing Scot. The slave traders who made Ujiji their home were an aggressive, arrogant group — ‘the vilest of the vile’ in Livingstone’s words — who would surely allow Livingstone to die if left behind. And though there was also a good chance Livingstone would fall ill on the trail into Manyuema, at least Bogharib would be able to assist him.

Livingstone paddled out of Ujiji on 12 July 1869, carrying just a Bible, his journal and a pair of chronometers. After a three-day paddle, Livingstone and his men crossed the lake, making landfall at the base of the Mugila Mountains. On 1 August Livingstone and his small group of attendants successfully linked up with Mohammed Bogharib’s caravan.

The trail went further into the centre of Africa than Livingstone had ever before travelled. It was a region of mountains, rainforest and head-hunters. However, it was vital to Livingstone that he risk the difficult journey. The Lualaba River flowed through there somewhere and he meant to trace its course. Based on his explorations thus far, the northward-flowing Lualaba’s path was identical to the upper reaches of the Nile as drawn by Ptolemy on his map of AD 140. Livingstone intended to travel there to prove that the two rivers were one and the same.

SPRINGTIME IN LONDON
was marked by the delicate explosion of primrose flowers, swans returning to the Thames, school groups excited to be outdoors again and, for the rich, the frivolous bustle of the social season. From May to July England’s most powerful families moved from their country estates into their London townhouses. Grosvenor Square, Park Lane, Piccadilly and Belgrave Square pulsed with aristocratic men in top hats and waistcoats, wives and daughters in bustles and bonnets, family dogs, Siamese cats, black-and-white-clad household staff, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages on cobblestones and early morning delivery wagons bearing meat, milk and produce. Three intoxicating months were spent on débutante balls, social calls, croquet, horse racing, symphonies, shopping and intellectual events such as the Royal Academy of Art’s annual exhibition of influential painters. From the riding trails in Regent’s Park wafted the unforgettable aroma of horseflesh and money. Parliament was in session, adding the daily routine of governmental work for the peerage. Evenings were long
and warm, perfect for strolling along Park Lane or drinking a tall gin on the terrace.

The majority of the Royal Geographical Society’s membership belonged to this elite, and Sir Roderick Murchison appropriately chose this time of year to deliver his annual RGS president’s address. Year in and year out, it was a centrepiece of the social season. The clubby Whitehall Place headquarters would be abandoned for the night, in favour of a Burlington Gardens lecture theatre. Gentry and aristocracy came by the hundreds. In an age when there was no cinema, for one night only they would live vicariously in the world of adventure.

Murchison would speak of the RGS and its ongoing explorations. Jungles and savannahs and untouchable Himalayan peaks came to London, punctuated by inspiring field reports from the men Murchison had tasked to conquer them. The geologist was an aristocrat, a Scot, a baron and a knight, but most of all Murchison was a showman. He never used one word when it was possible to use three, and his addresses often stretched long into the evening, after London’s famous pastel twilight was replaced by the mute sparkle of gas street-lights. The RGS was so in vogue, though, and the tales of adventure so breathtaking, that the length was forgiven. Murchison would stand before a map of the world, speaking with such passion that he held the crowd in the palm of his hand. Everyone in the room became a lion. And that was important. For a month or a year later, when Murchison sought exploration funding, many in the audience would hold the purse strings. Murchison’s every word was a reminder that he worked night and day to make Britain the most far-reaching nation on earth.

The 1869 address, however, was different. Murchison was still centre-stage — in addition to the regular president’s address, he also formally accepted re-election to his seventh two-year term. But the evening’s focus lay elsewhere — on Dr David Livingstone. There was no escaping talk of the explorer. Murchison didn’t mind, confiding to the audience his ‘ardent hope that my dear friend
Livingstone might soon return to us, so that I might have the joy of presiding at the national festival which would then unquestionably take place in his honour’.

In fact, while Murchison was still passionate about each and every one of the RGS’s ongoing expeditions in Australia, Canada, the Middle East, South America and Central Asia, his friend’s whereabouts were his reason to live. He admitted as much to the audience. Speaking in the lucid tones of a man glimpsing impending death, Murchison placed Livingstone’s return in the context of his own demise. ‘If I live to witness this completion of my heartiest aspiration,’ he stated, ‘I will then take leave of you in the fullness of my heart.’

For a change, Murchison wasn’t being melodramatic. At seventy-seven, the RGS president was no longer the athletic young geologist who trekked up and down the Swiss Alps. He had grown frail and bald, with jowls sagging noticeably and caterpillar-like salt-and-pepper eyebrows shooting hairs in all directions. His mansion at 16 Belgrave Square was still one of London’s leading intellectual salons, a place where debates and parties ensured Murchison’s social stature and brought his adventures before polite society. But his wife Charlotte, to whom he had been married for fifty-four years, had died in February after a long illness. He had been the unlikely architect of the British Empire, cobbling it together outpost by outpost; she had been his champion, advocate and inspiration. They had no children, so in the days leading up to her death, Charlotte’s failing health was a daily reminder their salon would soon close for ever.

So when Murchison spoke of death it was not as a distant, abstract idea, but as an interloper whose presence grew stronger every day. The Livingstone uproar, though it pained him, was the ideal summation of a life dedicated to advancing public interest in geography. It was almost a homage to Murchison. He was the Richelieu, the Boswell — the man turning everyday adventurers into exploration’s superstars.

History had never known a man like Roderick Impey Murchison. At first glance the aristocratic Scot was just another visionary patron synonymous with exploration: Queen Isabella standing behind Christopher Columbus, Lord Sandwich bestowing funding and political intercession for Cook, Thomas Jefferson (whose vision for exploring the American West was inspired by Cook’s journals) giving marching orders to Lewis and Clark. But Murchison was much more than that. Not just the driving force behind a single expedition, he fathered an entire generation of global unveiling. Some members of the Royal Geographical Society — Charles Darwin, notably — felt Murchison’s showmanship detracted from its scientific aims. But Murchison’s legacy was nothing less than the growth of the British Empire and expansion of the known world. His explorers thanked him by naming twenty-three topographical features on six continents in his honour — waterfalls, rivers, mountains, promontories, glaciers and even an island. In Australia, the Murchison River’s tributaries were the Roderick and Impey. ‘To relate the doings of the Royal Geographical Society under Murchison’s supremacy’, the official RGS record formally admitted, at the expense of those powerful men borrowing the presidency when Murchison took a few years’ rest, ‘would be almost to write a history of geographical discovery in the most crowded years of its modern development.’