Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (19 page)

Nonetheless, it was money. ‘It will take two months or more for these supplies to reach Ujiji from Zanzibar,’ a relieved Murchison explained to the RGS on 4 June. ‘Therefore all anxiety must be set aside for months to come. In about seven or eight months good news might be expected, and soon after that I hope we might see our friend again in his native country.’

Livingstone’s salary advance was duly transported to Zanzibar, relief supplies were purchased, a small caravan was hired, and the British Consulate’s office concluded preparations for what represented England’s final official attempt to help Livingstone. Either the supplies would find him and he would come out of Africa under his own power, or he would die and be laid in an anonymous grave. By all appearances, there seemed to be nothing more Murchison could do for Livingstone.

Ironically, in October 1870, as the seven-member relief caravan finalized preparations in Zanzibar, seventy-eight-year-old Sir Roderick Murchison was paralysed by a stroke.

On 1 November, the relief caravan sailed from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo, the traditional starting point for travel inland to Ujiji. ‘After a vast amount of delay,’ wrote Consul Churchill, ‘I have succeeded in sending off to Dr Livingstone a reinforcement of seven men, who have
engaged to place themselves at the disposal of the Doctor as porters, boatmen, etc, and a quantity of beads, cloths and provisions for his use.’

In December, Churchill was stricken with a severe malaria attack and returned to England on medical leave. Until a replacement could be appointed, his post was assumed by Livingstone’s old nemesis, John Kirk. Despite a recent ruling from his immediate superiors in Bombay that forbade medical officers from appointment to consular positions, and despite opposition from the old guard diplomatic corps, Kirk was determined to keep his new job in Zanzibar. It was the chance for status and power he’d always craved. ‘I had been given’, Kirk later wrote of the temporary position, ‘a fair chance of distinguishing myself.’

Kirk’s ambitions would not be easily realized. As 1870 came to a close, Kirk was unaware that Henry Morton Stanley was, quite literally, right over the horizon. In fact, he was only days from Zanzibar. Stanley’s search for a second coup, and Kirk’s search for his first, could only mean a collision of egos.

Livingstone, oblivious to either man’s plotting, was the prize.

James Gordon Bennett, Jr
©Bettmann/CORBIS

FOUR HUNDRED AND
thirty-six days after meeting Bennett, and nearly five years after Livingstone disappeared, Henry Morton Stanley finally went looking. He had completed Bennett’s lengthy itinerary.

The air in Zanzibar was balmy and humid as Stanley stood on the creaking, weathered deck of the American whaler
Falcon
. The island had been a mesmerizing green carpet as
Falcon
followed its contour through the Zanzibar Channel. The lime-coloured countryside dazzled Stanley and the tang of tropical landfall was intoxicating. But as
Falcon
nosed into Zanzibar’s busy port and the sun rose on Friday, 6 January, he became uneasy. Flat-roofed white palaces stood side by side facing the water, like a row of opulent ivory teeth. Each palace entryway featured Zanzibar’s trademark, an ornately carved wooden door. The air, he wrote in his journal, smelled of raw sewage, wood smoke, stale sweat, drying animal hides and breakfast. Twenty miles on the other side of the Zanzibar Channel, cloaked in morning fog, sprawled the eminence making Stanley’s morning an anxious affair: Africa.

Stanley had travelled the world since 1866. He knew the food, customs, haggling, lodging and transport of America, Europe, the Middle East and India. None of that, however, mattered in Africa. He was a novice. Everything was new. His anxieties threatened to paralyse him. Stanley was anxious to hear the latest Livingstone rumours and either to begin hunting or to turn around and take up Bennett’s alternative plan — the journey to China. He was anxious about the logistics of travelling through Africa, and aware he was innocent to the morals and means of its equatorial heart. He was anxious to meet the notorious John Kirk, and pepper him with sly questions about Livingstone. He was anxious to be under way, if Livingstone was still out there, before the forty-day monsoon season began in April.

He was extremely anxious about money, because he didn’t have any. The
Herald
had advanced him a thousand pounds at the start of his trip, but it was long gone. He prayed that his London bureau chief had sent a fresh supply of financing, and that the money was waiting at the American Consulate.

But most of all, Stanley was anxious about Central Africa. The ‘eternal, feverish region’ haunted his dreams. He’d read every book he could find since leaving Bennett — Burton, Speke, Livingstone, even E. D. Young — and as far as Stanley could imagine, the land he was about to cross was an enormous swamp of malarial mosquitoes, hippopotamus, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, tortoises and toads. The image depressed him. The journalistic code saying a correspondent stayed with a story until he got it, or until the assignment was given to someone else, went double at the
Herald
. There was no way out. Unless Bennett ordered otherwise, Stanley had to walk into Africa to find Livingstone. Only then could he return to the safety of his bureau in London.

Thanks to a phenomenal gift for suppression, Stanley turned his anxieties into action. His problem-solving began the instant he stepped from
Falcon
’s launch onto Zanzibar’s stone quay. He knew just one man in Zanzibar,
Francis Rope Webb, so his first stop was the American Consulate. At Stanley’s side was the two-man search force he’d begun assembling en route to Zanzibar: William Farquhar, a Scottish sailor, navigator, thug and drunk he met while sailing across the Indian Ocean, and Selim, a slender teenage manservant of Arab Christian ethnicity he hired back in Jerusalem. Selim could do no wrong in Stanley’s eyes, but in the two short months he’d known him, Farquhar was already the focus of Stanley’s greatest journal rants. ‘Farquhar is a sailor intelligent after a fashion,’ Stanley described, ‘but no exception. He is remarkably sulky, taciturn and unwilling to work, no matter what the job.’

Stanley, however, could not do without Farquhar. The travel plan taking shape in Stanley’s head depended upon the former first mate’s nautical knowledge. Instead of walking overland like Burton and Speke, Stanley planned to sail south from Zanzibar for fifty miles then enter Africa via a picturesque river known as the Rufiji. ‘It is this river that I intend to ascend to the Tanganyika,’ he wrote in the 1871 Colonial Edition Journal he would carry into Africa. With any luck, he would find Livingstone somewhere by the lake. Then, perhaps with Livingstone at his side, Stanley would return to civilization by sailing the Nile’s length. His re-emergence into civilization at Cairo would be a spectacle for the ages. The world would be astonished.

Just as important as glory, the Nile was also the fastest way to file his story. ‘If Livingstone is at Ujiji my work is easy,’ Stanley wrote. ‘The race is now for the telegraph.’ There was no telegraph in Zanzibar, which meant additional months travelling by ship to Aden or Bombay after the long walk from Ujiji. Cairo, however, had a telegraph of its own. And sailing downriver, even thousands of miles downriver, was faster than a long slow walk and a long slow sail.

The major obstacle to Stanley’s plan was that technical sailing skills eluded him. He had served a short stint in the Union Navy, but as a clerk. Hence, he was reliant upon the nautically savvy Farquhar.

Stanley strode along the waterfront to the great white building flying the American flag. He hoped to meet his old friend Francis Rope Webb face to face, pick up the
Herald
expedition money and learn the latest Livingstone news.

The thirty-eight-year-old Webb showed Stanley every hospitality, offering him and his men a place to stay. But Webb also broke the withering news that there was no
Herald
money waiting. Stanley was dumbfounded. He had considered such an oversight, but for the
Herald
to make such a grievous error meant the death of the search. Money was one problem he couldn’t fix through a simple attitude adjustment. He needed cash in hand to buy supplies and hire men.

The obvious solution was a quick return to Aden or even Bombay, where he could fire off a cable to Bennett. Stanley still had eighty dollars in his pocket — just enough to pay for such a trip. Either choice, however, would waste another six months at the very least. The start of Baker’s journey into Africa was just as delayed as Stanley’s, but Baker might still find Livingstone in that amount of time. Leaving Zanzibar was not an option.

Webb was the answer. In an act that would have been humiliating if Stanley wasn’t so desperate, he begged the American Consul to sign his name to a twenty-thousand-dollar line of credit. Webb, knowing James Gordon Bennett was more than good for the money, agreed. As part of the deal Webb stipulated that all monies be spent at businesses affiliated with the United States. For all his diplomatic title, Webb’s focus was strictly commercial. He doubled as the Zanzibar director for the Boston trading firm of John Bertram and Company. Thanks to the Civil War and the opening of the Suez Canal, American companies’ share of Zanzibar’s three-million-dollar annual market was shrinking. Britain’s, thanks to John Kirk, was increasing.

The shift grated on Webb. Zanzibar was small enough that all business was personal. And, personally, American traders despised Kirk. Webb considered him an aloof
‘empire builder’ who spoke in haughty ‘Kirkisms’. Even a member of the British clergy residing in Zanzibar once noted that Kirk was ‘a great hand at contradicting you flat, and aims at being the authority on all points under debate’.

Just as infuriating was Kirk’s success. He’d only been acting British Consul for a month, but already he’d made it his business to know all that was going on in Zanzibar. Having been apprenticed to Consuls Churchill and Seward for five years, Kirk also knew the importance of sending regular dispatches to London and Bombay, reporting on all activity concerning British influence — trade, intrigue within the Sultan’s palace, ship arrivals and departures, and travel into the interior.

Diplomatically, Kirk had already shown a brilliance Webb lacked by forging a watertight bond with Sultan Barghash, the new Omani ruler of Zanzibar. Barghash was portly, with a wispy beard and moustache, and constantly wore slippers because his feet were swollen by elephantiasis. He was not the sort of man with whom the buttoned-down Kirk would normally make friends, but the alliance was pivotal: Barghash controlled East African trade from Zanzibar all the way to Lake Tanganyika.

Simultaneously, the Royal Navy was assuming control over the waters off East Africa. Webb foresaw the day when American traders and ships would be muscled aside entirely. So even though Stanley’s journey might change Zanzibar’s dynamics little in the long term, it was a solid injection of business and international one-upmanship at a time when the American companies in Zanzibar — Bertram and Company; Arnold, Hines and Company; William Goodhue — needed it most.

Webb took Stanley around town. He introduced him to the Sultan, and to the second most powerful man in Zanzibar, customs master Ladha Damji, in order that Stanley might gather more information about journeying up the Rufiji. Stanley lied about his intentions, telling the Hindu with the snowy beard that the
Herald
was sending him up the Rufiji to write a travel piece on the river’s
famous beauty. Lined by grassland and forest, densely populated with hippos, rhinos, buffaloes, giraffes, baboons and monkeys, the Rufiji was developing a reputation as one of Africa’s jewels. Stanley’s cover story to the customs master was novel, but believable. It was known that one traveller — Central Africa’s first recorded tourist — had already come to Africa just to see Livingstone’s most wondrous discovery, Victoria Falls. If anything, a newspaper reporter writing stories about the Rufiji River portended things to come.