Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (22 page)

The more Stanley ruminated about Kirk’s failure to expedite supplies to Livingstone, the more the conflict between him and Kirk escalated in his head. Stanley represented America: brash, arrogant with resources, steadfast in the belief that anything was possible. Kirk was Great Britain: sober, powerful, understated. So while Kirk was quietly sure Livingstone would carry on until the supplies inevitably reached him, Stanley was appalled Kirk could be so reckless about Livingstone’s safety. ‘If the British Consul puts forward a plea that he was not aware that his supplies to Livingstone were still halted at Bagamoyo, it will only prove to me that he was more culpably negligent than ever of his duty to a British subject and a brother official, who was left completely dependent on him for even the means to live,’ Stanley wrote.

As if reading Stanley’s mind, a rumour circulated through Bagamoyo on 10 February that ‘balyuz’ — the Consul — was coming to town. The relief caravan immediately packed up and slipped away in the dead of night, headed in the general direction of Ujiji. By the time Kirk stepped off HMS
Columbine
and strolled into Bagamoyo two days later, they were long gone.

Kirk claimed he was in Bagamoyo to hunt, but really he was there to save face. Snider rifle in the crook of his arm, Kirk ventured into the bush for a day of shooting, pretending disinterest about the caravan. In actuality, he followed their path several miles inland to confirm the relief caravan wasn’t just loitering outside town, waiting for him to go back to Zanzibar so they could head back to the beach.

Stanley seemed to be the only man not fooled by Kirk’s ruse. Stanley confronted Kirk in Bagamoyo. He scolded the Consul for being negligent with Livingstone’s supplies, and Kirk responded by looking down his nose at Stanley. He sneered that the journalist knew nothing about Africa. To prove it, Kirk coldly predicted tse-tse flies would soon kill the two new horses that were the objects of Stanley’s pride. Then, having had the last word, Kirk sailed back to Zanzibar on
Columbine
.

Finally, to ensure Kirk was seen as Livingstone’s staunch ally, Kirk wrote to the new Foreign Secretary back in London, Lord Granville. The letter was dated 18 February. Kirk swore he had travelled with the caravan from the beaches of Bagamoyo until they were eight miles outside town. ‘Had I not gone in person,’ he wrote to assure Granville, ‘the caravan might have loitered yet several months.’

Back in Bagamoyo, Stanley set aside his rivalry with Kirk to focus on his expedition. Porters were beginning to trickle in. Stanley hired them immediately and began sending sections of the caravan on their way to Tabora, which lay five hundred miles to the west. The first group of twenty-four pagazis left on 18 February, led by a group of three soldiers. With the monsoons due to arrive in six weeks, it was crucial that Stanley make sure the other four groups left before 1 April. After that point it was likely the rains would turn the trail into a black sludge, and travel would be impossible.

No route inland was safe from the rains. And though it was a minor detail, of the three caravan routes heading west, Stanley chose the route Arab traders considered fastest — but also the most rugged. The three routes weren’t much different from one another, and even crossed each other at certain points. One had been followed by Burton and Speke. The other by Speke and Grant. Stanley’s was shortest, if only by a little, but Stanley reasoned it would make a difference when the rains hit. ‘My mission was one that required speed,’ Stanley wrote. ‘Any delay would render it useless. Forty days’ rain and a two-hundred-mile swamp must not prevent the New York
Herald
correspondent from marching, now that the caravan is ready.’

Finally, on 21 March, his caravan was indeed ready. After seven interminable weeks, it was finally Stanley’s turn to leave Bagamoyo. Farquhar had left on 25 February, leading the third caravan, followed by the fourth caravan on 11 March. But Shaw would travel with Stanley in the rear column. Separating the two sailors was
intentional. Farquhar was a bitter whore-monger and drunkard who enjoyed baiting Shaw, a simple, witty dreamer prone to depression and rage. Separating them seemed the best hope of minimizing conflict on the trail.

Stanley had begun to compare the inactivity of Bagamoyo with doing time in a federal penitentiary. Therefore, as he rode the bay horse out of town, there was a song in his heart. Stanley’s group was the largest caravan segment, including twenty-eight porters, Bombay and eleven soldiers, Selim the fourteen-year-old interpreter, Omar the dog, a tailor, a cook, John Shaw and Stanley. Mrs Webb’s flag flew at the front of the column. ‘We were all in the highest spirits — the soldiers sang extempore, the Kirangoze lifted his voice into a loud bellowing note, and fluttered the American flag,’ Stanley wrote of that stirring morning. ‘My heart, I thought, palpitated much too quickly for the sobriety of a leader. But I could not help it. The enthusiasm of youth still clung to me.’

A total of 192 people comprised the New York
Herald
expedition’s five caravans. ‘Altogether,’ Stanley wrote, ‘the expedition numbers three white men, twenty-two soldiers, four supernumeraries, with a transport train of eighty-two pagazis, twenty-seven donkeys and two horses, conveying fifty-two bales of cloth, seven man-loads of wire, sixteen man-loads of beads, twenty loads of boat fixtures, three loads of tents, four loads of clothes and personal baggage, two loads of cooking utensils and dishes, one load of medicines, three of powder, five of bullets, small shot and metallic cartridges, three of instruments and small necessaries, such as soap, sugar, tea, coffee, Liebig’s extract of meat, pemmican, candles, etc, which makes a total of one hundred and sixteen loads — equal to eight and a half tons of material.’

The sheer mass of goods was a reassuring reminder Stanley would never do without. It was also his acknowledgement that his logistics were influenced too greatly by reading Burton, and from listening to Sheikh Hashid. The New York
Herald
expedition, however, could no longer afford to base itself on previous journeys. The average
caravan slogged six miles per day — less than one mile per hour. Time meant little in Africa, and ten miles a day was a fair journey. But Stanley was attempting the outrageous. He needed to move faster. He needed to start thinking for himself.

In many ways, that applied to his life as well as his caravan. Africa was a big land with a big sky and empty spaces, where silence and solitude and boredom forced even a man like Stanley, at once entranced and terrified by introspection, to peer inside his soul to divine the essence of his being. It was a process, though, that he intended to suppress through activity. ‘Pleasure cannot bind me, cannot lead me astray from the path I have chalked out,’ he wrote, defining the facade of denial and bluster concealing his inner chaos. ‘I have nothing to fall back upon but energy and much hopefulness.’

The facade, however, started to crack as soon as he began his journey into Africa, on 21 March 1871, with the glorious march from Bagamoyo. Pleasure seeped in through those cracks, and Stanley was too awash in sensation to care. ‘Loveliness glowed around me as I looked at the fertile fields of manioc, the riant vegetation of the tropics, the beautiful strange trees and flowers, plants and herbs, and heard the cry of the peewit and cricket and the noisy sibilance of many insects,’ Stanley wrote. ‘Methought each and all whispered to me, “At last you are started.”’

The pleasure was fleeting. Three days later, just as Kirk predicted, both horses died. To Stanley’s smug satisfaction, when he slit them open for a field autopsy, the cause of death was parasitic worms, not tse-tse flies.

‘O FATHER,’ LIVINGSTONE
prayed in his journal on New Year’s Day, 1871. ‘Help me to finish this work to Thy honour!’

Finally, at the age of fifty-eight, through a perseverance that bordered on mania, it seemed as if Livingstone had done just that. On 29 March 1871, he reached the village of Nyangwe, on the shores of the Lualaba River. Until then, he had nearly given up finding the Source. ‘It is excessively trying,’ he wrote of his search a few days earlier, ‘and so many difficulties have been put in my way that I doubt whether the Divine favour and will is on my side.’

But then he found it — or at least, thought he had. Before him lay the Lualaba River, which he was more convinced than ever was the Source of the Nile. Through interviews with Arabs and villagers and his own observations during five long years of withering travel, he had come to the conclusion that the Lualaba could be nothing other than the upper Nile. The Nile and Lualaba, then, were one and the same. By tracing the Lualaba south to its source, he would find the Nile’s.

At one time Livingstone thought the Lualaba might be the source of the great Congo River instead, but an observation of the Lualaba’s immense width and length, steady northward flow and two-thousand-foot elevation made him positive it was the Source. ‘I went down to take a good look at the Lualaba,’ he wrote. ‘It is narrower than it is higher up, but still a mighty river — at least three thousand yards broad and always deep. It can never be waded at any point, or at any time of year. The people unhesitatingly declare that if one tried to ford it he would assuredly be lost. It has many large islands, and at these it is about two thousand yards, or one mile. The banks are steep and deep. There is clay and yellow schist in the structure. The current is about two miles away to the north.’

And north led, theoretically, to where it became the Nile. To confirm that theory, Livingstone needed to rent a canoe from the Nyangwe villagers and follow the river’s flow to see where it led. Once that was accomplished, he could then backtrack down the Lualaba to its source, sure that he had also solved the mystery of the Nile’s.

The villagers of Nyangwe, however, had seen Livingstone travelling with Arabs, and thought the white-skinned Livingstone to be an eminent slaver. They were convinced he wanted a canoe to cross over to the river’s far side and make war. The villagers were happy to rent a canoe to Chuma and Susi, and even small groups of lesser Arabs, but the white-skinned Livingstone wasn’t to be trusted. ‘They were alarmed at my coming among them,’ he wrote, ‘and ready to flee. Many stood afar off in their suspicion.’

Nyangwe, like Bambarre, was comfortable, and Livingstone was eager to earn the people’s trust, no matter how long he had to wait. The busy village was easily one of the finest places in Africa he had ever resided in. The people were enormously intelligent. Ivory was so plentiful that they decorated the arches of their doorways with elephant tusks. The women were stunning, with a colouring like light cocoa, fine noses, full lower lips and delicate
jaw lines. They wore no clothing, save for a leather band around their waist, from which dangled thin, ornamented strands of grass cloth to cover their pubic region and the cleft in their buttocks. Their hair was woven into long, elaborate shapes that protruded from the front of their heads like a sun visor, then also cascaded down the back of their necks in ringlets. Many possessed a great skill for swimming and holding their breath, and would dive to the bottom of the Lualaba for freshwater oysters. Livingstone was quite taken with the women of Nyangwe.

Unfortunately, Livingstone wasn’t the only outsider enchanted by the women of Nyangwe and other villages in the Manyuema region. Coincidental to his journey, the Arabs had carried their slave trade further and further into the heart of Africa due to the Zanzibar cholera epidemic. Never having seen guns before, tribes in the Manyuema region didn’t understand what the Arabs fired at them in times of war. It seemed that the newcomers had found a way to trap lightning, and it was assumed that fighting back was futile. The Arabs, who were initially terrified of the cannibalistic aspect of Manyuema, were soon flooding the region, stealing ivory and people with abandon. Word had already trickled back into the interior that women of Manyuema were fetching high prices in the Zanzibar slave markets. Their beauty was considered so stunning that many of Zanzibar’s Omani half-castes were purchasing the Manyuema women to be wives instead of consigning them to a harem.

Livingstone had no plans to marry these women, whom he observed daily in the village marketplace. That didn’t necessarily mean, however, Livingstone was chaste. Though a man of God, he was not without weakness. The missionary who arrived in Africa as a teetotal virgin had become fond of beer and champagne, and often travelled with a small bottle of brandy when he could procure it. Livingstone was also fond of women — and sex. It was only natural in a land where the intense heat made nudity preferable to being fully clothed, where sex often took place in the outdoors because the communal family hut
was too small for intimacy, where the muffled sounds of furtive lovemaking could be heard at night, and where Livingstone occasionally stumbled upon Africans in the act of intercourse. It was also not surprising that a widower enduring long absences from England would want the company of a woman.