For seven years Marchand suffered fevers and illness, yet he weathered the climate better than most. He enjoyed it. He had also formulated, or refined, the plan he had dreamed of as a boy back in Thoissey, a small town near Lyons. The dream: to out-Stanley Stanley. He did not see Thoissey again until September 1895. On that first holiday home in France he put up a formal scheme to the Ministry of Colonies: he would be the first to carry the tricolore across Africa. His route would be new, untrodden by a European before. He would go further and faster than Stanley. He would at last be on an equal footing with the gods of his youth, his heroes, and would live his visionary dreams.
His seven years in Africa had made him no less prone to visions, but, like many, he needed to kill the source of his childish inspiration in order to achieve it: he began to hate the people he had once idolised – the British. Along with his fellow soudanis – the name was given to officers of the French Sudan, the easternmost part of French West Africa – he saw that the British were behind everything that spelt trouble in Africa. They were behind slavers though they professed to be against slavery, they pushed forward native kings hostile to French rule, they sought, successfully, to block French ambition in Africa at every turn. In other words they were the controlling power. The Germans, in contrast, were well thought of. It is easy to be popular when you have no power.
Marchand’s plan, the one accepted, was his most simple: to beat the British to the upper Nile. Kitchener’s railway had yet to be started. Omdurman was only a name in the gazetteer. It looked good.
But when Marchand landed in Libreville, the capital of the French Congo, in July 1896, the country was in uproar. One hundred and fifty Senegalese had been sent to accompany the expedition, but they had been held up by de Brazza, the Governor, who claimed that troops not under his direct control would upset the delicate balance of the Congo. The balance looked already to be upset, yet Marchand soldiered on; finally he confronted de Brazza about the lack of armed support and the condition of the country. De Brazza would be reported to the highest authority, if he did not co-operate. De Brazza gave way and Marchand set out to pacify the country between Luongo and Brazzaville (laughably beyond its namesake’s control). Six months after their arrival in the Congo the expedition arrived at their real starting point. As Burton said, there are many ‘starts’ to an expedition. They carted with them 13,000 pieces of luggage intended for the expedition, for resupply of French outposts along the way, and for establishment of the fort intended at Fashoda.
How big was a piece of luggage? Certainly a porter could carry no more than three or four pieces. One piece of luggage was a box of seeds, including haricots verts which one of Marchand’s lieutenants, Émile Landeroin, would later grow in the swamps of the Nile. En route he provided, even in dire conditions of swamp and fever, haute cuisine with heroic roux and sauces made out of native butter and mealie flour, poured over whatever fell to hand: Nile perch, tilapia, reed buck, buffalo, crocodile. They travelled upriver in a steamship, the Faidherbe, which would be their sturdy companion until the last.
Marchand led by example. The expedition doctor wrote, ‘Our chief is so enthusiastic, so persuasive, that he manages everything by his own example . . . he never seemed to rest. Everyone was caught up in his urgency and wished to follow him, to feel himself one of us.’
Over a year later the expedition had steamed up one of the narrowest of the Congo’s tributaries, the M’bomu, managing to reach a point 130 miles from what was hoped would be a navigable tributary of the upper Nile. Between the headwaters of the Congo and the Nile lay a 2,000-foot-high forest plateau. On one side the water drained into the Congo, on the other it went into the Nile, but in the middle there was nothing for the Faidherbe to float in. In a move reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, their small steamer was sawn into sections to be carried by porters across this divide. More pieces of luggage. It took weeks to do this in a systematic enough way so that the ship stood a chance of being reassembled once they reached the other side. Marchand himself took a demonic interest in the dismantling of the ship, in the exact record of each nut, bolt and rivet – lose a bolt in the Ituri Forest and the ship might never steam again. They had many porters, sturdy Yakoma tribesmen, to carry the bits, but one vital part of the boat could not be subdivided: the boiler. It took several days to work out what to do. Marchand encouraged the whole team to brainstorm the problem. You can imagine what a Gallic fervour of ingenious thinking this would bring on. They thought of a sedan-chair-type arrangement with extended poles for the porters to carry – but it was impossible, too heavy. They thought of transporting the boiler in a kind of rope hammock – too unwieldy. Finally, with a kind of naive brilliance, Marchand cut to the heart of the problem: they would reinvent the wheel; it was decided to roll it the entire 130 miles to the Nile.
But to roll a wheel you need a road. So they built one.
It took a thousand porters to make a suitably wide and level track. A path was surveyed and cut, then widened and flattened. Logs were laid to make a rough road. The chief engineer, Jean Souyri, almost became demented watching his precious boiler being jolted over roughly hewn tree trunks laid over crags, dry watercourses, ridges and pits, swaying as it was jerked from rock to rock, closer and closer to the now sacred destination of the Nile. The boiler was fourteen feet long and about four feet in diameter. Since it had to be rolled along its long axis, the road had to be fourteen feet wide. Wide enough for a humvee in fact; a vehicle which, unfortunately, they did not possess.
Having been travelling for over a year, the expedition was now spread out over about a thousand miles of country. Lines of communication were stretched almost to breaking point, but still Marchand pushed on like a crazed prophet determined to reach the upper Nile before the British could claim it. And the Faidherbe was not the only boat they carried: in the rear there were two metal whaling boats, also in parts, carried head high by the chanting Yakoma.
Imagine rolling a boiler from London to Birmingham, and then some. Around Coventry the jungle would give way to the dusty, rocky plains of the watershed. It was still hard going, and now they had to search out waterholes and straggly trees; finally they arrived at the upper Sueh, which flowed into the top of the Sudd swamp and eventually into the White Nile.
In a mad exercise of Imperial Meccano, it was time to reassemble the Faidherbe and continue the journey. Despite Marchand’s explicit records it was not a quick job. As they laboured to fit the jigsaw puzzle of the steamboat together, they saw that time yet again was against them. The rainy season was passing, and the river was getting lower by the day, ominous rocky pools forming as they watched. It looked as if the porters would need to shoulder their burden again – along with 90,000 rounds of ammunition, many hundred kegs of bordeaux and champagne, vin de Banyuls and ‘le corned beef’, much scorned though the latter was. As the water lowered, the Faidherbe, sans boiler (it would have weighed the ship down too much going over rocks), was put into accelerated reassembly and dragged over rapids a further one hundred miles. They hoped they would meet a great river that would bear them north without need of an engine. But here, by the side of a muddy tributary, at last beaten, they had to wait until the rains came. Four more months . . . and now they were separated from the very heart of the ship itself – the boiler.
Sans boiler the noble Faidherbe would be useless against the current. She had no sails and was too heavy to row. So another wooden road, a neat parody, we can now see with the comfort of hindsight, of Kitchener’s railway. Along this road, which ran alongside the dry river, the boiler would be rolled to the new resting position of the Faidherbe.
So in the south we have the French, quixotically making a wooden railway along which to roll a ship’s boiler. Up north you have the passionless, idealess rosbifs building a real railway – rails and sleepers and all – and they were winning. Kitchener’s army was already at the junction of the Atbara river and the White Nile, getting closer by the day. The British h
ad steam trains while the French didn’t even have a boiler.
Engineer Souyri gave up in disgust and retreated back to the Congo. Days after he had left, the boiler arrived. Marchand’s men then rebuilt the engine slowly, painstakingly, relying on diagrams in their now rotting notebooks.
In the kitchen garden the expedition’s doctor grew lettuces, radishes, spinaches, aubergines, cucumbers. When a Dinka chief walked thirty miles with a brother who had, he said, been constipated for seven weeks, a terrible ailment it has to be admitted, the doctor mixed up a remedy involving spinach, cod-liver oil, senna pods and pepper. The results were said to have been explosively satisfactory. But still the rains did not come.
Unbeknown to Marchand, the British had meanwhile won yet another war – slaughtering the Mahdi’s men and taking Omdurman, all according to plan. The Prime Minister Lord Salisbury would probably have offered a face-saving formula to the French. The territory that Marchand had traversed along the Bahr el-Ghazal could have been given to the French, and, if the French government had not at that moment just imploded over the Dreyfus Affair, a more conciliatory attitude might have been taken. But Salisbury’s Cabinet were not so diplomatically minded. They had won a war that had cost few lives but a lot of effort; they would not be denied their absolute rights over the Nile.
Britain had a big army very close to Fashoda. The French, though on a war footing, with the navy in the process of mobilising, were very far from being able to fight a war in Africa over a few acres of swamp. Britain was willing, had an army in situ and a navy vastly more powerful than that of France. That didn’t stop the French drawing up an invasion plan – of Britain! The tentacles of the Nile reach everywhere. Control of a river in Africa was leading towards a great war in Europe.
The Faidherbe was moored on the Nile at Fashoda, where Marchand and his men had built a camp. A few miles downstream were the British, who had travelled upriver as soon as Omdurman had been fought and won. The British were demanding that the French leave. The French wouldn’t. It was all very polite on the surface. There was no attempt to tear down the tricolore. Kitchener knew enough not to be heavy handed. The stand-off continued for months. The invasion plan was seen to be impractical and was withdrawn.
Meanwhile there was one last chance for the French to assert themselves, a 10,000-strong Ethiopian force with several Cossack mercenaries and a French citizen named Faivre and a Swiss citizen improbably called Potter.
The then Ethiopian emperor Menelik II (before being emperor he had been imprisoned by mad Theodore, though he ended up marrying Theodore’s daughter) had started sending Ethiopian troops south and west from the Ethiopian highlands to claim more of Africa. They had with them European advisers who naturally sought also to advance European interests. These men could lend their force to a joint French–Ethiopian claim to the upper waters of the Nile. The only problem was that the Ethiopian soldiers couldn’t see the point of marshy, disease-ridden Equatorial Africa. They found the conditions of travel so appalling that, though they reached the Nile, it was with a reduced force of only 800, the rest having deserted or died, lost to dysentery and malaria. When it came to asserting France’s claims alongside Ethiopia’s, they planted two fluttering flags side by side on the bank. Two Ethiopians swam out to an island to push their claims a few yards further, but of the French/Swiss force only Potter (or was he perhaps a cunningly placed British interloper?) could swim, and he was now delirious with fever.
Even with this failure, the French government clung to the hope of a solution that would be to their advantage. In the end they ordered Marchand, somewhat humiliatingly via a letter sent through Kitchener, that one officer should be sent to Cairo and then to Paris to further the decision-making process. Time passed, and conditions for the British were markedly worse than for the French. The French knew how to live. They sent daily baskets of produce from their gardens sown with European vegetables to Kitchener and his men, who were living on army biscuit, roasted hippo and a sort of Nile weed thought to be nutritious. There were a dozen deaths a week in the British camp, which was situated on the toad-infested mudflats downriver from Fashoda. The temperature was often over 40 degrees and not even Kitchener’s officers had mosquito nets, whereas Marchand and every one of his Senegalese and Yakoma men had been using them since their departure from the west coast of Africa.
In the end the five months of waiting became too much for Marchand. He went to Cairo himself to plead with the French Ambassador to support his tenuous hold on Fashoda. The answer was not only no, it was a no that transformed Marchand at a stroke from being a man who had led an heroic force to being an isolated adventurer, an obsessional nut, an embarrassment. He was warned not to wear his uniform in Cairo for fear of giving offence. Unable to save face, the government in Paris sought to use Marchand as a scapegoat, claiming that his well-stocked fort in Fashoda was ‘on the verge of starvation’.
Marchand was so disgusted that he never again spoke of Fashoda. Like his government, he desired to wash that memory of the Nile for ever from his life. He wept openly at the handing-over ceremony to the British.
To justify his journey, perhaps only to himself, Marchand decided to continue with the gallant ship Faidherbe up the Sobat river into Ethiopia. It is the Sobat that pours ‘white’ silt into the Nile and gives the lower river its name. It was slow and tortuous going as they were now running against the current. The river grew rockier and drier, the Faidherbe ground against stones and finally bottomed out on a ledge of limestone and began to take on water. She would go no further. Rather than simply leave her, the expedition unanimously agreed that she deserved a more dignified resting place. Two days of hard slog saw the completion of a little dry dock. With huge effort the Faidherbe was dragged into it and saluted, then toasted in one of the last bottles of champagne they had left: ‘Our brave little ship! May she rest in peace.’
They trekked on for six weeks to Addis Ababa, Harar and finally the French port at Djibouti. The going was rough and stony but it was a blessed relief after the swamps and jungles. At the edge of the Indian Ocean they hoisted the tattered tricolore they had raised with such high hopes and lowered in shame at Fashoda. Marchand perhaps wept again. It is not recorded. Back in France the expedition was sidelined by the establishment, but over the years the reputation of Marchand’s incredible journey grew – though only within the French-speaking world. In Britain his exploits are all but unknown.
Rusted remains of the steamer Faidherbe lie to this day on the banks of the upper Sobat, tribute to the determination of Capitaine Jean-Baptiste Marchand. Sadly, though, the boiler was taken out to be hammered into tribal weaponry many years ago.
40 • The first trans-African traveller, circa 1898
‘Don’t come to me, I will come to you,’ said the malaria.
Upper Nile saying
The days of the old Nile explorers were merging into a new age of colonial expansion: explorer + Maxim = colony being the general equation. The extent of European penetration into the Nile region around the turn of the twentieth century made for safer travel – if you were on the right side. This meant that much longer journeys through Africa were now possible.
Possibly one of the most unPC travellers was the empire builder Ewart Grogan, who in 1898–1900 became the first man to travel from the Cape in South Africa to Cairo, via the headwaters of the Nile. Grogan had failed at school and university in England, and had gone to South Africa to make his fortune. When he asked a young woman to marry him, she said she would not unless he proved he could succeed at something. So he rashly decided on his plan to become the first man to traverse Africa from south to north.
Mentored by Cecil Rhodes, Grogan saw Africa as one big opportunity for the British to extend the reach of their empire – through hard work, not mere appropriation, it must be said. Grogan was immensely tough and brave, a Cambridge dropout and a first-rate shot. His comments on people with a darker-hued skin are probably what has kept his otherwise fascinating acco
unt of walking from Cape to Cairo out of print, other than the poor print-on-demand copies which render some pages unreadable.
Grogan enters our story when he hits the Nile basin in eastern Rwanda. His Watusi guide had introduced him to some ‘ape-like creatures leering at me from behind some banana-palms’. One of these creatures is described as ‘a tall man with long arms, pendant paunch, and the short legs of the ape, pronouncedly microcephalous and prognathous’. These creatures were easily alarmed, but once they realised that Grogan was friendly they explained by sign language exactly how to capture elephants – which was one of Grogan’s interests (he treated the whole trip partly as an extended hunting holiday). Grogan writes:
I failed to exactly define their status, but from the contempt in which they are held by the Waruanda, their local caste must be very low. The stamp of the brute was so strong on them that I should place them lower in the human scale than any other natives I have seen in Africa. Their type is quite distinct . . . and, judging from the twenty or thirty specimens that I saw, very consistent. Their face, body and limbs are covered with wiry hair, and the hang of their long, powerful arms, the slight stoop of the trunk, and the haunted, vacant expression of the face, made up a tout ensemble that was terrible pictorial proof of Darwinism. Two of them accompanied me to Mushari . . . they showed me the ease with which they can make fire with their fire-sticks.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 44