by Tim Jeal
But James Gordon Bennett Jr's decision to delay the search would turn out to be spot on. Less than a month after the proprietor's meeting with Stanley, the Bombay Gazette (zo November) published a letter written by Livingstone six months earlier, on 30 May 1869, from Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Bennett's new hope was that by the time Stanley had travelled to all the places he had listed a year would have passed and, with luck, nothing more would have been heard from Dr Livingstone. In Stanley's famous published account of the Paris interview, he quotes Bennett as saying: `Draw a thousand pounds now, and when you have gone through that, draw another thousand, and when that is spent draw another ... and so on; but, FIND LIVINGSTONE.' Proof that he said no such thing is contained in a letter that Stanley sent to Bennett from Zanzibar on 117 January 1871, a year and two and a half months after the Paris meeting. As might have been expected, given the on-off nature of the Livingstone search project, there had in reality been no dramatic injunction to FIND LIVINGSTONE at whatever cost, as Stanley would state in his best-seller, How I Found Livingstone. Instead, in his letter Stanley recalled for James Gordon Bennett Jr's benefit that he (Bennett) had decided to send him on a year's course of travel through the Middle East ending at Zanzibar.
James Gordon Bennett Jr
`How much do you allow for this?' I asked.
`Oh! As much as it will cost. Draw £Soo now and when that is over, draw another - and another etc.,' you replied.
`Well I have drawn but £6oo that has lasted me a year ....'
So clearly the '£5oo ... etc.' had only referred to the Middle Eastern journey. The vexed question of how much the African journey would cost had not been touched upon at the meeting on z8 October - which was why in this same letter (117 January 1 1870) Stanley, by now at Zanzibar and expecting a large remittance, pointed out anxiously that $4,000 or $5,000 would be needed fast, in order to find Livingstone in the interior.48
When Stanley met Katie and Thomas Gough Roberts in London two days after his vital meeting with Bennett, it could not have been easy for him to break the news to them that he was about to be sent abroad again, for even longer this time. Here then was a crucial moment of choice for Stanley, which his earlier rejection by the Ambella family should have prepared him for. If he told Roberts he was going to Africa, or even around the world, the man would be horrified. White men often died in Africa, and journeys round the world could take years. Naively, Stanley hoped that if he merely told Roberts that he would be in the Middle East for a year, and if he suggested an immediate marriage in London followed by a period travelling together, Roberts would agree to his daughter marrying. But Mr Roberts would only allow him to marry Katie if he abandoned all lengthy foreign assignments. It should have been clear to Stanley at this point that he could have either marital security or distant fame and glory, but not both - or at any rate, not with Katie.
This all-important meeting with his fiancee and Mr Roberts took place in a house in the Euston Road and lasted about an hour. Stanley thought his fiancee looked at him rather coolly - as indeed she might, given the unwelcome news about his new assignment. She seems to have felt the same about his behaviour, for later she said that he had merely been `business-like'.49 Roberts refused to let Katie travel, and after rejecting an early marriage told Stanley he would have to wait to wed until he was able to stay in Britain long enough to show commitment to a settled way of life." Stanley must have realized that this postponement would probably be fatal. But while he did not give up, he never for a moment thought of abandoning his African quest. That, in the last resort, mattered most of all to him. Yet Stanley still longed for the security of marriage, and hoped he could find Livingstone and marry Katie. He wrote to her from the steamer Europe, on 8 November, while in the Grand Harbour at Malta:
Those few minutes I have passed with you [in London] have done me infinite good. My love for you is now rich and deep, it is also respectful. I find it impossible to express it all ... there is no being on earth I love as much as my own dear, dear girl.5'
Two letters from Katie reached Stanley in Constantinople in April 118 7o and he replied by offering to marry her if she came out to Turkey at once, the alternative being for her to wait two years until he came home."Z By the time this letter reached Katie, her father had died. She wrote several grief-stricken letters, none of which reached Henry. Her father had left her only a few hundred pounds in his will and she wanted help now, not in two years' time. With her bereaved family needing her so much, how could she possibly join Henry in some remote place? It was the end for her.
It is unknown whether Henry wrote to Katie between mid-April and early October 1187o. But on 7 October he wrote from Bombay, having learned at last, from an old letter of hers that had been awaiting his arrival since July, that Thomas Roberts had been dead for months. Stanley expressed sympathy, but felt unable to tell her more about his coming expedition than: `I shall be absent from 6 months to i year in Africa.' Katie was not to worry about the money she had expected to inherit. `Your poverty will make no difference with me ... I shall hurry up with my business, and marry you. I swear it by all I hold sacred.'' 3 But could he really have believed that a girl who had lost both her parents in a short space of time, and had money worries, would be prepared to wait for him, knowing nothing of his mission? The choice had really been between her, or James Gordon Bennett Jr and Africa, as Henry must have known since their meeting in the Euston Road almost a year before. The romantic side of his nature told him that their story ought to end in marriage: the workhouse boy, having distinguished himself beyond all expectations, weds the daughter of the respectable local gentleman, and they live happily ever afterwards in a big house just outside the town where they had spent their youth. But Katie had never understood his inner conviction of being chosen for a great task. Her ambition was to have a husband with her to help raise their children.
It is not known when she met the architectural student whom she married in September 187o. Despite Urban Rufus Bradshaw's magnif icent names, he was not from a privileged family, his father being a Manchester policeman. But if he lacked Stanley's self-made glamour, at least he was able to be with Katie when she needed him. By the time Stanley wrote his last surviving letter to Katie from Bombay's Byculla Hotel, she was already living as Mrs Urban Bradshaw in Pendleton, outside Manchester, and taking in piano pupils.54
In late October 11869, after his key meeting with Bennett, Stanley had stayed with Edward King in Paris, but refused to tell him about his assignment. On the day of Henry's departure, the two friends set out together for the Gare de Lyon. Before boarding the train, Stanley said very solemnly: `I may not be back for many years, but I shall come back. Goodbye!''' King did not doubt him for a moment. Whenever attacks were made on Stanley in the press in the years to come, King would always believe in him.
Oddly, the only person Stanley told about his Livingstone search in advance of leaving appears to have been a precocious thirteen-year-old American boy, Edwin Balch, whose wealthy parents lived in Paris. Henry visited them when he came to see Edward King, or Mr Bennett, who preferred Paris to New York. Edwin wanted Henry to take him travelling and wrote many wheedling letters, which received kind but discouraging replies.s6 Yet Stanley still relished boyish admiration. In fact, when he had first met Edwin in February 11869, the boy's enthusiasm for exploration had impressed him so much that he had given him a copy of Livingstone's Missionary Travels. Though not permitted to come travelling, Edwin was told the Livingstone secret. He wrote to Henry on zr May, informing him that he had seen reports in a French newspaper stating that Sir Roderick Murchison believed Livingstone was `crossing the [African] continent on the Equator'.'' In Murchison's most recent statement, it had merely been said that Livingstone was not approaching Zanzibar, as had been rumoured.58 So Henry was desperate to see this French article, which Edwin eventually ran to earth. Its author suggested that Livingstone would eventually emerge on the west coast, rather than on the east, and this - though un
true - had come as welcome news to Stanley, whose greatest fear had been that Livingstone might emerge any day at Zanzibar.'9
During the year that followed Stanley's meeting in Paris with James Gordon Bennett Jr and his farewell to Edward King at the Gare de Lyon, he reported on the opening of the Suez Canal, peered into the excavations at Jerusalem, visited Odessa and the battlefields of the Crimea, interviewed the governor of the Caucasus at Tiflis and journeyed to the Persian Gulf via Persepolis.6o And at the end of all this, in Bombay, where Stanley was waiting to sail for Africa, what news did he hear about Livingstone's whereabouts? Incredibly, in October r 870, no more was known about the great explorer than had been known a year earlier. And no other letter had been received at Zanzibar, or anywhere else.
Challenging though this uncertainty was, it remained the ideal situation that Mr Bennett had dreamed of when postponing the search. When Dr Livingstone had written his last letter to Kirk on 30 May 11869, the explorer had been at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and had been proposing to cross the lake and head west into Manyema, where the people were said to be cannibals. But whether he was still there, or had gone elsewhere, or been killed and eaten, was a mystery. Stanley was about to take an immense gamble - the kind that other gambling men would have thought far likelier to end with his death than with his success.
SEVEN
The Long-imagined Quest
Stanley sighted the island of Zanzibar on the morning of 6 January 1871 from the deck of an American brigantine, the Falcon. In the hazy distance he could see, beyond the masts and rigging of the ships at anchor, a jumble of white, flat-roofed houses, and the blood-red banner of the Sultan streaming out over his unfinished palace. Wafting into Henry's nostrils, on a scarcely discernible breeze, was an odour that in years to come would summon up in an instant this gateway to Africa: a heady mix of spices, tar, rotting vegetables, excrement and drying hides. The sun had not yet burned off the early morning mist, and across the strait ,the high lands of the continent loomed like a lengthening shadow'.'
Here, at last, was the `Dark Continent' - that double-edged designation Stanley would one day use in two best-selling books. But despite his later commercialization of the phrase, it had not been coined by him but by the early nineteenth-century missionaries. To them, Africa's `darkness' had not been principally due to its geographical mystery, or even to the colour of its inhabitants. For men like Moffat and Livingstone, Africa's `darkness' was a spiritual and intellectual one, requiring the Gospel's light. For settlers and explorers, the continent's darkness had more to do with the unknown extent of it. But the darkness that troubled them most of all was the shadow of death. The death rate on the four expeditions sent from Britain to the rivers Congo, Zambezi and Niger between 11816 and 118411 had been over 6o per cent. Since then, although the principal explorers in east and central Africa (Speke, Burton, Baker and Grant) had survived, they had all come close to death, surviving only through liberal dosing with quinine - prescribed with the laxative resin of jalap by the greatest survivor of them all, David Livingstone.
For a man like Stanley, who needed to prove himself after his childhood rejection, mastering Africa was a test that could scarcely be bettered. The task would have an epic dimension, involving power, pride and, above all, endurance as he battled with the African environment and with his own human limitations. At the heart of the non-conformist Christian education of the workhouse had been the idea of redemption through suffering - becoming a new man. In the vastness of Africa, as ruler of his small party - away from the social distinctions of north Wales, from the greed and materialism of the slave-owning Deep South, from the helpless boy he had once been - there might emerge the new, perfected Stanley. He could so easily have spoken the words that Patrick White gave to Voss, the eponymous explorer hero of his masterpiece: `To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.'
In 118411, the year of Stanley's birth, when the twenty-eight-year-old Livingstone stepped ashore at Cape Town for the first time, the geography of central Africa was as much a mystery to Europeans as it had been to the Greeks and Romans z,ooo years earlier. The existence of the great lakes was not suspected, and the position of the sources of the Nile and Congo were matters only for fruitless conjecture. Then, between 11853 and 11856, Livingstone, in a majestic journey, crossed Africa along the line of the Zambezi. He suffered twenty-seven attacks of malaria and almost died at the half-way stage. Two years later, Richard Burton and John Speke reached Lake Tanganyika, and that same year Speke gained his first sight of an immense lake, which with typical Victorian cultural arrogance he called Lake Victoria. He returned in 1186z and found the vast lake's narrow northern outflow, which he would claim as the source of the Nile. In 11864 Samuel Baker reached a large lake north-west of Speke's Victoria Nyanza, the Luta Nzige, which he renamed Lake Albert. But none of these men had proved whether these nyanzas were single bodies of water, or groups of lakes. Nor did anyone know whether Lake Tanganyika - lying to the south-west of Lake Albert - fed it by a connecting river. If it did, Tanganyika (being so far to the south) would be the primary source of the Nile, rather than Speke's Victoria. This link was something Stanley wished to investigate, should he reach the Tanganyika in his search for Livingstone.
As Henry wandered through the crooked lanes of Zanzibar, seeking out the red-turbaned Banian, or Indian traders, from whom he would buy his supplies, nervousness vied with justifiable pride. He had taken many risks to secure his present opportunity - first offering to go to Abyssinia for Bennett at his own expense, then to travel through the Middle East with no guarantees of how much money would be available for the African part of his journey. But he had let none of this discourage him. The concept was so perfect that fear of insufficient commitment from Bennett and the New York Herald had never for a moment deterred him. Newspaper despatches made a journalist's name better known with every column inch that was published. So Stanley expected that the letters he would soon be writing to the Herald from Africa would build him an immense readership long before his enterprise was over and he wrote his travel book, which would surely outsell Livingstone's best-selling Missionary Travels, which Henry had read in his teens. To have put together a newspaper and book package, centred on a stunt, was an advanced idea to have had in the late 186os, when most newspapers (notable exceptions being the New York Herald and New York Sun) simply reported the news in a frankly pedestrian manner.
It was a terrible shock to Stanley, on arriving at Zanzibar, to find that Bennett had let him down by not sending any money. However, because Henry had been left penniless by Bennett at the end of the Abyssinian expedition, even being reduced to selling his watch to buy food, he had taken care to bring Levien's letters proving that he was on a bona fide assignment for the Herald. He took these to the American consul, Francis Webb, to whom he had written two years previously, enquiring confidentially about Livingstone's whereabouts. This letter, along with those from Levien, gave Consul Webb enough confidence in Stanley to agree to pledge his own credit. Reassured by the US consul's guarantee, the merchants of Zanzibar accepted two drafts that Stanley now drew on the New York Herald, for $3,750 and $11,25o, respectively.'
Because Stanley found Gordon Bennett's behaviour so personally insulting, he would never in print admit to what had happened. Hypersensitive to slights, Henry exaggerated the cost of his journey because he needed to give the world the impression that the New York Herald was roo per cent behind him. In his first despatch to the Herald,' he claimed that he had just spent $8,ooo on cloth, beads and wire alone - an immense exaggeration. Since his journey is still thought - even by scholars - to have been lavishly funded, it is worth quoting the sum Stanley told Mr Bennett was essential for his mission - a mere $4,000 to $5,000, with a basic figure of $3,842 given at the end of a detailed list. That this really was the modest sum he thought adequate can be verified by comparing it with the calculations he made on the endpapers of his copy of Richard Burton's two volume work, The Lake Regions of Central
Africa, amounting to $3,280 for all men and supplies.4 Stanley would later say that Mr Bennett had paid £4,000 for his expedition, equivalent to about $zo,ooo - an even larger exaggeration. In order to make such an over-estimate seem credible, Stanley destroyed his contemporary accounts and wrote out a new version, substantiating the $8,ooo figure for supplies alone. Getting in on the act, Mr Bennett stated that the expedition cost him between £8,ooo and £9,ooo.I Because Henry willingly connived in these exaggerations, his critics would one day say that whereas rival explorers were under-funded, he had had everything he needed and more, and had therefore had an easier time. Incredibly, Stanley's funding was inferior to Burton's and Speke's, and even to the £z,ooo raised by Livingstone in 11866, which the doctor condemned as wretchedly inadequate.'
Stanley's need to feel important after his workhouse years led him into another unfortunate exaggeration: that his expedition was larger than all recent ones. In his first African despatch to his newspaper, he gave the total number of his pagazi or porters as 8z men, rather than the 1157 he would claim in his book to have hired. In this same despatch, his total for the expedition was r r r men. The figure he gave Bennett was ioo pagazi, with a total for the whole caravan of just over rzo, as opposed to the 119z claimed in his book and accepted by recent biographers.' His diary puts it beyond doubt that the lower estimates are reliable. Plainly, Stanley's achievement (unrecognized till now) was the greater for having been won with far slenderer resources than those stated by all his previous biographers.