Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

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Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer Page 17

by Tim Jeal


  The two men left Ujiji for Unyanyembe on 27 December with five of Livingstone's followers and about forty of Stanley's men. For a week they travelled south by water, and then overland for forty-seven days, following the same route Stanley had taken to avoid Mirambo on the way to Ujiji. On setting out, Henry felt a heavy sense of responsibility to be choosing a safe route for the world's most famous explorer. Then, during the second half of February, Stanley fell ill again, and their roles reversed - with him being carried in a cot. Soon after Stanley's recovery, Livingstone was stung by a swarm of bees. Despite suffering terribly, that same evening he dined with Stanley, who gave his cook, Ferajji, stern instructions to produce for dinner the best meatballs and custard dessert in his repertoire.5° Unyanyembe was reached on 118 February and the pair settled down in the tembe in Kwihara, which Stanley had occupied before leaving for Ujiji.

  The first letter Stanley opened on arrival was from the US consul, Francis Webb, informing him that James Gordon Bennett Jr had repudiated his (Stanley's) draft for $3,750. `The amount will ruin me,' a distraught Webb told Henry, `unless you can certify me that you will be able with private means to meet all these obligations.' Clearly, Henry could not do that. He said nothing to Livingstone, who was happily reading some letters from his grown-up children. Despite his extraordinary achievement, it occurred to Henry that Bennett was about to treat him as he had treated others. Near the bottom of the pile, he came across a later communication from Webb enclosing a letter from a man called Hosmer - apparently Levien's replacement in London. Hosmer announced that the Herald was now prepared to cash all drafts drawn by Stanley." He breathed again.

  At Kwihara, Livingstone and Stanley were once more among ArabSwahili traders. Although the doctor was `driven almost into a passion' when the subject of Arab atrocities came up in conversation, he tenderly nursed Mwini Mokay, a dying slave trader, who had left a trail of blood and havoc in Manyema.sz Yet while caring for others, however undeserving, the doctor neglected his own health. Stanley feared that he would jettison the shallow-draught boat he meant to leave for him, and prefer to wade through swamps. Henry wrote prophetically: `His weakest point is dysenteric attacks.' And these, Stanley had noted, had been worse when Livingstone had got wet. So what would happen in the rainy season, as Livingstone rounded the southern sources of the Lualaba through endless marshes?53 Because of the war still raging between Mirambo and the Arabs, Livingstone said he would not risk heading due west to Nyangwe to trace the Lualaba north from there. Instead, he meant to make for the southern foot of Lake Tanganyika, and only after sorting out all the sources of the Lualaba would he head north for Nyangwe where he had last seen the great river.

  As their time together moved to its melancholy close, Stanley became increasingly worried. Although Livingstone had put on weight during the four months they had spent together, and looked much younger, Stanley was alarmed by his frequent bouts of bowel trouble, which he would never let stop him.-54 `I shall see Livingstone no more,' Henry confided to his diary, `unless he finishes his task.'ss `At his age, drawing near his Goth year it appears to be a big task - from the cannibals on the Lualaba's banks, & the multitude of rivers he has mentioned.' Stanley doubted he could have endured such a journey: `My shrunken muscles & whimpering stomach urge me to leave the black man's land before another bout of fever lays me low under the sable Sol 1.,,6 The doctor filled the time by writing helpful letters of introduction for Stanley to make use of in Britain.57

  On the evening of I I March, Stanley's men began to sing `a slow and mournful refrain about the white man going home - oh, oh, oh...' The 13th was planned to be the last full day Stanley would spend with `dear old Livingstone'. That evening, the dividing door between their rooms was closed by the doctor:

  and we both think our own thoughts. What his are I know not. Mine are sad. My days seem to have been spent far too happily - for now that the last day is almost gone, I bitterly regret the approach of the parting hour. I now forget the successive fevers, and their agonies, and the semi-madness to which they often plagued me. The regret I feel is greater than any pains I have endured ... the Farewell, I fear may be forever. Forever? And For Ever ...58

  Stanley had turned down Livingstone's invitation to travel with him, partly in order to fulfil James Gordon Bennett Jr's brief, but also because fearing that he had never been `made for an African explorer', for: `I detest the land most heartily."' Yet feeling closer to Livingstone than to anyone he had ever known, Stanley was racked with nostalgia, both for the man and for the extraordinary continent he had made his own. That night, for the first time, Livingstone gave Stanley proper thanks

  uttered with no mincing phrases, but poured out as it were at the last moment until I was so affected that I sobbed as one only can in uncommon grief ... that kind of praise that steals into one & touches the softer parts of the ever veiled nature ... for a time I was as a sensitive child of eight or so and yielded to such a burst of tears that only such a scene as this one could have forced.

  Livingstone told him that when he had marched for the coast `this house will look as if a death has taken place'. It worried the doctor that Stanley was still weak, and he advised the journalist to delay his departure till after the rains. But Stanley knew that until he reached the coast and despatched to Livingstone the fifty pagazi he needed, the explorer would not be able to leave on his epic journey.6o

  On the following day, the 114th, both men were up at dawn and sat down to `a sad breakfast', which Henry could not eat. He offered to leave two men with Livingstone in case it was found that he had forgotten something, and they could then bring it on. In fact, Livingstone was not ready to part with Stanley quite yet, and said he wanted to accompany him for a few hours. `I must see you fairly off on the road.' While they walked side by side, Stanley `took long looks at Livingstone to impress his features thoroughly on the memory'. But at last the moment for parting came.

  We wrung each other's hands & I tore myself away before I unmanned myself again before others; but Susi & Chumah, & Hamydah - the doctor's faithful followers, then came to shake & kiss my hands before I could turn away.

  `Goodbye, Doctor, dear friend.'

  `Goodbye.'

  `March! Why do you stop? Go on! Are you not going home?'

  We came to a ridge, and I looked back & watched his grey figure, fading dimmer in the distance ... I gulped down my great grief and turned away to follow the receding caravan. 61

  Later, Stanley wrote in his diary: `I felt very lonely all afternoon - as if I had but just parted with my family ... I cried at parting with the good doctor ...'62 Then Stanley penned a letter, which he never sent.

  David Livingstone died thirteen months later near Lake Bangweulu, so they never met again. This friendship between the nineteenth century's two greatest explorers was the relationship in Stanley's life that came closest to giving him the father and son bond he had dreamed about since his workhouse days. Unlike his make-believe love for the cotton broker Henry Hope Stanley in New Orleans, his devotion to Livingstone was real, and was to some extent reciprocated. Whenever Livingstone encountered any criticism of Stanley, he defended him. He had heard from his son William that John Kirk had told him that Stanley would `make his fortune out of Dr Livingstone'. `If he does,' Livingstone told his eldest brother, John, `he is heartily welcome, for he saved me a wearisome tramp ... and probably saved my life.' In many letters home, Livingstone described Stanley as being like an ideal son. He also wrote to friends asking them to entertain Stanley and treat him `just as you would me'.64 Livingstone's reward would be the picture of himself as a near saint, which Stanley painted in his great bestseller, How I Found Livingstone, and which would remain largely unchallenged until my biography a century later.

  Yet how much had the future direction of Stanley's life been changed by the famous meeting? Had he `found' himself by `finding' Livingstone - at least in the sense of finding his vocation as an African explorer? Indeed he had, although he would not understand t
his fully for another six months. Now, as he marched towards the coast, protecting his scoop was what mattered most of all to him.

  A week after their parting, Henry sent a letter to Livingstone by Susi and Hamoydah, who had brought some mail from the doctor. After making a touching but rather awkward admission to Livingstone - `very few amongst men have I found I so much got to love as yourself' - Stanley made a request that mirrored his immediate concerns: `Do not forget the Herald. The Herald will be gratified to me for securing you as a Correspondent.'' Clearly, at this moment, Stanley expected to continue his career as a journalist.

  From the coast Henry wrote to Gordon Bennett, briefly complaining about his dishonoured bank drafts, but ending with the kind of flattery the mogul expected: `Congratulating you upon the successful termination of this arduous enterprise - because the glory is due to the "Herald"."' It is easy to see why it was advantageous for Stanley to continue to attribute the story's invention to his employer. But he did so not just so that Bennett would send him on high-profile missions in future. In truth, Henry feared that if it ever became known that for many years he had viewed finding Livingstone as a way to become famous, people would find it distasteful that he had rescued a great explorer as a career move, rather than solely for altruistic reasons. (Of course, since then, the mission had come to mean a great deal more to Stanley than fame and money.)

  At Stanley's urgent suggestion, Livingstone had penned two letters to Bennett for publication in the New York Herald, as a token of his gratitude for being re-supplied. The doctor had written these letters willingly enough, seeing them as an opportunity to put his views on the slave trade before a vast audience, and to give publicity to the massacre he had witnessed at Nyangwe.67 Mr Bennett was prepared to pay $8,000, or £i,6oo - more than the original cost of the expedition - to have the two letters telegraphed to New York in their entirety, and thus protect one of the greatest news stories of the century.61

  Nothing that Stanley wrote in 1[8711 or early 11872. shows that he had any idea that his meeting with Livingstone would turn out to have been a key event both in the history of African exploration and in the future colonization of Africa. But how could he have known this - not yet having written the book that would turn cantankerous Dr Livingstone into a secular saint? Nor could Stanley, or anyone else, guess that, after dying in south-central Africa, his friend would become a mythical and iconic figure, attracting hosts of missionaries, settlers and explorers to Africa. Yet one passage in Stanley's diary - written a day before he parted from Livingstone - shows that at a deeper level he realized that his new vocation was already forming. `I think it only needed this softening [Livingstone's admission of how grateful he was] to secure me as his obedient and devoted servitor in the future, should there ever be an occasion where I could prove my zeal.'`9

  TEN

  `Fame is Useless to Me'

  I detest & shrink from it [fame]. What a contrast this world [fashionable London] is to the sinless, peaceful life that I enjoyed in Africa. One brings me an inordinate amount of secret pain, the other sapped my physical strength and left my mind expanded and was purifying ...

  Stanley's Diary, ii August 1872

  As Stanley approached Bagamoyo on the coast - after completing, in an astonishing thirty-five days, a journey that had taken him three months in the reverse direction - he knew that his success in `finding' Livingstone was about to make him famous - just as he had wanted. Inevitably, he had no idea what fame might actually be like. James Gordon Bennett Jr cabled: YOU ARE NOW [AS] FAMOUS AS LIVINGSTONE HAVING DISCOVERED THE DISCOVERER. ACCEPT MY THANKS, AND WHOLE WORLD['S].' It was sad that Livingstone had not thought to warn his young friend that fame excited resentment and envy, unless its possessor were modest and conciliatory. Though self-aware enough to know he could be over-sensitive and hot-headed, Stanley was 111equipped to deal with the events and personalities he would shortly encounter.' Though returning to a country where he had once been rejected, he was not going to be able to act the wronged and now vindicated hero - without seeming touchy and arrogant. In fact, he meant to conceal his past entirely, which removed that problem, but meant that people would see him as a successful American and, inevitably, this would make them underestimate his real achievement. But he would pay any price to avoid being publicly branded a workhouse bastard.

  Stanley's party entered the dusty little town of Bagamoyo at sunset on 6 May 1872, firing guns and blowing horns. To Stanley's surprise he saw a young, red-headed white man standing in front of a whitepainted wooden house set among huts and palm trees. This was Lieutenant William Henn, RN, of the Livingstone Search and Relief Expedition sent out to Africa by the Royal Geographical Society, after the Mirambo war had made the Society's governing council fear that Kirk's supplies would never reach Livingstone. Another of the expedition's members, Lieutenant L. S. Dawson, RN, shocked Stanley deeply: `The truth is,' said Dawson, `they [the RGS council] didn't want you to find him [Livingstone]. You cannot imagine how jealous they are at home about this expedition of yours.'i Without considering how bitterly disappointed he would have felt if the Royal Geographical Society's expedition had forestalled him, rather than vice versa, Henry jumped to the conclusion that RGS officials had taken against him personally. So he behaved coolly to Dawson, Henn and twenty-one-year-old Oswell Livingstone, who had come out hoping to aid his father. This meant they would all speak ill of him to Sir Henry Rawlinson, the RGS's new president.

  Stanley's most important task on Zanzibar was to recruit and send pagazi to Livingstone at Unyanyembe. Henry devoted infinite care to the selection of these men and sent them off in person, along with twenty who had served with him. These fifty-seven carriers arrived at Unyanyembe in mid-August 11872; the doctor wrote rapturously to friends and family about their good qualities, and never changed his mind. The vast majority would be with him when he died nine months later, and would help carry his body to the coast. After watching them sail for Bagamoyo, Stanley wrote in his diary: `I felt strange and lonely, somehow. My dark friends who had travelled over so many hundreds of miles, and shared so many dangers with me, were gone and I was left alone. How many of their friendly faces shall I see again?' His servant, Selim, he sent back to his native Jerusalem, but Kalulu, the eleven-year-old former slave boy, would return with Stanley to be educated in London.

  At Marseilles, on 24 July, en route to England, Stanley gave his first major press interview as a celebrity to the Daily Telegraph's John Le Sage, who described Stanley as an American with `a very broad chest and powerful-looking frame and a most intelligent expression of countenance; his hair, naturally curling, once light in colour, has turned quite grey during his expedition'.4 In fact, Stanley's hair was only flecked with grey, but he still looked considerably older than his actual age of thirty-one. He had been so emaciated after twenty-three attacks of fever that several acquaintances in Zanzibar had failed to recognize him.' After describing the far-from-perfect Dr Livingstone as `the bravest and noblest gentleman and truest Christian living', Stanley launched into the first of his ill-judged public attacks on Dr Kirk for betraying Livingstone. Le Sage was clearly disconcerted, adding, `Mr Stanley is far from well' and Dr Kirk will `probably explain himself'.'

  In Paris, a few days later, at a banquet presided over by the US ambassador, Mr E. B. Washburne, much was made of Stanley's American nationality. The hero of the hour then spoke of Livingstone's saintly character before launching into another fierce onslaught on Dr Kirk. But this time, he knew he had gone too far: `I was led by the warmth of the occasion to speak more hot-headedly about Kirk than I intended ... it does not do to run atilt at anybody in a mixed assembly of this kind.'' Stanley's continuing antagonism arose because Kirk was claiming in public that Livingstone was angry with him solely because of what he had been told by Stanley. This was untrue. In two letters to Kirk written by Livingstone several weeks before his meeting with Stanley,' the doctor rebuked the consul for employing a dishonest and incompetent man, Sherif Basha, to bri
ng essential supplies and carriers to him in the interior in 118 7o. The carriers had then plotted with local Arabs to stop him crossing the Lualaba - in order to avoid risking their lives on a long exploring trip. These men had mostly been slaves, costing Livingstone $6o per annum each, rather than the $z5 he would have been charged for free men. Sherif went on to steal all Livingstone's stores.

  The explorer therefore declared that all his plans had been destroyed by Kirk's choice of Sherif and his caravan of slaves. Undeniably, Stanley had added to Livingstone's fury with Kirk by telling him that a year later the consul had allowed his goods to rot for months at Bagamoyo without going near them, and had only arrived on the mainland after a shooting holiday, when the carriers had already left. Kirk would claim in letters to friends and to the foreign secretary, Lord Granville, that he had himself sent off, and even travelled for several days with part of the supply caravan. Incensed by this lie, Henry wrote to The Times saying that if Kirk had really seen the carriers, he would certainly have written a letter to Livingstone for them to take into the interior. But no such letter existed.' Stanley had also been upset that US Consul Webb had sent to him, while he was with Livingstone, eleven packages by various Arab-Swahili caravans. But Dr Kirk, in the same period, had sent Livingstone nothing. The doctor referred sadly to this fact in correspondence.'° Yet though Kirk had been a lot less energetic than he should have been, Stanley's filial devotion to Livingstone seems to have made him hate the British consul as intensely as he might have done had Livingstone really been an adored and maltreated father. While Kirk only attacked Stanley in public, he railed in private about `the insult' of Livingstone's letters."

 

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