by Giles Foden
One of the cotton-growing areas was to the north-east of Lake Tanganyika—the destination of Spicer and his men. Tanganjikasee, as the Germans called the lake, was well stocked with fish, hippopotamus and crocodile, but its main appeal was strategic. During the early 1900s, as the colony developed, the Kaiser was keen to extend his empire further into Central and East Africa. He saw clearly how modern transport could bring remote regions as yet unconquered into his orbit. In 1904 he began building a railway through the centre of German East Africa. The Mittellandbahn, as it was known, would link the capital Dar es Salaam with the port of Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika—effectively connecting the Indian Ocean in the east to the Congolese border in the west.
No one doubted the Mittellandbahn’s importance. As The Times of Tuesday 29 December 1914 put it: ‘The great value of the railway as an economic factor lies in the fact that it borders on three great inland seas—Nyassa, Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza—thus linking up the great lake system of Central Africa and the River Congo with the east coast ports…One thing is certain—had the great conflagration in Europe not taken place we should have clashed with Germany in Africa. Our Central African and the east coast trade would have been in jeopardy, and our power would have gradually declined east of the 25th parallel.’
The railway was especially useful in the matter of transporting ships to the lake, which hitherto had required African labour. In 1900, setting off from Dar es Salaam, a team of 5,000 porters had carried the 60-ton Hedwig von Wissmann—the ship John Lee had seen—to Kigoma. This port town would later become the centre of German maritime operations in the west, under the command of Kapitan zur See (‘Sea Captain’) Gustav Zimmer, the man destined to be Spicer’s strategic rival on the lake.
This was the context in which Lee’s plan was to be made operational. Not that Spicer regarded it as Lee’s plan any more. He liked to intimate that he had already been studying just such a plan when Lee came up with his. Spicer had never met Lee, but he was quite prepared to hold forth on him to Dr Hanschell in the early days of their voyage to Cape Town.
‘Lee is one of those chaps one meets all over Africa,’ he told the doctor, ‘doing a bit of shooting, prospecting, contracting for native labour and so on—a bit of a tramp, in fact. What they call a ‘stiff’ over there.’
As far as the Admiralty was concerned, who came up with the plan was immaterial. They just wanted it completed as soon as possible. At the heart of Spicer’s orders was the instruction to capture, sink or otherwise disable the Hedwig von Wissmann.
It was supposedly a secret mission, although Kapitan Zimmer’s memoirs reveal that he knew there was a British naval expedition on its way to the lake by late May 1915: before it had even set off! How this could be is still unclear. In any case, Zimmer had no good reason to fear any British boats, having a trump card up his sleeve. He was more concerned at rumours that the Belgians were trying to build an iron-panelled steamer, the Baron Dhanis, the parts of which were currently hidden inland. Zimmer had paid good money to the Holo-holo to find out where, but so far had drawn a blank.
Steaming south on the Llanstephen Castle, Spicer and his men were aware of little if anything of all this. They simply knew they had to get Mimi and Toutou halfway up Africa, then sink the Hedwig. Until then, they could relax. The weather was getting warmer and they would soon cross the Equator. After putting in at Madeira, where they took the opportunity to sample the island’s famous fortified wine and to load plentiful supplies of fruit and vegetables, the day finally came.
It was a tradition on ships of the Castle line that fun and games were to be had when the Equator was crossed. These generally included an appearance by the sea-god Neptune, complete with trident. Churchill scorned such festivities and they were unlikely to have changed much in the intervening decade:
Neptune and his consort boarded us near the forecastle and paraded round the ship in state. Never have I seen such a draggle-tailed divinity. An important feature in the ritual which he prescribes is the shaving and ducking of all who have not passed the line before. But our attitude was strictly Erastian and the demigod retired discomfited to the second class, where from the sounds which arose he seemed to find more punctilious votaries.↓
≡ In his autobiography, A Collector of Characters, Spicer’s artist brother Theodore remembered similar antics taking place on the family’s sea voyage back from Tasmania: ‘That trip has remained in my memory, particularly the incident when Father Neptune came on board and tricks were played on those who had never crossed the equator before.’
A few days after they had crossed the Equator, Spicer’s officers had just finished dinner when he invited them to his cabin. Once they were all inside he turned on them in fury, saying he had heard them talking about ‘Lee’s Expedition’. Such talk was to cease forthwith.
‘This is no man’s expedition!’ he shouted. ‘It is the Naval Africa Expedition—that is its official title—and I am in command!’
He dismissed them at once and the doctor and ‘Tubby’ Eastwood went for a walk on the deck. The setting sun was a beautiful sight on the western ocean as they leant over the ship’s rail. Neither spoke as night fell. There was no sound, writes Shankland, who reported their conversation, save ‘the swish of water against the ship’s side and the deep throbbing of the engines’. Stars had appeared by the time Dr Hanschell broke the silence.
‘What do you think of the ultimatum?’ he asked Eastwood, meaning Spicer’s threat to punish anyone who described their enterprise as ‘Lee’s expedition’.
‘I was thinking,’ said the Methodist as he gazed up at the night sky, ‘that the hand of God is over this expedition.’
‘I’ve no information about that,’ the doctor replied, half-mockingly, ‘but of one thing I’m sure—that Spicer’s hand will be over it.’
‘Tubby’ Eastwood was used to Hanschell’s atheist jibes by now. ‘It amuses you to play the Devil’s Advocate, doctor,’ he said, ‘but I know you don’t mean any harm.’
A few minutes later Wainwright and a civilian passenger joined them. Wainwright’s companion began pointing out the Southern Cross and the other stars that filled the magnificent panoply of the tropical heavens, when a voice was heard in the darkness. It was Spicer, correcting the civilian’s reading of the night sky.
‘You must forgive me if I don’t agree,’ responded the passenger. ‘Stars are in my line of work, you know.’
‘Oh, indeed?’ retorted Spicer. ‘I certainly wouldn’t know it from what you’re telling us. I am a Navigating Officer!’
Wainwright’s companion studied Spicer as he emerged into the light, then simply turned and walked away.
‘That was the Astronomer Royal of Cape Town,’ explained the doctor, as casually as he could.
‘Is that so?’ Spicer laughed out loud. ‘He’d make a damned bad Navigating Officer!’
Such stories spread like wildfire among the members of the expedition, rapidly eroding Spicer’s authority. It was his stupid boastfulness about hunting that especially did for him. When he claimed to have carried a water-buck back to camp slung over one shoulder, having outstripped his native trackers, it only needed someone to point out that a water-buck was about the size of a pony for him to appear a figure of fun.
It didn’t help that the Captain of the Llanstephen Castle clearly thought Spicer a complete idiot. One day, under Spicer’s supervision, Lieutenant Cross and the other engineers had been starting Mimi and Touton’s engines to test them. Some passengers were smoking nearby on the promenade deck and as he passed the Captain said, ‘No smoking here!’
‘Whyever not?’ inquired Spicer, sidling up.
‘Because of the danger of igniting petrol vapour,’ explained the Captain.
‘What nonsense!’ said Spicer, in full earshot of his men and the watching passengers. ‘We’re far out of reach of any vapour!’
‘No smoking here!’ the Captain shouted, so loudly people looked up. ‘Those are my orders!’
> Spicer flushed, but for once he kept quiet—until that night in the bar. ‘You know what these Merchant Service fellows are like!’ he told his juniors. ‘Actually, I could have ordered the Captain off the deck there and then. As a Commander RN on the active list in time of war, I can order any merchant skipper to turn his ship over to me.’
Engineer Lieutenant Cross, who had witnessed the whole episode, chewed the side of his mouth as Spicer spoke. He now did this as a matter of course to stop himself from laughing or answering back. Spicer had already reprimanded him for ‘smiling in a disbelieving manner’ on one occasion. This had resulted in an embarrassed pause at the dinner table, until Cross was forced to retract his smile in public and confirm that he entirely believed what Spicer was saying: that he had a certificate from the Admiralty authorising him to run the engine-room of a second-class cruiser. In effect, Spicer was claiming to be an experienced engineer.
‘Bloody liar!’ Cross muttered, once Spicer had left the table. It was becoming a common sentiment among Spicer’s men who, with mounting dismay, continued on their way to Cape Town, where the African leg of their adventure would begin.
During the journey, British forces captured Bukoba, an important port on the other great African lake, the Victoria Nyanza. One can be sure that the full story of the victory did not come through on the Llanstephen Castle’s Morse set: drunken soldiers dancing about in looted German dress uniforms, or in stolen ladies’ underwear, with spiked Pickelhaube helmets on their heads and cigars between their lips.
Some of the looters, writes Byron Farwell, ‘were scandalised…by their glimpses of the Germans’ sex lives. One soldier discovered companion photographs of the German commandant: in the first he stood resplendent in full dress uniform beside a woman (his wife?) who was completely naked; in the second, the same woman stood fully dressed in formal attire beside the naked commandant.’
FOUR
It was a cool day. The region at the tapering end of Africa where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans come choppily together was less turbulent than usual. There was no storm and the foamy line where the oceans met—or was it divided?—was barely visible. It must have seemed a good omen to those like ‘Tubby’ Eastwood who put their faith in God’s providence. The first part of Mimi and Toutou’s journey was over. There had been no attacks by U-boats or those surface raiders of the German fleet that still roamed the sea-lanes. The liner carrying the Naval Africa Expedition arrived safely in Cape Town, South Africa, on 2 July 1915.
The town was beautifully situated in the shadow of Table Mountain and since the War it had become a busy naval base. It was the headquarters of the British Admiral charged with keeping the crucial trade routes of the Indian Ocean free from German attack. Most of the German Navy was concentrated in the North Sea and the Pacific, but there was one serious threat in the African theatre. Further up the coast, past the South African city of Durban and the coast of neutral Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), lay German East Africa or Tanganyika as it was sometimes known.
Near the Tanganyikan capital Dar es Salaam, the speedy, three-funnelled German cruiser Königsberg was still hiding out in the swamps of the Rufiji delta. The ship’s exact position had been spied out by a South African ivory hunter, Major Pieter Pretorius, who knew the Rufiji well. Disguised as an Arab trader, he had paddled up one of the delta’s channels with an African assistant. Reaching the German cruiser, they boarded it with a basket of chickens for barter. As the exchange took place, they discovered that the ship’s torpedoes had been sent ashore. Having disembarked, Pretorius spent a month taking readings of the tide and sounding the channel depths so that the Severn and the Mersey would have a clear passage.
The next few days would see the Königsberg attacked by the flotilla of British boats which was assembling near Mafia Island—a kind of mini version of Zanzibar off the German-held coast, all palm trees and Arab traders. From Mafia Island, with the help of some aircraft, an attack would be launched into the mangrove-choked channels of the Rufiji River where the Königsberg had been hiding for months. The mouth of the river, once the largest waterway on earth, formed an enormous delta about 500 square miles in extent. With mangrove trees occupying the greater portion of the coastline and sand filling up the channels, the Rufiji could only properly be navigated by light-draught ships, such as were assembling at Mafia Island.
It was this operation that preoccupied the British Navy down in Cape Town and not the arrival of Spicer’s expedition. Consequently, there was nobody there to greet them after their 17-day, 6,000-mile voyage. Tyrer stepped down the gangplank, squinting through his monocle, followed by Tait and Mollison in their kilts and all the officers carrying cutlasses and wearing the special grey uniform of the Naval Africa Expedition. Spicer made them parade on the quay once more, as the African stevedores carried off the ship’s cargo. Mimi and Toutou were lifted off the Llanstephen Castle by crane, their mahogany hulls swaying in the freshening wind, the so-called ‘Cape Doctor’, which blew down from the north.
Spicer informed his officers that their hotel was on Adderley Street—a long, slightly rackety thoroughfare that stretched from the lower slopes of Table Mountain down towards the sea; nearby were some formal gardens laid out by the colony’s Dutch founders. Spicer then told ‘Tubby’ Eastwood, his round-faced confidential clerk, to find cheaper lodgings in the town for the ordinary sailors. He drew Dr Hanschell to one side. They would be staying at the Mount Nelson, the town’s most salubrious establishment.
Spicer and the doctor took a hansom cab up there from the docks. An African guard in a solar topi let them through the gate, above which the glorious mountain towered with its ‘table-cloth’ of cloud. The cab horse trotted up Mount Nelson’s cobbled driveway, which was lined on either side by majestic, thick-trunked Royal palms. Another guard in a sun-helmet opened the door of the cab and Dr Hanschell stepped out and stood before one of the grandest hotels he had ever seen. Surrounded by lush gardens and painted a creamy buff, it was a kind of Gothic folly: the last bastion of European sophistication on the southernmost tip of Africa.↓
≡ The hotel, which still exists, was painted pink in the 1920s, probably because this colour reminded the Mount Nelson’s Italian manager of the villas of his homeland.
This pillared palace had a history, too. A young journalist called Winston Churchill had stayed there while covering the Anglo-Boer War, which had ended a mere 13 years before. Were it not for the Gallipoli debacle, Churchill would have been Spicer’s ultimate superior, as head of the Navy.
This wasn’t the fallen minister’s only connection to the battle getting under way in East Africa. In 1914, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had sent a glowing message to the crew of two of the light-draught ships now assembled at Mafia Island, HMS Severn and HMS Mersey. These ‘unseaworthy steel boxes’ (originally intended as river barges for the Brazilian Navy) carried very little fuel, but earlier in the War they had played an important role supporting the Belgian Army off Calais and Boulogne. It was for this reason Churchill congratulated their crew, who, like Spicer’s men, were mainly volunteers and reservists. They would have joined the Gallipoli fleet, but, pulled by tugs from Britain to Malta, they had been too slow to get there in time. Then it was decided they should be sent to East Africa to resolve the Königsberg problem, so they were tugged a further 5,000 miles to Mafia Island and the Tanganyikan coast. As it turned out, their fate was intimately connected with that of Mimi and Toutou, which had a no less curious journey ahead of them.
Once off the Llanstephen Castle, the two motor boats were put on to goods trucks in a railway siding, ready for travel. The special cradles that had held them on the deck of the boat were simply lifted on to the flat beds of the railway wagons and bolted down again.
After a comfortable night at the Mount Nelson, Spicer spent the following morning making a series of official visits to navy and government officials in the town. He took with him as his aide-de-camp Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, complete with
monocle and cutlass and canary-yellow hair. Meanwhile, Dr Hanschell and ‘Tubby’ Eastwood went to Lennard’s the pharmacist to supplement the expedition’s inadequate medical supplies.
Mr Lennard supplied zinc-lined boxes to keep the medicines safe from rain and insects. He also advised not putting all of the painkillers in one box, all the quinine in another, and so on. It was always better to split up the supplies, he said, in case a box went astray. The old chemist, who had fitted out many safaris in his time, also counselled taking plenty of laxative pills. These, he informed them, would be in constant demand from the African tribes they would encounter on the way.
While further preparations were made for their journey up to the Congo, Spicer had time to ponder a report he had received that John Lee, whose idea the whole thing had been, was a drunkard and had been ‘blabbing’ about their top-secret mission. In fact, many people knew about the expedition and the big-game hunter was probably innocent. However, the German commander Zimmer’s memoirs make clear that his intelligence about the arrival of the expedition came around the same time that Lee appeared in the Congo in late May.
Lee had worked hard blazing the trail up in the Congo, if his companion Magee is to be believed. Four years after the War he described Lee’s work in the National Geographic :
While preparations were being pushed in England, Lee and I left for Africa on 22 May 1915, going ahead of the main body to select a route across the African bush from the point where the boats would be taken off the train. It was important that a route be free as possible from hills, gorges, etc, yet close to water, should be chosen, as our boats were to be taken over this trail intact, each drawn by a traction engine.