by Giles Foden
Crossing the 20-mile plateau was easy enough, except that now a great many lions surrounded the camp at night. On 12 September they reached the other side and saw far down below them the Lualaba River or Upper Congo River, on which they would soon enough continue their journey. Or so they thought. In fact, going down the Mitumba Plateau proved no easier than climbing up it. On the first day the hawser broke and the leading steam engine, suddenly relieved of its burden, shot downwards, unable to stop. Slewing wildly, it struck a tree, almost catapulting the driver out of his seat. It was a lucky escape, for he narrowly avoided a drop of several hundred feet into the gorge below. After that, Mimi and Toutou were lowered down the steeper gradients by teams of men, until they reached places where the steam engines could take over again. Sometimes, says Spicer, the gradient was so steep they had to bury a ‘dead man’, that is—‘several blocks of timber 20 feet long—about 8 or 9 feet in the ground, with a wire strapped round them and brought up to the surface, thus acting as an anchor; then by means of a hawser and bollard we managed to ease the traction engine gently down the slope.’
And so the precarious descent continued, hindered considerably by the constant search for water for the engines’ boilers. They tracked down only slimy pools here and there, until one day the inevitable happened. The engines ran out, but before the expedition’s drinking water was plundered once more they discovered that more than 400 people—including porters, road-builders, camp servants and the naval volunteers themselves—had a mere ten gallons left to share. There was nothing left for the oxen, who had begun to paw the dust in frustration.
Three parties of water-scouts were sent out, one under Dr Hanschell, who returned with a few petrol tins full of what was really more mud than liquid. But the day was saved by Wainwright, whose party returned with 150 African women. On their heads were balanced clay pots full of water, which they had carried up from a natural well some eight miles away.
The women had to make the trip several times before the steam engines had been filled and the African labourers had quenched their thirst. The Europeans had to wait until Dr Hanschell had boiled theirs in his five-gallon drums. Smelling the water, the oxen began to bellow loudly. Only when they, too, had been watered could the women finally put down their pots. It is unclear whether they were ever recompensed for this astonishing act of mercy. According to Hanschell (via Shankland) ‘each received a generous length of cloth as payment and reward’, but Magee maintains the women were commandeered: ‘That the gentle susceptibilities of white folk may not be unnecessarily aroused by the fact that the native women were ‘rounded up’ to fetch water, it may be said that the work in this country is done by the women of the native villages, while the men loaf—sad yet true.’↓
≡ In his lecture Spicer says: ‘we bribed the women by supplying them with gaudy waist-cloths—in that place a woman is regarded as over-dressed if she has two articles of clothing.’
Thirsty, sun-bleached and aching all over, Spicer’s men reached Sankisia at the foot of the plateau on 28 September. Almost six weeks after they had begun their journey, Mimi and Toutou were nearing water once again. The Boer was paid for his services and released—now he had to lead his oxen all the way across the mountains. As for the steam engines, they were cleaned, oiled and put into storage.
The Belgians had built a railway in this part of the country using supply routes up the Congo River of very much the type described by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Eighteen miles of track linked Sankisia to the river at Bukama, where the Congo was known as the Lualaba (the name changed at Stanley Falls, further north). A trading-station for ivory and diamonds, Sankisia did not have much going for it, but it was connected to the telegraph system and this enabled Spicer to contact the Admiralty about the food supplies he had forgotten. He requested they be sent from Kinshasa, the Atlantic Ocean port in the far west of Congo, where the Liverpool-based firm of Lever Brothers (later Unilever) had a depot.
From Kinshasa, writes Conrad in Heart of Darkness, the river makes its way across Congo, ‘resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land’. Once they had loaded the boats onto the train and reached Bukama, just two hours away, Spicer’s men would be at the tail end. But whether Spicer himself, that ‘obscure conqueror of fame’, that ‘exalted egoist’ (the phrases are from another of Conrad’s novels, Lord Jim), would be able to see through the next stage of their journey was still uncertain.
TEN
On 1 October 1915 around 2 PM a train carrying Mimi and Toutou and their crews arrived over a skeletal iron bridge at Bukama Station in central Congo. Under the bridge ran the Lualaba River, on which our expedition would make the next leg of their journey. Down by the water were some desolate sheds and a dingy shop selling cheap goods. The place was thick with mosquitoes.
Dr Hanschell sensed it would be unwise to stay too long: everything about Bukama spelled fever. In any case, Spicer was eager to be off. He had shown some good sense in hiring a river-pilot called Mauritzen, a stocky, fair-haired fellow who wore a straw hat and a white suit. Like Freiesleben, he was a Dane in the employ of the Belgians. Mauritzen was a trained hydrographer, expert at charting rivers and seas—a skill Spicer shared…
The Dane looked on as Toutou, still in her wooden cradle, slid down some iron rails into the river. The cradle was knocked away with hammers and to everyone’s relief she floated clear. But for how long? queried Mauritzen. He explained to Spicer that the river was very shallow further down and its sandy bottom could sometimes shift, making it difficult to follow charts. He suggested raising each motor boat on eight empty petrol drums, four on either side, with grass-filled sacks between the hull and the drums for protection.
It worked: Toutou ‘drew’ less (sat more shallowly in the water). An extension was fitted to the rudder so that she could still be steered. Her engine was started—that worked, too. By 5 PM Mimi was afloat as well, the white ensign (the red cross on a white ground that is the flag of the Royal Navy) fluttering at her prow. It was only then that they discovered both boats had sprung leaks and Mimi and Toutou were hastily hauled up the rails on to dry land.
The journey upriver would not start for another week. They had to wait for the supplies to go on ahead, as well as mend the leaks—the mahogany boards that made up the sides of Mimi and Toutou had warped in the intense heat and their seams had opened. This necessitated, writes Magee, ‘taking out the engines, caulking the seams, and submerging the boats, which then resumed their normal seaworthy condition’. While this was being done the stores and camping equipment, along with other material, were transferred into immense dugout canoes, carved from tree trunks. The largest of these could bear three tons and were big enough to carry the pieces of the motor boats’ cradles, which would be needed later in the journey.
On 3 October, Tait—the Scot who lost a finger at Ypres—was separated from his bosom pal Mollison and sent on with a company of askaris, at the head of a flotilla of canoes, with orders to transfer stores to depots ahead. Tait’s flotilla also carried Mimi and Toutou’s special cradles. Three days later the motor boats followed, towed by river barges propelled by Congolese paddle-men. Spicer considered it too dangerous to use Mimi and Touton’s engines, the probability of a collision with a sandbank at speed being all too likely. In a canoe at the front of this floating caravan sat the pilot, Mauritzen, wearing his white linen suit, panama hat, and carrying a rifle across his knees.
Not long after they set out, Mimi struck a sandbank. Dragging her loose took several hours, as all of her heavy equipment had to be unloaded. Leaving their own craft, the paddlemen helped lift her free, the naval volunteers using mangrove poles to lever her prow. This manoeuvre was frequendy repeated in the course of their journey, which was full of bends and backwaters.
Mauritzen was also well aware of the dangers of hidden rocks or submerged branches. Spicer agreed, saying he had encoun
tered many similar ‘snags’ in the Gambia.↓
≡ In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness such ‘snags’ appear as a distinctive shape disturbing the fairway of the river. As Marlow says: ‘I caught sight of a V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? Another snag!’
When the going was good, the volunteers simply soaked up the atmosphere, marvelling at the green mansions that rose up either side of the river. They were in the real jungle now: the deep forest that had once formed an immense equatorial belt across Africa’s middle. The thick-girthed trees, heavy with moss and liana, seemed to carry within them the observances of previous generations; and they remembered also, or so it seemed, a time when there were no human eyes to observe them. Hiding in the ancient groves were several varieties of bamboo and palm trees, including those bearing ‘palm nuts’, from which oil was produced. Here and there, nearer the bank, were clumps of giant hibiscus flowers, which closed their red petals at night, and pockets of white maduras from which poison for arrow-tips was extracted by local tribes.
Of these at first there was no sign. The only human sound was the occasional chant from the oarsmen beating time as their blades dipped in and out of the water and the boats heaved forwards. The volunteers mainly kept silent, awed and not a little humbled by the majesty of the surrounding forest. Only when something remarkable was seen—like the gleaming shells of turtles on the water’s surface—did one of them pipe up. There were also hundreds of snout-nosed crocodiles basking on the river bank or winking from the shallows. They posed little danger, but Mauritzen kept his rifle handy all the same. Far more deadly were the hippos that lived in the river, he explained, as they thought nothing of rising under a boat to overturn it.
The main sound on the Lualaba River was birdsong—the croak of hornbills nesting in hollow trees or the eerie cry of a fish-eagle as it dived to scoop its prey from the water. The men could see partridges and guinea fowl near the bank and the occasional heron stalking through the shallows. But most noteworthy were the hummingbirds: red and blue and emerald, they hovered next to the boats, their wings a blur of colour. They were joined by black-and-white kingfishers swooping to and fro over the dark swirling water.
On that first day the expedition covered only three miles. They hit sandbanks or mudbars 14 times before turning in and setting up camp on the river bank. In the pitch-blackness of the night many of them lay awake listening to the grunted conversations of hippos, the chattering of baboons and the famous ‘laughter’ of hyenas—but insects were their greatest bugbear. The men always tried to eat before dark, otherwise their candles and hurricane lamps would attract hordes of ‘flying things’, as Magee calls them in the National Geographic. ‘A plate of soup, a few minutes after being placed on the table, became a seething mass of floundering insect life.’
The morning sun revealed a different landscape along the river: high grass and palms fringed the banks for miles, breaking occasionally to reveal acres of open savannah where antelope grazed and elephant came down to the river to drink. Fortunately there were fewer snags on this stretch. Overtaking Tait and his flotilla of canoes on that second afternoon, the men with Mimi and Toutou must have thought themselves in a kind of paradise, though some spoiled it by taking potshots at the animals on the bank. Again Conrad’s words come to mind: ‘In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water…incomprehensible, firing into a continent.’
The day ended with a terrible discovery. It left those involved very shaken, but once again Magee omits to mention it in his narrative—perhaps not wishing to offend the ‘gentle susceptibilities of white folk’. Dr Hanschell, on the other hand, left Shankland in no doubt as to what had happened:
Towards evening a gap appeared where they could get ashore. They landed, scrambled up a steep bank, pushed their way through dense undergrowth and found themselves in a deserted village, abandoned like many others in the district because of the ravages of sleeping sickness. A stockade surrounding the village had sprouted into a thicket and all the exit paths were blocked by grass standing eight feet high. The roofs of the huts had fallen in, wooden bowls and earthenware pots lay among the rubbish, and an unfinished piece of weaving hung in a primitive loom. As they approached, a cloud of flies rose droning and hovering over their heads: rats scuttled away from under their feet. Human bones lay all around, cracked open by hyenas to get at the marrow.
The expedition spent an uncomfortable night in this grove of death.
The next day the insect peril followed them to the water. No sooner had the cool of dawn lifted—a moment presaged by a dreadful hum in the distance—than a vast cloud of tsetse flies swept downriver. The Congolese stopped paddling and started beating them off their bare backs with swatches of cloth. Spicer’s men used the fly-whisks purchased in Elizabethville. The pain of the tsetse bite is ‘like the prick of a red-hot needle’, notes Magee, and the whisks had to be employed with some force: ‘The flies can bite through clothing quite easily, and actually have to be knocked off, it being impossible to shake them clear.’
While they were being bitten the paddlers lost control of the boats—they slewed sideways—and it took some time for the order of the convoy to be re-established. Once the cloud of flies had lifted, the paddlers dipped their long blades back in the water and, to the rhythm of their chant, began heaving forwards again. They hardly went ten yards, however, before the dreadful hum would be heard again and once more they would all be switching and swearing.
The flies became so bad that Spicer decided to risk using Mimi and Toutou’s 100-horsepower engines. They had struck deeper water now and it seemed safe to assume they were less likely to hit anything. The petrol drums were cast off from the keels of the motor boats and the barges that had previously pulled Mimi and Toutou were now taken behind them; it was their turn to be towed. For probably the first and only time in their lives the paddlemen could hitch a ride, and it was with wonder that they watched the high-powered engines churn through the silver-black river. The extra speed meant they were able to leave the tsetses behind.
The following day, scratching at their bites, Spicer’s men spotted more animals in the papyrus reeds and grass along the bank. Inevitably, some of them wanted to shoot again and this time Spicer allowed them to unload their Enfields into the bush. One gets a sense of what this must have been like from the travel journals of Evelyn Waugh, who made the same journey (albeit in the opposite direction) 15 years later:
The captain employed his time in inflicting slight wounds on passing antelope with a miniature rifle. Occasionally he would be convinced he had killed something; the boat would stop and all the native passengers disembark and scramble up the side with loud whoops and yodels. There was difficulty in getting them back. The captain would watch them, through binoculars, plunging and gambolling about in the high grass; at first he would take an interest in the quest, shouting directions to them; then he would grow impatient and summon them back; they would disappear further and further, thoroughly enjoying their romp. He would have the siren sounded for them—blast after blast. Eventually they would come back, jolly, chattering, and invariably empty-handed.
With no doubt similar delays, Mimi and Toutou made their slow progress upriver. As the sun was setting, somebody spotted a steamer. Its smoking chimney above the reeds gave away its position. After a mile or two of struggling in its wake, the expedition pulled alongside. It was a vessel of the Belgian company that ran the Congo, its deck populated by a medley of African passengers and their livestock, together with a few white traders, as well as mailbags and other freight. Most of the room was taken up with stacks of wood for the boilers. The ship’s sides were grimy with river muck, but its name, Constantin de Burlay, was rather romantic.
They were not well received. The captain, who came to the white-painted rail to inspect them, spoke only Flemish. Nevertheless, profanities are a universal language. A ‘burly, choleric unshaven individual’, according to Shankland, Captain Blaes was not very amenable to Spicer’s mimed suggestion tha
t their stores be loaded aboard the steamer. In fact, he retreated to his cabin, whence ‘the volleys of Gotfer! and Gotferdomme! that issued…sounded very like English goddams’.
Eastwood took over the negotiations. His blandishments, translated into Flemish by the steamer’s purser, were relayed to the indignant Captain Blaes. Eventually the patient Methodist prevailed. It was agreed the Constantin would wait for Tait’s party to arrive and that the stores would be loaded on to the steamer’s lighter (a small boat she towed behind).
In the morning Mimi and Toutou continued upriver, Mauritzen joining Spicer in Mimi at the front of the procession. The crocodiles were larger in this section of the water and the men kept their rifles ready; but if they were ever in danger it was from a nearby hippopotamus, which opened its massive mouth to reveal bright pink gums and fearsome, tusk-like teeth. One crunch of its powerful jaws and the boats would be reduced to splinters. The men wanted to squirt some lead into its mouth. Some took a few shots, but missed and an argument broke out, Dr Hanschell objecting that it was cruel and unsporting. Spicer took his side and ordered everyone to cease fire. The creature followed them for hours all the same, its head just above the water as it pursued them without a sound.
Winding through floating clumps of light-green vegetation, the expedition progressed under the relentless sun (everyone wore a solar topi now). Sitting or lying on the boats, the men watched slender palms and massive baobabs scroll by on the bank. This was the Africa they had always imagined—but more so, so much more so. Every now and then tributaries flowed off into the forest wilderness and it was here that elephants often appeared. Wreathed in creepers and grasses, these mighty beasts would spread their ears and, lifting their trunks, trumpet at the boats as they went by. Mimi and Toutou also passed more villages, from some of which the inhabitants would emerge, standing tall and proud on the bank above, hands on hips, disdainful of strangers.