Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure
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The legend would grow up that Chuma and Susi, two of his longest-serving men, would persuade the others to help them carry his body to the coast. This version of events owes a lot to their being brought back to Britain at the expense of a rich philanthropist to help Horace Waller edit The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa. The truth seems to have been more remarkable. The decision to risk carrying Livingstone’s body to the coast – despite the high possibility of accusations of witchcraft being made en route - appears to have been made as a result of a much larger number of Africans achieving a consensus. Chuma’s name would not be among those carved on the tree near which Livingstone’s African servants buried their master’s heart and organs. But the names of Chowpereh and Manwa Sera, who had both accompanied Stanley to Ujiji, and had been chosen by him to serve Livingstone on his last journey, were on the tree, along with Susi’s. These three men had been made ‘heads of department’ by Livingstone. Chowpereh and Manwa Sera would go on and serve Stanley, as outstanding captains on his great trans-Africa journey a decade later, and Susi would work for him on the Congo in the early 1880s. The names of the three of them were carved by Jacob Wainwright, who had been educated at Nasik, along with the five other pupils of the Bombay mission school chosen by Stanley to travel with Livingstone. These men were Christians – at least by education – unlike Chuma and Susi, who were Muslims – and they would have played a significant part in the discussions that took place. Uledi and Mabruki were also senior men. They had already served Grant and Speke, and Stanley and would serve Stanley again. So the group of Africans who gathered around the hut they had built at Chitambo’s village included some of the most experienced caravan leaders and captains in Africa, who would prove their outstanding abilities again and again. Given the extraordinary hardships of Livingstone’s last journey through the swamps of Bangweulu, it is a striking fact that none of these men deserted.19
Perhaps self-interest and the hope of a reward played some part in the decision they made, but it seems more likely that their principal motivation was to honour a great man by taking his body back to his own people along with the diaries and notebooks which he had kept with such care. Their first step, after his death, was to hide from Chief Chitambo the fact that their master was dead, and to gain the chief’s consent to build a hut within a palisade outside the village. The new structure was open to the sky so they could use the sun to dry out their master’s body, once they had removed and buried his organs. It was while doing this grim work that they found a blood clot of several inches diameter in his lower intestine – an obstruction that must have caused him appalling pain. The rains had just ended so they were able to make use of sunlight to dry the body for two weeks, having placed salt in the open trunk. Eventually the body was encased in bark and sewn into a large piece of sailcloth. The odour of putrefaction made it hard for them to eat, so in an attempt to stop the smell, they tarred the whole bundle.20
Livingstone’s men reached Zanzibar in the remarkable time of five months. By then ten men had died of disease, and they had once been obliged to fight their way out of a hostile village.21 In Unyanyembe they met Lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron, who had been chosen by the RGS, in preference to Stanley, to lead an expedition intended to assist Livingstone and solve the Nile mystery. Blind to the magnificence of what Livingstone’s carriers were doing, Cameron advised them to take no further risks with superstitious chiefs along the route and to bury the body at once. This they politely refused to do. Cameron then urged them to part with Livingstone’s geographical instruments, so his party could use them. To prevent any thefts, Jacob Wainwright had written out a long and accurate inventory of all Livingstone’s possessions. None of the men wished to hand over their master’s sextants and chronometers, but the white man was insistent, so they did as he asked.
At Zanzibar, John Kirk was away, and the acting consul, Captain W. F. Prideaux, paid them their wages but gave them no additional reward. For men like Susi, Chuma, Gardner and Amoda, this was a disillusioning conclusion to eight years’ service. It would be a year till the RGS struck a medal for these men, but by then they would have dispersed, and very few ever received it. Of those who did, it cannot have meant as much to them as a gift of cloth, beads and cattle would have done.22 By the time Chuma and Susi arrived in England, thanks to the generosity of Livingstone’s friend, James Young – the inventor of paraffin – his burial in Westminster Abbey had already taken place. Only the comparative newcomer Jacob Wainwright, whose passage was paid by the Church Missionary Society, arrived in time for the funeral.
TWENTY-THREE
Where Will You Be?
Dead or Still Seeking the Nile?
Stanley first heard of Livingstone’s death at the island of St Vincent during his voyage back to England from West Africa, and received official confirmation when he reached London on 17 March 1874. His mentor’s body was even now on its way to Southampton. Grief-stricken at the news, Stanley wrote to Livingstone’s 27-year-old daughter, Agnes, assuring her that ‘no daughter was ever beloved so deeply as you were … How I envy you such a father. The richest inheritance a father can give his children is an honoured name.’ Yet Stanley believed that the doctor had also bequeathed something of immense importance to him as well. ‘The completion of your father’s discoveries,’ he told Agnes, ‘[is] like a legacy left me by Livingstone.’1 The story of Livingstone’s lonely death and his refusal to give up his work after months of anguish and struggle conjured up powerful images of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. In Stanley’s eyes the geographical task of opening Africa was also part of a wider moral obligation which he described with feeling in the obituary he wrote for the Graphic:
Though the heart of Livingstone … has ceased to beat, his voice rings out loud … He has bequeathed a rich legacy to fight the evil horror of the slave trade … and left an obligation on the civilized nations of Europe and America, as the shepherds of the world, to extend their care and protection over the oppressed races of Africa.2
Although Stanley grieved as he sat in the New York Herald’s London office, poring over the coverage of Livingstone’s death, he was stirred by the thought that the doctor’s unfinished work was newsworthy again. Here then was Stanley’s great opportunity to escape from the dismissive snobs of the RGS, from his grasping mother and step-father, from Katie Roberts, who for cash had shown his love letters to an unscrupulous publisher, and most of all from the delusion that fame and wealth could make him happy. His hope of future happiness lay in striving for some great purpose, ‘for my own spirit’s satisfaction’, as he put it. At the heart of the Nonconformist Christian education of the workhouse had been the idea of redemption through suffering -becoming a new man. And what would be more likely to achieve this re-fashioning than the isolation, the hardships and the pain he would endure while completing the work of his hero, David Livingstone? ‘I was not sent into this world to be happy; I was sent for a special work,’ he would write twenty years later.3
While Livingstone’s death – and his burial in Westminster Abbey at which Stanley was a pall-bearer – did not determine the future course of Stanley’s life, they certainly strengthened his existing determination to solve the Nile problem. He approached the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald in such a positive spirit that they each offered £6,000 towards the cost of solving the age-old mystery. The journey he outlined to them would be the most ambitious ever attempted by a land explorer. First he intended to circumnavigate Lake Victoria in a portable boat to see if it was a single body of water and the primary source of the river that flowed out at Speke’s Ripon Falls. It might turn out to be, as Burton had predicted, three or more lakes of little individual consequence. Then he meant to sail around Lake Tanganyika to see what other rivers – apart from the Rusizi – flowed into and out of it. This, he expected, would establish once and for all whether Tanganyika was part of the Nile’s system. Then, finally, he would attempt to navigate the Lualaba from
where Livingstone had left it at Nyangwe, to see whether it was the upper Nile or the Congo – potentially a 7,000-mile journey dwarfing all earlier African expeditions.
Just as he began the detailed planning of his epic journey, Stanley fell in love with a spoilt young heiress. Alice Pike was the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of America’s richest men, who owned real estate, distilleries and two opera houses. Stanley met Alice while they were both staying at London’s exclusive Langham Hotel. Although twice her age, the infatuated explorer soon proposed and was accepted, although he thought Alice ‘the very opposite of my ideal wife … However pretty, elegant etc. she may be, she is heartless and a confirmed flirt.’4 Given his sensitive nature, Stanley was risking emotional catastrophe and knew it.
Alice Pike.
While he was pursuing Alice, scores of gentlemen and officers were pursuing him in the hope of being taken on his expedition. But the ‘gentlemen’ of the RGS had already ensured that Stanley would choose working-class companions. The three he selected were young brothers, Frank and Edward Pocock, oystermen from the Medway, who looked after the editor of the Daily Telegraph ’s yacht, and Frederick Barker, a clerk at the Langham Hotel, who had pestered him until he gave in. Not one of these three men had even been abroad. Kalulu, the slave boy, whom Stanley had rescued and sent to school in Wandsworth, was told that he would be returning to his own country as his master’s valet. He, of course, knew all about Africa, and was not sure that he wished to return there. These four improbable adventurers were about to embark upon one of the greatest journeys of all time. It seems unlikely that Stanley would have reminded them of the fate of Shaw and Farquhar on his last journey, or of the deaths of Cameron’s two white companions, which had recently been reported.
On arriving at Zanzibar, the engagement of African porters, translators, guards and servants became Stanley’s priority. These men would be more important for his survival than his trio of inexperienced Europeans. So it delighted him that Mabruki Speke, Chowpereh, Uledi and Ferajji, who had accompanied him to Ujiji, all wanted to serve him again. Also eager to come was Manwa Sera, who with Chowpereh had been leaders of the party Stanley had sent to join Livingstone on his final expedition. All these Africans were Wangwana – the black free men of Zanzibar – originally coerced or enticed from their tribal environments by slave and ivory traders operating deep in the interior. Stanley considered them ‘clever, honest, industrious, docile, enterprising, brave and moral’.5
On 17 November 1874, he led into the interior a party of 228 people, which included sixteen wives and mistresses and ten children belonging to his African captains.6 The expedition’s first objective was to reach the Victoria Nyanza, 700 miles away, and sail round it. Just as he had done when describing his journey to find Livingstone, he would exaggerate his numbers when writing about this new expedition – claiming that he took 356 people into the interior.7 Once again this would serve to devalue his true achievement and lead historians to see him as an entirely new type of explorer with unlimited manpower, weaponry and resources. In order to get to the Nyanza, Stanley chose to pioneer a direct route, rather than go via Tabora. The rains started in December, and the men soon began to slip and fall on the clayey path under their sixty-pound loads. By January 1875, the expedition had reached an endless tableland covered with dwarf acacia, mimosa and rank-smelling gum trees. No tree was taller than the others and the forest was so thick that it was impossible to avoid the thorns and stubby branches which threatened their eyes and faces. There was no game in the forest, and, even worse, it appeared to be waterless. After eight days in this hellish environment, five men died of dehydration and another four weakened, fell behind and could not be found.8
The Pocock brothers, Edward (left) and Frank (right).
Emerging at last in a land of cultivated fields and cattle, Stanley’s followers believed themselves safe. But it soon became apparent that local Wanyaturu tribesmen would only come near them if ‘carrying a prodigious quantity of arms – spears, bows and arrows and knobsticks’.9 Edward Pocock contracted smallpox and died, while the local chief was issuing threats to them to leave his territory. Stanley read the burial service in a shaking voice while Frank Pocock wept over the grave. Frederick Barker, Stanley’s storekeeper and clerk, was seriously ill with fever, but the Wanyaturu warriors would allow no dallying on their land. Even after a porter in the rearguard was hacked to pieces, Stanley advised against any attempts at revenge. But when another of his men was stabbed to death, and about a hundred tribesmen fired arrows into his camp, he authorised retaliation. In the fight that followed, his men disobeyed orders and chased after their attackers, killing six Wanyaturu but losing three of their own number to poisoned arrows. A further fifteen of Stanley’s people were driven away, never to be seen again. At the end of this disastrous skirmish, twenty-two of his party were missing, presumed dead. By the time his caravan reached the Victoria Nyanza on 27 February 1875, Stanley had lost sixty-two men out of his original 228, either through illness, or desertion, or at the hands of hostile Africans. At this rate, he feared he would have none left long before his journey ended. But soon after this sad event, Frank Pocock raced down from the brow of a hill, shouting: ‘I have seen the lake, sir, and it is grand!’
Although the morale of Stanley’s men was boosted by the attainment of their first objective, he himself was depressed by private worries. Before leaving Zanzibar, he had received some worrying letters from his fianceè, Alice, who had accused him of being ‘real mean about writing’, and informed him that she was ‘real angry with Africa’, because his letters took so long to reach her. Pressed about precisely when he might return, Stanley had admitted in a letter sent from Zanzibar that his journey could last three years rather than the two he had promised when they had been in England together. Her reply had not made pleasant reading: ‘And suppose you are not home then, where will you be? Dead or still seeking the Nile?’10 The strong possibility that she might not wait filled him with foreboding, causing him to say to a journalist friend that he felt ‘a careless indifference as to what fate might have in store’.11
Certainly his plan to sail around the lake in the twenty-four-foot Lady Alice, with eleven crewmen and a guide was a very brave one.12 All the more so, since he had been shocked to find that Arab slave dhows were sailing on the Nyanza, turning every local tribe against strangers. By venturing on the water, Stanley would therefore be running a real risk of being surrounded by hostile canoes. Yet he could not hope to map the lake by travelling overland, unless he devoted a year or more to this one task. So in a boat it would have to be – although at night he and his men would have to sleep ashore, exposing themselves to attack. Furthermore, as the only white man in the boat (Frank Pocock having been left in charge of the expedition’s lakeside base camp), Stanley could expect to be murdered if his men ever mutinied. But, under the command of Wadi Safeni, and Uledi, his steersman, he believed his crew to be not merely loyal but exceptionally intrepid. ‘Their names,’ he declared, ‘should be written in gold.’
Local people at Kagehyi (Kayenzi), where the expedition had first reached the lake, warned his rowers that they would meet ‘people gifted with tails; enormous fierce dogs of war; cannibals who preferred human flesh above all’. His men were also told that the lake was so large that it might take two years to trace its shores, and that few of them were likely to survive that long. It is a great tribute to Stanley’s leadership that his men were prepared to embark with him on 7 March.13
Indeed, when sailing northwards up the eastern side of the lake, the Lady Alice was trapped by thirteen canoes and Stanley was only able to engineer their escape by shooting at and sinking one of these vessels, killing three men.14 By the time Stanley reached the north-eastern corner of the lake, on 27 March, he had established that from north to south the lake measured more than 200 miles. He and his men had sailed almost 500 miles in all, greatly assisted by southerly winds, which had enabled them to sail rather than row for much of
their voyage at a rate of over twenty miles per day. This was despite coming through several terrifying tropical storms.
In general Stanley mapped the lake well, with his worst two errors being to miss the deceptive entrance to the massive Kavirondo Bay, and to fail to get close enough inshore to gauge the true size of the lake’s south-western corner. But by late March he had proved that Burton, Schweinfurth and the garrulous armchair theorist, McQueen, had been plain wrong to have argued against the Nyanza being a single sheet of water. Suspecting from the start that this would prove to be the case, Stanley had named the substantial bight at the lake’s south-eastern corner, Speke Gulf. He found no outflow anywhere during his voyage along the eastern shore; and the first he came to, after reaching the northeastern corner, was Speke’s Ripon Falls.
Here, on 28 March, Stanley ordered his men to take down their sails and row to the falls, ‘the noise of whose rushing waters sounded loud and clear in our ears’. Stanley told readers of the New York Herald that ‘Speke had been most accurate in his description of the outgoing river.’ But neither in this despatch, nor in his diary did Stanley positively indentify this river as the Nile – the closest he came was to call it ‘the great river outflowing [sic] northwards’.15
Of course it was still possible that the Lualaba might join the Nile to the north and west of Lake Albert (indeed this was what Livingstone had believed), and Stanley was determined to address this possibility in due course. But for the present, Speke’s claim that the White Nile flowed out from Victoria Nyanza was an assertion which Stanley took very seriously.