Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  On 4 April 1875 the Lady Alice sailed on westwards along the northern shore of the Nyanza, arriving later that day at the king of Buganda’s lakeside hunting resort of Usavara. Mutesa was still kabaka – as he had been when Speke had stayed in Buganda. On hearing of Stanley’s approach, the kabaka sent six canoes to meet his white visitor, and ordered 2,000 warriors to greet him at the shore and then accompany him to the royal residence. There Stanley was presented with ten oxen, sixteen sheep and three dozen chickens. The Mutesa, whom Stanley believed he now got to know, was very different from the violent and sadistic young man Speke had written about. Stanley attributed the kabaka’s surprisingly gentlemanly manner to his being a dozen years older, and to the influence of Khamis bin Abdullah al-Barwani, an Arab ivory trader, who had lived at court for a year. Stanley had met Khamis at Tabora and had found him the most personally attractive of all the Arabs there.16

  A few months earlier, Stanley had written in his diary that ‘he often entertained lofty ideas concerning regenerative civilization, and the redemption of Africa’.17 If Livingstone had ever been in his present situation, Stanley was sure he would have summoned Christian missionaries to Mutesa’s court. If the country became the first in central Africa to embrace Islam, there would be profound consequences for the whole continent. Stanley suspected that Mutesa’s claim to be a Muslim did not run much deeper than his courtiers’ liking for Arab daggers and embroidered jackets, and he was determined to test his theory. This was not primarily a religious issue for him. The shocking truth was that Mutesa had allowed his country to become ‘the northern source of the [East African] slave trade’;18 so if nothing were done, a link would inevitably be formed between Buganda and the Muslim slave traders in Sudan, with the terrible consequence that the land of the Acholi, the Madi and the Dinka would become a slave-producing wasteland. Stanley’s determination that this should not happen would make his visit to Buganda not simply a defining moment in Africa’s exploration, but a major event in its history.

  As soon as Stanley could obtain the kabaka’s permission for such a course, he wrote a letter to the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph appealing for missionaries to come to Buganda.19 By an extraordinary coincidence, a few days after Stanley’s landing at Usavara, another white man arrived at Mutesa’s court. He was Colonel Ernest Linant de Bellefonds, who had been sent by the Egyptian government on a diplomatic mission. This French officer was under the direct orders of Colonel Charles Gordon, known to the British public as ‘Chinese Gordon’ due to his earlier victory over the Taiping rebels. Now Gordon was serving the khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, as governor of Sudan’s most southerly province, Equatoria. De Bellefonds was therefore able to take Stanley’s letter of appeal north with him, and guarantee its early arrival in Britain. Within weeks of its appearance in the Daily Telegraph, £24,000 would be raised for a Bugandan mission, and a year later the first British missionaries would arrive, with momentous consequences – as will be seen – for that country’s future.

  The well-provisioned Frenchman gave Stanley a supper of paté dé foie gras and sardines in his tent and then handed him a letter from Gordon, written four months earlier. The Governor of Equatoria explained that, at the time of writing, he was steaming up the Nile, south of Gondokoro, constructing trading stations as he voyaged upstream towards Lake Albert.20 It was still Stanley’s intention, when he returned to Buganda with his whole party, to travel north-west to Lake Albert to explore it thoroughly, as Baker had failed to do. So it piqued him to think that by now Gordon had probably already circumnavigated the lake. De Bellefonds could shed no light on this, but he did tell Stanley that in June 1874 another subordinate of Gordon, Colonel Charles Chaillé-Long, an American of French ancestry, had been sent to Buganda to see whether it might be possible to annexe the country to Egypt and incorporate it into the Sudan. (This news meant that Stanley was the fourth white man to have reached Buganda and not the third – after Speke and Grant -as he had previously imagined.) De Bellefonds explained that it was Khedive Ismail’s dream to extend his empire southwards along the entire length of the Nile, up to its supposed source, the Victoria Nyanza. In 1874, Colonel Chaille-Long had sailed downstream from the Ripon Falls to become the first white man to see straggling Lake Kyoga, and its surrounding area of water-lily wetlands. Although he had not navigated his way through this shallow lake to establish a link with Lake Albert, Stanley was sure that Gordon would soon send someone who would.21

  Before meeting de Bellefonds, Stanley had been aware that Mutesa was at odds with the king of Bunyoro and wanted modern European guns in order to bring him to heel, but his conversations with the Frenchman established that Mutesa’s more urgent need of weapons was to enable him to oppose Gordon’s advances into his territory. Despite his liking for de Bellefonds, Stanley loathed the idea of Buganda and its surrounding territories becoming part of Muslim Egypt’s empire. So he sympathised with the kabaka’s hope that by attracting more white men to his country, he would be able to buy guns from them and gain their help against the autocratic Khedive Ismail. Mutesa’s longing for such weapons became keener still after he saw Stanley shoot dead a baby crocodile at a distance of more than a hundred yards. No Arab gun, he was sure, could have achieved this magical result. Although knowing that the kabaka’s motive for allowing missionaries to enter his country was part of a planned strategy, Stanley, for his own purposes, exaggerated Mutesa’s enthusiasm for Christianity in his newspaper despatches. The explorer was not gullible, and was perfectly aware that an African ruler with 300 wives would be no pushover for missionaries insisting upon strict monogamy. But if Stanley had admitted to his readers in Britain that Mutesa had his own agenda, and was not as ‘civilised’ as he had suggested in print, the missionaries might well have had second thoughts about coming. The future of the whole region was at stake, and he knew he was lucky that Mutesa had given his permission for Christian missionaries to come. Ironically, Ismail’s employee de Bellefonds had played a crucial part in convincing the kabaka that Christianity was not a sect but the religion of all white men. A Calvinist himself, the Frenchman had helpfully kept quiet about religious divisions in Europe.22

  Stanley left Buganda on 21 April 1875 and sailed southwards down the western shore of the Nyanza, after waiting in vain for Mutesa to provide a promised escort of thirty canoes. In these vessels, he had hoped to transport all his men back across the lake to Buganda from Kagehyi on the southern shore, so they could accompany him to Lake Albert.

  The Lady Alice was two-thirds of the way to Kagehyi, when Stanley became embroiled in the first act of a two-part tragedy that would dog him for the rest of his life. For three days his crew had been rowing into a strong headwind, with their sails furled. The only food they had managed to purchase for forty-eight hours had been a few fish. So when a large island, Bumbireh, came into view, they prayed that they would be able to buy food there. But as they ran their boat up on a sandy beach, they heard war cries and saw about sixty spearmen rushing across the sand towards them. Stanley raised his revolver, but his men begged him not to fire because they were too hungry to face the lake again. Against his better judgement, Stanley offered no resistance as his boat was dragged up the beach, with him and his crew inside it. Warriors clustered around the Lady Alice, pointing spears, pulling at their hair, and jabbing at Stanley and his men with sticks and clubs.

  Stanley’s reception on Bumbireh.

  Several terrifying hours passed, during which Stanley was constantly afraid that they were about to be massacred. But his cool-headed interpreter and coxswain, Wadi Safeni, kept talking. He seemed to have negotiated their release with a large payment of cloth and beads, when Shekka, the chief of the islanders, appeared and ordered the seizure of their oars. Stanley knew they would be killed unless they could launch their boat immediately. With the strength of absolute desperation his men manhandled their craft into the lake, and tore up the bottom boards to use as paddles, working as arrows fell in the water around them. Me
anwhile, Stanley fired at their pursuers with his elephant gun, killing one man and seriously wounding another. Disastrously for his future reputation, Stanley believed that all newspaper editors liked to offer their readers buckets of blood, as his own had done during the American Indian Wars. His memory of this persuaded him to tell the readers of the Daily Telegraph and New York Herald that he had killed nine or ten people, and not an unexciting one or two. Pleasing editors apart, Stanley’s lifelong insecurity meant that he was never able to let people think that anyone had ever got the better of him.23

  On his return to Kagehyi, Stanley’s pressing problem remained how to transport to Buganda the 155 men whom Frank Pocock had fed and kept together while he had been away. Frank was now his only white companion, since Frederick Barker, the hotel clerk, had died of malaria two weeks earlier. After his horrifying experience on Bumbireh, Stanley wanted to travel overland to Buganda. But this became impossible when the rulers of two lakeside kingdoms announced that they would fight him if he attempted the land route. He was therefore obliged to look for canoes, eventually managing to purchase twenty-three frail and leaky specimens. In these, he embarked most of his men on 20 June. Two days later, a storm sank five, and proved to Stanley that he could not risk heading out into the middle of the Nyanza to avoid passing the island where he and his men had narrowly escaped death. So there seemed no alternative to sailing through the strait between the island and the equally hostile mainland. Even when Mutesa sent fifteen fully crewed dugouts to assist him, Stanley still feared attack by a superior number of lighter, more manoeuvrable Bumbireh canoes when he entered the narrows.

  To gauge the mood of the islanders, he sent a delegation to buy food. These men were met with a hail of spears and arrows, which killed one of them, and mortally wounded six others.24 Since the men of Bumbireh had just been reinforced by Antari, ruler of the lakeside kingdom opposite, Stanley and his Baganda (Bugandan) allies felt they either had to abandon the attempt to reach Buganda, or make a pre-emptive strike to ensure that they themselves were not overwhelmed in the strait.25 So Stanley ordered the crew of the Lady Alice to sail close to the shore of Bumbireh, enabling his riflemen to pick off warriors who had gathered to prevent a landing. These tribesmen with their bows and arrows posed no risk to Stanley and his men, but thirty-three of them were killed; and this undeniable fact left Stanley vulnerable to accusations of murder.

  At the time – so convinced was he that he would have put his entire party at risk unless administering this violent shock – he did not anticipate serious objections to his behaviour on his return to Britain. In West Africa, he had recently witnessed General Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army kill 2,000 spear-carrying Asante warriors with the latest European field artillery and receive no censure on its return. Yet Stanley knew that unlike Sir Garnet, he had acted only for himself, without the sanction of any government. ‘We went into the heart of Africa self-invited,’ he wrote later, ‘therein lies our fault. But it was not so grave that our lives [when threatened] should be forfeited.’26 Claiming self-defence, he went on to write openly in his newspaper despatches about the numbers killed on his second visit to Bumbireh.

  Colonel Gordon was regularly involved in hostile encounters with the Bari tribe in southern Sudan. Indeed the Bari murdered Ernest Linant de Bellefonds shortly after he had delivered Stanley’s letter. So Gordon knew that there were often occasions when travellers faced a situation of kill or be killed. ‘These things may be done but not advertised,’ the future martyr of Khartoum confided to Richard Burton.27 The mauling Stanley received in the British liberal press was destined to damage his moral reputation so seriously that his unique journey, revealing so many of the secrets of the African central watershed, would never win for him the praise and recognition it would otherwise have done.

  The expedition reached Buganda in mid-August to find that Mutesa was at war with his neighbours to the east (the Wavuma), so Stanley was denied all help for four months and only travelled north-west in early January 1876. But he and his Baganda escort were driven back from Lake Albert by a large party of Bunyoro warriors. Stanley had no alternative but to head south for Lake Tanganyika – his next objective.

  En route, he spent several weeks exploring the Kagera river, which flowed into the western side of Lake Victoria. Stanley had first seen this rapidly flowing river before meeting Mutesa the previous April. Over eighty feet deep in places and 120 yards wide, he suspected that the Kagera was ‘the real parent of the Victoria Nile’ and was therefore eager to trace it into Rwanda. But, once again, he was driven back by hostile Africans, when correctly believing himself on the brink of ‘another grand discovery’.28 Two months later, still travelling south towards Lake Tanganyika, Stanley met Mirambo, the Nyamwezi ruler, whom he dubbed ‘the African Napoleon’. Mirambo had with him an army of 15,000 men, including child soldiers, and was reputed to have killed many thousands of people, so Stanley must have been scared. He sensibly raised no objections when invited to become the warlord’s blood brother.

  On 27 May 1876, Stanley reached Ujiji, and although distraught to find no letters from Alice, he did receive other good news, which he at once put in a letter to Edward Levy-Lawson, the owner of the Daily Telegraph:

  We have obtained a signal triumph over Cameron, the Protégé of the RGS, whose attainments were said to be vastly superior to those of Burton, Speke, Livingstone & Baker – if Markham [secretary of the RGS] was to be believed … By crossing the Lualaba and striking off in the wrong direction he [Cameron] has left the question of the Lualaba where Livingstone left it.29

  Cameron had bowed to pressure from the notorious Arab slave trader Tippu Tip, and had abandoned his aim of following the Lualaba north from Nyangwe. Instead he had marched southwest on a trans-continental journey of no particular geographical significance. So if Stanley could avoid dying, he would be the one to finish Livingstone’s work and become, in a century of great explorers, the greatest.

  He completed in a mere fifty-one days the circumnavigation of Lake Tanganyika, which Speke and Burton, and Cameron had all failed to achieve. Stanley confirmed Cameron’s surmise that the River Lukuga was the lake’s only outflow and apparently drained into the Lualaba. This fact – in conjunction with the relative heights of Tanganyika, Victoria and the Lualaba at Nyangwe – made him suspect that Lake Tanganyika was very likely part of the Congo’s system, rather than the Nile’s. If so, he could expect a far longer and more dangerous journey to the Atlantic than the one he might otherwise have taken down the Lualaba to the Bahr el-Ghazal and then the Nile. So he sat down to write Alice what he believed might well be the last letter she ever received from him, ‘until I meet you or death meets me’.30

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Unknown Half of Africa Lies Before Me

  In London, six months before Stanley left Lake Tanganyika for the Lualaba, Christopher Rigby, Speke’s devoted friend, had walked all over the City in an attempt to get hold of copies of the edition of the Daily Telegraph which contained Stanley’s first despatches from Lake Victoria. Colonel Rigby’s search had ended in frustration, since ‘every copy had been bought at once’. In the end, he had been obliged to go to the RGS where he had read the newspaper and had then been shown ‘Stanley’s original map of the Victoria Lake’, which overjoyed him by being ‘in shape so very near to what Speke made it’.1

  Richard Burton was another early visitor to the RGS. He came again on 29 November 1875, well-prepared for the debate on Stanley’s discoveries. But if Rigby had expected that ‘B the B’, as Speke had called Burton, would apologise for having poured scorn so groundlessly, for over a decade, on his travelling companion’s account of the Nyanza, he must have been thunderstruck to hear Burton say that he ‘still regarded it as possible that the Tanganyika might be connected with the Nile [because] by some curious possibility the Lukuga would be found to be the ultimate source’. Burton hypocritically ‘expressed his heartfelt sorrow that his old companion had not been spared … to see the correc
tions [my emphasis] which Mr Stanley had made with regard to his [Speke’s] wonderful discovery of that magnificent water that sent forth the eastern arm of the Nile’. The western arm, Burton still maintained, would spring from his Lake Tanganyika – his hope being that the Lukuga would flow into the Lualaba, which would in turn join the Nile somewhere above Lake Albert, as Livingstone had believed it would.2

  Meanwhile, in Africa, Stanley had not quite ruled out such a scenario. As he marched through Manyema towards the Lualaba, he still yearned for that river to be the Nile – not for Burton’s sake of course – but to vindicate the hopes of his honorary father, David Livingstone. Before crossing Lake Tanganyika, Stanley had been plagued by desertions so his party was now down to 132 individuals, most of them terrified by the dangers that might lie ahead on the river. Kalulu, the youth whom Stanley had rescued and educated, was one of the deserters. After he was recaptured, Stanley would not be able to forgive him. Yet, in the end, it would be clear that Kalulu’s decision to escape had been the right one. He would surely have reached adulthood, if he had only managed to avoid recapture.3

  On 17 October 1876, the expedition arrived on the banks of the Lualaba, and Stanley saw, for the first time, an immense pale-grey river winding its way slowly northwards into the unknown, between densely wooded banks. For the sake of the Lualaba, Livingstone had sacrificed himself, but, like Cameron, had failed to follow it beyond Nyangwe. Stanley had no means of knowing how far it would flow to the north before deviating to east or west, declaring its kinship to the Nile or to the Congo.

  The following day he met the most important Arab-Swahili slave trader in Manyema, Hamid bin Muhammad el-Murebi (whose nickname Tippu Tip was supposed to mimic the sound of bullets; a grandmother had been the daughter of a Lomani chief, explaining his African appearance). He had the power to guarantee or to deny Stanley the canoes and other supplies which were essential for his voyage downstream. So the explorer felt he had no choice but to do a deal with him, rather than be stopped from following the river. The Arab also had men to spare as an escort to protect Stanley’s people from hostile tribes along the Lualaba immediately to the north of Nyangwe. These tribes were dangerous to strangers because of slave raids made by men like Tippu Tip, but Stanley would still need protection and was prepared to pay him the amazing sum of $5,000 (the entire cost of his Livingstone quest) to accompany him with 140 armed men for sixty marches north of Nyangwe. If he failed to reach agreement with the Arab, Stanley knew he would fail in his mission. Cameron had tried to cut a similar deal, but Tippu Tip had turned him down. Stanley’s deal did not mark a lessening of his hatred for slave traders. In a despatch written at this time, he urged Britain to act militarily against ‘a traffic especially obnoxious to humanity – a traffic founded on violence, murder, robbery and fraud’.4