Collected Essays (33 page)

The first main object was to discover the course of the Niger; and the motive? ‘In 1783’, Mr Plumb writes in his admirable introduction to Mr Howard’s anthology,
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America had left the Empire. For some years merchants and financiers had confidently predicted her economic collapse, but no collapse came. And as yet no one realized that the political separation of Britain and America did not entail disastrous economic consequences, so that in mercantile circles the discovery of new markets seemed an urgent problem.

But the dream was more compelling than the motive can explain. Think of the German who

intended to travel as a Moslem trader. With great, perhaps excessive, thoroughness he trained on a diet of spiders, grasshoppers, and roots, and before sailing, in order to leave nothing to chance, had himself circumcised. These tribulations were suffered without reward, for the moment he set foot in Africa he caught fever and died.

Think too of the slender chances of survival. The phrase ‘the White Man’s Grave’ has become a music-hall cliché to those who have never seen the little crumbling cemeteries of the West Coast like that on Bunce Island in Sierra Leone river. Mungo Park in the course of his second expedition reported: ‘I am sorry to say that of forty-five Europeans who left the Gambia in perfect health, five only are at present alive, viz. three soldiers (one deranged in his mind), Lieutenant Martyn, and myself.’ Forty years later the chances were hardly better. ‘On the 18th’ (Macgregor Laird reported)

Mr Andrew Clark, a fine young gentleman about eighteen years of age died. . . . Poor fellow! He expired with the utmost calmness, drinking a cup of coffee; and his amiable and obliging disposition having endeared him to the crew, his death threw an additional gloom of despondency over these ill-fated men. In the afternoon James Dunbar, one of the firemen, died. On the 19th, my chief mate, Mr Goldie, and my sailmaker, John Brien, followed; and on the morning of the 20th, our super-cargo, Mr Jordan, expired. I thought at the time that Doctor Briggs had died also; as, while he was endeavouring to revive Mr Jordan, he swooned and remained insensible for a long time. In the evening of the 20th, Mr Swinton also died . . .

No other part of Africa has cast so deep a spell on Englishmen as the Coast, with the damp mists, the mangrove swamps, the malaria, the blackwater and the yellow fever (the only coast in the world dignified by a capital letter and needing, no qualification). Is it that the explorer has the same creative sickness as the writer or the artist and that to fill in the map, as to fill in the character or features of a human being, requires the urge to surrender and self-destruction? – you cannot even surrender yourself so completely to a book or a picture as you can to the chances of death. Mary Kingsley was well aware of this suicidal streak that drove her to the Coast. In a letter to a friend she wrote quite frankly, ‘Dead tired and feeling no one had need of me any more, when my father and mother died within six weeks of each other in ‘92, and my brother went off to the East, I went down to West Africa to die’; and in the sedate poetic prose of Mungo Park – the greatest of all writers on Africa – one can detect the same desire to lose himself for ever. The almost incredible privations and dangers of his first journey among the ‘fanatic Moors’ left him with life still on his hands and he had to return to Africa, giving up his quiet practice as a doctor in Peebles, to lose it – no one knows exactly where. (A Chief near Busa is said to wear his ring to this day.) ‘When the human mind’, he had written, ‘has for some time been fluctuating between hope and despair, tortured with anxiety, and hurried from one extreme to another, it affords a sort of gloomy relief to know the worst that can possibly happen. . . .’ Again and again in Park’s narrative the prose quickens with that gloomy relief as his fingers touched the rock bottom of experience.

It is right that Mungo Park should be the best represented of all the explorers in Mr Howard’s excellent anthology. He was a born writer – the others, with the exception of Burton, became good writers only because of the interest and oddity of their material. Burton here is very much the Burton of the
Arabian Nights
with his range of intricate experience: his eye for the bizarre concrete detail, like the golden crucifix dangling from the neck of a Dahomey official, ‘but the crucifix is strangely altered, the crucified being a chameleon, the venerable emblem of the rainbow God’: his wicked common sense about the Amazons of Dahomey – ‘wherever a she-soldiery is, celibacy must be one of its rules, or the troops will be in a state of chronic functional disorder between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five’: his malevolent tolerance – ‘Human sacrifice in Dahomey is founded upon a purely religious basis, which not only strengthens but perpetuates the custom. It is a touching instance of the King’s filial piety.’ What a strange encounter it would have been in those days for a chance voyager to South Africa to call in passing on Her Majesty’s Consul in Fernando Po.

There has been one deplorable change as the years passed – the growth of British superiority. To Mungo Park an African king deserved the same respect as his own. ‘The king graciously replied’, ‘The good old king’, such phrases are scattered through his work, and because he respected African sovereignty he respected the African, king or slave. There is a sense all the time of Christian equality. The Moors are cruel – they are not savages.

It is with the not very likeable – and I feel not very reliable – Major Dixon Denham in the 1820s that the white sneer can be observed for the first time. ‘Nothing’, he wrote, ‘could be more absurd and grotesque than some, nay, all, of the figures who formed this court’, though one believes that the sight of Major Denham naked and begging for a pair of trousers makes a higher claim to absurdity if we really believe in the episode. (I write
if
, for Major Denham’s story frequently seems to echo hollowly not only the mood but the incidents of Mungo Park’s narrative.)

Even the more likeable Macgregor Laird displays the white pride – ‘Among other annoyances, they thrust a disgusting Albino close to me, and asked if he was my brother’; and with Captain Trotter’s expedition up the Niger in the 1840s the tone has dismally darkened. ‘Captain Trotter, Senior Commissioner, explained that Heir Majesty the Queen of Great Britain . . . repugnant to the laws of God . . . Her benevolent intentions for the benefit of Africa . . .’, and so on and so on.

We are not very far now from filibustering Stanley: the hundred lashes to a carrier, the chained and padlocked chiefs, the strong body of men armed with Remingtons, ‘the withering fire’, ‘the Winchesters were worked handsomely’. The dream has vanished. The stores are landed, the trade posts established; civilization is on the way, the Anglican missionaries will build their fake Norman churches of laterite blocks, and as malaria and yellow fever are defeated, the wives will follow their Rugbeian husbands to hill stations and help them to administer the equal justice of a good public school. Even the savagery of Stanley had something of Africa still about it, more than the playing fields of Bo or the art classes of Achimota. We have much to be proud of in West Africa, of the indirect rule established by Lugard, of our protection – unknown to the same extent in East Africa – of the native, but the Christian equality which enabled Park to accept with humility the rebuke of a slave has vanished for ever.

1952

‘SORE BONES: MUCH HEADACHE’

I
T
is a sad thing about small nationalities that like a possessive woman they trap their great men: Walter Scott, Stevenson, Burns, Livingstone – all have to some extent been made over by their countrymen, they have not been allowed to grow or to diminish with time. How can they even shift in the grave under the weight of their national memorials? a whole industry of trinkets and souvenirs and statuettes depends on the conformity of the dead. A Civil Service of curators, secretaries, and guides takes charge of the memory. (65,000 people pass annually through the turnstiles of the Livingstone Memorial House at Blantyre with its coloured statuary and its Ancestry Room, Youth Room, Adventure Room.) An explorer can suffer from his legend as much as a writer – the explorer, too, has a passion to create, and just as a body carried to its grave at the summit of a Samoan hill obscures the writer struggling with the character of Hermiston, so the last trek of Livingstone’s faithful carriers to the coast, with the obvious drama and the missionary moral, has intruded between us and the patience, the monotony, and the weariness incurred in adding a new line to a map, surveying an uncharted range, correcting an erroneous reading, above all it has obscured Livingstone’s failure – you will not find photographs of the Lari massacre at Blantyre. (Dr Macnair does not help us to escape the legend by writing always in capital letters of the Explorer, the Traveller, the Missionary. I prefer the admirably clear and sensible geographical notes by Dr Ronald Miller.
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)

The virtue of this selection from Livingstone’s travel books and journals is its dullness – the reader must dig himself for the vivid fact or the revealing sentence. Livingstone was not primarily concerned with the beauty of the scenery or the drama of his journeys: he was concerned, at the beginning, with the location of healthy mission stations, later with discovering trade routes (which he considered might help towards the extinction of slavery) – the discoveries of Lake Shira and Lake Nyasa had no drama for him: they were incidental.

We discovered Lake Nyasa a little before noon on September 16, 1859 Its southern end is 14° minutes 25’ South lat., 35° 30’ E. long. At this point the valley is about 12 miles wide. There are hills on both sides of the lake.

The plot of the novel catches the attention, but the subject lies deeper. ‘The Nile sources are valuable only to me as a means of opening my mouth with power.’

Literary expression was not Livingstone’s object – a compass reading was more important for his mission. (‘It seems a pity that the important facts about two healthy ridges should not be known to Christendom.’) But in the early years when he wrote for publication,
Missionary Travels and Researches, The Zambesi and Its Tributaries
, he thought it necessary to take as his model the work of other Victorian travel books.

We proceeded rapidly up-river. The magnificent stream is often more than a mile broad and is adorned by many islands from three to five miles in length. The beauty of the scenery on some of these islands is greatly increased by the date-palm with its gracefully curved fronds and refreshing light-green colour, while the lofty palmyra towers above and casts its feathery foliage against a cloudless sky. The banks of the river are equally covered by forest and most of the trees on the brink of the water send down roots from their branches, like the banian. The adjacent country is rocky and undulating, abounding in elephants and all other large game, except leches and nakongs, which seem generally to avoid stony ground.

The airs and graces were to be shed when he was no longer concerned in advancing the sales of his books at home and increasing his opportunities for work. In the final journals we get the hard truthful writing of which he was capable. Written for no one but himself during that terrible seven-year journey, they present a picture quite different to those bas-reliefs of a missionary in a peaked consular cap, Bible in hand, surrounded by his native followers. Tired out, disillusioned (for now he was dependent upon the very slave traders whom he wished to put out of business for ever), uncertain of everything (even of the Zambesi whose navigability had been his obstinate dream) except of his simple evangelical faith, so free from the complex dogmas of a theologian – just God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. (The Apostles’ Creed was nearer to him than the Athanasian.)

How little experience is needed in a reader to make him realize the appalling nature of the seven-year journey. This writer has experienced only four weeks of African travel on foot, one strike of carriers, one bad Chief, a single night of high fever, only a few days when provisions grew short – but multiplying that small experience nearly a hundred times in days and how many hundred times in privation, it seems almost incredible that Livingstone could have gone on for so long without returning to civilization. Dr Miller admirably describes the condition of all African travel – the spider-web if tracks that may lead somewhere or nowhere:

One of the amazing features of Africa is the close network of footpaths that exists everywhere – and leads everywhere – highly convenient for movement within a limited neighbourhood, but most confusing for the stranger wishing to make a long cross-country traverse; and placing him at the mercy of guides who may mislead him, deliberately or accidentally, or simply immobilise him by withdrawing their services. . . . Thus we find Livingstone, like many other African travellers, subjected to expensive and infuriating delays by the refusal of chiefs to supply guides. He navigated and fixed the framework of his maps by means of sextant observations, of course, but these could not tell him which fork of the path led merely to an outfield, and which to the next village on his route; which to a swamp and which to the ford on the river.

Here are a few jottings of his journey.

Christmas Day 1866. ‘A little indigestible porridge, of hardly any taste, is now my fare and it makes me dream of better.’

January 1867 (the great journey was not yet a year old). Deserting carriers stole:

all the dishes, a large box of powder, the flour we had purchased dearly to help us as far as the Chambesi, the tools, two guns and a cartridge pouch; but the medicine chest was the sorest loss of all. I felt as if I had received a sentence of death, like poor Bishop Mackenzie.

October 1867. ‘Sore bones; much headache; no appetite; much thirst.’

December 1867. ‘I am so tired of exploration . . .’

July 1868. ‘Here we cooked a little porridge, and then I lay down on one side, and the canoe men and my attendants at the fire in the middle. I was soon asleep and dreamt I had apartments in Mivart’s hotel.’