Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (38 page)

His optimism did not last long. Soon he was upbraiding the sepoys and Nasik men for deliberate cruelty to the mules and camels which he had brought to gauge whether they had greater resistance to the tsetse fly than had oxen and horses. The Nasik men, copying the sepoys, engaged local tribesmen to carry their loads on the understanding that the white man would pay. They also offered the party’s Somali guide, Ben Ali, cloth and money to direct them all back to the coast. Eventually Livingstone was obliged to give one of the sepoys ‘some smart cuts with a cane’.
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Yet this was not enough to stop the thieving and the infliction of deep gashes on the baggage animals’ flanks. Many of the poor creatures were dying before May was over; and Livingstone had no idea whether this was due to the tsetse or to the sepoys. Just when tensions within the party were growing worse, Livingstone began to see evidence of terrible inhumanity every few miles. On 19 June he wrote:

We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become the property of anybody else if she recovered after resting for a time.

Local people admitted that when they managed to rescue such slaves, they would only feed them up in order to sell them again.
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This evidence of African indifference to African suffering increased rather than lessened Livingstone’s determination to end the slave trade, and at this time he wrote two well argued despatches to the British Foreign Secretary urging that Zanzibar should be blockaded at once, and the main slave market closed. He gave detailed reasons why he did not believe that this would create anarchy in Zanzibar, or cause smaller slave markets to open up along the coast. There is something extraordinarily impressive about the unemotional and logical way in which he marshalled his facts at a time when he was involved with the far from abstract misery of the slaves themselves. Every few days, he was finding little groups of corpses. Some had been shot, others stabbed, and others tied together and left to starve to death.

Meanwhile his porters dawdled, stole and threatened to desert. In July the sepoys concocted a story about how a tiger had killed and eaten the expedition’s only buffalo calf. Livingstone asked whether they had seen the tiger’s stripes. They eagerly agreed that they had. Since African tigers have no stripes, the doctor was unimpressed. Next day a sepoy threatened to shoot a Nasik man and another stole a large number of cartridges and cloth from the stores. At last Livingstone had had enough and gave the sepoys eighteen yards of cloth and left them at a village to wait for the next Arab caravan to the coast.
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On 6 August, when he reached the blue waters of Lake Nyasa, he found ‘a dash in the breakers quite exhilarating’. By now, he was down to twenty-three men, less than half the number he had had in early May. A month later, when he arrived at the crossing point on the Shire river, the ten Johanna porters decided to desert
en masse.
They had learned from Arab slave traders and local Africans that the country ahead was being pillaged by the ‘Mazitu’ (Ngoni) and since they wished to see their families again would serve no longer. They had been almost as troublesome as the sepoys, so Livingstone did not try to detain
them. In 1863, he had encountered the ‘Mazitu’ in the same area and knew that the dangers ahead were very real.
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In January 1867, shortly after the man carrying the expedition’s chronometers had slipped and fallen, damaging these vital clocks and guaranteeing that all Livingstone’s future calculations for longitude would be inaccurate, his medicine case was stolen by a deserter. With most of his party ill with malaria and dysentery, the second loss struck Livingstone as a possible death sentence. But despite this, and although the rains were making travel increasingly difficult, the doctor was focussed again and excited. He was heading for an unknown lake which he believed would be found to feed a river flowing into the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. This lake might therefore prove to be the source of the Nile. On 16 January he described a typical day’s progress:

The rain as usual made us halt early… We roast a little grain and boil it, to make believe it is coffee … Ground all sloppy; oozes full and overflowing – feet constantly wet … Rivulets can only be crossed by felling a tree on the bank and letting it fall across … Nothing but famine and famine prices, the people living on mushrooms and leaves. We get some elephant meat from the people, but high is no name for its condition. It is very bitter but it prevents the heartburn.
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The place where Lake Bangweulu was supposed to be was engulfed by a gigantic swamp. Hoping to find the river flowing out of it, he marched north and unwittingly passed almost 120 miles to the east of the lake proper, not realising when he crossed the Chambesi river that it flowed into Bangweulu. By the time he recognised his mistake the lake lay 100 miles to the south-west of his present position. He was ill for much of the following month; then war broke out between local Africans and Arab-Swahili slave traders. So by the time he reached Lake Tanganyika it was April. Then he was ill again. The war continued, preventing him from finding out whether there was a river flowing into the western side of Lake Tanganyika.

At this time he heard of a large lake called Moero (Lake Mweru), 100 miles to the west of where he was. His immediate thought was that it must be linked with Bangweulu, and could therefore lead
him to the river he was seeking. But with the war being waged more fiercely than ever, he was unable to leave for this new lake until the end of September. By now his party numbered only a dozen men, and by necessity he was obliged to travel with the infamous slave and ivory trader Hamid bin Muhammad el-Murebi, known as Tippu Tip, who was close to establishing political and commercial control over the whole area.
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In November 1867 – just over a year and a half after landing on the East African coast – he and Tippu reached Lake Moero and, as he had hoped, he managed to establish from local reports that it was indeed linked with Bangweulu. Even more thrillingly, he heard that an immense river flowed out of Moero’s northwestern corner on a course that took it to the north, no one knew where. This river was called the Lualaba and from the moment Livingstone heard its name, he knew that he would have to follow it. He felt sure that it would either enter Lake Tanganyika, before exiting through the Rusizi and then flowing on through Lake Albert to the White Nile, or it would miss Tanganyika entirely and flow into Lake Albert directly.
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For the remaining years of his life the Lualaba would obsess Livingstone, giving him no peace.

Livingstone’s lack of porters and the exhaustion of his stores obliged him to remain with Tippu Tip until well into the New Year. He dithered about whether to go back to Lake Bangweulu (to make a map of it and Lake Moero, along with the connecting Luapula river) or whether to travel to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, where he would be able to replenish his stores and engage more porters. But neither Tippu nor Muhammad Salim, another slave trader, kept to the plans they had announced to him earlier, and in the end out of sheer frustration, in mid-April 1868, Livingstone set out for Lake Bangweulu with nine men, five of whom deserted on the same day. But with the remaining four, he bravely headed south, pursued by a messenger sent by Muhammad Salim to dissuade him from his suicidal venture. Livingstone ignored him and pressed on south. After months of illness and indecision, his recovery was almost superhuman. He even found it in his heart
to forgive the five deserters. ‘I did not blame them very severely in my own mind for absconding; they were tired of tramping, and so verily am I … Consciousness of my own defects makes me lenient.’
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During the twenty-seven days it took Livingstone to reach Kasembe’s village, fifty-four miles to the south on the Luapula river, he and his men waded, at times waist deep, through ‘black tenacious mud’ exuding ‘a frightful faecal odour’ and contended with leeches that ‘needed no coaxing to bite but flew at the skin like furies’.
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Livingstone left Kasembe in mid-June with Muhammad Bogharib, the only Arab slave trader he would come to think of as a friend. Always, he believed that by using Arabs to further his geographical aims, he was increasing his chances of living long enough to do the maximum possible harm to the hateful trade. By July Livingstone was back at Bangweulu and taking new observations for longitude and latitude. On 8 July – confident that an Arab caravan would take his next packet of letters to the coast – he wrote a despatch to Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary:

I may safely assert that the chief sources of the Nile arise between 10° and 12° south latitude or nearly in the position assigned to them by Ptolemy … If your Lordship will read the following short sketch of my discoveries, you will perceive that the springs of the Nile have hitherto been searched for very much too far to the north. They rise some 400 miles south of the most southerly portion of the Victoria Nyanza, and indeed south of all the lakes except Bangweolo.
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In August Livingstone re-joined Bogharib, who was planning to visit Manyema in search of slaves and ivory. But a change of plan led the Arab to return instead to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. This was just as well for Livingstone, whose health collapsed soon after Bogharib’s decision was made. Pneumonia and malaria might have killed him if he had been taken to Manyema on a litter. But by the summer of 1869, after four months of recuperation in Ujiji, he felt strong enough to set out once more for Manyema. It seemed an incredible piece of luck that Bogharib was leaving for that place at exactly this time.

Within a few months Livingstone expected to be on the banks of the Lualaba, which he estimated to be 200 miles from the western shores of Lake Tanganyika. His optimism was sadly misplaced. He had entirely underestimated the anarchy and mass murder going on in Manyema, now that it had become an ivory boom area. The Arab-Swahili newcomers were far more ruthless than men of Bogharib’s generation and murdered any villagers who tried to negotiate a reasonable price for their tusks. As a result, widespread fighting broke out between Africans and Arabs, and so Livingstone found it very hard to travel as soon as Bogharib went off trading on his own. The hardest time in Livingstone’s life was just beginning.

Because his attempt, between June 1870 and July 1871, to become the first European to reach the mighty Lualaba and to navigate its course downstream, is a virtual compendium of all the deadliest pitfalls that the nineteenth-century African explorer could expect to face during an entire lifetime, I chose this
annus horribilis
as the subject of Chapter One of this book. It graphically demonstrates the almost superhuman determination of the greatest explorers never to surrender – even when facing death by drowning, malaria and tick fever. Desertions, food shortages, droughts, floods, slave raids, threats of violence and actual violence, all punctuated Livingstone’s days in 1870 and 1871.

But, amazingly, there were rewards too during this awful period. In March 1871, he was awed by his first sight of the broad, brown waters of the Lualaba – 3,000 yards wide at this point – flowing slowly and powerfully northwards between densely forested banks. Because this immense river appeared on no maps, and had not been described in the literature of any of the world’s geographical societies, its discovery was all the more thrilling. As explained in Chapter One, due to his readings of Herodotus, and the apparent confirmation given to the Greek historian’s account of the Nile’s sources by Josut and Moenpembe – two well-travelled Arabs, whom the doctor met in Manyema in 1870 – Livingstone had become convinced that the Lualaba was indeed the Nile. His
own work in isolating the source bolstered this conclusion. So the fact that his many efforts to reach it at times came close to killing him was simply a reflection of his certainty that this was
his
moment when he must not fail, as the gentlemen explorers had done when their great moments had come.

For seven frustrating months, Livingstone was unable to move any closer to the fabled river because suffering from pneumonia and enduring the terrible pain of tropical ulcers eating into the soles of his feet. Ill-health kept him a prisoner in the town of Bambarre, midway between Lake Tanganyika and the Lualaba, until February 1871. At this time his following dwindled to three men.

Then, out of the blue, on 4 February ten porters arrived from the east coast, sent many months earlier by Acting-Consul Kirk.
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Although these men enabled Livingstone – with additional help from several Arab slave traders – to reach the Lualaba a month later, they then did their utmost to prevent him following the river downstream. In his daily field notebooks, he railed against these new arrivals, who turned out to be slaves owned by
banians
for whose services Livingstone was being asked to pay more than if they had been free men. He thought them devious, dishonest and cowardly, since they were not prepared to accompany him in a canoe down the Lualaba. Their perfectly natural fear was that tribes along the banks, after suffering repeated raids by Arab slave traders operating from Nyangwe, would attack all strangers on the river. The ‘Banian slaves’, as Livingstone called them, made it impossible for him to secure canoes by telling the local Manyema that he ‘wanted neither slaves nor ivory but to kill them’. Though Chuma and Susi, who had been with Livingstone since 1861 and 1863 respectively, knew what the slaves were saying about their master, they never told him.