Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (17 page)

When David Livingstone returned to London in December 1856 he was at the zenith of his fame and popularity. He was forty-three. He had money and prestige for the first time in his life. In between his explorations he’d managed to marry and father four children. Africa hadn’t yet ravaged him physically, and the tragedies that would mar his final years had not yet begun.

Livingstone’s fame was so great that when Murchison threw a ‘Farewell Livingstone Festival’ on 13 February 1858, just before the explorer’s departure for a second Zambezi expedition, 350 of England’s most prominent citizens filled the Freemason’s Tavern. Notably absent was Lord Clarendon, head of the Foreign Office. Having a commoner gain so much attention irritated him. British explorers were supposed to be gentlemen of money and pedigree. ‘For some time past,’ Clarendon told Murchison by way of excuse, ‘I thought Dr L. was being too much honoured for his own good, and that the public was being led to expect more from his future labours than will probably be realized.’

Clarendon’s prescience proved tragically accurate. Livingstone’s aim for the grand new expedition was to explore the entire Zambezi basin, a massive undertaking that involved journeys on water and foot to the source of several major rivers. If anyone but Livingstone had announced such a plan he would have been mocked. But Livingstone had already done the impossible by walking across Africa. The public expected phenomenal things from the second Zambezi journey — Murchison alone foresaw the seeds of a British colony and breakthrough discoveries of coal deposits on the upper Zambezi.

The journey was a highly publicized failure. Public
response was best summed up by
The Times
’s assessment on 20 January 1863. ‘Livingstone’, the paper wrote, ‘was unquestionably a traveller of talents, enterprise and excellent constitution, but it is plain that his zeal must outweigh his judgement.’

The Zambezi was too shallow and laden with sandbars and waterfalls for easy navigation. Slavery had decimated the region. The expedition was caught in inter-tribal war and slave raids. Dead bodies floated on the water, and children starved in the ruins of once-thriving villages. It was no place for a colony.

Within the expedition, the problem was Livingstone’s travelling companions. Livingstone was a reluctant leader, expecting the men to be self-motivated, like him. He disliked travelling with white men, finding them impatient and argumentative.

‘Constantly’, remembered expedition member E. D. Young, ‘has he asserted his belief that for a man to succeed as a traveller in Africa he should go unaccompanied by other white men.’ Parliament, however, had approved thousands of pounds in funding. The mission needed commensurate grandeur. So instead of travelling with porters alone, a contingent of British scientists and artists was assigned to accompany Livingstone. Livingstone issued strict orders that the locals were to be treated with kindness at all times. Guns were only for obtaining food and scientific specimens. ‘The best security from attack consists in upright conduct,’ he warned the Africa newcomers.

As Livingstone expected, the six men proved whiny and timid. With the exception of botanist John Kirk, also a Scot, they weren’t fit enough to keep up when the journey switched from the river to overland. Livingstone’s brother, Charles, whom he’d invited as morale officer out of misplaced loyalty, was the worst of all. Charles was a self-centred martinet whose behaviour made his older brother furious. The only times Livingstone lost his temper were to rebuke Charles. With Kirk, on the other hand, he was a warm father figure.

Most of the men mocked Livingstone behind his back. They thought he was crazy for taking too many chances — and asking the same of them. His stubbornness prevented Livingstone from backing down in favour of caution once a difficult course had been set. His motto was ‘never give up’, and so he pushed forward, always forward, the picture of British exploration in his blue serge trousers and jacket, peaked consular cap perched on his narrow head. ‘If I risk nothing I gain nothing,’ he groused.

The risks and resolution took their toll. The Zambezi expedition began the erosion of Livingstone’s health. Despite his diligence about taking proper medication, several attacks of malaria, eczema and dysentery wore him down. It took longer and longer for the tireless energy to rebound. C. F. Mackenzie, a balding young missionary bishop travelling with the group, wrote of a typical day on the trail: ‘Livingstone tramping along with a steady, heavy tread which kept one in mind that he had walked across Africa.’ Tragically, Mackenzie lost a vital cache of supplies inadvertently in 1862, letting them tumble from his canoe into the Zambezi’s chaotic waters. The supplies he lost were not food or plates or beads, but medicines. And in a river delta infested with mosquitoes, where anti-malarial quinine was all important, the missionary had effectively signed his death warrant. Malaria killed him soon after. Mackenzie’s demise spelled the end to an endeavour known as the Universities Mission project, whose charge was to establish Christian missions deep in Africa. The idealistic venture was enthusiastically backed by the British evangelical movement. And though Livingstone could not be blamed for Mackenzie’s fumbling or his unnecessary death, he would be — with still more tragic results.

As for Livingstone and Kirk, it was Charles Livingstone who drove the wedge between them. As the expedition wore on, and Kirk grew more and more homesick, Charles disparaged the sensitive botanist’s skills. In a momentary lapse of judgement, David Livingstone joined in. He apologized soon after, but the damage was done.
Combined with the loss of his journals to the Zambezi and his desperate need to return home, a rift was effected between Kirk and the explorer. The rift grew slowly, but it never stopped widening. ‘I can come to no other conclusion,’ Kirk wrote in his journal on 18 September 1862, ‘than that Dr Livingstone is out of his mind.’

The most devastating aspect of the trip, however, was the death of Livingstone’s wife, Mary. Theirs was an enigmatic marriage, with moments of great intimacy and adventure — at her insistence, she and the children travelled by ox cart with Livingstone during an early crossing of the Kalahari — interspersed with monumental separations. He had married the sturdy, brown-eyed woman, who wore her straight hair pulled back in a bun, in 1845. They had five children together, and suffered the loss of Elizabeth Mary in infancy. It was common in Victorian England for women to handle all child-rearing while the husbands busied themselves with making a living, so it wasn’t unusual that Livingstone spent so much time away from home. But Mary, the daughter of famous missionary Robert Moffatt — Livingstone’s supervisor at Kuruman, during the explorer’s initial days in Africa — had begun a downward mental spiral when she returned to England with the children during Livingstone’s walk across Africa. That spiral continued when Livingstone left for the Zambezi expedition. She became fond of brandy, and threw herself at other men. With her husband off for yet another long expedition, Mary could stand it no more. In 1858, Mary placed the children in the care of family friends and sailed to Africa to be with him. She briefly joined the expedition, but was forced to return to Britain in April 1858, when she found that she was pregnant. By 1861, Mary was leaving young Anna Mary with Livingstone’s mother in Scotland, and returning to Africa. She met up with him at Shupanga, a small mosquito-choked port on the lower Zambezi. Within months she was dead from a devastating combination of malaria and continual vomiting, breathing her last with Livingstone at her side. But the loss shattered him. The health problems
that would dog him for the rest of his life began in earnest with Mary’s death on 27 April 1862. ‘I cannot tell you how greatly I feel the loss,’ Livingstone wrote to a friend a week later. ‘It feels as if heart and strength were taken out of me — my horizon is all dark. I am distressed for the children.’

The expedition was recalled in 1863, five years after it sailed. Livingstone emerged from the interior and discharged his men. Still not ready to go home, however, he piloted his steel steamship
Lady Nyassa
2,500 miles from Africa to India to sell it. She was forty feet long, with an awning over the stern and a steam engine. Livingstone had barely taken the helm travelling up the Zambezi, let alone piloted her on the open ocean, but somehow he managed the forty-five-day crossing. The manoeuvre was audacious. There was a swashbuckling tempo to the casual manner in which it was attempted and achieved — like an afterthought, as if the ocean was a minor obstacle after five years fending off the dangers of Africa.

Now, six years and thousands of miles of world travel later, David Livingstone was a radically changed man. As he rested in Bambarre in October 1869, he was no longer an explorer. Livingstone was a lost old man, looking for a set of fountains that might not exist, repeating the worst mistakes of his Zambezi expedition. He was down to just three companions: Chuma, Susi and a boy named Gardner.

Livingstone lacked health, resources and an ability to communicate with the outside world. As bad as things had been during the first three and a half years of this most recent expedition, Livingstone had always been capable of doing the unthinkable: giving up. He could have walked east to the African coast and found a ship to take him to Zanzibar or Cape Town, where the British Consulate would have seen to it that he received medical assistance and a passage back to London.

But David Livingstone in the waning months of 1869 was no longer physically capable of such a feat. Unable to press onward, and equally unable to retreat, he was
helpless. If he was going to live to see London again — see the people who loved him and cared for him, whether or not he found the Source — David Livingstone would need to be rescued.

AT THE SAME
moment, James Gordon Bennett, Jr was holed up in his Paris hotel suite trying to conjure brilliant thoughts. The twenty-eight-year-old newspaper tycoon was seeking to counteract yet another in the series of crises that had unfolded in New York over the past two months, this one having to do with a gold market scandal he’d stumbled into. With the reputation — indeed, the very future — of his New York
Herald
at stake, Bennett had fled to Paris aboard a Cunard liner. He took a suite at the luxurious Grand Hotel, the city’s finest accommodation, to plot his next move. It was a situation calling for a bold gambit, a compelling distraction. He would publish an epic newspaper story or series of newspaper stories to distance the
Herald
and himself from the scandal. The question was: stories about what?

Bennett had spent his youth in France because New York had been unsafe for his family then. His father, a penniless Scottish immigrant who made his fortune publishing the
Herald
, was in constant physical danger
because of his uncompromising editorials. The family was new-money wealthy and shunned by New York society. Bennett, Sr, was once beaten by thugs as the police stood by; on another occasion he received a bomb in the mail — both on account of his editorial perspectives. Out of fear for the children’s safety, Bennett’s mother relocated the brood to France while the elder Bennett stayed behind to run the
Herald
.

Almost two decades later, with the paper he’d inherited on the verge of ruin, it felt natural for Bennett to seek sanctuary in the City of Lights. Paris, too, was in upheaval. Emperor Napoleon III was pursuing war with Otto von Bismarck’s Germany. More tangibly, Baron Georges Haussmann’s architectural modernization was changing the city for ever. Slums were being razed, boulevards were being widened and arranged in a geometric grid, and the medieval sewage systems revamped. For many men those changes would have been a distraction, but Bennett thrived on chaos. His suite at the Grand, street level and noisy, was ideal for serious thought, business and socializing.

Bennett had no direct role in the gold market scandal that caused him to flee New York, but one of the two principal participants was his frequent drinking companion Ed Fisk, a financier who had made his fortune selling fifty-three million dollars of watered-down Erie Railway stock. Fisk’s partner was the slick Jay Gould. Working in cahoots with Boss Tweed, whose Tammany Hall ring was looting New York City’s Treasury, Gould and Fisk tried to boost their wealth to stratospheric levels by cornering the United States gold market in September 1869.

To prevent the Treasury from dropping the price of gold and making a shambles of their plan, Gould secretly enlisted the aid of his friend Abel R. Corbin, who was married to President Ulysses S. Grant’s sister. Grant had been in office just five months and was naive about the intricacies of government finance. So when Corbin persuaded Grant to keep the price of gold high as a means
of boosting the nation’s economy, Grant went along with it. Fisk and Gould, with that decision, cornered the gold market — temporarily.

In late September Grant realized his error. He immediately ordered the Treasury to release the nation’s reserve supplies of bullion onto the market. Gold prices plummeted. The stock market endured a horrific crash. Gould, tipped off about Grant’s plans, sold his gold in time to reap an eleven-million-dollar profit. But he never warned his partner. Like gold speculators across America, Fisk, Bennett’s drinking friend, lost everything.