Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (18 page)

Five days later, the devastated Fisk was prepared to tell all. He hunkered down with a
Herald
financial reporter and named names: Gould, Corbin, assistant treasurer Daniel Butterfield and, most of all, President Grant. The President was wide open to charges that his influence had been purchased. Fisk’s words were bold and the story would definitely sell newspapers, but his claims about a grand conspiracy were unsubstantiated. It was just Fisk’s word against the President of the United States. Running the piece left the
Herald
open to a libel suit. The public would vilify Fisk for trying to swindle the nation then ratting on his cohorts. Bennett, whose public drinking jaunts were always high profile, would become a suspect by proxy. Between a libel suit and the bad publicity, the
Herald
could be ruined. Bennett would be disgraced.

Bennett faced the greatest decision of his short career as editor. Running the story meant he could lose it all. Not running the story meant a competitor would get the scoop eventually. The
Herald
’s silence could be mistaken for a cover-up.

Bennett stalled. He ordered his writers to use every investigative means possible to prove Fisk’s story. They turned up nothing. After two weeks Bennett ordered a tightly edited version of the piece to run. Grant’s involvement was downplayed. Bennett’s connection with Fisk wasn’t mentioned at all.

Then Bennett sailed for Paris and waited for the furore to subside. Spending his days ruminating and his nights
drinking champagne, the accomplished yachtsman set his course. Ideally, there would be a war somewhere for a
Herald
reporter to cover — war coverage was always popular. But the world, to Bennett’s chagrin, was a relatively peaceful place. A touch of civil unrest in Japan and a minor unpleasantness in Fiji, but otherwise, peace.

On 11 October,
The Times
ran another letter about Livingstone, this one stating that Arabs returning to Zanzibar from the interior had seen a white man in Ujiji. Bennett had his story. What better way to ensure the
Herald
’s stature than tweaking the British tail one more time? Or, as Bennett liked to call it, ‘twisting the lion’s tail’. He cabled New York, looking for Randolph Keim, one of the
Herald
’s best reporters. Bennett wanted to give Keim the Livingstone assignment. But word came back that Keim was somewhere unreachable in America. Bennett settled for the
Herald
’s correspondent in Madrid, covering the rebel uprisings rocking Spain. ‘Come To Paris On Important Business,’ he tersely cabled Henry Morton Stanley.

Three weeks passed. It was 27 October when a nervous Stanley rapped on his boss’s door at midnight. Bennett was in bed. ‘Come in,’ he yelled, not getting up.

Stanley stepped inside. He was nervous, afraid he was about to be fired. The Aden failure had been followed by a few months’ lazy reportage in Spain, where he’d actually spent very little time at the front. With Bennett’s proclivity for firing people — most recently, Stanley’s boss in the London bureau, Colonel Finlay Andersen — and with no advance word about why he’d been told to pack up his bags and race to Paris, Stanley feared the worst.

He stepped inside Bennett’s room. The ceiling was vaulted and the room was large enough to be an apartment. A bed was in the corner. There was a table in a sitting area just inside the door. Stanley had met Bennett on several occasions, most recently six months before. It was Bennett who ordered the editorial praising Stanley’s Abyssinia coverage. Nevertheless, Bennett was infamous for keeping his employees off balance.

‘Who’re you?’ Bennett demanded as if they’d never met.

‘My name is Stanley,’ he later recounted.

‘Ah, yes. Sit down. I have important business on hand for you.’ Bennett got out of bed and threw on his bathrobe. He paced and spoke at the same time, the tall thin editor hovering over the short, beefy, seated reporter.

‘Where do you think Livingstone is?’ Bennett continued.

‘I really do not know, sir.’

‘Do you think he is alive?’ Bennett pressed.

‘He may be and he may not be.’ In fact, Stanley wrote in his journal, he thought Livingstone was dead. Most everyone he knew felt the same.

‘Well, I think he is alive and that he can be found, and I am going to send you to find him.’

‘What? Do you really think I can find Dr Livingstone? Do you really mean me to go to Central Africa?’

‘Yes. I mean that you shall go and find him wherever you may hear that he is,’ Bennett answered. ‘The old man may be in want. Take enough with you to help him should he require it. Of course you will act according to your own plans and do what you think best — but find Livingstone.’

Stanley was dumbfounded. He marvelled at the magnitude of what Bennett was ordering. This was a vast difference from a professional military search à la Sir John Franklin, or the humanitarian rescue impulse beating inside E. D. Young. Sending a journalist into the African interior was either an act of enormous pomposity or incredible stupidity. Africa wasn’t a place for amateur sleuths.

‘Have you considered seriously the great expense you are likely to incur on account of this little journey?’ Stanley asked.

Bennett was unconcerned about money. What concerned him was creating the proper news cycle for the Livingstone story. It would need time to blossom. Stories would begin appearing intermittently. The
Herald
’s readers would become knowledgeable about Africa and enthusiastic about finding Livingstone. Done properly,
Livingstone and Africa would insinuate itself into New York’s subconscious. It would become the topic of dinner conversations. New Yorkers would find themselves worrying about Livingstone’s safety. They would eagerly buy papers telling of the latest news.

To buy time — and, more important, precluding the need to spend thousands of dollars for an African expedition should the gold scandal die quietly — Bennett ordered Stanley to delay his trip to Africa. He told him to write a series of travel stories first. The first would be the 17 November opening of the Suez Canal. Bennett wanted a critical piece on the canal’s viability. But just as important, he wanted Stanley to spy on the Baker expedition by following it a short way up the Nile.

Then it was off to Jerusalem to write about the Biblical archaeology in process. Then to Constantinople to check out rumours of war. ‘Then — let me see — you might as well visit the Crimea and those old battlegrounds. Then go across the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea. I hear there is a Russian expedition bound for Khiva. From thence you may get through Persia to India — you could write an interesting letter from Persepolis,’ Bennett continued.

On and on, until finally, a year in the future, Stanley would find himself in Zanzibar. If Livingstone had been found, Stanley’s orders were to sail directly from Zanzibar to China and look for trouble. Otherwise, it was straight into the interior and don’t come back until Livingstone was found. ‘And if you find him dead,’ Bennett concluded, ‘bring all possible proofs of his being dead. That is all. Goodnight, and God be with you.’

As Bennett went back to bed, Stanley stumbled back into the chill autumn night. His dazed demeanour matched Paris’s chaos. The meeting had been brief, no more than half an hour. Important issues like funding and timetable had been touched on, but not clarified. The burden of initiative had switched from Bennett to Stanley. But Henry Morton Stanley’s life had changed irrevocably in the course of that short meeting. So had Livingstone’s. For better or worse, the fledgling reporter had just become
the man who would broadcast David Livingstone’s fate to the world. Not only did he still have his job, but the man who once compared being a journalist with being a gladiator was being asked to lay down his life in the name of journalism.

Most wonderful of all was this: Stanley had found his second coup.

A YEAR PASSED
in a blur of hope and failed hope without any sign of Livingstone. He had been missing for four years and was considered, most likely, to be dead. One of his letters, dated May 1869, had arrived in Zanzibar the following November. However, his parting words had little hope for his safety. He was heading into cannibal country, he said, and would likely be eaten. Not even the Arabs reported seeing him since.

Meanwhile, Stanley was in the process of travelling the Asian subcontinent fulfilling Bennett’s orders, girding himself for his secret impossible task. And in London, Murchison was dealing with two shattering reports about Livingstone. The first came to light on 2 February, when
The Times
published a letter from a British naval officer in West Africa swearing that Livingstone had been burned by natives in the Congo. ‘He passed through a native town and was three days on his journey when the king of the town died. The natives declared Dr Livingstone had bewitched him,’ Captain Ernest Cochrane of HMS
Peterel
wrote. ‘Then they killed him and burnt him.
This news comes by a Portuguese trader travelling that way. Livingstone was in the lakes at the head of the Congo, where he was going to come out.’

There was a very good chance the news was true. As a naval officer, Cochrane was assumed to be a man of honour. And it was also true that the alleged burning took place along the same westerly path Murchison had long predicted Livingstone would follow. Murchison, however, brushed off the report as just another act of Portuguese insolence. They were jittery about losing Africa and weren’t above planting lies about their unlikely rival. ‘I can see no grounds for despondency,’ Murchison told the RGS in his president’s address.

He was, however, thoroughly disheartened by a letter Vice-Consul Kirk wrote from Zanzibar on 5 March. Murchison was fond of Kirk — the younger man’s hoodwinking by Musa and the Johanna men in 1867 notwithstanding. He saw Kirk, who was both a fellow Scot and RGS member, as his conduit into Africa and Livingstone. Murchison also knew that the Arab slavers were a cornucopia of information about the African interior, fully linked to the bush telegraph. Kirk’s letter, however, confessed to Murchison the sorrowful news that none of the caravans returning from the interior had a scrap of intelligence respecting Livingstone.

Murchison dealt with the news by imagining his lost friend Livingstone had concocted a brand new agenda. ‘The theory which I have now formed to account for this entire want of information is that he has quitted the eastern region entirely and has been following the waters flowing from the western side of the lake,’ Murchison said, publicly establishing once and for all that Livingstone was not coming out via Zanzibar. ‘These will lead him necessarily across a large unknown region, to emerge, I trust, at some port on the west coast.’

Just to be safe, Murchison wanted to send a shipment of relief supplies to Ujiji. The tactic had been tried twice before, in 1868 and 1869. Arabs had looted the majority of the first shipment and a cholera epidemic had killed
seven of the porters carrying the second. The survivors helped themselves to the supplies, leaving nothing for Livingstone. They were so sure Livingstone was dead they even threw away his letters from home.

Despite those failures, Murchison wanted to try one more time. He fearlessly approached Lord Clarendon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and a man professing ambivalence about Livingstone’s achievements, to ask a favour. Murchison requested a thousand pounds from the Government to buy relief supplies. The money would be hand-carried to Zanzibar by the British Consul, H. A. Churchill, who was in London on sick leave. Stores would be purchased and shipped by ivory caravan to Ujiji.

The request was politically risky for Murchison. While the rest of England professed great sympathy over Livingstone’s disappearance, Prime Minister William Gladstone had been notably silent. Portly and balding, the esteemed legislator was a devout Christian. A favourite pastime was walking the streets of London late at night, convincing prostitutes to seek another profession. He practised self-flagellation as a means of fending off feelings of sexual temptation engendered by those encounters. That inner conflict was also on display in his feelings for Livingstone. Gladstone had been a vocal advocate of Livingstone and the ill-fated Universities Mission to Central Africa. He met personally with Livingstone before the beginning of the Zambezi expedition. They met informally again on his return, bumping into one another at a dinner party at Lord Palmerston’s home. Livingstone called his conversation with Gladstone ‘very affable’.

Gladstone, however, distanced himself from Livingstone after the mission’s failure and the deaths of Bishop Mackenzie and his two colleagues. Politically, the Prime Minister shifted his focus from Africa and the foreign expansion favoured by his rival, Benjamin Disraeli, to focus more on domestic issues such as Irish Home Rule. By begging Gladstone for money Murchison was asking the Government to take a stand one way or another on his friend.

On 7 May 1870, during a four-hour Saturday afternoon cabinet meeting, the money was approved. Livingstone was the tenth item on a thirteen-item agenda, preceded by an Election Bill and followed by a million-pound loan guarantee to New Zealand. Gladstone knew public sentiment was firmly behind Livingstone, and would have risked unnecessary controversy by denying the request. Thanks to Gladstone’s tight-fisted and widely loathed Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, the Government didn’t lose face. Instead of a humanitarian gift from a grateful nation, Robert Lowe decreed that Livingstone’s thousand pounds would be an advance on his next two years of consular salary.