Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (26 page)

When Stanley first met Farquhar on the barque
Polly
, travelling from Bombay to the Seychelles, he had been awed at the way Farquhar had beaten a fellow sailor. His physical strength was daunting. When the journey into Africa began, Farquhar was broad-shouldered and
bellicose, still exuding power. His belly and nose showed the years of drinking, but he was squat and strong and very much a presence to be reckoned with.

But as Stanley stopped before Farquhar’s tent in Kiora and called out to his second in command, he was shocked at the corpulent mass wandering forwards. Farquhar, like Stanley and Shaw, was bearded. But he was plump in a way no man should be in a land where food was so precious. ‘As he heard my voice, Farquhar staggered out of his tent, as changed from my spruce mate who started from Bagamoyo as if he had been expressly fattened,’ Stanley wrote in amazement, ‘as we do geese and turkeys for Christmas dinner.’

The navigator was undoubtedly sick. But his dirty little secret was that he’d also been living like a king in Kiora, so uncaring about Stanley’s crazy desire to see Africa’s wildlife that he’d bartered almost all the third caravan’s cloth for a daily banquet of goats, eggs and chickens. Farquhar’s new girth was all the more obvious because Stanley was a walking cadaver. ‘I saw and regarded, not without wonder, the bloated cheeks and neck of my man Farquhar. His legs were also donderous, elephantine,’ Stanley wrote. It seemed incongruous that a man could claim to be so weak and sick but have such a massive appetite. Stanley was sure Farquhar was nothing more than a sensate monster, wasting the New York
Herald
’s money.

That night, Stanley had four porters carry an exhausted Farquhar into his tent to account for all the spent cloth. He demanded an accounting for the waste of time, money and manpower. Farquhar, forced to defend himself while spread-eagled on the thin carpet of Stanley’s small field tent, couldn’t think straight. His answer was circuitous and convoluted. ‘What he did do, what he did not do, what he had expended on cloth and beads, what he had not expended,’ an exasperated Stanley wrote, ‘were so inextricably jumbled up together that I felt myself drifting towards helpless insanity.’

Stanley had no choice but to relieve Farquhar. ‘An Arab
proprietor,’ he noted, ‘would have slaughtered him for his extravagance and imbecility.’ Ideally, Farquhar would have been left to find his own way home. Instead, the third and fifth caravans were combined and Farquhar was placed on a donkey. With the trail towards Ujiji leading up through a steep mountain, the ride would be a hell all his own for the swollen Farquhar. Each bump, each sway of the donkey that would pitch Farquhar helplessly to the ground, would be his penalty for incompetence.

The Rubeho Mountains became the caravan’s newest nemesis. Sir Roderick Murchison once theorized that Africa’s centre was a trough ringed by a mountain plain. And though Stanley was a thousand miles east of the depression forming the Congo’s swampy centre, the Rubeho proved the truth of the second part of the theory. Running north by north-east, roughly paralleling the Eastern African coast, the Rubeho and its eight-thousand-foot peaks were a prime, though jagged, example of the geographical term known as ‘uplift’.

The first third of Stanley’s journey was complete. Jungle terrain was now a memory, replaced by ‘wilderness of aloetic and cactaceous plants, where the kolquall and several thorn bushes grew paramount’. Even villages would become few and far between as the caravan entered a moonscape of red sandstone. For Shaw and Farquhar, the mountains were a symbolic point of no return — beyond them lay the centre of Africa. Quitting the caravan would be far more difficult. Thoughts of mutiny passed through their heads.

Shaw tested Stanley’s authority the first night in the Rubeho. Too ill to walk, he’d been travelling by donkey cart over the mountains. The rugged trail was impossible to surmount in such a bulky vehicle. Stanley sent word back for Shaw to abandon the cart and catch up with the caravan as quickly as possible. When Shaw showed up four hours later one of the porters was carrying the cart on his head, while Shaw followed behind on a donkey. His stooped body, topped with a conical hat like something from China, was a sorry sight. The bare-chested porters,
whose only clothing was cloth tied around the waist like a skirt, didn’t look half as tired. Many of them were also sick, but had to either keep up or be left behind for the hyenas and lions — the donkey cart wasn’t an option. Shaw, Stanley wrote, was ‘riding at a gait which seemed to leave it doubtful on my mind whether he or his animal felt most sleepy’.

Stanley angrily ordered the porter carrying the cart to fling it into a gully, then berated Shaw in front of the men. Shaw, Stanley commanded, was to dismount and walk. The donkey was needed for carrying supplies.

Three tense days later, Shaw worked up the courage to confront Stanley. He and Farquhar arrived at breakfast in a dark mood. Stanley’s greeting got no reply. He’d noticed the two engaging in heated conversation over the previous few days, and suddenly realized he was their topic. ‘Selim,’ Stanley said to his servant. ‘Bring breakfast.’

Liver, roasted goat, pancakes and coffee appeared. Then, after scorning the food as ‘dog’s meat’, Shaw aired his grievances. Since the death of most of the caravan’s donkeys in the Makata Swamp, he and Stanley had been forced to walk. ‘It is a downright shame the way you treat us,’ Shaw said. ‘I thought we were to have donkeys to ride every day and servants to wait on us. Instead of which I have now got to walk every day through the hot sun, until I feel as if I would rather be in hell than in this damned expedition.’

‘Do you know’, Stanley replied coolly, ‘that you are my servant, sir, and not my companion?’

‘Servant be damned.’

Stanley’s punch came out of nowhere, reaching across the camp table and knocking Shaw to the ground. He ordered the soldiers to confiscate Shaw’s rifle and pistol, strike his tent and throw all his possessions two hundred yards outside the boma.

Shaw could only watch as Bombay and four of the soldiers took down his tent, brought Stanley the weapons and gathered his belongings. ‘Now go, sir,’ Stanley told the young sailor. ‘These men will escort you outside of the camp, and there leave you and your baggage.’

Shaw stayed determined to get the best of Stanley. He followed Bombay and his men outside the camp. When they returned, Stanley noticed that Shaw wasn’t with them. But as he and Farquhar resumed their breakfast inside the tent, with Stanley trying to find a delicate way to tell Farquhar it wasn’t in the best interests of the New York
Herald
expedition for the afflicted sailor to travel with them any more, Bombay appeared in the doorway. ‘Mr Shaw would like to speak to you.’

‘I went out to the gate of the camp, and there met Shaw, looking extremely penitent and ashamed,’ Stanley wrote. ‘He commenced to ask my pardon and began imploring me to take him back, and promising that I should never find fault with him again.’

The two shook hands. ‘Don’t mention it, my dear fellow,’ Stanley replied. ‘Quarrels occur in the best of families. Since you apologize, there is an end to it.’

But Shaw wasn’t as penitent as he pretended. The rest of the day passed as usual, and all seemed well that night as the camp lay down to sleep. In the morning they would push on to the village of Mpapwa, which made Stanley happy. With the donkeys all dead or dying, Mpapwa would be a perfect spot to hire new porters.

Stanley entered his tent and climbed into his hammock. There was no mosquito netting to keep away insects. He brushed them away and stared at the canvas ceiling of his tent as he drifted off to sleep. Suddenly, a gunshot. A bullet tore through the tent’s canvas and whistled past Stanley’s head, missing him by inches. He roared from the tent in his bare feet. ‘Who fired that gun?’ he barked at the porters huddled around the fire. The mountain air was cold at night. They sat very close.

‘Bwana Mdogo,’ came the answer.

Gripping a pistol in each hand, Stanley stalked to Shaw’s tent and threw back the flap. Shaw was breathing hard, as if sound asleep. His gun lay nearby. Stanley picked it up and felt the barrel — it was still hot. ‘I would advise you in the future’, he said to Shaw, who was stirring, ‘not to fire into my tent. I might get hurt, you know.’

Stanley never mentioned the incident to Shaw again. He was confident the tension would dissipate when the caravan finally reached Mpapwa, a traditional Arab caravan stopover in a forest at the base of green hills, 160 miles from the coast. To a great extent, Stanley was right. The deprivation and fatigue of the trail — which had caused some of the mutinous tension — were alleviated by Mpapwa’s abundance of comfort and, more important, food: eggs, milk, mutton, honey, beans. ‘Thank God!’ Stanley wrote in his journal that night. A plague of earwigs buzzed around inside his tent, making it hard to concentrate. ‘After fifty-seven days of living upon matama porridge and tough goat, I have enjoyed with unctuous satisfaction a real breakfast and dinner.’ For Shaw, there were the comforts of women to go with the food — an Arab caravan numbering almost one thousand men and slaves was in Mpapwa, on the way back to Bagamoyo. The women were being offered as prostitutes.

Abdullah bin Nasib, leader of the large caravan Stanley encountered in Mpapwa, claimed to know Livingstone’s location. ‘Abdullah’, Stanley wrote of the tall, nervous man, ‘gave me information on L. He had gone to Maurieria, which was a month’s march from Ujiji. He had shot himself in the thigh while out hunting buffalo. As soon as he gets well he would return to Ujiji.’

If Bin Nasib was being truthful, Livingstone was alive and on his way to Ujiji. Mpapwa was turning out to be a very providential town, indeed.

Stanley was mesmerized by the land around Mpapwa, with its verdant slopes thick with forests of sycamore, acacia and mimosa trees, notched here and there by tumbling streams. As caravan life had not offered much chance for solitude or reflection beyond the functional, he took advantage of the opportunity to slip away for a few hours. He hiked up one hill to the summit to enjoy the view of all he had travelled through. ‘One sweep of the eyes embraced hundreds of square miles of plain and mountain, from Ugombo Peak to distant Ugogo, and from Rubeho and Ugogo to the dim and purple pasturelands of
the wild, untameable Wahumba,’ Stanley wrote of the view.

Then his eye turned to the arid land westward, through which the caravan would pass next. ‘The plain of Ugombo and its neighbour of Marenga Mkali, apparently level as a sea, was dotted here and there with “hillocks dropt in Nature’s careless haste”, which appeared like islands amid the dun and green expanse. Where the jungle was dense the colour was green, alternating with dark brown. Where the plain appeared denuded of bush and brake it had a whitey-brown appearance, on which the passing clouds now and again cast their deep shadows. Altogether this side of the picture was not inviting. It exhibited too plainly the true wilderness in its sternest aspect. But perhaps the knowledge that in the bosom of the vast plain before me there was not one drop of water but was bitter as nitre, and undrinkable as urine, prejudiced me against it.’

After three serene days, the caravan marched from Mpapwa. It was 21 May. Stanley had hired new porters in Mpapwa to carry the load once given to the donkeys and had resupplied foodstuffs, then pointed the group ‘westward, always westward’. The entire caravan was refreshed by the stop.

The only man in the New York
Herald
expedition who had been unable to enjoy the respite of Mpapwa was Farquhar. The elephantiasis was killing him. He couldn’t walk, and he was so heavy that two donkeys had died from carrying him. So when it came time to push on, Stanley was through with Farquhar. Leaving him alone in the middle of Africa was an extreme solution but there was no other choice. He explained to Farquhar ‘it would be better if I left him behind, in some quiet place, under the care of a good chief who would, for a consideration, look after him until he got well’.

Just in case Farquhar’s condition got worse, Stanley copied the name and address of Farquhar’s next of kin, a sister living in Edinburgh, inside his journal. An English-speaking porter named Jako was ordered to stay and
protect the dying sailor. Stanley gave Jako cloth, tea, a carbine and three hundred rounds of ammunition for protection and currency. Nobody but Shaw, who was losing his only ally, was unhappy about Farquhar’s abandonment. The porters loathed the Scot for his rants and cruelty, and mimicked the former sailor so well that even Stanley couldn’t help but laugh. Stanley, who despised weakness in himself and so was hypercritical of it in others, rationalized that Farquhar was worthy of the abuse. ‘Farquhar had become the laughingstock of the caravan from his utter helplessness to do anything at all for himself,’ Stanley wrote. He was glad to be rid of Farquhar and racing on to Ujiji.

Five days later Farquhar fell down and died as he tried to get out of bed. The locals, not knowing how to dispose of the white man, dragged his naked body into the jungle for the hyenas. ‘There is one of us gone,’ Stanley told Shaw after hearing the news from some Arab traders. ‘Who will be the next?’

The taunt would prove eerily prescient. Only one of them would live to see Zanzibar again.