Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (43 page)

A week passed. Then another. Stanley observed Livingstone’s every movement, just as the explorer had observed so many tribes, animals and geographical features over the years. He noted Livingstone’s amazing cleanliness and appetite, and how the explorer quickly became stout from eating the four meals a day Stanley fed him. But more than anything, Stanley revelled in Livingstone’s company. ‘There is a good-natured abandon about Livingstone which was not lost on me. Whenever he began to laugh there was a contagion about it that compelled me to imitate him,’ Stanley wrote. ‘The wan features which had shocked me at the first meeting, the heavy step which told of age and hard travel, the grey beard and bowed shoulders, belied the man. Underneath the well-worn exterior lay an endless fund of high spirits and inexhaustible humour. That rugged frame of his enclosed a young and most exuberant soul.’

And just as soon as Livingstone felt capable again, the older explorer suggested that the younger explorer might want to accompany him in his search for the Source. Stanley, who had been prodding Livingstone to return to Zanzibar with him, was flattered, but knew it was impractical.

So they had reached a compromise. They would return to Tabora together, but only after searching the shores of Lake Tanganyika for a river flowing out of its northern end, towards Lake Victoria. That would at least confirm a portion of Livingstone’s Source theory.

It was agreed. They canoed from Ujiji on 16 November in a long dugout canoe paddled by twenty of Stanley’s men. The canoe was crafted from a mvule tree so wide that the paddlers could sit by side. Fair weather made the journey pleasant. Stanley and Livingstone passed the hours in conversation as the canoe glided over the dark-green waters of Tanganyika. Hippos sported around the boat, coming up for air and threatening to tip the canoe before disappearing back underwater. The shores were heavily wooded and grassy, with some of the trees bursting with startling, bright blossoms. The lake was so vast that Stanley considered it an inland sea.

Their adventures were as dangerous and unlikely as anything Stanley or Livingstone had seen before: a near ambush while camping along the shore, the sight of couples making love along the banks as Stanley and Livingstone paddled past. To Stanley’s surprise, Livingstone never whipped or harangued his men, preferring to settle all differences through gentle persuasion. Even more surprising was how Livingstone used the same method with hostile tribes demanding tribute. Not only did Livingstone achieve more through kindness than Stanley had through rage, but by the time Livingstone had negotiated their way out of one problem or another, a hostile tribe or recalcitrant porter was often a new ally.

As Stanley and Livingstone paddled the shores of Lake Tanganyika together, world attention on Livingstone’s plight was escalating into frenzy. It all began when Kirk’s letters of 22 and 25 September arrived in London. Murchison was dead, so his letter was passed on to the new RGS president. When a horrified Sir Henry Rawlinson learned that Livingstone was surrounded, without hope of escape, he went public with the truth about Livingstone’s predicament. On 27 November, Rawlinson decreed that the RGS would send a search and relief expedition to save Livingstone. ‘It appeared to the Council and myself that the hope we had of communicating with Dr Livingstone through Mr Stanley, the American traveller, must for the
present be abandoned,’ Rawlinson said. ‘One plan proposed was to send native messengers, offering a reward of one hundred guineas to whichever would bring a letter back in Dr Livingstone’s handwriting to the sea coast. Another, recommended by one of our African travellers, was to organize a direct expedition headed by some experienced and well-qualified Europeans.’

In a follow-up meeting on 11 December, the latter won out. Rawlinson demanded that the RGS go and rescue Livingstone. However, his influence waned outside the RGS. Rawlinson was an articulate man and a true adventurer, but the new RGS president lacked Murchison’s political connections. His position was further weakened on 14 December, when James Grant publicly expressed great faith in ‘the little American Stanley’, whom he had by coincidence met once in Abyssinia.

When Rawlinson formally requested money from the Foreign Office to finance a search, they gave it their official backing and expressed their deep sympathy, but refused to allocate funding. Public outrage was so great that the issue of rescuing Livingstone was taken up on the floor of Parliament. James Grieve, a sixty-one-year-old Liberal Member of Parliament from Greenock, stood in the House of Commons to battle for Livingstone’s cause. He demanded that Robert Lowe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, explain the rationale behind denying funding for a search.

Lowe was not a popular man by any stretch of the imagination. He was enormously disliked by Gladstone, the very prime minister who’d given him his job. Lowe’s attention to fiscal restraint at the expense of humanity and warmth even had the charismatic Benjamin Disraeli refusing to shake his hand. Lowe had no intention of changing his manners on account of a wayward African explorer. Having already dealt with the Livingstone issue back in May 1870, Lowe wasn’t any more amenable to dispensing funds — unnecessarily, in Lowe’s point of view — nearly two years later.

After first telling Grieve that he thought the question was ludicrous, Lowe reminded Grieve that money had
previously been allocated to find Livingstone, that Livingstone was nowhere to be found, and that Sir Samuel White Baker was already in the region with a large armed force. ‘It is from those armed men’, the Chancellor told Grieve dismissively, as part of a lengthy defence, ‘that Livingstone would be most likely to receive relief.’

Grieve was reluctantly forced to accept Lowe’s explanation. No governmental monies were allocated to fund a rescue expedition. But in Gondokoro, unbeknown to Lowe or Parliament, Sir Samuel White Baker was giving Livingstone very little thought and none of his assets. He was too busy finding food for his men, trying to motivate his apathetic Egyptian troops, enlisting Florence to keep track of weather and barometer and waging war with the naked Bari. Baker had not forgotten about Livingstone, of course. He was in the habit of questioning the occasional traveller from the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika, and had even heard vague reports of a white man or two in Central Africa, but Gondokoro was not yet stable enough for Baker to leave without risking its collapse. The little fort on the Nile was a bare, dusty expanse hardly capable of sustaining the grain vital to Baker’s still. To Baker and the Bari, however, Gondokoro was worth fighting for. Neither group planned on leaving it to the other.

Back in London, in the minds of Henry Rawlinson and the RGS, Baker had become less relevant. They were no longer depending upon Baker’s passive search plan — regardless of the British Government’s official position. The time had come for action. A public fund-raising drive was begun, led by the Crimean War heroine Florence Nightingale. ‘If it costs ten thousand pounds to send him a pair of boots, we should send it,’ she railed in what would be an overwhelmingly successful public campaign. ‘England too often provides great men then leaves them to perish.’

Nightingale’s candour rallied the British public, but by then America had appropriated their hero. In New York, James Gordon Bennett, Jr was busy twisting the lion’s tail like never before. On 11 December 1871 —
the same day Rawlinson belatedly agreed it was time to search for their lost lion, but long before the world became aware that Stanley had found Livingstone — Bennett had run Kirk’s letters pleading innocence in the
Herald
. With Stanley elevated from merely the ‘American traveller’ of the 19 September edition all the way up to a swashbuckling adventurer who was not only racing through Africa, but tormenting the British Consul in Zanzibar to such a degree that letters to officials in London were being written, the stage was set for Stanley’s mission to be ladled out to the people of New York, dispatch by dispatch.

The first ran on 22 December 1871. It was the piece Stanley had written on 4 July, the ninety-fifth anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from the British. That symbolism gave his published words a patriotic tinge that enhanced the Anglo-American rivalry. The ensuing commotion was so great that Bennett ran a taunting editorial the following day: ‘An African exploring expedition is a new thing in the enterprises of modern journalism,’ Bennett wrote proudly, ‘and in this, as in many other great achievements of the Third Estate, to the New York
Herald
will belong the credit of the first bold adventure in the cause of humanity, civilization and science.’

Then, contradicting Kirk’s assertion that Stanley was stuck, Bennett assured the
Herald
’s readers that his reporter would get through. Bennett was ‘thus encouraged in hope that this expedition will settle all doubts in reference to Dr Livingstone, and we hope too, that it will accomplish something more than the solution of the Livingstone mystery’.

Bennett was confident Stanley and the
Herald
would be forever linked with ‘the names of Burton and Speke and Grant, and of Baker and Burton and Livingstone’, then went on to conclude that Britain was ‘too slow and too penurious’ to find her missing explorer.

Other American papers took up the cause. On 27 December 1871 the Buffalo
Express
called Stanley’s
expedition ‘the most extraordinary newspaper enterprise ever dreamed of’.

Bennett then twisted the lion’s tail even harder, puckishly sending a second New York
Herald
expedition to Africa. The
Herald
was now off to Gondokoro to find and rescue Sir Samuel White Baker (completely disregarding the fact that Baker wasn’t lost and certainly didn’t need to be rescued). Bennett’s mocking of British exploration while trumpeting American initiative elevated the rivalry to new heights.
Herald
circulation soared.

Alvan S. Southworth, the journalist in charge of finding Baker, planned to hire a massive steamboat to cruise upriver on the Nile from Cairo. Southworth’s published opinion that ‘energetic, live, I might say reckless Americans, each with his special mental and physical gifts, could bare this whole continent to the view of anxious mankind’, set the scene perfectly for the coming publication of Stanley’s dispatches. ‘The British’, Southworth went on to write, ‘are good, hardy, stubborn travelers, but they are like their journalism and ideas — slower than the wrath of Grecian gods.’

Meanwhile, deep in Africa, Livingstone and Stanley were oblivious to the hype and bedlam. The sublime bond growing between the two explorers would become the richest by-product of the New York
Herald
expedition. Stanley was an eager pupil, and basked in Livingstone’s paternal influence. Even though Stanley had already proven adept at the fundamentals of African exploration during his travels through Ugogo, dealings with the Arabs in Tabora and circuitous escape from Mirambo, Livingstone was giving him a new kind of tutorial on exploration. On the northern end of the lake, they found the river rumoured to flow from Lake Tanganyika into the Nile — the Rusizi — but it flowed into Tanganyika, not out of it.

The Source lay elsewhere, Livingstone confided in Stanley. He would have to travel south again. In the absence of a river flowing out of Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone was sure that the fountains were somewhere
far to the south of his current position — likely somewhere between latitudes ten and twelve degrees south. Livingstone had heard of four fountains, two of which spawned a river that flowed to the north — the Lualaba — and two which begat a river flowing south — the Zambezi. Natives had mentioned them to him time and time again. That put the fountains in the vicinity of a lake called Bangweolo, which Livingstone had visited in 1868. As the crow flew, it was four hundred miles from Ujiji to Lake Bangweolo. But a wanderer like Livingstone never travelled in such a direct manner. For him to walk that far south again and find the Source, he would likely need to wander for a full year.

One thing was certain: Livingstone would not allow Stanley to rescue him. The explorer longed to return to England but, no matter how much he missed his children and friends, and despite physical problems that would have years earlier killed a man of lesser constitution, Livingstone would not leave Africa until his work was done.

On 13 December, after a month-long, three-hundred-mile canoe trip, Livingstone and Stanley paddled back to Ujiji and took up residence at Livingstone’s home once again. Livingstone’s dysentery had returned, worse than ever. Also, he was showing stronger signs of a hereditary form of manic depression known as cyclothymia, which caused alternating days of low moods with days of euphoria. This chronic bipolar dysfunction was manifested in the way Livingstone communicated with Stanley — one day revelling in endless conversation, and the next shunning the young American with the curious accent — even as they had sat together in the dugout mvule canoe. Despite those illnesses and the constant anaemia and hookworm, the two men’s relationship continued to deepen. They spent their remaining days in Ujiji buying supplies with Stanley’s dwindling bundles of cloth and preparing for the trek back to Tabora. Once they arrived at Stanley’s home there, Livingstone would remain in Tabora to rest while Stanley would race back to Zanzibar
and purchase supplies so Livingstone could continue his travels. Stanley would then immediately commission a fresh group of porters to carry the new supplies to Livingstone. The men accompanying the medicine, cloth, food and beads from Zanzibar to Tabora would then remain in Livingstone’s employ until he found the Source. In many ways, Livingstone would be starting afresh, as if he was stepping off the
Penguin
once more, as he did back in 1866. The only differences would be the knowledge gained thus far, the fact that his position deep in Africa precluded another journey through the coastal jungles and Livingstone’s ever-diminishing health.

Their plan was to leave Ujiji for Tabora some time around New Year’s Day, 1872. Stanley purchased goats for the journey so Livingstone would have milk, which was the easiest way for him to ingest calories. A mule was also procured, meaning Livingstone could ride after so many years of walking. Stanley dedicated himself to crafting a comfortable, functional saddle for his mentor. When fever forced Stanley into bed again on 18 December, Livingstone was by his side until it broke on 21 December. It was then that Stanley noticed that Livingstone’s left arm suffered some sort of paralysis, and was shorter than the right. Livingstone explained to Stanley about the lion attack from 1843, then let the young man trace his fingers along the left bicep and elbow to feel how the bones had set improperly.