Into Africa Read online

  Britain did, too, and in a much more proprietary fashion. Inevitably, the two nations quarreled. Britain and the United States came to loggerheads over the sovereignty of Oregon, British claims of global naval supremacy, reparations for U.S. shipping sunk by British-built vessels sailed by the Confederacy during the Civil War, Newfoundland fishing rights, the Canadian frontier, and control of the Pacific Ocean. Most appalling to the British were America's designs on Canada. “Nature designs this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union,” promised Secretary of State William Seward after purchasing Alaska from Russia in 1867. With an auspicious chunk of Canada dividing America from her new Alaskan territory, it seemed only a matter of time before Canada became part of the United States. Britain's Hudson Bay Company, though, had blazed the first trails through that wilderness, setting up trading posts and towns. The British, historically far more in love with commerce than with colonies, didn't plan on letting Canada go.

  Stanley's Herald bosses had forbidden the journalist from using Aden's British-run telegraph services, for fear the London papers would get wind of Stanley's top-secret mission. But when a letter arrived from Webb in mid-January saying Livingstone wouldn't be coming anywhere near Zanzibar, Stanley quickly telegraphed the news to the Herald's London bureau. By the end of the month Stanley received a response: The search for Livingstone was over. Stanley was reassigned to Spain to cover their Civil War. He sailed from Aden on February 2. “I am relieved at last,” he rejoiced in his journal.

  Stanley's commitment to self-improvement, though, continued long after boarding the Magdala and leaving Aden in his wake. He continued clipping and pasting exhortations for several months after leaving Aden, as if preparing for some great endeavor not yet revealed to him. Occasionally, he transcribed biblical passages from Proverbs or Jonah by hand. “Heavens,” he wrote in his journal on February 16, 1869. “What a punishment it would be to have no object or aim in life.”

  Even as Stanley buoyed his mood with positive thinking and self-assurances, frustration set in. He was filled with impotent rage to learn that his employers considered the journey to Aden a failure. “I am hardly to blame because Livingstone has not shown himself to the world,” he wrote. “It is unjust that I am in disgrace when I cannot alter events or change destiny.”

  Unjust or not, Stanley had a penchant for turning even the slightest snub into a motivation to prove his worth. The Herald's disappointment raised his personal stake in finding Livingstone.

  • CHAPTER 8 •

  Trouble

  March 1869

  Lake Tanganyika

  Ujiji represented life itself to Livingstone, and by the time he began his rugged overland journey to the inland trading mecca, almost two long years had passed since that horrible rainy night when his medicines were stolen. Despite the Arabs' great kindness in that time, Ujiji also represented a return to independence. Fully resupplied with the cloth, gunpowder, brandy, cheeses, and vital medicines awaiting him, Livingstone would once again be able to sally forth into the wilderness at his own pace—and without compromise.

  The journey to Ujiji, however, which should have seemed like a triumphal march, was almost the death of Livingstone. He celebrated New Year's Day 1869 fording rivers in a driving rainstorm, wishing he could stop for a rest but fearing the Lofuko River might flood in the meantime and block his path to Ujiji. Two days later, on January 3, he collapsed. Pneumonia had set in. His attendants were forced to carry him in a litter. He was too feeble to sit, and the only food he could keep down was a spoonful of gruel. “Can not walk,” he wrote on January 7. “Pneumonia of right lung, and I cough all day and all night: sputa rust of iron and bloody, distressing weakness. Ideas flow through the mind with great rapidity and vividness, in groups of twos and threes. If I look at any piece of wood, the bark seems covered over with the figures and faces of men, and they remain, though I look away and turn to the same spot again. I saw myself lying dead in the way to Ujiji.”

  In his thoughts of death, Livingstone also thought of home, and the desire that his loved ones felt comfort in his pending demise. “When I think of my children and friends, the lines ring through my head perpetually:

  “I shall look into your faces,

  And listen to what you say,

  And be very often near you,

  When you think I'm far away.”

  “Mohamed Bogharib offered to carry me. I am so weak I can barely speak,” Livingstone wrote on January 9. “I am carried four hours each day on a kitanda, or frame, like a cot. Then sleep in a deep ravine . . . Mohamed Bogharib is very kind to me in my extreme weakness, but carriage is painful. Head down and feet up alternates with feet down and head up. Jolted up and down and sideways—changing shoulders involves a toss from one side to the other of the kitanda. The sun is vertical, blistering any part of the skin exposed, and I try to shelter my face and head as well as I can with a bunch of leaves, but it is dreadfully fatiguing in my weakness.”

  He was too sick to write another word for five weeks. Livingstone finally reached the western shore of Lake Tanganyika on February 14, 1869. Ujiji and his medicines lay just sixty miles across on the other side. However, there was a shortage of canoes for carrying men and material, and the lake's waves were too high for easy paddling. Livingstone was forced to wait. He extracted “twenty funyes, an insect like a maggot,” from large pimples on his arms and legs on February 25. These subcutaneous maggots were, in fact, feeding on his flesh. In addition, Livingstone was suffering from an anaerobic streptococcus bacterial infection on his feet, causing bone-eating tropical ulcers.

  On February 26, canoes finally became available. The agonized Livingstone and his men, along with Bogharib's caravan, began paddling for Ujiji. They stayed close to Lake Tanganyika's shores, preferring the safety of the longer path along its coast to the large swells of the tempestuous direct route across the middle. As Chuma and Susi paddled, Livingstone lay in the bottom of the broad dugout canoe. Finally, on March 14, a shattered and emaciated Livingstone reached Ujiji. He rose and walked into the Arab trading post, brimming with satisfaction and happy anticipation of receiving his new supplies.

  To Livingstone's horror, almost nothing remained. His stores had been plundered. The medicines, food, and mail were gone. Of the eighty pieces of cloth—so vital for bartering with native tribes—just eighteen were still there.

  Livingstone was devastated and destitute, and once again threw himself on the mercy of the slavers. They found him a small lean-to in which he could sleep. A salve of butter, beeswax, copper sulfate, and coconut oil was procured to heal his sores. Rest and hygienic improvements banished the maggots. The Arabs taught Livingstone the revolutionary concept of boiling his drinking water as protection against parasites and bacteria, decreasing the risk of dysentery. However, fearful he would reveal insider's truths about the slave trade, they continued their practice of refusing to carry his dozens of letters back to Zanzibar.

  By June 1, Livingstone's strength was returning. He became fluent in the Masai language. He ate. He moved into a small home the Arabs rented for him. He planned the continuation of his journey. He studied algae growth along the shoreline and determined that the current flowed north out of Lake Tanganyika, meaning his theories about the Nile were likely correct. And slowly, very slowly, he regained the ability to wander.

  Livingstone's health was still frail as he made plans to bid Ujiji farewell, but an Arab caravan led by Mohamed Bogharib was assembling on Lake Tanganyika's northwest shore. Lacking supplies of his own, Livingstone had no choice but to join the slavers once again. Their path was due west into Africa's heavily forested Manyuema region, an area that would later be named the Congo. Bogharib had little to gain by assisting Livingstone—indeed, taking the explorer into one of the slaving industry's most bountiful and relatively untapped new territories could endanger Bogharib's future ability to harvest slaves there—but the Muslim was a
compassionate man. Despite their profound religious differences, he liked the ailing Scot. The slave traders who made Ujiji their home were an aggressive, arrogant group—“the vilest of the vile,” in Livingstone's words—who would surely allow Livingstone to die if he were left behind. And though there was also a good chance Livingstone would die on the trail into Manyuema, at least Bogharib would be able to assist him.

  Livingstone paddled out of Ujiji on July 12, 1869, carrying just a Bible, his journal, and a pair of chronometers. After a three-day paddle, Livingstone and his men crossed the lake, making landfall at the base of the Mugila Mountains. On August 1 Livingstone and his small group of attendants successfully linked up with Mohamed Bogharib's caravan.

  The trail went farther into the center of Africa than Livingstone had ever traveled. It was a region of mountains, rain forest, and headhunters. However, it was vital to Livingstone that he risk the difficult journey. The Lualaba River flowed through there somewhere and he meant to trace its course. Based on his explorations thus far, the northward-flowing Lualaba's path was identical to the upper reaches of the Nile as drawn by Ptolemy on his map of 140 A.D. Livingstone intended to travel there to prove that the two rivers were one and the same.

  • CHAPTER 9 •

  The Home Fires

  May–September 1869

  London

  Springtime in London was marked by primrose blossoms' delicate explosion, swans returning to the Thames, school groups excited to be outdoors again, and, for the rich, the frivolous bustle of the social season. From May through July England's most powerful families moved from their country estates into their London town homes. Grosvenor, Park Lane, Piccadilly, and Belgrave Square pulsed with aristocratic men in top hats and waistcoats, wives and daughters in bustles and bonnets, family dogs, Siamese cats, black-and-white-clad household staffs, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages on cobblestones, and early morning delivery wagons bearing meat, milk, and produce. Three intoxicating months were spent on debutante balls, social calls, croquet, horse racing, symphonies, shopping, and intellectual events like the Royal Academy of Art's annual exhibition of influential painters. From the riding trails in Regent's Park wafted the unforgettable aroma of horseflesh and money. Parliament was in session, adding the daily routine of governmental work for the peerage. Evenings were long and warm, perfect for strolling along Park Lane or drinking a tall gin on the terrace.

  The majority of the Royal Geographical Society's membership belonged to this elite, and Sir Roderick Murchison appropriately chose this time of year to deliver his annual RGS president's address. Year in and year out, it was a centerpiece of the social season. The clubby Whitehall Place headquarters would be abandoned for the night, in favor of a Burlington Gardens lecture theater. Gentry and aristocracy came by the hundreds. For one night only they would live vicariously in the world of adventure.

  Murchison would speak of the RGS and its ongoing explorations. Jungles and savannahs and untouchable Himalayan peaks came to London, punctuated by breathtaking field reports from the men Murchison had tasked to conquer them. The geologist was an aristocrat, a Scot, a baron, and a knight, but most of all Murchison was a showman. He never used one word when it was possible to use three, and his addresses often stretched long into the evening, after London's famous pastel twilight was replaced by the mute sparkle of gas streetlights. The RGS was so vogue, though, and the tales of adventure so breathtaking, that the length was forgiven. Murchison would stand before a map of the world, speaking with such passion that he held the crowd in the palm of his hand. Everyone in the room became a lion. And that was important. For a month or a year later, when Murchison sought exploration funding, many in the audience would hold the purse strings. Murchison's every word was a reminder that he and the RGS were worthy of that money, working night and day to make Britain the most far-reaching nation on earth.

  The 1869 address, however, was different. Murchison was still center stage—in addition to the regular president's address, he also formally accepted reelection to his seventh two-year term. But the evening's focus lay elsewhere—on Dr. David Livingstone. There was no escaping talk of the explorer. Murchison didn't mind, confiding to the audience his “ardent hope that my dear friend Livingstone might soon return to us, so that I might have the joy of presiding at the national festival which would then unquestionably take place in his honor.”

  In fact, while Murchison was still passionate about each and every one of the RGS's ongoing expeditions in Australia, Canada, the Middle East, South America, and Central Asia, his friend's whereabouts were his reason to live. He admitted as much to the audience. Speaking in the lucid tones of a man glimpsing impending death, Murchison placed Livingstone's return in the context of his own demise. “If I live to witness this completion of my heartiest aspiration,” he stated, “I will then take leave of you in the fullness of my heart.”

  For a change, Murchison wasn't being melodramatic. At seventy-seven, the RGS president was no longer the athletic geologist who reveled in trekking up and down the Swiss Alps. When he spoke of death it was not as a distant, abstract imminence, but as an interloper whose presence grew stronger every day. He had grown frail and bald, with jowls sagging noticeably and caterpillar-like salt-and-pepper eyebrows shooting hairs in all directions. His mansion at 16 Belgrave Square was still one of London's leading intellectual salons, a place where debates and parties ensured Murchison's social stature and brought his adventurers before polite society. But his wife, Charlotte, to whom he had been married fifty-four years, had died February 9, after a long illness. He had been the unlikely architect of the British Empire, cobbling it together outpost by outpost. Four years older than her husband, Charlotte had been his champion, advocate, and inspiration. They had no children, so Charlotte's death foreshadowed the day their salon would close forever.

  The Livingstone uproar, though it pained Murchison, was the ideal summation for a life dedicated to advancing public interest in geography. For Murchison was the Richelieu, the Boswell—the man turning everyday adventurers into exploration's superstars.

  History had never known a man like Roderick Impey Murchison. At first glance he was just another visionary patron insinuating himself into world exploration: Queen Isabella standing behind Columbus, Lord Sandwich bestowing funding and political intercession for Cook, Thomas Jefferson giving marching orders to Lewis and Clark. But Murchison was much more than that. Not just the driving force behind a single expedition, he fathered an entire generation of global unveiling. Some members of the Royal Geographical Society—Charles Darwin, notably—felt Murchison's showmanship detracted from its scientific aims. But Murchison's legacy was nothing less than the growth of the British Empire and expansion of the known world. His explorers thanked him by naming twenty-three topographical features on six continents in his honor—waterfalls, rivers, mountains, promontories, glaciers, and even an island. In Australia, the Murchison River's tributaries were the Roderick and Impey. “To relate the doings of the Royal Geographical Society under Murchison's supremacy,” the official RGS record formally admitted, at the expense of those powerful men borrowing the presidency when Murchison took a few years' rest, “would be almost to write a history of geographical discovery in the most crowded years of its modern development.”

  Empire building was a calling Murchison came to by accident. He was born in 1792, into a family of Scottish highlanders disenfranchised by their pro-Jacobite leanings. His father, Kenneth, was a surgeon, philanderer, and duelist. He recouped the family wealth by taking work in India, where he was paid a substantial reward for curing the sick child of a prince. Kenneth fathered five children. Three of them, however, were illegitimate. As his father's oldest legitimate heir, it was four-year-old Roderick who inherited Tarradale, the family estate, when his father died of natural causes in 1796. Roderick went on to become an Army officer, fought in the Napoleonic Wars, then resigned his commission. In 1815 he married Charlotte, the intellectual, dynamic, only child of
a wealthy general. They lived in Switzerland, France, and Italy from 1816 to 1818. The time was notable for long Alpine walks and Murchison's first concerns about the United States' growing international presence.

  Murchison sold Tarradale after returning to England. Lacking a career, he spent the next several years living aimlessly, a sporting squire who devoted himself so thoroughly to the outdoors that he was considered “one of the greatest fox hunters in the north of England.” By the time Roderick was thirty-three, however, the Murchisons were in the advanced stages of squandering his inheritance. Idle living and bad investments had taken their toll. Roderick and Charlotte moved to London to start over. He took her advice and settled down to the life of a gentleman scientist. “She had studied science, especially geology, and it was chiefly owing to her example that her husband turned his mind to those pursuits in which he afterward obtained such distinction,” said her friend, physicist Mary Somerville.

  Science was considered a glamorous way for a man of means to pass his days. Geology allowed him to indulge his passion for the outdoors at the same time. Murchison attacked it with the obsessive ferocity that was becoming his calling card. Beginning with explorations of the Thames Valley, he began roving into Scotland and Russia to explore new rock formations. He was credited with defining the Silurian, Devonian, and Sedgwick geologic periods. His understanding of the earth's structure grew so profound that though he never set foot in Australia, he predicted a massive vein of gold would be discovered there. It was.