Into Africa Page 14

  Stanley had traveled the world since 1866. He knew the food, customs, haggling, lodging, and transportation of America, Europe, the Middle East, and India. None of that, however, mattered in Africa. He was a novice. Everything was new. His anxieties threatened to paralyze him. To start with, Stanley was anxious to hear the latest Livingstone rumors and either begin hunting or turn around and begin Bennett's alternate plan—the journey to China. He was anxious about the logistics of traveling through Africa, and aware he was innocent to the morals and means of its equatorial heart. He was anxious to meet the notorious John Kirk and pepper him with sly questions about Livingstone. He was anxious to be under way, if Livingstone was still out there, before the forty-day monsoon season began in April.

  He was extremely anxious about money, because he didn't have any. The Herald had advanced him a thousand pounds at the start of his trip, but it was long gone. He prayed that his London bureau chief had sent a fresh supply of financing, and that the money was waiting at the American Consulate.

  But most of all, Stanley was anxious about Central Africa. The “eternal, feverish region” haunted his dreams. He'd read every book he could find about exploring the continent since leaving Bennett—Speke, Livingstone, E. D. Young, and especially Burton. Stanley was so taken with his apple-green copy of the rogue explorer's two-volume Lake Regions of Central Africa that it had become his personal guidebook. He studied the text page by meticulous page, penciling copious notes in the margins and endpapers about which routes Burton suggested to follow, which supplies to purchase, how many porters to bring along, and how much to pay them.

  Burton's writings were equally descriptive, however, about Africa's perils. Therein lay the root of Stanley's anxiety. From Burton's writing, Stanley envisioned that the land he was about to cross was an enormous swamp of malarial mosquitoes, hippopotamus, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, tortoises, and toads. The image depressed him. The journalistic code saying a correspondent stayed with a story until he got it, or until the assignment was given to someone else, went double at the Herald. There was no way out: unless Bennett ordered otherwise, Stanley had to walk into Africa to find Livingstone. Only then could he return to the safety of his bureau in London.

  Thanks to a phenomenal gift for suppression, Stanley turned his anxieties into action. His problem solving began the instant he stepped from Falcon's launch onto Zanzibar's stone quay. He knew just one man in Zanzibar, Frances Rope Webb, so his first stop was the American Consulate. At Stanley's side was the two-man search force he'd begun assembling en route to Zanzibar: William Farquhar, a Scottish sailor, navigator, thug, and drunk he met while sailing across the Indian Ocean; and Selim, a slender, teenaged manservant of Arab-Christian ethnicity Stanley hired back in Jerusalem. Selim could do no wrong in Stanley's eyes, but in the two short months he'd known him, Farquhar was already the focus of Stanley's greatest journal rants. “Farquhar is a sailor intelligent after a fashion,” Stanley described, “but no exception. He is remarkably sulky, taciturn, and unwilling to work, no matter what the job.”

  But Stanley could not do without Farquhar. The travel plan taking shape in Stanley's head depended upon the former first mate's nautical knowledge. Instead of walking overland like Burton and Speke, Stanley planned to sail south from Zanzibar for fifty miles, then enter Africa via a picturesque river known as the Rufiji. “It is this river that I intend to ascend to the Tanganyika,” he wrote in the 1871 Colonial Edition Journal he would carry into Africa. With any luck, he would find Livingstone somewhere lakeside. Then, perhaps with Livingstone at his side, Stanley would return to civilization by sailing the Nile's length. His reemergence into civilization at Cairo would be a spectacle for the ages. The world would be astonished.

  On a more practical note, the Nile was also the fastest way to file his story. “If Livingstone is at Ujiji my work is easy,” Stanley wrote. “The race is now for the telegraph.” There was no telegraph in Zanzibar, which meant additional months traveling by ship to Aden or Bombay after the long walk from Ujiji. Cairo, however, had a telegraph of its own. And sailing downriver, even thousands of miles downriver, was faster than a long, slow walk and a long, slow sail.

  The major obstacle to Stanley's plan was that technical sailing skills eluded him. He had served a short stint in the Union Navy, but as a clerk. Hence, he was reliant upon the nautically savvy Farquhar.

  Stanley strode along the waterfront to the great white building flying the American flag. He hoped to meet his old friend Webb face-to-face, pick up the Herald expedition money, and learn the latest Livingstone news.

  The thirty-eight-year-old Webb showed Stanley every hospitality, offering him and his men a place to stay. But Webb also broke the withering news that there was no Herald money waiting. Stanley was dumbfounded. He had considered the possibility of such an oversight, but for the Herald to make such a grievous error meant the death of the search. Money was one problem he couldn't fix through a simple attitude adjustment. He needed cash in hand to buy supplies and hire men.

  The obvious solution was a hasty retreat to Aden or even Bombay, where he could fire off a quick cable to Bennett. Stanley still had eighty dollars in his pocket—just enough to pay for such a trip. Either choice, however, would waste another six months at the very least. Baker, like Stanley, had gotten a slow start, but he might find Livingstone in that amount of time. Leaving Zanzibar was not an option.

  Webb was the answer. In an act that would have been humiliating if Stanley wasn't so desperate, he begged the American Consul to sign his name to a twenty thousand dollar line of credit. Webb, knowing James Gordon Bennett, Jr., was more than good for the money, agreed. As part of the deal Webb stipulated that all monies be spent at businesses affiliated with the United States. For while Webb's title may have been diplomatic, his focus was strictly commercial. He doubled as the Zanzibar director for the Boston trading firm of John Bertram and Company. Thanks to the Civil War and the opening of the Suez Canal, American companies' share of Zanzibar's three million dollar annual market was shrinking. Britain's, thanks to John Kirk, was increasing.

  The shift grated on Webb. Zanzibar was small enough that all business was personal. And personally, American traders despised Kirk. Webb considered him an aloof “empire builder” who spoke in haughty “Kirkisms.” Even a member of British clergy residing in Zanzibar once noted that Kirk was “a great hand at contradicting you flat, and aims at being the authority on all points under debate.”

  Just as infuriating was Kirk's success: He'd been Acting British Consul for only a month, but already Kirk had shown a diplomatic brilliance Webb lacked by forging a watertight bond with Sultan Barghash, the new Omani ruler of Zanzibar. Barghash was portly, with a wispy beard and mustache, and constantly wore slippers because his feet were swollen by elephantiasis. He was not the sort of man with whom the buttoned-down Kirk would normally make friends, but the alliance was pivotal: Barghash controlled East African trade from Zanzibar all the way to Lake Tanganyika.

  Simultaneously, the British Navy was assuming control over the waters off East Africa. Webb foresaw the day when American traders and ships would be muscled aside entirely. Stanley's journey was a solid injection of business and international one-upmanship at a time when the American companies in Zanzibar—Bertram; Arnold, Hines and Company; William Goodhue—needed it most.

  Webb took Stanley around town. He introduced him to the Sultan, and to the second most powerful man in Zanzibar, customs master Ladha Damji, in order that Stanley might gather more information about journeying up the Rufiji. Stanley lied about his intentions, telling the Hindu with the snowy beard that the Herald was sending him up the Rufiji to write a travel piece on the river's famous beauty. Lined by grassland and forest, densely populated with hippos, rhinos, buffalo, giraffes, baboons, and monkeys, the Rufiji was developing a reputation as one of Africa's jewels. Stanley's cover story to the customs master was novel, but believable. It was known that one traveler—Central Africa's first recorded touri
st—had already come to Africa just to witness Victoria Falls. If anything, a newspaper reporter writing stories about the Rufiji River portended things to come.

  Unfortunately, Damji knew very little about the Rufiji. It was too far south of the caravan routes to interest him. But that was exactly why Stanley planned to travel that way. There was concealment in that distance. None of the Zanzibar-Ujiji caravans would see him. No one would report on his whereabouts. Word would never make it back to London and prompt a new British rescue mission or a messenger ordering Baker to make a beeline for Ujiji. It was, after all, shaping up as a race: Stanley was coming from Zanzibar; Baker was progressing up the Nile. The first man to find Livingstone would win.

  Kirk added an unexpected time element to Stanley's search. Their first meeting occurred January 9. Stanley and Webb had just left the customs house. The extreme heat of the sun on that day was like a passive instrument of torture. The street was narrow and squalid, “lined with tall, solid looking houses,” Stanley remembered. Kirk was a slim man of thirty-eight, just a year older than Webb, with round shoulders and a beard covering his jaw line but not his cadaverous cheeks. “Dr. Kirk,” Webb called out, as the acting British Consul crossed their path. “Permit me to introduce Mr. Stanley of the New York Herald.”

  The former botanist of the Zambezi expedition said nothing. He raised his eyelids until the whites of his eyes became perfectly round, as if lapsing into a trance. There was no movement of the mouth or nod of the head. “If I were to define such a look,” an unimpressed Stanley wrote, “I would call it a broad stare.”

  The fact that Kirk was in Zanzibar at all was due to Livingstone. But Kirk, who still considered himself an explorer of sorts, could still recall vividly the day in 1860 when Livingstone attempted to run the Zambezi's treacherous Cabora Bassa rapids in twenty-four-foot dugout canoes, and the terror of rocketing uncontrollably through the walls of whitewater, then having his “body sucked under a canoe.” Even as Kirk clawed onto the safety of a rock, he could see boats downstream snapped in half and crushed by water and jagged boulders. Just as horrifying, from a professional point of view, was the notion that somewhere inside that frothing maelstrom were eight volumes of his botanical notes—lost forever.

  Kirk spent the remaining three years of the journey nurturing his hatred for Livingstone. He especially disliked Livingstone's random exploration style and daily willingness to risk his life—and the lives of his caravan—without a second thought. The explorer's “reason and better judgment,” Kirk wrote to a friend, “is blinded by headstrong passion.”

  That didn't prevent Kirk from pleading for Livingstone's help in securing employment after they returned to England. Livingstone, not knowing of Kirk's resentment, swallowed his pride and went to the Zambezi expedition's most vocal critic, Foreign Secretary Lord Russell, seeking a consular position for the botanist. None were available—or at least none to Kirk's liking. He turned down postings to the Comoros and Mozambique, and even rejected Zanzibar initially. What the botanist wanted was a position with prestige, easy duties, plenty of free time for hunting and collecting botanical specimens, and most of all, generous pay. Livingstone vowed to keep looking. During a stopover in Bombay en route to Zanzibar in January 1866, Livingstone pressed his friend Sir Bartle Frere, the Governor of Bombay, to give Kirk the medical officer position in Zanzibar. Frere agreed. Kirk was in Zanzibar by June 1866, missing Livingstone by two months.

  When Stanley met Kirk for the first time on that stifling January morning in Zanzibar nearly five years later, however, he knew nothing of the animosity or of Livingstone's intercession. He just knew Kirk had been with Livingstone and was more knowledgeable than any other man in Zanzibar—perhaps in the world—about Livingstone's exploration proclivities. Like a detective ferreting out evidence from an eyewitness, Stanley sought to extract information from Kirk. The challenge made him edgy with anticipation. In order to keep his secret safe, he had to extract the information without letting on about Livingstone, so his tactic was to ask questions about the Rufiji. “Met Kirk, companion of Livingstone,” Stanley wrote in his journal. “He had never been on that river. He thought of going for some time, was pretty sure it was a large river.”

  That was all. Nothing about Livingstone. And while Kirk let the moment pass without notice, Stanley began to view Kirk as an adversary. Just as Webb viewed Kirk as an impediment to American power, so Stanley began to see the former botanist as an opponent in his quest to find Livingstone.

  Their next encounter was on January 17. Kirk was holding a wine party at his home. Stanley attended as Webb's guest. Stanley was antsy in polite company, prone to distraction and eager for provocative points of view. The guests were members of the diplomatic community. All night long, Stanley watched disdainfully as they made small talk, waiting to steal his moment alone with Kirk. Finally, they stood together, the stocky American and the thin Scot, inspecting an elephant rifle and talking hunting. Kirk was traveling to the mainland in mid-February to hunt big game and was fond of talking about the trip and his shooting ability. Livingstone's name, to Stanley's enormous relief, came up tangentially, without prompting.

  “Ah, yes. Dr. Kirk, about Livingstone,” said Stanley, who later recorded the conversation in great detail. “Where is he, do you think, now?”

  “Well, really, you know, that is very difficult to answer,” Kirk replied. “He may be dead; there is nothing positive whereupon we can base sufficient reliance. Of one thing I am sure, nobody has heard anything definite from him for over two years. I should fancy, though, he must be alive. We are continually sending something up for him. There is even now a small expedition at Bagamoyo about starting shortly,” Kirk said, making mention of the convoy of relief supplies commissioned by Murchison.

  “I really think the old man should go home now,” Kirk continued. “He is growing old, you know, and if he died, the world would lose the benefit of his discoveries. He keeps neither notes nor journals. It is very seldom he takes observations. He simply makes a note or dot, or something on a map, which nobody understands but himself. Oh yes, by all means, if he is alive he should come home and let a younger man take his place.”

  “What kind of man is he to get along with, Doctor?”

  “Well, I think he is a very difficult man to deal with generally. Personally, I never had a quarrel with him, but I have seen him in hot water with fellows so often, and that is principally the reason, I think, he hates to have anyone with him.”

  “I am told he is a very modest man. Is he?” Stanley asked.

  “Oh, he knows the value of his own discoveries. He is not quite an angel,” Kirk replied.

  “Well now, supposing I met him in my travels—I might possibly stumble across him if he travels anywhere in the direction I am going—how would he conduct himself toward me?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don't think he would like it very well. I know if Burton, or Grant, or Baker, or any of those fellows were going after him, and he heard of their coming, Livingstone would put a hundred miles of swamp in a very short time between himself and them. I do. Upon my word, I do.”

  Stanley walked back to Webb's house that night thoroughly depressed. He considered quitting. It seemed that with every passing day, Stanley had to overcome a new hurdle to success. If it wasn't Bennett's failing to send money, it was Kirk, coolly, calmly, surgically replacing hope with something worse than fear: doubt.

  Stanley brushed aside his depression. “I did not suppose, though I had so readily consented to search for the doctor, that the path to Central Africa was strewn with roses. Had I not been commanded to find him? Well, find him I would, if he were above ground,” he journaled.

  The footrace had taken on a new dimension. Not only was Stanley racing Baker, he was also competing against the slave caravans and the tribal telegraph. He couldn't let word of his arrival precede him. Livingstone was likely to run in the other direction. And since Stanley's great commission was to pursue Livingstone until he foun
d him, the game of cat and mouse could go on for years.

  Stanley cherished the secret more than ever as he began his first bits of shopping for supplies in the bazaars and markets, eliciting scores of questions from traders eager to know where the white man was going. The French Consul, taking note of Stanley's spending habits, thought the American “rather eccentric in his way of doing things, refusing everyone's advice and consequently reduced to his own resources.”

  Two of Stanley's first purchases were boats—the first twenty-five feet long and six feet wide, the other ten feet long and four and a half feet wide. Farquhar, Selim, and a new hire, the British sailor William Shaw, who was stranded in Zanzibar after beating a mutiny charge, were put to work ripping the wooden sides away and replacing them with collapsible canvas. The ribs, keel, stem, and stem pieces were disassembled for easier overland transport. As needed, the boats would be reassembled and floated.

  When Stanley learned that the Rufiji and Lake Tanganyika did not connect, and in fact, were separated by two hundred miles of mountains and woodland, he still pretended that the Rufiji was his destination. Not even Selim, Farquhar, and Shaw knew the truth. So as his three assistants spent their days in Webb's courtyard, tarring the canvas, sewing sails and tents, Stanley changed his course: He would follow the caravan routes west from Bagamoyo to Ujiji. The boats would still be used for the second half of the journey, to Cairo.