Into Africa Read online

  Kirk claimed he was in Bagamoyo to hunt, but really he was there to save face. Snider rifle in the crook of his arm, Kirk ventured into the bush for a day of shooting, pretending disinterest about the caravan. In actuality, he followed the caravan path several miles inland to confirm the relief caravan wasn't just loitering outside town, waiting for him to go back to Zanzibar so they could head back to the beach.

  Stanley seemed to be the only man not fooled by Kirk's ruse. Stanley confronted Kirk in Bagamoyo. He scolded the Consul for being negligent with Livingstone's supplies, and Kirk responded by looking down his nose at Stanley. He sneered that the journalist knew nothing about Africa. To prove it, Kirk coldly predicted tsetse flies would soon kill the two new horses that were the objects of Stanley's pride. Then, having had the last word, Kirk sailed back to Zanzibar on Columbine.

  Finally, to ensure Kirk was seen as Livingstone's staunch ally, Kirk wrote to the new Foreign Secretary back in London, Earl Granville. The letter was dated February 18. Kirk swore he had traveled with the caravan from the beaches of Bagamoyo until they were eight miles outside town. “Had I not gone in person,” he wrote to assure Granville, “the caravan might have loitered yet several months.”

  Back in Bagamoyo, Stanley set aside his rivalry with Kirk to focus on his expedition. Porters were beginning to trickle in. Stanley hired them immediately and began sending sections of the caravan on their way to Tabora, which lay five hundred miles to the west. The first group of twenty-four pagazis left on February 18, led by a group of three soldiers. With the monsoons due to arrive in six weeks, it was crucial that Stanley make sure the other four groups left before April 1. After that point it was likely the rains would turn the trail into a black sludge, and travel would be impossible.

  No route inland was safe from the rains. And though it was a minor detail, of the three caravan routes heading west, Stanley chose the route Arab traders considered fastest—but also more rugged. The three routes weren't much different from one another, and even crossed each other at certain points. One had been followed by Burton and Speke. The other by Speke and Grant. Stanley's was shortest, if only by a little, but Stanley reasoned it would make a difference when the rains hit. “My mission was one that required speed,” Stanley wrote. “Any delay would render it useless. Forty days rain and a two hundred mile swamp must not prevent the New York Herald correspondent from marching, now that the caravan is ready.”

  Finally, on March 21, his caravan was indeed ready. After seven interminable weeks, it was finally Stanley's turn to leave Bagamoyo. The second caravan had left February 21. Farquhar left February 25, leading the third caravan, followed by the fourth caravan on March 11. But Shaw would travel with Stanley in the rear column. Separating the two sailors was intentional. The former was a bitter whoremonger and drunkard who enjoyed baiting Shaw, a simple, witty dreamer prone to depression and rage. Separating them seemed the best hope of minimizing conflict on the trail.

  Stanley had begun to compare the inactivity of Bagamoyo with doing time in a federal penitentiary. Therefore, as he rode the bay horse out of town, there was a song in his heart. Stanley's group was the largest caravan segment, including twenty-eight porters, Bombay and eleven soldiers, Selim the fourteen-year-old interpreter, Omar the dog, a tailor, a cook, Shaw, and Stanley. Mrs. Webb's flag flew at the front of the column. “We were all in the highest spirits—the soldiers sang extempore, the Kirangoze lifted his voice into a loud bellowing note, and fluttered the American flag,” Stanley wrote of that stirring morning. “My heart, I thought, palpitated much too quickly for the sobriety of a leader. But I could not help it. The enthusiasm of youth still clung to me.”

  A total of 192 people comprised the New York Herald expedition's five caravans. “Altogether,” Stanley wrote, “the expedition numbers three white men, twenty-two soldiers, four supernumeraries, with a transport train of eighty-two pagazis, twenty-seven donkey and two horses, conveying fifty-two bales of cloth, seven man-loads of wire, sixteen man-loads of beads, twenty loads of boat fixtures, three loads of tents, four loads of clothes and personal baggage, two loads of cooking utensils and dishes, one load of medicines, three of powder, five of bullets, small shot and metallic cartridges, three of instruments and small necessaries, such as soap, sugar, tea, coffee, Liebig's extract of meat, pemmican, candles, etc., which makes a total of one hundred and sixteen loads—equal to eight and a half tons of material.”

  The sheer mass of goods was a reassuring reminder Stanley would never do without. It was also his acknowledgment that his logistics were influenced too greatly by reading Burton, and from listening to Sheikh Hashid. The New York Herald expedition, however, could no longer afford to base itself on previous journeys. The average caravan slogged six miles per day—less than one mile per hour. Time meant little in Africa, and ten miles a day was a fair journey. But Stanley was attempting the outrageous. He needed to move faster. He needed to start thinking for himself.

  In many ways, that applied to his life as well as his caravan. Africa was a big land with a big sky and empty spaces, where silence and solitude and boredom forced even a man like Stanley, at once entranced and terrified by introspection, to peer inside his soul to divine the essence of his being. It was a process, though, that he intended to suppress through activity. “Pleasure cannot bind me, cannot lead me astray from the path I have chalked out,” he wrote, defining the façade of denial and bluster concealing his inner chaos. “I have nothing to fall back upon but energy and much hopefulness.”

  The façade, however, began cracking as soon as he began his journey into Africa on March 21, 1871, with the glorious march from Bagamoyo. Pleasure seeped in through those cracks, and Stanley was too awash in sensation to care. “Loveliness glowed around me as I looked at the fertile fields of manioc, the riant vegetation of the tropics, the beautiful strange trees and flowers, plants, and herbs, and heard the cry of the pee-wit and cricket and the noisy sibilance of many insects,” Stanley wrote. “Methought each and all whispered to me, ‘At last you are started.' ”

  The pleasure was fleeting. Three days later, just as Kirk predicted, both horses died. To Stanley's smug satisfaction, when he slit them open for a field autopsy, the cause of death was parasitic worms, not tsetse flies.

  • CHAPTER 15 •

  The Source

  March 29, 1871

  Nyangwe

  “O Father,” Livingstone prayed in his journal on New Year's Day, 1871. “Help me to finish this work to Thy honor!”

  Finally, at the age of fifty-eight, through a perseverance that bordered on mania, it seemed as if Livingstone had done just that. On March 29, 1871, he finally reached the village of Nyangwe, on the shores of the Lualaba River. Until then, he had nearly given up finding the source. “It is excessively trying,” he wrote of his search a few days earlier, “and so many difficulties have been put in my way that I doubt whether the Divine favor and will is on my side.”

  But then he found it—or at least, thought he had. Before him lay the Lualaba River, which he was more convinced than ever was the source of the Nile. Through interviews with Arabs and villagers and his own observations through five long years of withering travel, he had come to the conclusion that the Lualaba could be nothing other than the upper Nile. The Nile and Lualaba, then, were one and the same. By tracing the Lualaba south to its source, he would also find the Nile's.

  At one time Livingstone thought the Lualaba might be the source of the great Congo River instead, but an observation of the Lualaba's immense width and length, steady northward flow, and two-thousand-foot elevation made him positive it was the source. “I went down to take a good look at the Lualaba,” he wrote. “It is narrower than it is higher up, but still a mighty river—at least three thousand yards broad and always deep. It can never be waded at any point, or at any time of year. The people unhesitatingly declare that if one tried to ford it he would assuredly be lost. It has many large islands, and at these it is about two thousand yards, or one
mile. The banks are steep and deep. There is clay and yellow schist in the structure. The current is about two miles away to the north.”

  And north led, theoretically, to where it became the Nile. To confirm that theory, Livingstone needed to rent a canoe from the Nyangwe villagers and follow the river's flow to see where it led. Once that was accomplished, he could then backtrack down the Lualaba to its source, sure that he had also solved the mystery of the Nile's source.

  The villagers of Nyangwe, however, had seen Livingstone traveling with Arabs, and thought the white-skinned Livingstone to be an eminent slaver. They were convinced he wanted a canoe to cross over to the river's far side and make war. Strangely, the villagers were happy to rent a canoe to Chuma and Susi, and even small groups of lesser Arabs, but the white-skinned Livingstone wasn't to be trusted. “They were alarmed at my coming among them,” he wrote, “and ready to flee. Many stood afar off in their suspicion.”

  Nyangwe, like Bambarre, was comfortable, and Livingstone was eager to earn the people's trust, no matter how long he had to wait. The busy village was easily one of the finest places in Africa he had ever resided. The people were enormously intelligent. Ivory was so plentiful that they decorated the arches of their doorways with elephant tusks. The women were stunning, with a coloring like light cocoa, fine noses, full lower lips, and delicate jaw lines. They wore no clothing, save for a leather band around their waist, from which dangled thin, ornamented strands of grass cloth to cover their pubic region and the cleft in their buttocks. Their hair was woven into long, elaborate shapes that protruded from the front of their heads like a sun visor, then also cascaded down the back of their necks in ringlets. Many possessed a great skill for swimming and holding their breath, and would dive to the bottom of the Lualaba for freshwater oysters. Livingstone was quite taken with the women of Nyangwe.

  Unfortunately, Livingstone wasn't the only outsider enchanted by the women of Nyangwe and other villages in the Manyuema region. Coincidental to his journey, the Arabs had carried their slave trade farther and farther into the heart of Africa due to the Zanzibar cholera epidemic. Never having seen guns before, tribes in the Manyuema region didn't understand what the Arabs fired at them in times of war. It was merely assumed that the newcomers had found a way to trap lightning, and that fighting back was futile. The Arabs, who were initially terrified of the cannibalistic aspect of Manyuema, were soon flooding the region, stealing ivory and people with abandon. Word had already trickled back into the interior that women of Manyuema were fetching top dollar in the Zanzibar slave markets. Their beauty was considered so stunning that many of Zanzibar's Omani half-castes were purchasing the Manyuema women to be wives instead of consigning them to a harem.

  Livingstone had no plans to marry these women whom he observed daily in the village marketplace. That didn't necessarily mean, however, Livingstone was chaste. Though a man of God, he was not without weakness. The missionary who arrived in Africa as a teetotal virgin had become fond of beer and champagne, and often traveled with a small bottle of brandy when he could procure it. Livingstone was also fond of women—and sex. It was only natural in a land where the intense heat made nudity preferential to being fully clothed, where sex often took place in the outdoors because the communal family hut was too small for intimacy, where the muffled sounds of furtive lovemaking could be heard at night, and where Livingstone occasionally stumbled upon Africans in the act of intercourse. It was also not surprising that a widower enduring long absences from England would want the company of a woman.

  Livingstone's thoughts of sex were actually evident in his journals long before Mary died. His entry of January 8, 1854, describing a fiery African princess named Manenko, was a commentary on the brash sexuality he encountered in his travels. Livingstone wrote that she was “a tall strapping woman of about twenty . . . in a state of frightful nudity. This was not from want of clothing, for, being a chief, she might have been as well clad as her subjects, but from her peculiar style of elegance of dress. In the course of a quarrel with her entourage she advanced and receded in true oratorical style . . . and, as usual in more civilized feminine lectures, she leaned over the objects of her ire, and screamed forth all their faults and failings since they were born, and her despair at ever seeing them better.” Manenko referred to Livingstone as “my little man,” and he complained that she left him with “no power.” It was common for royal women like Manenko, if they so desired, to share the bed of passing travelers. Hypothetically, if Livingstone was so ordered, he had no choice but to make love—or be killed.

  Throughout his years in Africa, Livingstone's journal admissions about sex were limited to vivid appreciations of the beautiful women he saw in his travels. But in a candid personal letter to G. E. Seward, the British Consul whom Livingstone befriended during his time on Zanzibar in 1866, the explorer revealed a telling private detail. In the course of sharing insights about expedition supplies and the vagaries of life in Africa, Livingstone displayed uncharacteristic machismo by confiding in Seward that he'd had so many African women he felt like a famously prolific biblical lover. “I had, like Solomon, three hundred wives princess (but don't tell Mrs. Seward),” Livingstone confessed to his fellow Scot.

  Clearly, the vast continent of Africa held a deep spell over all outsiders who visited it. As 1871 marked the fifth year of the source search, Livingstone, like Stanley, was being changed daily by its complexities.

  • CHAPTER 16 •

  Bed of Thorns

  April 1871

  East African Coastal Plain

  790 Miles to Livingstone

  Stanley's seven-hundred-mile walk from Bagamoyo to Lake Tanganyika could be broken into rough thirds. The first third comprised the stretch from the Indian Ocean across the coastal jungle. The second portion began when the trail rose from the jungle, ascended to an elevation of fifteen hundred feet, then continued all the way across grassy savannah and waterless desert into Tabora, where the original porters would be discharged and new men hired. The final third was the push into Ujiji, on the coast of Lake Tanganyika, which took place largely through thick, rocky forest.

  The journalist knew from his research that Burton and Speke needed five months to make Tabora, so he knew better than to be too impatient over the caravan's languorous rhythm. Instead, Stanley adopted the air of a bored tourist in the first days of his journey, taking notes and gaping at the scenery. The path over the coastal plain passed through small villages and crossed rivers. Bare-breasted African women tilled their gardens, titillating Stanley even as they pointed and laughed at his safari outfit of knee-high boots, khaki pants and shirt, and the balaclava helmet that kept the sun at bay. Strangler figs, forest grass, marsh reeds, acacias, dwarf fan palms, and tiger grass rioted all around them. The land and sky were alive with a stunning array of birds: pelicans, pigeons, jays, ibis sacra, golden pheasants, quails, hawks, and eagles whirled. Monkeys howled, and the trail shifted with the movement of lithe and speedy black mambas, green mambas, cobras, fat puff adders, night adders, and seventeen other poisonous snakes. The mauve hides of partially submerged hippopotamuses poked above the surface of the Kingani River like bulbous stepping stones.

  Stanley, fancying himself a big game hunter in the manner of his rival Kirk, fired on them with his shotgun. The metal pellets only irritated the hippos. Some moved away. Most ignored him. One angry male, however, bellowed at Stanley. The journalist switched to the more powerful Winchester, a forty-four caliber Henry Model with a twenty-seven-inch barrel, and shot the hippo dead.

  Despite that act of destruction, Stanley thought he was in Eden. “The country,” he wrote during his first euphoric week of travel, “is as much a wilderness as the desert of the Sahara, though it possesses a far more pleasing aspect. Indeed, had the first man at the time of the creation gazed at his world and perceived it of the beauty which belongs to this part of Africa, he would have no cause for complaint. In the deep thickets, set like islets amid a sea of grassy verdure, he would h
ave found shelter from the noonday heat, and a safe retirement for himself and spouse during the awesome darkness. In the morning he could have walked forth on the sloping sward, enjoyed its freshness, and performed his ablutions in one of the many small streams flowing at its foot. The noble forests, deep and cool, are round about him, and in their shade walk as many animals as one can desire. For days and days let a man walk in any direction, north, south, east, and west, and he will behold the same scene.”

  For Stanley's caravan the day began before sunrise, with Bombay yelling “set out, set out” to the camp. Tents were dropped. Breakfast was eaten quickly, and the march began by 6 A.M. Stanley always left last to ensure nothing was left behind, then charged ahead to lead the way. Bombay kept the column in line. Shaw rode drag, at the back, encouraging stragglers. Each late afternoon when the caravan stopped there was a rush to collect thorn bushes for building the nightly berm, known as a boma, around camp to ward off carnivores. Tents for Stanley and Shaw would be pitched in the center of the boma. Stanley's hammock, carpet, and bearskin would be laid out in his tent by Selim, who would also unpack Stanley's travel duffel.

  Meanwhile, the porters and soldiers would divide into informal groups of three to seven men. Each group would build their own fire, cook their own food, and build the night's sleeping hut. The hut would begin with a single ridge pole, followed by forked uprights, rafters of small sticks and bark, then grass for the roof and sides. Grass was also spread across the ground as a mattress. When the ground was muddy the porters built raised sleeping platforms of sticks and grass.