Into Africa Read online

  In the evenings, after dinner, the men smoked and talked before the campfire until eight or nine. Stanley didn't fraternize with the men, preferring to retire to his tent. He donned flannel pajamas, sat in his camp chair, described the day in his journal by lamplight. The script was neat and flowery. His notes were long and descriptive, full of personal thoughts and honest expression, admitting both fear and courage.

  Livingstone was very much on his mind, but Stanley was losing his sense of haste. Africa was the first place on earth he'd ever enjoyed total control of his environment. He thought of himself as “the vanguard, the reporter, the thinker, the leader.” He liked that the porters and soldiers called him Bana Mkuba—Big Master.

  But Stanley wasn't really in control, and he knew it. As he'd feared all along, it was Africa that held sway over his future. And almost as if poking fun at him, the continent terminated his idyll with a bit of comedy. Just a week into the journey the jungle grew thicker. The fourth caravan was stopped by illness while Stanley's group raced ahead. However, a warning came to mind from Burton's writings, something about unsupervised porters being likely to dawdle—if they traveled at all. The experience with Kirk's relief expedition in Zanzibar had proved that true. Afraid his fourth caravan would turn around and march back to Bagamoyo, Stanley called a halt until they caught up.

  Until then, coastal breezes had made insects scarce. But with the jungle came bugs. Flies swooped about the camp in a variety of shapes and sizes that intrigued Stanley so much he ordered the soldiers to catch handfuls for his inspection. Dutifully, the men ran around camp, grabbing at air. They brought their catch to Stanley in his tent. Copying Burton, Livingstone, and even Kirk, Stanley affected the air of dutiful scientist, recording his discoveries. He let the flies play on him, observing them in action. There was the large black-headed African horse fly, longer by a third than a honey bee and with a bite that drew blood. A second fly sang like a cricket but was smaller and had white stripes across its abdomen. The smallest of all was brown, with long wings that made it look just larger than the average housefly. That fly made no sound. But Stanley had previously noted that it tended to attack horses and donkeys in great swarms. The animals would cry out in pain. Blood would stream down their legs. They writhed and bit and swished their tails, but the small fly was tenacious. Once it began sucking blood, it would not let go. Only goats and antelopes, Stanley learned from his porters, were immune to this little brown pest. Even humans were targets. The porters said the little fly was known as “chufwa.” Only later did Stanley learn it was also called “tsetse.”

  Also unknown to Stanley, and to medical science at the time, was that the tsetse carried a microscopic parasite known as trypanosome, which caused sleeping sickness. If a tsetse landed and inserted its proboscis in a person's skin—a puncture feeling more like a sting than a bite—and began sucking his blood, it had the potential to inject the parasite that would then breach the body's immune system by altering its structure. Fevers, seizures, slurred speech, confusion, and lethargy followed within days. Death came several weeks later. Stanley was unaware that sleeping sickness was incurable and that it killed more people in Africa each year than lion, hippo, and crocodile attack combined. Stanley merely passed the evening in his flannel pajamas, playing with the small brown fly as if it were a toy.

  The next morning, still in his comfortable, unrestrictive pajamas, wearing canvas shoes instead of boots, Stanley was in the mood to go hunting. If an Englishman had been nearby Stanley would never have dreamed of an act so gauche as hunting in pajamas, but just a week outside of Bagamoyo and Kirk, he was living by a different sense of decorum. Survival and comfort were more important than proper dress. And, having seen elephant, wildebeest, and zebra tracks along the trail, Stanley was eager to bag meat for the cooking pot. Livingstone was temporarily forgotten. With the fourth caravan still nowhere in sight, Stanley was sure that “within reasonable proximity to game, I doubted not but I could bring some to camp.”

  Stanley pulled back the door of thorns marking the boma's entrance. A gun bearer accompanied him. They stepped into a field where the grass grew taller than their waists. The pace was slow, without conversation. Every culvert and rise was checked for signs of a crouching animal. Soon Stanley found the hoof prints, scat, and trampled grass showing that antelope and hartebeest had recently passed through. Both were small, fast animals that traveled in herds and made good eating. Separating from the gun bearer, Stanley struck off alone down the trail. He was already a mile from camp.

  The path led into a jungle and down a stream. Carrying his rifle low, his pajamas already drenched in perspiration, Stanley tracked the animals along the water for a full hour. Footprints and trampled grass showed the way. Then just as suddenly as it had appeared, the trail vanished. Stanley instinctively turned around to retrace his steps, but in the jungle's thick undergrowth he lost his way. Not even his trusty pocket compass could point the direction back to safety. So he surveyed the horizon and guessed. “I steered for the open plain, in the center of which stood the camp,” he later wrote.

  It was a hopeful thought, but wrong. Stanley took a bearing and made his course. But just a few steps later a thorny acacia branch snagged the right leg of his pajamas and ripped it almost all the way off. As Stanley staggered to catch his balance, another branch reached out and grabbed his pajamas on one shoulder, ripping the flannel again. Two steps later, an aloe plant's tendrils grabbed the left leg of his pajamas, leaving both his legs exposed.

  A less determined or more pragmatic man might have paused to calm himself, or plot another course. But Stanley, legs bare and pajamas hanging in rags from his body, pressed on. Just one step later a low vine caught his ankle and pulled him to the ground. Instead of landing atop another vine, or even plopping with indignity into the black jungle mud, Stanley prostrated himself on a bed of thorns. He cried out in pain, but the jungle canopy's thick leaves and the press of tangled undergrowth muffled his agony. His legs bled. Thorns had broken off and embedded themselves in his skin. The beautiful flannel pajamas that gave him so much comfort at night, removing him from the hardship of Africa with their downy warmth, had been transformed into lengths of dirty cloth dangling from his body. For all intents and purposes, Henry Morton Stanley was naked.

  The young journalist pried his flesh from the bed of thorns and plopped down into the mud to take stock. The saving grace was that his gun and compass hadn't been lost. Rifle in one hand, compass in another, Stanley crawled gingerly across the thorn patch in search of the elusive trail. “It was on all fours, like a hound on a scent, that I was compelled to travel,” he wrote. Adding insult to injury, a plant whose leaves gave off a foul smell struck him in the face as he burrowed through the jungle. A sharp, burning pain like cayenne pepper juice had been squirted into his flesh, and sizzled deep into his facial wounds. And through it all, he sweat as if water was being strained through his body. “The atmosphere, pent in by the density of the jungle, was hot and stifling,” Stanley wrote later. “The perspiration transuded through every pore, making my flannel tatters feel as if I had been through a shower.”

  When he finally slinked from the jungle and stood again, Stanley looked back at the green hell. His entire body was a collage of gashes and abrasions and puncture wounds. If his torn clothing and mud-streaked body didn't mark him as an African ingénue, his farmer tan certainly did. Humiliated and exhausted, Stanley endured the stares and snickers of his caravan as he found the boma and returned to its protection once again. Stanley marched to his tent to clean himself and change clothes. He had already vowed he would never enter an African jungle again. “When I had finally regained the plain and could breathe free,” he wrote, “I mentally vowed that the penetralia of an African jungle should not be visited by me again, save under most urgent necessity.”

  Africa would give Stanley no choice. The jungle would be an omnipresent part of his travels until the tropical coastal plain turned into the sparse, low rainfall scrub
known as nyika that served as a transition to the savannah's wide open spaces. Even if that weren't the case, Stanley was too enraptured by Africa to remain upset for long. Within moments of swearing off jungle travel, he was again experiencing great affection for Africa's beauty and hardships. “Notwithstanding the ruthless rents in my clothes and my epidermal wounds,” he admitted in his journal, “as I looked over the grandly undulating plain, lovely with its coat of green verdure, with its boundaries of noble woods, heavy with vernal leafage, and regarded with pretty bosky islets amid its wide expanse, I could not but award it its meed of high praise. Daily the country advanced in my estimation, for hitherto I felt I was but obeying orders, and sickly as it might be I was duty bound to go on,” he wrote. “But day by day the the pall-like curtain had been clearing away and the cheerless perspective was brightening.”

  In the days that followed, Stanley continued coming to terms with Africa. It wasn't the place of nightmares at all, but a populous, sprawling country of previously unimagined splendor. It was the island he dreamed of years before in Aden, a place where no other man controlled his destiny. Even before Aden—since leaving his family behind on a whim and sailing from England as a teenager—Stanley had sought such a place. Finding it was the realization of years of longing, and the hardship was actually empowering.

  As if sensing Stanley's euphoria, Africa tested him again by letting loose her rains. An April 1 deluge opened the monsoon season. Stanley's infatuation with Africa dwindled, replaced by the reality that the miles to come would be one challenge after another, punctuated by moments of brilliant, though deceptive, beauty. “Down poured the furious harbinger of the Masika season, in torrents sufficient to damp the ardor and newborn love for Africa I had lately manifested.”

  Then Stanley suffered a more serious setback. As he continued to wait in the rain for his lagging fourth caravan, camped in one spot for day after valuable day instead of moving toward Livingstone, Stanley's men began deserting. As they left they stole equipment, cloth, and provisions. Others became sick with various ailments brought on by the rains—fever, chills, a mysterious “weakness of the loins.” Selim had malaria and even sturdy Bombay suffered from rheumatism. Finally, on April 4, a week after Stanley began waiting, the fourth caravan arrived, joyously firing their muskets to announce the arrival. Khamisi, a porter afflicted with the loin malady, found the strength to desert in all the hubbub, stealing two goats, supplies from the caravan, and the personal belongings of several fellow porters before running off.

  Stanley had had enough. He'd been stern with his men, but reluctant to use force. However, the theft and desertion had to stop or he would shortly be impoverished. Stanley ordered two armed sepoys to find Khamisi and bring him back, using all necessary force.

  As the searchers for Khamisi trekked east toward Bagamoyo, Stanley ordered the expedition to break camp and march west. April 8 was spent fording a jungle that smelled so foul from plants and decay that Stanley was afraid the men would collapse from nausea. The trail was just a foot wide. There were “thorny plants and creepers bristling on each side, and projecting branches darting across it, with knots of spiky twigs and spike-nails, ready to catch and hold anything in height.”

  After enduring thorns, rains, desertion, and dense jungle, Stanley finally encountered Africa's darkest demon. On April 10 “we met one of those sights common in this part of the world. To wit, a chained slave gang, bound east. The slaves did not appear to be in any way downhearted; on the contrary, they seemed imbued with the philosophic jollity of the jolly servant of Martin Chuzzlewit,” Stanley observed, referencing a book by the popular author Charles Dickens. He went on to note the surprising fact that both the slaves and their captors were African. “Were it not for the chains, it would have been difficult to discover master from slave; the physiognomic traits were alike—the mild benignity with which we were regarded was equally visible on their faces. The chains were ponderous. They might have held an elephant captive; but as the slaves carried nothing but themselves, their weight could not have been insupportable.”

  Stanley was clearly traveling through a landscape unlike any other on earth. And while he regarded the slaves and slavers as a curiosity, their stares made it clear Stanley was the more unique sight: He was white, he was alone, and he was in charge of his destiny—with all that implied.

  • CHAPTER 17 •

  Swamp Fever

  April–May 1871

  Makata Swamp

  760 Miles to Livingstone

  April was an oppressive collage of downpour, drizzle, thunder, chills, fever, humidity, sweat, exhaustion, and death—punctuated by the sucking sound of feet and hooves plodding through mud. The caravan was unable to find its collective rhythm as the monsoons slowed the men's pace to half-a-mile per hour. The porters were sick so often in April that the caravan only marched fourteen of the expedition's first twenty-nine days. Stanley could have helped the pace if he had brought enough medicine for the porters, as well as himself—but he hadn't. The only alternative was a full halt when illness struck the caravan.

  Ironically, it was Stanley, the African newcomer, who was the titan of the group, impervious to sickness. He attributed his health to a few teenaged doses of a malaria-like Arkansas swamp fever that had struck him down after he first arrived in America and begun the process of completely changing his identity. Stanley said he was more robust for having endured the “ague.” So even as the caravan morale plummeted from the rains and disease, Stanley grew more insistent on pressing the chase for Livingstone. As a man with attention deficit problems, Stanley craved action. Inactivity gave him too much time to think, which gave him the blues. He wrote of being “more comfortable and lighthearted while traveling than when chafing and fretting in camp at delays no effort could avoid.”

  Stanley liked that every day on the trail was a new adventure. The path to Ujiji was sometimes thin, sometimes the width of a road, but always defined by mud and vegetation. The caravan threaded through forests of tamarind, acacia, and mimosa trees. Rivers like the Ungerengi, where banana trees and seventy-foot-tall, thick-trunked mparamusi trees grew along the banks, were swollen by flash flooding. They had to be waded by the entire caravan—not an easy task for a porter carrying seventy pounds. Nights became two-blanket cool as the trail wended to an elevation of one thousand feet. Insects became even more common. Horse flies, tsetse flies, wasps, black ants, white ants, red ants, centipedes, and beetles would fill the four enclosed walls of Stanley's tent each night, crawling over his body and flying into the canvas—so many genera of wriggling, buzzing, biting bugs that he bragged in his writings that a scientific insect collection couldn't match the variety and numbers.

  Hyenas began prowling the perimeter of the camp at night, scaring the expedition's donkeys by their mere scent, waiting for the unwary expedition member—man or beast—to venture out. As villages stretched farther apart, Stanley's most valuable commodity—food—grew scarce. Hunting expeditions resulted in a small assortment of grouse, quail, and pigeons, but the small birds hardly yielded enough meat to fuel a caravan.

  Morale was tested again when Khamisi, the deserter and thief, was caught, bound, and brought before a tribunal of porters and soldiers. They sentenced him to be flogged with the Big Master's donkey whip. Khamisi's “crying sorrow” as his peers administered the thirteen lashes wrung whatever joy remained from the camp.

  Then, as if sickness tapped him on the shoulder and entered his body on a whim, Stanley endured his first hectic day of African fever. “I surrendered to it at once,” he admitted in his journal on April 20. “First, general lassitude prevailed, with a disposition to drowsiness; secondly, came the spinal ache which, commencing from the loins, ascended the vertebrae, and extended around the ribs until it reached the shoulders, where, it settled into a weary pain.” The pain got worse, causing “insane visions, frenetic brain throbs, and dire sickness.” Twelve hours later the sickness passed. Whether it had been a fever or a brisk jolt of mal
aria, Stanley didn't know. Regardless, he ingested heavy doses of bitter quinine the next three days. As chills washed over his body each night, Stanley shivered under a heavy bearskin blanket. Unbeknownst to Stanley, the caravan was about to enter its greatest obstacle so far. It was vital for the Big Master to be healthy.

  They came upon it after a walk through a pleasant forest with light red soil. Most of the year, what lay before them was known as the Makata River. The plodding, muddy tributary measured only forty feet across. But in the monsoon season the Makata exploded. The river carved great chunks of earth from its banks then overflowed them altogether. In some places it measured a mile wide. The low-lying areas surrounding it became engorged with water, until the entire plain between the Useghara Mountains and the village of Simbaweni became flooded. The impromptu swamp measured forty-five miles from one side to the other. While the swamp's mire averaged just a foot deep, the enormous footprints of giraffes, elephants, and buffalo created holes five times that depth. The porters constantly plunged into them as they walked. The donkeys, with their heavy loads, did, too, and were sometimes trapped underwater.

  The endless hours of trudging through the dirty black water was like a poison to the caravan's already devastated morale and health. As the end of each day drew near, they searched the horizon for dry mounds protruding from the swamp so they could make camp. The nonstop rain throughout the night, and the lack of bushes or trees from which to build sleeping huts, made the nights miserable, as well.

  As they traveled deeper into the swamp, conditions worsened. Tall reeds became a new barrier to progress, like slimy fences of vegetation. The water grew deeper, and the courage to step each morning from dry sleeping mounds into murky water grew harder. For five days the Herald expedition persevered through the Makata. Food was impossible to find and hunting was out of the question. The exhausted, starving porters shifted their burdens from their shoulders to atop their heads to keep the precious cloth dry. Simple fevers became of minimal concern as more fatal diseases attacked. “First the white man Shaw caught the terrible fever of East Africa, then the Arab boy Selim,” Stanley wrote. “Then the soldiers, one by one, and smallpox and dysentery raged among us.” A porter died. The donkeys died in twos and threes. Even Omar the dog got dysentery. He died, too.