Into Africa Page 18
Finally it was Stanley's turn to endure dysentery. The illness was brought about by a vicious series of biological factors, and was nearly impossible to avoid in the flooded jungle. Bacteria entered men's bodies through unpurified drinking water and from Makata swamp water infecting open sores. Bacteria lodged in the mucous lining of their intestinal walls, and the intestine bled as the bacteria burrowed into it. A bloody, mucous-laden diarrhea ensued as the body tried to purge the illness. Fever set in, along with nausea and vomiting. The frequent diarrhea caused dehydration as the men lost fluid. The lack of water made them lethargic. They grew weak because food passed directly through their bodies without providing nutrition. Sometimes dysentery passes in two or three days; sometimes it is fatal.
During the Civil War, languishing in a prisoner of war camp outside Chicago, Stanley had watched fellow prisoners from his adopted Confederate cause die from dysentery. He had almost succumbed himself. Now the same thing was happening in Africa. Dysentery plundered his body from the inside, but Stanley did not die. However, in a single week he lost a quarter of his body weight, dropping from a fleshy 170 pounds to a skeletal 130—“a mere frame of bone and skin.”
Stanley had no choice but to press on. He was in the middle of the swamp. But walking through the Makata, trying to maintain the sense of supreme authority even when many of the men were beginning to hate him and were eager to turn back, was exceedingly difficult. Stanley guzzled three entire bottles of a famous bowel medication known as Collis Brown's Chlorodyne, without improvement. He suffered the indignity of alternately vomiting and relieving himself atop the brackish water again and again. The incident in his flannel pajamas was a trivial embarrassment by comparison.
On May 4, after five long days, the caravan cleared the Makata. “The swamp with its considerable horrors having left an indelible impression on our minds, no one was disposed to forget its fatigues or the nausea,” a relieved Stanley wrote. Still sick, he stopped the caravan in the village of Rehenneko to convalesce. Fresh air and a dollop of Dover's powder from his medicine chest fostered a cure for his dysentery.
There, at the foot of the Usagara Mountains, surrounded by bamboo forests and crystal-clear streams, they rested four days. The entire caravan needed the refreshment, especially the porters: only five donkeys had survived the swamp. Their 150-pound loads would have to be split among the porters.
There was one small reason to celebrate in Rehenneko: the monsoon season had ended. With drier conditions, it was safe to assume the string of sickness and sloth would end as well. This joy was short-lived, however, for in place of the rains came Africa's legendary heat. Two days after the caravan's “terribly jaded men and animals” began climbing into the granite and red sandstone of the Usagaras, the temperature reached 128 degrees.
• CHAPTER 18 •
Parliament
May 5, 1871
London
As Stanley lay in his tent the day after emerging from the filth of the Makata, his body purging its very essence to stave off dysentery, and as Livingstone began his fifth week of waiting for the canoe that would carry him to the source, British Foreign Secretary Earl Granville rose to address the House of Lords. The aging Earl was dressed immaculately. As he began speaking his voice carried easily through the narrow parliamentary chamber. The peers sat on benches facing one another other across the chamber's broad center aisle. On one end of the rectangular room was the golden throne where Queen Victoria sat while opening Parliament. At the other end a doorway opened onto the long stone corridor connecting the House of Lords with the House of Commons. That door, as Granville prepared his remarks, was closed.
Granville's family had served Britain with distinction for more than one hundred years, but he had little foreign policy experience when he had become Prime Minister Gladstone's Foreign Secretary, upon Lord Clarendon's death in June 1870. At the time, Granville had been concerned the job might be too much for him. He was reassured when his Permanent Undersecretary, a man with twenty years in foreign service under his belt, swore he had never “known so great a lull in foreign affairs, and that he was not aware of any important question that he should have to deal with.”
Three weeks later, Napoleon III, trying to appear strong after diplomatic fiascos in Mexico and Austria, declared war on Germany. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called his bluff. In what would become a recurring theme over the next seventy years, Germany invaded France on August 2, 1870. An army of 400,000 German troops raced toward Paris. The apathetic French army numbered half that size and offered minimal resistance. By September, even as the Germans continued their inexorable push toward the French capital, Napoleon III was captured. It was the Parisians who finally fended off the Germans, but only for a time. The City of Lights, so eloquently remade by Haussman, was besieged for four months. As Livingstone rested, ate, and made journal notations in the very center of Africa, oblivious to the actions of the outside world, the residents of Paris survived on rats and household pets until finally surrendering to German occupation in January 1871. Napoleon III was sent into exile—to Britain, ironically, the same nation that had banished his uncle to one of the earth's most remote corners a half-century earlier.
To say the least, Granville's first year on the job had been a trial by fire. The delicate task of maintaining the illusion of British power in European affairs while remaining neutral had been his responsibility. But in May 1871, as Granville rose to speak, the world was finally returning to its prewar lull. Land and monetary details of the French surrender were being brokered in Germany. The Treaty of Frankfurt, which was due to be signed any day, would restore peace to Europe. It also gave Granville a bit of good news to share with his parliamentary colleagues.
Another piece of buoyant news had arrived, unexpectedly, that morning from Zanzibar.
“Your Lordships will, I am sure,” Granville began, every syllable carrying easily, thanks to the House of Lords' formidable acoustics, “be glad to hear that dispatches have been received this day at the British Foreign Office from Dr. Kirk, the acting British Consul at Zanzibar, containing information on the safety of Dr. Livingstone.”
Granville went on to say that thanks to Kirk's diligence, relief supplies were racing across Africa. Livingstone's “immediate wants appear to have been met by the Arabs.” The acting British Consul had taken care of the rest.
Salvos of “hear, hear” swept the House of Lords. For an instant, France and Germany were set aside. With Baker sweeping down from the north and Kirk controlling matters in Zanzibar, it was clear Britain had the David Livingstone situation under control. If he was alive, it was only a question of who would find him first.
• CHAPTER 19 •
Mutiny
May 1871
The Rubeho Mountains
670 Miles to Livingstone
Stanley's top-secret mission pressed inland, his ambitions unknown to the world, even as dissension among his men continued to escalate. In the interests of prodding the caravan forward, Stanley was becoming a minor despot. Though whipped and sexually molested as a child, he felt no empathy for the weak. If he was sick the caravan halted. The days of halting when porters were ill, however, were becoming fewer. If a member of the caravan other than himself fell ill—whether white man or black—he left him behind, whipped him, or stopped, then groused in his journal about the man's malingering. Africa was the first time in Stanley's life he held absolute power—no one could reject him, no one could call him a leper. He gloried in his ability to inflict pain, as if looking for excuses to lay his whip across a bare back. In his mind, it was all part of his quest to better himself. “Solomon was wise perhaps from inspiration, perhaps from observation. I was becoming wise by experience, and I was compelled to observe that when mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the lazily inclined, a dog whip became their backs, resorting them to a sound, sometimes to an extravagant, activity,” Stanley wrote proudly.
Porters were whipped for trying to desert, a Hi
ndi cook was banished from camp for pilfering, a soldier was lashed for being too ill to wade the Makata Swamp, and caravan tailor Abdul Kader was publicly accused of being the weakest man alive—then lashed. “The virtue of a good whip was well tested by me on this day,” Stanley bragged. “And Abdul Kader (and may he carry the tale to all his kith, kin, and race), one may make sure, will never accompany a white man again to Africa.”
Stanley had learned his racism during his teenage years in New Orleans, and saw it reinforced when he fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He had a habit of modeling his behavior on male authority figures, and his treatment of the Africans was copied from the infamous arrogance of Generals George Custer and Philip Sheridan during their battles with the Cheyenne Indians in 1867. Custer and Sheridan thought the Indians should be treated like children. Stanley assumed that attitude with Africans. They were tolerated, but it was understood that the indigenous population were second-class citizens, under the authority of white men.
Stanley was not as extreme as Custer or Sheridan. But just like Sheridan, who became more arrogant in his relations with the Indians as he gained power, Stanley displayed an increasing darkness in his character as he penetrated farther into Africa. The journalist once content to record the actions of others, the wide-eyed innocent stepping off the Falcon in Zanzibar, the excited new leader parading his caravan out of Bagamoyo—all those aspects of Stanley were set aside. In their place was a dogmatic, oppressive ruler. He was willing to do whatever it took to find Livingstone for the New York Herald. Even as men died for his cause, Stanley was setting a new standard for adventure journalism. Even veteran war correspondents like the Times's legendary W. H. Russel were almost passive in comparison.
The two men bearing the brunt of Stanley's oppressive behavior were Bombay and Shaw. Stanley heaped all his frustrations and fears on those two. The famous Bombay—so vital for encouraging the caravan and overseeing the daily routine of cooking, making and breaking camp, and the overall organization of the forward march—could do nothing right in Stanley's eyes. The journalist was aware that Bombay had been awarded a silver medal by the Royal Geographical Society for his epic journeys alongside Burton, Speke, and Grant, and thus was exalted by that august British body as a de facto explorer—an honor and designation far beyond Stanley's most outlandish dreams. It was as if by belittling the gritty Bombay, Stanley was raising himself to the status of Burton and Speke. Being a racist in an era when it was not just condoned, but expected, Stanley had no problem treating the fifty-year-old Bombay, almost twenty years his senior, like an ignorant child. “Working myself into a fury, I enumerated his sins to him,” Stanley wrote after screaming at Bombay one midnight by the fire, in full view of the entire camp. The list of sins included a lost goat, a fondness for staring into the campfire at night, and an inability to locate a deserted cook. Stanley demoted Bombay that night, replacing him with Mabruki, a thief with deformed hands whom Stanley knew Bombay despised.
Shaw was more deserving of Stanley's rage. Since he was a white man, Stanley preferred to punish Shaw through subtle disdain rather than public humiliation. The sailor was turning out to be a lazy hypochondriac whose talents as a sail maker were unnecessary and whose fear of Africa led him to repeatedly threaten quitting. Shaw bullied the porters and soldiers, rode a donkey at all times instead of walking, and had venereal disease—though it was unclear whether he brought it with him from his travels at sea or picked it up during one of his many dalliances with African village women. As a sign of his authority, the former mutineer preferred to be called Bana Mdogo, or Little Master. And even though Stanley afforded Shaw luxuries such as a tent and an occasional servant, the sailor's fear of Africa was at odds with Stanley's success-at-all-cost mission. Shaw had lost his temper earlier in the journey, calling Stanley a fastidious ingrate and a slave driver. He swore he'd leave Stanley and join the first caravan they met heading east.
Stanley, who maintained the detached air of a ruler with Shaw, reminded him about his salary advance back in Zanzibar—the one he'd drunk away the morning they sailed. Unless Shaw fulfilled the remainder of his contract, Stanley promised to keep the sailor's personal belongings.
Shaw backed down, but he never stopped maintaining Stanley was a madman. It was only a matter of time before the two would clash again, and before Farquhar would reenter the picture. Mutiny is most often a conspiracy of the unhappy rather than a solo act, and as long as Shaw's only peer had been Stanley his rage had had no outlet. Shaw couldn't speak Swahili or Hindustani, the two primary languages of the porters and soldiers. But when Stanley and Shaw's fifth caravan caught up with Farquhar's third caravan, everything changed.
The third caravan had come to a halt when Farquhar contracted elephantiasis, a form of leprosy caused by microscopic filarial worms invading the body. The parasites blocked his lymphatic system, causing an enlargement and thickening of Farquhar's bodily tissue. Elephantiasis can cause men's testicles to swell to a foot or more in diameter, and legs and arms to grow until they look like overstuffed sausages. Once the swelling began Farquhar was barely able to walk, and his swollen testicles made riding his donkey an exercise in pain management. His body felt drained of strength. Unable to travel onward, Farquhar had made camp outside the village of Kiora, and remained in his tent for two weeks until Stanley arrived.
When Stanley first met Farquhar on the bark Polly, traveling from Bombay to the Seychelles, he had been awed at the way Farquhar had beaten a fellow sailor. His physical strength was daunting. When the journey into Africa began Farquhar was broad-shouldered and bellicose, still exuding power. His belly and nose showed the years of drinking, but he was squat and strong and very much a presence to be reckoned with.
But as Stanley stopped before Farquhar's tent in Kiora, then called out to his second in command, he was shocked at the corpulent mass wandering forward. Farquhar, like Stanley and Shaw, was bearded. But he was plump in a way no man should be in a land where food was so precious. “As he heard my voice, Farquhar staggered out of his tent, as changed from my spruce mate who started from Bagamoyo as if he had been expressly fattened,” Stanley wrote in amazement, “as we do geese and turkeys for Christmas dinner.”
The navigator was undoubtedly sick. But his dirty little secret was that he'd also been living like a king in Kiora, so uncaring about Stanley's crazy desire to see Africa's wildlife that he'd bartered almost all of the third caravan's cloth for a daily banquet of goats, eggs, and chickens. Farquhar's new girth was all the more obvious because Stanley was a walking cadaver. “I saw and regarded, not without wonder, the bloated cheeks and neck of my man Farquhar. His legs were also donderous, elephantine,” Stanley wrote. It seemed incongruous that a man could claim to be so weak and sick but have such a massive appetite. Stanley was sure Farquhar was nothing more than a sensate monster, wasting the New York Herald's money.
That night, Stanley had four porters carry an exhausted Farquhar into his tent to account for all the spent cloth. He demanded an accounting for the waste of time, money, and manpower. Farquhar, forced to defend himself while spread-eagled on the thin carpet of Stanley's small field tent, couldn't think straight. His answer was circuitous and convoluted. “What he did do, what he did not do, what he had expended on cloth and beads, what he had not expended,” an exasperated Stanley wrote, “were so inextricably jumbled up together that I felt myself drifting toward helpless insanity.”
Stanley had no choice but to relieve Farquhar. “An Arab proprietor,” he noted, “would have slaughtered him for his extravagance and imbecility.” Ideally, Farquhar would have been left to find his own way home. Instead, the third and fifth caravans were combined and Farquhar was placed atop a donkey. With the trail toward Ujiji leading upward through a steep mountain, the ride would be a hell all its own for the swollen Farquhar. Each bump, each sway of the donkey that would pitch Farquhar helplessly to the ground, would be his penalty for incompetence.
The Rubeho Mountains became the ca
ravan's newest nemesis. Sir Roderick Murchison once theorized that Africa's center was a trough ringed by a mountain plain. And though Stanley was a thousand miles east of the depression forming the Congo's swampy center, the Rubeho proved the truth to the second part of the theory. Running north by northeast, roughly paralleling the Eastern African coast, the Rubeho and its eight thousand–foot peaks were a prime, though jagged, example of the geographical term known as “uplift.”
The first third of Stanley's journey was complete. Jungle terrain was now a memory, replaced by “wilderness of aloetic and cactaceous plants, where the kolquall and several thorn bushes grew paramount.” Even villages would become few and far between as the caravan entered a moonscape of red sandstone. For Shaw and Farquhar, the mountains were a symbolic point of no return—beyond them lay the center of Africa. Quitting the caravan would become far more difficult. Thoughts of mutiny passed through their heads.
Shaw tested Stanley's authority the first night in the Rubeho. Too ill to walk, he'd been traveling by donkey cart over the mountains. The rugged trail was impossible to surmount in such a bulky vehicle. Stanley sent word back for Shaw to abandon the cart and catch up with the caravan as quickly as possible. When Shaw showed up four hours later, one of the porters was carrying the cart on his head, while Shaw followed behind atop a donkey. His stooped body, topped with a conical hat like something from China, was a sorry sight. The bare-chested porters, whose only clothing was cloth tied around the waist like a skirt, didn't look half as tired. Many of them were also sick, but had to either keep up or be left behind for the hyenas and lions—the donkey cart wasn't an option. Shaw, Stanley wrote, was “riding at a gait which seemed to leave it doubtful on my mind whether he or his animal felt most sleepy.”