Into Africa Page 2

  Stanley learned something else in the war—that he had a way with the written word. While serving as a clerk in the Union Navy he began writing newspaper stories on the side, detailing his battle experiences. He also began expressing his thoughts in a journal, revealing both surprising depth and moments of great melancholy.

  When the war ended Stanley joined the scores of Civil War vets who traveled into the American West to make their fortune. He made his way to the California gold fields and then to Colorado's silver mines, selling the odd freelance story to the Missouri Democrat about life on the authentic frontier. For the most part, however, Stanley was a drifter. In January 1866, frustrated with shoveling quartz in the Black Hawk City smelting works, Stanley moved two miles west to Central City and found employment as an apprentice printer with the town newspaper. The Miner's Daily Register wasn't glamorous (he had to moonlight by prospecting for gold to make ends meet), but it was regular work. After four months, however, Central City became tedious and Stanley hatched his plan to travel to New York, then Asia Minor to assemble stories for a proposed book. With Cook, Stanley began his journey by taking the stagecoach from Central City into Denver, and it was there that they built their raft.

  On May 6, the two men carefully dragged it down the banks of the South Platte and scampered aboard. Stanley carried a pistol and rifle to hunt game for dinner, and each man had a bedroll, but otherwise their gear and provisions were minimal. They poled the raft into the swift, swirling current. The river carried them through Colorado toward Nebraska.

  Stanley and Cook kept a sharp eye for Indians along the banks at all times. The Cheyenne and Pawnee were ostensibly peaceful, but rogue bands of braves still attacked travelers. The American Indians had had their lands to themselves until European powers and their colonial offspring grew interested in the vast region's commercial possibilities. Everything west of the Missouri River had been a blank spot on the map a mere sixty years earlier, when Lewis and Clark marched westward for a definitive reconnaissance in 1804. The Indians were forced off the prime agricultural and pasture lands onto desolate reservations that served as open-air prisons. Now, Stanley and Cook's river ride allowed them to bear witness to what remained of the American frontier. The miles passed quickly. The prairie was beautiful and pure, awash in the renewal of spring.

  A week into the journey the raft flipped. Stanley and Cook escaped by swimming to shore, then ran hard along the banks trying to catch up with their craft as it bobbed downstream. Stanley finally dove back in and swam toward it. The muddy water swirled about him, threatening to suck him under. But Stanley was persistent, if nothing else, and finally he caught the raft and guided it back to shore.

  The next day, he and Cook floated downriver to Platte City, a small town at the convergence of the North and South Forks of the Platte. They were chilled from a night spent trying to sleep in wet clothes, and limped into town after carefully hiding their raft by the river. The town consisted of a dozen houses, some made of wood and some of sod. There was a small hotel, assorted saloons, a dry goods store, and a few stray goats and mules. It was a town, however, with a reputation for vigilante violence. There were few trees in the area, so the bodies of horse thieves and murderers could be seen dangling from telegraph poles. One visitor to Platte City wrote that those telegraph poles served as “a line of gallows, twenty to the mile.” Stanley and Cook took a room.

  Platte City was just eighteen miles down a dirt road from Fort McPherson, headquarters of the U.S. Army's Fifth Cavalry. A captain of the cavalry was in town when Stanley and Cook checked into their hotel. Taking one look at the bedraggled travelers, the captain accused Stanley and Cook of being deserters from the army post at Fort Laramie, up the North Fork of the Platte. He ordered them not to leave Platte City until he could check their status. Just to make sure they stayed in town, the captain ordered two of his soldiers to keep Stanley and Cook under surveillance.

  Not only did Stanley refuse to be intimidated, he seemed to revel in disregarding authority. He calmly went about his business, eating a meal in the small hotel and stocking up on food and ammunition for the remaining few hundred miles to Omaha, where the Platte and Missouri combined. The fact that his every movement was being watched didn't fluster Stanley.

  After spending the night in town, Stanley and Cook paid their hotel bill and made to leave. The captain had been warned by his men, and was waiting for the erstwhile journalists. “Shall I put you under arrest?” he said, squaring off in front of Stanley.

  There was little about Stanley that was physically intimidating. His nose was unbroken. His ears lacked a fighter's cauliflower. He had no visible scars. His hands ran to small, and had a curiously reddish tint. There was an omnipresent look of childlike confusion in his eyes. Yet Stanley glared at the captain with a menace Cook had never witnessed before. Placing one hand on his revolver, Stanley calmly agreed with the captain. “Yes,” he said, clearly willing to shoot. “If you have men enough to do it.”

  The captain let them pass.

  On June 12, 1866, Stanley arrived in New York City. His ungainly search for success was under way. More important, Stanley had begun traveling east as Livingstone worked his way west. As the miles between them decreased, the adventures that would ensue—random and whimsical at first, then linear and relentless—had begun, as well. Not even Stanley, with his enormous capacity for bluster and outlandish dreams, could imagine all that lay ahead.

  • CHAPTER 1 •

  The Nile Duel

  Two Years Earlier

  September 16, 1864

  Bath, England

  The catalyst for the saga of daring took place shortly after eleven in the morning on Friday, September 16, 1864. Richard Francis Burton stood alone on the wooden speaker's platform at the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual convention, awaiting his debate opponent. His wife, Isabel, sat a few feet behind. He clutched a sheaf of arguments. He was strong but narrow in the shoulders and hips, like a matador. His eyes were so dark brown they were often described as black. His mustache, truly black, flowed over and around his lips to his chin. The legendary Somali scars ran up his cheeks like slender compass arrows pointing north. He remained calm as he watched the doors for John Hanning Speke's entrance. The fair-haired geographical hero with the cold blue eyes was Burton's opposite, and Burton had waited six years to settle their rivalry. A few minutes more meant little.

  The audience felt differently. It had been a wet, cramped morning and they were lathering into a righteous fury. There had been rumors of a cancellation due to some sort of injury to Speke, but the almost two thousand adventurers, dignitaries, journalists, and celebrity gazers came anyway. They braved a howling rain to get seats for what the newspapers were calling the Nile Duel, as if the debate were a bare-knuckle prizefight instead of a defining moment in history. Burton and Speke would argue who had discovered the source of the Nile River—the most consuming geographic riddle of all time. Curiously, Burton and Speke made their conflicting source discoveries during the same expedition. They had been partners. And even as they made plans to destroy one another, Burton and Speke suppressed deep mutual compassion.

  They were former friends—lovers, some whispered—turned enemies. Theirs was a “story of adventure, jealousy and recrimination, which painted their achievements in bright or lurid lights and tragic shades,” in the words of Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay. Each man's aim was not just claiming the Nile, but destroying the other socially, professionally, and financially. The winner would know a permanent spot in the history books. The loser would be labeled a delusional, presumptuous fool, with all the public ridicule that implied.

  Speke was a thin loner whose family home, Jordans, was just forty miles from Bath. He was childlike, entitled, wealthy, bland, deaf in one ear. At thirty-seven, he doted on his mother but had never courted any other woman. Critics acknowledged his prowess as a sportsman, but puzzled over his penchant for slaughter and fondness for eating the
unborn fetus of a kill. They wondered about the character of a man who once gave a rifle as a gift to an African chief fond of shooting subjects for fun, and who allowed a live human child to be steamed like a lobster during a tribal ritual in his honor. Speke felt that the ends justified the means—in this case, finding the source was worth the loss of inconsequential African lives. The source, Speke claimed, was a massive rectangular body of water the size of Scotland. He named it Victoria Nyanza—Lake Victoria—for the Queen.

  The dark-haired Burton claimed Lake Tanganyika as the source. That body of water lay 150 miles southwest of Victoria Nyanza, separated by mountainous, unexplored jungle. Burton did not dispute that the Nile flowed from Victoria, but he believed that another, yet undiscovered, river flowed from Tanganyika through the mountains, into Victoria.

  Lake Tanganyika's shape was slender and vertical on the map, like a womb parting to give birth to the great Nile. Its choice as Burton's geographical talisman was apt, for his character tics veered toward the sensual. The accomplished linguist had a fondness for Arab prostitutes and would someday write the first English translation of the Kama Sutra. In 1845, as a young army officer stationed in India, he'd been ordered to investigate Karachi's homosexual brothels. Burton's detailed reportage implicated fellow officers and evinced suspicion about his own sexuality—both of which combined to ruin his career. So he'd become an explorer. His knowledge of languages and Islam allowed him to infiltrate cities like Mecca and Harar, which were forbidden to non-Muslims. The resulting books about those escapades were best-sellers in the mid-1850s, earning Burton a reputation for daring while introducing Oriental thoughts and words to his readers. It was Burton who made the term safari—Swahili for “journey”—familiar to the English-speaking world.

  The mob packing the auditorium, so eager for spectacle and rage, knew the Burton and Speke story well. The time had come for resolution. When the eleven o'clock starting time came and passed, the crowd “gave vent to its impatience by sounds more often heard from the audience of a theater than a scientific meeting,” sniffed the Bath Chronicle. The audience gossiped loudly about Speke's whereabouts and stared at the stage, scrutinizing Burton with that unflinching gaze reserved for the very famous. In an era when no occupation was more glamorous than African explorer, Burton's features were already well known through photographs and sketches from his books. But for many in the audience, seeing his face up close, in person, was why they'd come. They felt the same about Speke.

  There was a third explorer many hoped to glimpse, a man whose legend was arguably greater than any living explorer. “The room,” the Chronicle noted of the auditorium, “was crowded with ladies and gentlemen who were radiant with the hope of seeing Dr. Livingstone.” The British public hadn't caught a glimpse of their beloved Livingstone since the halcyon days of 1857 when he seemed to be everywhere at once. His exploits had been a balm for the wounds of the Crimean War, the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade, and the bloody slaughter of British women and children during the Indian Mutiny. Livingstone reminded Victorian Britain of her potential for greatness. The fifty-one-year-old Scot was their hero archetype, an explorer brave, pious, and humble; so quick with a gun that Waterloo hero the Duke of Wellington nicknamed Livingstone “the fighting parson.” Livingstone was equally at home wandering the wilds of Africa and making small talk over tea with the Queen. The public made his books best-sellers, his speeches standing room, his name household. Livingstone was beloved in Britain, and so famous worldwide that one poll showed that only Victoria herself was better known.

  Livingstone, though, wasn't scheduled to appear at the Nile Duel. His first public appearance since returning from an exploration of Africa's Zambezi River six months earlier was officially supposed to take place the following Monday. He would lecture the British Association on the details of that journey. Ticket demand was so enormous that Livingstone, standing before a massive map of Africa, would give the speech live in one theater as Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society read it concurrently to the overflow crowd in a second auditorium. The Chronicle's special edition would publish the text in its entirety.

  Rumors, however, said Livingstone would make an appearance at the Nile Duel as moderator. His appearance would confirm the Duel's heft and counterbalance smirks of innuendo. For celebrity gazers and scientists alike, Livingstone, Burton, and Speke on the same stage would elevate the proceedings from grudge match to intellectual field day. Those three greats hurling geographical barbs would make the long hours in the rain more than worthwhile.

  Ironically, the crowd was unaware that the larger-than-life Livingstone was enduring a season of tumultuous upheaval. His problems had begun with the five-year journey up the Zambezi. The expedition had accomplished a great deal. But many of his companions died during the journey—including Livingstone's wife, Mary, who had been so desperate to be with him she left the safety of England to venture into Africa to find him, then joined the expedition halfway through the journey. Because of the deaths, the failure of a highly touted project that would have established Christian missions in the African interior, and reports that Livingstone was an inept leader, the British Government viewed the Zambezi expedition as a debacle. Hence, the Times questioned Livingstone's judgment, he was persona non grata at the Foreign Office—his place of employment—and influential Christian politician William Gladstone quietly severed their relationship.

  Financially, Livingstone was almost destitute. Even as friends urged him to retire and spend time with his children, he needed one last great geographical discovery so he could write the best-selling book about his travels that would provide for him and his children. “I don't know whether I am to go on the shelf or not,” he wrote to a friend, acknowledging that the Foreign Office might never let him lead another expedition, but vowing to return to Africa nonetheless. “If I do, I make Africa the shelf.”

  Most devastating of all, however, was that Robert, his prodigal eldest son, had secretly sailed to America to fight for the Union Army in their Civil War. Robert Livingstone had been taken prisoner during the siege of Richmond and been sent to a Confederate prisoner of war camp. There was no news of his whereabouts or physical condition. Livingstone, tragically, had castigated Robert for being aimless and base not long before the boy fled to America and enlisted.

  In Bath that morning, the British public knew nothing of Livingstone's personal travails. In its eyes, Livingstone was not a legend in decline, but a luminary whose lined, tanned face they longed to glimpse. As eleven o'clock came and went, however, Livingstone, like Speke, was nowhere to be seen. Burton and the audience watched the doors, straining for a glimpse of their entrance. What would happen in the next few minutes would alter the future of exploration, Africa, and the world.

  Broken down to its essence, the Nile Duel was simply a search for water—two hydrogen molecules bonding with a single oxygen molecule in the bowels of the earth, then seeping forth somewhere in the heart of Africa, becoming a trickle, then a stream, then a mighty river. The Nile was longer than any other river in the world, rolling effortlessly from mountains through jungle through Sahara through Cairo and into the Mediterranean. Mankind's most prolific kingdoms had risen and fallen on the Nile's shores. Moses, Cleopatra, and Alexander drank her waters. The Nile never shriveled, despite not having tributaries, substantial rainfall, or other obvious means of replenishment. She even flooded during September, the hottest month of the year in Northern Africa. Farmers planted in her fertile silt once the floods receded. Lush green fields blossomed in the desert as if the Nile was life itself.

  The Nile flowed south to north into the Mediterranean, but its source had always been a mystery. Theories ranged from the equator to the bottom of the world—or maybe from an even greater river, fed by an ocean, that sliced like an aqueduct across the entire African continent. In 460 B.C., Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” took it upon himself to find out. He pictured massive fountains spewing the Nile from the earth
, and set off alone to witness the spume and mist. Six hundred miles inland from Cairo, however, the Nile turned white at the waterfalls that would someday be labeled the First Cataract. Like sentinels, they guarded the Nile's inner reaches. The desert turned to jungle. The civilized world ended and a land of cannibals began. Herodotus turned back.

  The mystery was still unanswered when Ptolemy drew the first conclusive world map in 140 A.D. Basing his speculation on African legends, he said the source lay in snow-covered peaks along the equator, which he dubbed “the Mountains of the Moon.” Critics wrongly ridiculed that idea, saying that snow couldn't possibly exist in that latitude. Neither Ptolemy nor those critics traveled up the Nile to see if he was right. Centuries passed. The source became a force unto itself, too great for man to divine or witness. “It is not given to us mortals,” the French author Montesquieu wrote in the eighteenth century, “to see the Nile feeble and at its Source.”

  In 1798, source still undiscovered, Admiral Lord Nelson destroyed Napoleon's navy at the Battle of the Nile. Having established a toehold in Northern Africa, the British set to exploring their new land. The seas mapped and the continents defined, finding the source became the new grail of international discovery. There was no pot of gold, no fountain of eternal youth at the source, just glory—which, for most, was enough. Between 1798 and 1856 an electric collection of loners, thrill seekers, and adventurous aristocrats trekked upriver from Cairo, chasing the source. Most were British. A handful were female. Most died from disease, parasites, animal attack, or murder. None found the source. None came close. And with every failed attempt, Montesquieu's words rang more true.