Into Africa Page 22
Instead he reached for his dog whip. Stanley thrashed the man severely then cast him to the ground.
The crowd pressed in against Stanley and Shaw, making a threatening guttural noise that sounded like a man preparing to spit. Earlier in the trip Stanley might have cowed or even shown fear. But he was too sick and exhausted and fed up to care. He brandished his whip like a weapon, threatening all who came too close. “A little manliness and show of power was something the Wagogo long needed, and in this instance it relieved me of annoyance,” Stanley wrote of using the whip. “When they pressed on me, barely allowing me to proceed, a few vigorous and rapid slashes right and left with my serviceable thong soon cleared the track.”
The next night, as they camped in a grove of palm trees adjacent, Stanley was even able to convince his fellow travelers to take a day's rest so he could dose himself with quinine. As always, he was reluctant to stop when Shaw or the pagazis were the ones suffering from illness, but ignored that policy when he was sick. “Sometimes,” he theorized about malaria, “fever is preceded by a violent shaking fit, during which period blankets may be heaped on the patient's form.” The blankets didn't always work, Stanley went on to write, and he would be forced to lie there in agony as his head throbbed like someone was beating on his skull with a hammer from the inside. His spine and genitals would ache, and even his shoulder blades would become a source of pain.
Since Stanley had little other hope for recovery, he took his medicine and went to bed. Starting just before dawn, when the caravan should have been assembling for the march, Stanley began ingesting the bitter quinine crystals, extracted from cinchona bark. The doses continued for the next seven hours, when his fever began to break. Huddled under a layer of blankets as the temperature outside spiked well over one hundred degrees, the flap to his tent closed, Stanley began sweating with a torrential intensity, soaking his clothing and bedding. Hallucinations set in, an assortment of odd shapes and sensations floating about the room. “Before the darkened vision of the suffering man, floating in a seething atmosphere, figures of created and uncreated reptiles, which are metamorphosed into every shape and design, growing every moment more confused, more complicated, more hideous and terrible,” he wrote later. “Unable to bear the distracting scene, he makes an effort and opens his eyes, and dissolves the delirious dream, only, however, to glide again unconsciously into another dreamland where another inferno is dioramically revealed, and new agonies suffered.”
By noon, sleep and medicine were doing the trick. The malaria that had manifested itself in his body for fourteen days, with its delusions and chills and fevers, finally began to leave. He clumsily extricated himself from his hammock and groped around the darkened tent, trying to get his bearings. Suddenly, the tent flap whooshed open. A painfully bright shaft of light jabbed Stanley in the eyes. When Stanley looked over, there stood the Sultan of Mizanza, having come to collect his tribute in person. The sultan stepped inside the tent as if he owned it himself, and dropped the cloth covering his loins. He wore nothing underneath. Tall, aged, regal, the sultan had once been powerfully built.
Stanley stood mute. He gazed at “the sad and towering wreck of what must have been a towering form,” but didn't signal acceptance. So with a bemused giggle, the sultan pulled his robe on again. He stayed awhile longer as if nothing had happened, inspecting the inside of Stanley's tent—the portmanteau where Stanley kept his clothes and the nightstand with its books were particular fascinations—firing his Winchester, and wondering aloud on the extent of Stanley's wealth. Then he left. Later that afternoon, having waived demand for tribute, the sultan sent Stanley a sheep.
The next morning, Stanley and the other caravans fled the sultan's domain. The tributes and vagaries of Ugogo were becoming a source of irritation for everyone, and it was time to leave the surrealism of the region behind. “We had entered Ugogo full of hopes, believing it a most pleasant land—a land of milk and honey. We had been grievously disappointed. It proved to be a land of gall and bitterness, full of trouble and vexation of spirit, where we were exposed to the caprice of inebriated sultans,” Stanley wrote. “The wilderness of Africa proves to be, in many instances, more friendly than the populate country.”
Two weeks later, after marching 178 miles in 16 grueling days, the caravan reached Tabora. It was June 23, almost three months to the day since leaving Bagamoyo. Stanley had walked 525 ½ miles in 84days—Burton and Speke had taken 134 days to cover the same distance. The second leg of Stanley's march was done.
Stanley threw a party for the men, roasting a bull and providing banana beer. For the porters, their journey had reached its end. Afterward, they were paid off and released. For Stanley, it was time to hire new porters and begin the final leg of his Homeric voyage. It was time to make the push to Ujiji, where, hopefully, David Livingstone waited. Even slowing his pace, Stanley knew he could make Ujiji before September—unless, of course, some incredible catastrophe forced Stanley to turn around and go home.
• CHAPTER 24 •
The American Traveler
June 26, 1871
London
At sixty-one, gentle and urbane Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson had led a fascinating life. He had served in the army in India, deciphered ancient cuneiform tablets in Persia that told of Darius the Great's rise to power in 519 B.C., been a political agent at Kandahar in Afghanistan, and served as the British Consul to Baghdad. His knowledge of Persian and Oriental languages was matched by few Englishmen. It was only late in life that he abandoned a life of adventure and intrigue. He returned to Britain to settle down and start a family.
It was Rawlinson whom Murchison handpicked as his successor after the stroke. He was the sort of globetrotter and intellectual that the RGS presidency demanded, able to see the world beyond Britain as a three-dimensional realm of scientific possibility. Rawlinson, who enjoyed sitting his children on his knee to tell them stories of tigers in India, was two decades younger than Murchison. The world was still fresh in his mind, unlike in Murchison's, and Murchison had been unable to travel abroad for some time. Clearly, the RGS needed Rawlinson.
June was unusually cold in 1871. It was a cloudy, fifty-degree evening when Rawlinson gave his first presidential address in the lecture theater at Burlington Gardens. Hundreds of RGS members and their wives packed into the room as Rawlinson sat behind a large desk on the speaker's platform and began his first-ever rundown on the state of the Society. There was curiosity in the air. After nine straight years of Murchison's larger-than-life presidential speeches it would be strange having another man deliver the address.
Rawlinson was a polished speaker and spoke with the confidence of a man who was no stranger to public elocution. His words rose and fell for emphasis. He detracted from his text now and again to speak from the heart. He lacked Murchison's showmanship, which turned out to be a blessing. The audience warmed to him, and over the course of his speech it became clear that the presidency was in able, visionary hands.
Eventually, it came time to speak of Livingstone. “With regard also to our other great African explorer, Dr. Livingstone, we are still kept in a state of most painful suspense,” he began. From then on, however, Rawlinson's statement ventured far beyond mere update. To his lifetime of exciting moments, Rawlinson added one of the most memorable: He broke the news to the RGS that Stanley was looking for Livingstone.
Referencing a letter from Kirk, dated April 30, in which the Consul proudly announced that the caravan of relief supplies he'd coaxed out of Bagamoyo had passed through Tabora successfully and were almost to Ujiji, Rawlinson told of an odd American adventurer who had secreted himself into Africa. Apparently, the American wanted to say hello to Livingstone then continue touring the continent. “This gentleman,” Rawlinson noted, “who is said to be of the true exploring type, left Bagamoyo on the coast for Ujiji in February last, and intended to communicate with Livingstone before proceeding further into the interior, so that we must receive before long from this, if no
t from any other quarter, some definite intelligence of our great traveler's present condition and his plans for the future. Those who know Mr. Stanley personally are much impressed with his determined character and aptitude for African travel. His expedition is well-equipped, and he enjoys the great advantage of having secured the services of Bombay, the well-known factotum of Speke and Grant. He is entirely dependent, I may add, on his own resources, and is actuated apparently by a mere love of adventure and discovery.”
Exclamations of sensation and “hear, hear” filled the chamber. While it was a relief that someone was striving to make contact with Livingstone, it was also rather startling that an amateur adventurer—an American—was accomplishing a feat that had taken its measure of Britain's lions.
What no one noticed, because Kirk hadn't mentioned it, was that Stanley was a journalist—the same journalist who had turned London upside down with his Abyssinia coup. If the minor upstaging of the British press had elicited such howls, there was no telling how Britain would react if the American upstaged the RGS, the British Government, and the entire cult of British exploration. In Rawlinson's eyes, however, the most important priority was Livingstone's return. His rescuer's background was secondary—for the time being.
“I need hardly say,” Rawlinson summarized, “that if he succeeds in restoring Livingstone to us, or in assisting him to solve the great problem of the upper drainage into the Nile and Congo, he will be welcomed by this Society as heartily and warmly as if he were an English explorer acting under our own immediate auspices.”
Nonetheless, the London papers weren't informed of Rawlinson's announcement. The presence of the strange American in Africa remained a secret from the British public. Once again, it would be left to the American press to break that bit of news.
• CHAPTER 25 •
Mirambo's Kingdom
June 23, 1871
Tabora
480 Miles to Livingstone
Stanley finally reached Tabora almost three months to the day after departing from Bagamoyo. The sprawling village on the savannah, with its large houses and lavish gardens occupied by the wealthiest Arab residents, was one of three primary Arab enclaves in East Africa. The first was Zanzibar. The second was Tabora. The third was Ujiji. All had large Arab populations, harems, thousands of slaves, and existed solely for the purpose of exporting raw materials—mostly slaves and ivory—from Africa, while importing not just cloth and beads, but also coffee, tea, sugar, soap, and curry powder. Luxuries like butter were de rigeur for Tabora's residents.
Of the three enclaves, Tabora was the crown jewel. Set among dun-colored hills in the heart of the East African countryside, refreshed by clear streams and pockets of forest, surrounded by fruit orchards and well-tended fields of wheat, onions, and cucumbers, it possessed a beauty and abundance of resources that made it the African equivalent of an oasis. Many Arabs came to Tabora to trade, then liked it so much they lived out their lives there. The only real drawback to life in Tabora was the enormous population of poisonous snakes—more varieties of serpents could be found in and around Tabora than anywhere else in the region.
Technically, it was Sultan Barghash in Zanzibar who ruled Tabora. He had sent a man named Said bin Salim to act as governor. But bin Salim was an ineffective leader who clashed repeatedly with local traders. Even the commander of Tabora's three-thousand-man militia ignored bin Salim and deployed troops at his whim. As long as there was no war, however, the issue of troop mobilization was moot. Tabora was its tranquil self, a sanctuary of trade and sensual delights in a sea of dead grass and thirst. But there lived in the village of Urambo, twenty-two miles northwest of Tabora, an African chieftan named Mirambo who despised the Arabs and their claims of sovereignty over Tabora.
Mirambo was a handsome, powerful man who spoke in a quiet voice and was known for his generosity. He greeted visitors with a firm handshake and looked them directly in the eyes, inspiring confidence and a feeling of camaraderie. As a boy Mirambo had worked as a porter in the Arab caravans, and had adopted their manner of dress. The turban, cloth coat, and slippers he wore in his home gave him a cosmopolitan air.
The scimitar snug in the scabbard dangling from Mirambo's waist was also Arab and hinted at the more ruthless side of the charismatic young leader's personality. His date of birth was hard to pinpoint, but he was born the son of the Unyayembe region's mightiest king, sometime in the days shortly after the Arabs opened the first Bagamoyo-to-Ujiji slave route in 1825. The Arabs had slowly stripped power from his father, stealing his lands and cutting him off from the ivory trade that ensured his wealth and kingdom. When his father passed on and Mirambo assumed the throne, the Arabs refused to recognize him as the premier African ruler of the region. Instead, they backed a puppet of their choosing named Mkasiwa.
To make matters worse, Mkasiwa was so emboldened by the recognition that he considered Mirambo to be a far-flung vassal. This made Mirambo furious. He didn't immediately wage war on the Arabs, but expanded his kingdom among his own people, capturing village after village. He was a military genius and warred incessantly, excelling at the predawn surprise attack on an opponent's weakest flank. His army of teenaged conscripts—married and older men were considered less aggressive and so were discouraged from fighting—would open fire with their single-shot muskets, then switch to spears as they overran villages in relentless waves. Once a village was conquered Mirambo celebrated the victory by looting the huts and splitting the booty with his army. The goats, chickens, women, and cloth were a reward for a job well done, and a fine enticement to wage war the next time Mirambo was in a warlike mood.
After the booty was split, Mirambo would round up the residents of the village and behead the village chief with his scimitar. Then he would anoint a favored and loyal warrior as the replacement. If, over the course of time, the new man failed to follow Mirambo's directives to the letter, or attempted to rebel and form his own kingdom, a lesson was quickly taught. Mirambo would travel to the village and gather the citizens together. Then the warrior would be forced to kneel, and the scimitar would flash again. A new puppet would be installed, one who was more clear that Mirambo would tolerate no usurpation of his power. With this combination of battle, booty, and beheading, Mirambo rebuilt his father's kingdom. The growth of his power slowly squeezed the lands surrounding Tabora, until the only corridor the Arabs controlled was the trade route between Tabora and Ujiji.
By the summer of 1871, just as Stanley arrived in Tabora, Mirambo's strength was greater than ever—and still ascendant. Tabora was in a state of wartime preparedness as tension between Mirambo and the Arabs ratcheted upward. Both parties knew full well that the last African chieftain who'd confronted the Arabs, a man named Mnywa Sere, had been beheaded six years earlier. And with a lifetime of inequity to avenge, it made no difference to Mirambo that he was outnumbered three to one. The time had come to wage war.
Mirambo began by harboring runaway slaves. It was a passive move, a taunt that got the attention of the Arabs. The second act of war, however, attacked the Arabs where it hurt them most: trade. Mirambo blocked the route from Tabora to Ujiji. Caravans trying to run the blockade would be plundered and murdered. Immediately, the Arabs called a council of war and made plans to attack. Fifteen days, they predicted, was all the time they would need to crush the infidel.
Stanley knew nothing about the hostilities seething around him. He was simply relieved to be in Tabora, reunited with the other segments of the New York Herald expedition's massive caravan. He was overwhelmed when the governor himself, Sheikh Said bin Salim, sashayed out to welcome him wearing clean white robes. The two men shook hands like old friends, then walked through town to the governor's home for tea and pancakes, meeting the aged puppet Mkasiwa on the way.
Tabora was not a jewel to Stanley, but dusty and spartan, with that hostile air of repression common to crossroads and border towns. The stares of the local population made Stanley uneasy, a reminder of Ugogo. He was glad they did not a
ttempt to speak to him or approach him in any way. “All,” he wrote of the silent stares, assuming it was respect, “paid the tribute due to my color.”
It was a relieved Stanley who walked the three miles outside town to the home where he and his men would stay during their short visit. Though Burton and Speke had spent five weeks in Tabora, Stanley didn't plan to rest for more than a week before beginning the last push to Ujiji.
“There was a cold glare of intense sunshine over the valley,” wrote Stanley of Tabora, who was rethinking his earlier opinion that it was “of a picture without color, or of food without taste.” He wrote of looking up into “a sky of pale blue, spotless, and of an awful serenity.”
The building, which was made available to him by a local Arab merchant, was more like a fortress than a home. The ceiling was made of heavy wooden beams covered with tightly woven bundles of sticks. The walls were made of mud bricks and mostly windowless, but with ventilation holes. The veranda faced out onto an open plain. Donkeys were tethered to the sixteen pomegranate trees in the courtyard. There was a kitchen, a gunroom, a four-seat indoor toilet, a store room for the bales of supplies, and quarters for Shaw, Bombay, and all Stanley's men. Suddenly, after months of being a loose confederation, it was obvious that Stanley and his men were a team. Members of the various caravan segments renewed friendships and swapped stories of the trail. Stanley, who had come to consider himself their master and friend, was cheered by the men.