Into Africa Read online

  But it wasn't. Not definitely. Speke had failed to circumnavigate Victoria, meaning a river could have fed into it without his knowing, which would prove Burton's argument. And at one point he had taken a cross-country shortcut rather than follow the river's snaking course. Short of the two men returning to Africa together, the only way to settle the matter was through a scientific presentation of facts.

  In this way, September 16, 1864, was chosen as the date for the Nile Duel. Under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association, against the backdrop of Bath's fading Georgian splendor, in the east wing of the Mineral Waters Hospital, mankind's last geographical mystery would be settled. The hospital contained the only auditorium in town large enough to hold the debate's crowd. When first constructed in 1737, its creation represented a newfound scientific belief in water's restorative properties. That a divisive debate over water would be held within its walls was the sort of grand irony the occasion demanded. The Times of London—known as Old Thunderer for its gravitas—would be on hand to report the action, as would the more accessible papers like the Daily Telegraph and Manchester Guardian. The Bath Chronicle imported forty extra typesetters from London to churn out a new edition immediately after the verdict.

  On September 15, the day before the Duel, Burton and Speke had settled into their chairs for RGS president Sir Roderick Murchison's opening remarks, seeing one another for the first time since Africa. Speke was overcome. “He looked at Richard and at me, and we at him,” Isabel Burton wrote of that afternoon. “I shall never forget his face. It was full of sorrow, or yearning, and perplexity. Then he seemed to turn to stone. After a while he began to fidget a great deal, and exclaimed half aloud, ‘Oh, I can't stand this any longer.' He got up to go out. A man nearest him said, ‘Shall you want your chair again, sir? May I have it? Shall you come back?' and he answered, ‘I hope not' and left the hall.”

  Desperate to calm himself, Speke sought out a cousin who lived nearby. Speke suggested they spend the afternoon hunting partridge in Neston Park, about seven miles from Bath.

  By the following morning, the debate auditorium was smelling of wet wool, stale tobacco, and the myriad odors of bodies wedged cheek by jowl. There were as many women, surprisingly, as men. Stomachs rumbled in anticipation of lunch. Eleven o'clock came and passed. Burton waited for Speke. With every tick of the clock, the crowd's murmurs about tardiness turned to angry rumbles about impertinence and cowardice.

  At eleven twenty-five, the doors finally opened. All eyes turned quickly, but saw neither Speke nor Livingstone. Instead, the wiry, bald Murchison solemnly entered with the handful of men comprising the Society's inner council. They took their seats on the speaker's platform. Murchison waited for the crowd to hush, then began to speak in his usual convoluted delivery. “I have to apologize but when I explain to you the cause of my being a little late in coming to take the chair you will pardon me.” The next sentence, however, was as direct as a punch to the solar plexus.

  “Captain Speke has lost his life.”

  Speke had lodged his Lancaster breech-loading rifle, which had no safety, into a low stone wall before attempting to climb over. Something had jarred the rifle, making it fire. The coroner would avoid the word “suicide,” but his report would show that Speke pressed the barrel directly into his heart as he climbed over the fence. The bullet, the coroner wrote, “led upward toward the spine, and passing through the lungs, dividing all the large vessels of the heart.” Even though the shot passed through and through his heart, Speke's suicide was slow. He bled for ten minutes before dying at the base of the wall.

  “Sensation,” as the Chronicle reported the moment, swept the audience when Murchison broke the news. “Richard sank into a chair, and I saw by the workings of his face the terrible emotion he was controlling and the shock he had received,” wrote Isabel. “When called upon to speak, in a voice that trembled, he spoke of other things, and as briefly as he could. When we got home he wept long and bitterly, and I was for many a day trying to comfort him.”

  Murchison proposed a resolution regretting Speke's death, with condolences to be passed along to his family. After a unanimous show of hands, it was passed.

  As for Livingstone, people were wondering about his absence. When Murchison was asked where the missing explorer might be, he merely shrugged. “I expect him at any hour, but I cannot account for his absence.”

  “In fact,” Murchison concluded, knowing full well that Livingstone had been in seclusion, writing the speech he would deliver the following Monday in Bath, “he might be in Africa for all I know.”

  Two months later, Murchison was looking for a man to travel into Africa and settle the matter, forever. The Nile Duel was still alive and well, Speke's theories were being closely scrutinized, and Burton couldn't be trusted to seek the source for obvious reasons of nonobjectivity. James Augustus Grant, Speke's companion on the second journey, would be equally subjective; he had thrown himself on the coffin and keened like a grieving widow at Speke's funeral. Sir Samuel White Baker, the barrel-chested engineer who discovered Lake Albert, was still somewhere in Africa, position unknown. Even John Kirk, the botanist from Livingstone's Zambezi expedition, was out of the question. He had fallen in love and was about to be married. The timid young minister's son, who harbored a deep and secret hatred for Livingstone, wanted to settle down and get a good job, not take off for two years into Africa.

  As 1864 drew to an end, Murchison traveled north from London to offer the expedition to Livingstone in person. The explorer was living with his children and working on his Zambezi memoirs at Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's former estate north of London, now owned by Livingstone's good friend James Young.

  Livingstone adored Murchison. He literally owed his fame to the regal geologist. Both men knew Livingstone was aching to return to Africa, having said as much during his triumphant speech in Bath on September 19 and then again during an RGS meeting in London on November 14. Both men also understood, however, that Livingstone's financial concerns were too great to ignore. The explorer desperately wanted to ensure that his retirement would be comfortable, and that his children—Bob (when he returned, which was looking more likely as the American Civil War approached conclusion), seventeen-year-old Agnes, six-year-old Anna Mary, fifteen-year-old Tom, and thirteen-year-old Oswell, who was his father's spitting image—would have an inheritance. He couldn't, in good conscience, return to Africa without solving his money problems first.

  Livingstone turned Murchison down.

  The geologist was not deterred. “Why cannot you go?” Murchison implored. “Come, let me persuade you. I am so sure that you will not refuse an old friend.”

  Livingstone's defenses wavered. Despite their deep friendship, it was an extraordinary breech of Victorian England's social protocol for a man of Murchison's wealth to make such a vulnerable appeal to a man of lesser social stratum. With Murchison and Livingstone both getting on in years, finding the source would likely be the last expedition on which they would cooperate—and their greatest triumph if it succeeded. “Never mind about the pecuniary matters. It shall be my task to look after that,” Murchison reassured him. “You may rest assured your interest will not be forgotten.”

  His greatest fear allayed, Livingstone gave in. He would leave his children and return to Africa.

  “You,” Murchison enthusiastically reminded his friend, “will be the real discoverer of the source of the Nile.”

  Four months later, on April 16, 1865, Livingstone made a public statement of his intentions. “I have no wish,” he wrote, with sentiments that would change as the source became a fixation, “to unsettle what with so much toil and danger was accomplished by Speke and Grant, but rather to confirm their illustrious discoveries.”

  On August 14, 1865, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries safely delivered to the publisher, Livingstone sailed for Africa.

  • CHAPTER 2 •

  Into Africa
/>   June 19, 1866

  Along the Rovuma River, Africa

  “We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead,” Livingstone wrote in his journal exactly three months after leaving Zanzibar. “The people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become the property of anyone else if she recovered after resting for a time. I may mention here that we saw others tied up in a similar manner and one lying in the path was shot or stabbed, for she was in a pool of blood.”

  It had been two and a half months since Livingstone's journey inland had begun. He was marching along the Rovuma River delta, through a towering, omnipresent wall of bamboo forest, creeping vines, and mangrove trees. The air was heavy and humid, smelling of genesis and rot. His physical health was robust, but the combination of insubordinate porters, gruesome daily evidence of the slave trade, and painfully sluggish pace had him battling bouts of depression. He had averaged just three miles of travel per day since leaving the coast. It certainly wasn't the quickest way to verify Speke and Burton's theories about the source, but marching inland via the Rovuma was the only possible way for Livingstone to ascertain facts about his own, wildly improbable source theories. He believed the Nile and Zambezi were connected by a chain of lakes—from south to north: Nyassa, Tanganyika, Victoria. The source, in Livingstone's estimation, lay much farther south than Speke or Burton theorized.

  The obvious, and quickest, way to Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika was by traveling from the Indian Ocean to Lake Tanganyika via the Arab caravan route followed by Burton and Speke. Livingstone, however, was taking the long way. His march had begun three hundred miles south of Burton and Speke's point of departure. He planned to march due west along the banks of the Rovuma River until reaching Lake Nyassa, which he had first explored during the Zambezi trip. From there he would travel north toward Lake Tanganyika and the likely location of the source. He was undaunted that a German geologist, Dr. Albert Roscher, had been butchered by hostile tribes six years earlier while following the same path, or by reports that a rogue Zulu splinter group known as the Mazitu were marauding and killing near Lake Nyassa. When trouble came, Livingstone would sidestep it and move forward. Always forward.

  He was glad to be back in Africa, but the rest of his caravan lacked Livingstone's enthusiasm. There was no trail along the Rovuma, so paths had to be hacked through the brush. His pack animals were dying from sleeping sickness, and after the first hundred miles of travel the terrain had angled upward as they left the coastal plain behind. The temperature was dropping as the elevation rose, and cold south winds began to blow. Livingstone had hired a band of porters to supplement his original contingent, back at the mouth of the Rovuma, but the newcomers chafed at the hard work and turned back on June 11. That left Livingstone with his original band of twenty-six porters and soldiers, who had grown tired and surly in the extreme conditions.

  Part of the blame rested on Livingstone. Not only had he chosen his companions poorly, but his habit of wandering ahead to scout the trail left the group unsupervised. The result was chaos: the Johanna porters stole Livingstone's precious cloth and beads, dawdled, and conveniently lost Livingstone's nonessential supplies when they grew tired of carrying them; the sepoys, those Indian Marines handpicked by their country's governor to protect Livingstone from hostile tribes, were useless. Livingstone complained “they would not get up in the mornings to march, lay in the paths, and gave their pouches and muskets to the natives to carry.” The sepoys grew so desperate to go home they tried to sabotage the expedition by poking the pack animals with their bayonets, and encouraging the porters to run off with them. Only a small handful of men, led by Chuma and Susi, were committed to staying by Livingstone's side for as long as it took to complete his work.

  Livingstone endured the personnel issues, treating them as a necessary distraction. He focused his attention on exploration. With a chronometer and sextant he pinpointed the latitude and longitude of villages and rivers. A thermometer helped him divine altitude. His interests veered far from the merely scientific, however, and Livingstone wrote down anything else of interest that struck his fancy. He wrote about the holes dug in the ground so tribes could slow-cook the heads of zebras, the feet of elephants, and the humps of rhinoceroses. He noted that fire was so important for safety from wild animals and mosquitoes at night that villagers carried their kindling with them wherever they went. He wrote about how pottery was made, and casually noted that pottery shards were everywhere. But for every anthropological notation, a remark about slavery was sure to follow: the little girl orphaned because she was too weak to walk alongside her parents as they were taken away; the tribes who sold other tribes into slavery and wore the expensive white calico that was their reward; the well-dressed woman with the slave collar around her neck, demanding that someone free her but receiving no reply from bystanders. Livingstone wrote of those injustices with growing rage, furious with the Arabs and Portuguese for their behavior, and with the Africans who assisted them. “At Chenjewala's,” he wrote of a village visited on June 27, “the people are usually much startled when I explain that the number of slaves we see dead on the road have been killed partly by those who sold them; for I tell them that if they sell their fellows, they are like the man who holds the victim while the Arab performs the murder.”

  The journal entries often stretched to several pages per day, jotted with a small fountain pen with a steel nib. Livingstone kept his journals in a watertight tin box he'd purchased just for that purpose. The box would protect his words from the elements, and hopefully even float if swept down a river. For the words were his gold, his future. They would be molded into a book about his search for the source, and provide raw scientific and anthropological data to the Royal Geographical Society. But the journals, on a much deeper level, were also Livingstone's connection to his roots. He had been a prolific reader as a boy. Through the simple act of absorbing the printed word, the first seeds of exploration were planted in the unlikely explorer over four decades earlier.

  Livingstone was born in poverty, in a three-story tenement outside Glasgow in 1813. He was the second of seven children. His forefathers had been Highland rogues before moving to the city, but the adventure gene was recessive in Livingstone's impoverished father. While Neil Livingstone's brothers became soldiers of fortune, he sold tea and ran a small market. He was such a zealous member of the Independent Congregational Church that he impulsively dropped the “e” from the family name, imagining a connection between a “living stone” and witchcraft.

  The explorer spent his childhood working fourteen-hour days inside the din and chaos of the Blantyre Works cotton mill. The introspection, stoicism, and need for wide-open spaces that later became Livingstone's trademarks could be traced to the claustrophobia of the mill, where the noise was so great that all communication was conducted at a yell. As a man, walking through Africa, he rarely spoke at all.

  Evenings in Blantyre were for school. Sunday, the only day off for the adolescent Livingstone, was for church. Afterward, Livingstone was fond of escaping into the countryside for solitary hikes and rock hunts. The rare leisure time was passed reading. Books were readily available at the mill library. Travel books were the most popular genre in the Livingstone household, telling of a marvelous world far beyond industrial Glasgow. He read books by, among others, Australia explorer Matthew Flinders, South America explorer Francis Head, and Arctic explorer John Franklin. Scottish explorers such as Mungo Park, who'd explored Northern Africa's Niger River, and James Bruce, who emerged from his explorations of the tributary known as the Blue Nile unscathed, only to die falling down a flight of stairs in the safety of his own home, were Livingstone's early heroes.

  The two most powerful books in Livingstone's life, however, combined adventure with Christianity. The first book was Thomas Dick's Philosophy of a Future State, which reconciled the disparities between science and creationism. For a tee
nager contemplating medical school and newly passionate about Christianity, Dick's book was a powerful affirmation that Livingstone's chosen path wasn't heretical.

  The second book, Karl von Gutzlaff's Journal of Three Voyages Along the Coast of China, sealed Livingstone's fate. Gutzlaff's tale of Oriental missionary life enchanted the twenty-one-year-old cotton spinner. Livingstone had long dreamed of a life beyond the mill and even beyond Scotland. Gutzlaff's book showed how it could be done. After putting himself through medical school, Livingstone traveled south and entered the London Missionary Society's seminary in suburban London. He wanted, Livingstone told his new employers, to go to China.

  But by the time he finished seminary, Britain and China had gone to war over opium. The year was 1840. Instead of China, Livingstone was given a choice between saving souls in the West Indies or in Southern Africa. He chose Africa. The dashing twenty-seven-year-old idealist, virgin, teetotaler, medical doctor, and ordained minister traveled from London's hustle-bustle to the somnolent mission station of Kuruman, six hundred miles due north of Africa's southernmost cape. He was still suffering from his first broken heart, after being spurned by a young woman named Catherine Ridley before leaving London. Africa seemed like the ideal location to focus all his energies on sharing the good news about Jesus Christ, and to leave the real world's disappointments behind. It would become a recurring theme in Livingstone's life.

  Missionary work hadn't yet taken on the imperialist reputation it later earned—and to which Livingstone's explorations contributed. There was nothing sinister about Livingstone's intentions as he sailed for Africa on December 8, 1840, no great political conspiracy to steal the independence of Africa's tribes. He was simply a devout young man heeding Christ's admonition that his followers “go and make disciples of all nations.” He would wander the hinterlands like the Apostle Paul, enduring great personal risk to touch those far-flung souls who might otherwise never know Christ.