Into Africa Page 9
On November 21, 1867, Livingstone arrived in Casembe with Hamees and his caravan. The path into the village was lined with red anthills towering twenty feet high. The chief, also named Casembe, was a cruel man. He was fond of cutting off the hands and ears of his subjects. His chief adviser was a pompous dwarf with a broken back named Zofu, measuring three feet, nine inches tall.
In Casembe, Livingstone was introduced to another powerful Arab trader, named Mohamad bin Saleh. The new acquaintance was about to become Livingstone's third Arab benefactor. He was an older man, heavy and black, with a thick white beard and a broad smile. “Mohamad bin Saleh proposes to go to Ujiji next month. He waited when he heard we were coming in order that we might go together,” Livingstone journaled on November 27. Bin Saleh promised Livingstone the caravan's march from Casembe to Ujiji would take just one month.
As Livingstone waited three weeks for the day of departure from Casembe, battling a fever and observing the chief and Zofu with bemusement, his will to find the source inexplicably wavered. Thoughts of Ujiji were prompting emotional images of home. The village was a natural stepping-stone from the interior back to British civilization. “I am so tired of exploration, without a word from home or anywhere else for two years, that I must go to Ujiji for letters before doing anything else,” he wrote.
But as Livingstone marched out of Casembe with bin Saleh on December 22, the desperation ebbed. The act of moving forward once again, and through a region that was not only new to him, but delightfully beautiful, boosted his morale. The wide-open country was populated by many villages. Wildlife seemed to be everywhere, and Livingstone wrote of zebras, lions, hippos, buffalo, and leopards glimpsed along the way. He waxed eloquent about the beauty of the countryside. “The number of new notes I hear,” he wrote after a day walking through a bird-filled forest, “astonishes me.”
During those hours of each day when the caravan was on the march, Livingstone and his attendants quickly fell behind. His pace was a slow, deliberate plod. But he rarely paused for very long, and so rejoined the Arabs at the end of every day. Livingstone didn't like that the Arabs often lingered for two and three weeks at a time in one spot, for he longed to reach Ujiji and lay his hands on his supplies. But he stayed with the Arabs anyway, lacking the strength or resources to press on alone.
Despite bin Saleh's promises to reach Ujiji in one month, the caravan was still hundreds of miles south and west of Lake Tanganyika—and Ujiji, across the lake on the eastern shore—after three long months on the trail. By March of 1868, they were still on the banks of the Lualaba River, still well south of Tanganyika. The rainy season had begun, swelling the rivers to waist deep and turning the swamps to interminable seas of black mud. At the broad, overflowing Lualaba, however, bin Saleh called a halt. The rainy season was making the paths increasingly worse. The land through which they marched was often what Livingstone called a “sponge”—ground so waterlogged that a man could slip down into what looked like solid earth, as if he were falling into water. Bin Saleh ordered that travel would cease until the rains stopped—yet another halt which could take several months. Livingstone pleaded with him to continue, even though his remaining faithful followers were reminding him that they were too tired to continue. “They were tired of tramping,” Livingstone noted in his journal, “and so am I.”
The need to find the source had became an obsession once again, however, and Livingstone could not stand the monotony of waiting for the rains to end. If he couldn't move forward to Ujiji, he rationalized it was better to backtrack and look for the source. He had heard rumors of a lake named Bangweolo eighty miles off, which was connected by a river to a lake he knew of named Mweru. Livingstone wanted to explore the possibility that these were somehow part of the chain of lakes that became the Nile. Bin Saleh was adamant that Livingstone not go. Almost all of Livingstone's porters, emboldened by bin Saleh's opposition, and reluctant to leave the good life as a caravan member, deserted Livingstone to remain with the Arabs. On April 13, 1868, he marched deliberately away from bin Saleh's caravan. Livingstone began his journey with his six attendants, chief among them Chuma and Susi. Two days later, an attendant named Amoda turned around and fled back to the luxury of bin Saleh's caravan. Livingstone was down to just five men.
His march south was through the same swamps of black mud and parasites and leeches from which he had just come. His attendants often carried Livingstone through the rivers, and lifted him up when he sank into one of the great underwater depressions left by elephant footprints.
Starvation became a constant once again. Willing to eat anything, Livingstone often gnawed unripened ears of corn down to the husk. His teeth moved over the cobs with such intensity that his two front teeth loosened in their sockets and fell out. Trying to make light of his new look, Livingstone joked in his journal that he looked like a hippopotamus, but his physical decline was serious. His dysentery was becoming chronic. His hair was turned from brown to gray-streaked. It had always been his habit to shave daily, but he'd given that up and now wore a bushy white beard. Livingstone truly looked like a feeble old man.
On June 26, 1868, honestly appraising his decline, he pondered where he would like to be buried when he died. “We came to a grave in the forest,” he wrote. “It was a little rounded mound, as if the occupant sat in it in the usual native way. It was strewed over with flour, and a number of large blue beads put on it. A little path showed that it had visitors. This is the sort of grave I should prefer. To lie in the still, still forest, and no hand ever disturb my bones. The graves at home always seem so miserable, especially in the cold, damp clay, and without elbow room.”
Livingstone threw himself into his work. There seemed no rhyme or reason to it: north one day, south another. Investigate one river, then another. He was not lost, just performing a marvelously thorough, detailed exploration. His location was southwest of Lake Tanganyika, almost a thousand miles from Zanzibar, walking in broad circles about the countryside. The commitment to a two-year journey was long forgotten. “I hope I am not premature in saying that the Sources of the Nile rise from ten to twelve degrees south—in fact, where Ptolemy placed them,” he wrote to his friend William Cotton Oswell, hoping to mail the letter when he finally made his way to Ujiji. The missive was a detailed explanation of the course of various rivers—and, through that explanation, an argument for his source theory. “The Chambeze is like the Chobe, forty to fifty yards broad. But the country is not like that at all. It is full of fast-flowing perennial burns—we cross several each day, and crossed the Chambeze in ten degrees, thirty-four minutes south. It runs west into Bangweolo. Leaving that lake it changes its name to the Luapula, then into Lake Moero. On leaving it, the name Lualaba is assumed.”
Then Livingstone's tone changed abruptly. “I hope you are playing with your children instead of being bothered by idiots. In looking back,” he wrote, “I have but one regret and that is that I did not feel it my duty to play with my children as much as to teach the Bakwains. I worked very hard at that and was tired out at night. Now I have none to play with.” Livingstone was showing himself to be far more than merely a one-dimensional heroic Victorian archetype. He possessed, in fact, a very human mixture of hope, dreams, longing, depression, spirituality, sexuality, and regret.
As July of 1868 came to end, even a three-year journey became less and less likely. Livingstone's search for the source, with all the redemption, financial peace, and everlasting glory it promised, held him tightly in its grip. He would not return to civilization until he found it. However, unable to continue his search without supplies, he finally turned around on July 30 and marched north to rejoin bin Saleh's caravan. He planned to travel with them to Ujiji. There, Livingstone would resupply, then resume the search. He was becoming sure that the Lualaba River was the source. He just needed to prove it by finding the Fountains of Herodotus, then following the Lualaba to where it linked with the Nile.
It took ten weeks to journey north and rejoin bin Saleh's
caravan, a task made easier because the Arabs still hadn't made forward progress. Several other Arab traders had joined with bin Saleh since Livingstone left, including Mohamed Bogharib, a flamboyant Arab trader whom Livingstone met at Casembe's village. The traders hoped to use their strength in numbers to travel safely through the region's hostile tribes—including the Mazitu, who had migrated from Lake Nyassa.
On November 8, 1868, waiting for the new caravan to begin marching for Ujiji, Livingstone summed up his thoughts on the great search. “The discovery of the sources of the Nile is somewhat akin in importance to the discovery of the Northwest Passage, which called forth, though in a minor degree, the energy, the perseverance, and the pluck of Englishmen. And that anything that does that is beneficial to the nation and its posterity. The discovery of the sources of the Nile possesses, moreover, an element of interest in which the Northwest Passage never had. The great men of antiquity have recorded their ardent desires to know the fountains of what Homer called ‘Egypt's heaven-descending spring.' That which these men failed to find, and that which many great minds in ancient times longed to know, has in this late stage been brought to light by the patient toil and laborious perseverance of Englishmen.”
Another four weeks later, on December 11, the march for Ujiji finally began.
• CHAPTER 7 •
A Sharp Lookout
November 1868–February 1869
Aden
1,600 Miles to Livingstone
The first Livingstone “disappearance” story in a United States newspaper ran in the New York Herald on April 9, 1868. The Herald ran another two weeks later. So when rumors out of Bombay predicted that Livingstone would emerge from Africa sometime close to New Year's 1869, the Herald dispatched Henry Morton Stanley on a top-secret mission to the continent. Banking on the hope Livingstone would emerge in either Cairo or Zanzibar, Stanley based himself in Aden. The ancient port lay roughly halfway between the two cities. He arrived on November 21, 1868, took a small room in a local guesthouse, then sent out feelers in both directions. Stanley was prepared to launch north by train to Cairo or south by ship to Zanzibar at a moment's notice.
Stanley, charging through life with a massive chip on his shoulder, was eager to prove Abyssinia wasn't a fluke. The years of drifting and failure weren't that far in the past. His grasp on success was still tentative. “I must keep a sharp lookout that my second coup shall be as much a success as my first,” he journaled.
There was no doubt that Livingstone was alive—in addition to Young's evidence, Arab caravans had returned to Zanzibar bearing year-old letters from the explorer, written after the date of his supposed slaying. Still, three years was a long time to dodge Western civilization. Livingstone's previous expeditions were frequently punctuated by visits to villages, trading centers, missionary outposts, and ports on the Indian Ocean. During the Zambezi expedition, Livingstone had even left the African mainland entirely, traveling several hundred miles by boat down the Mozambique Channel to pick up fresh supplies. Clearly, something out of the ordinary was taking place. It was as if Livingstone had secretly cast himself into exile.
As the mystery had deepened, public fascination over Livingstone's whereabouts had grown. The world joined England's wondering. Newspapers in Europe, India, and South Africa were running stories. In the absence of facts, rumors sprouted like weeds, tawdry and epic alike. London wags were gossiping Livingstone had fallen for an African woman and begun a new family. Sir Roderick Murchison, on the other hand, was publicly predicting Livingstone might be walking across Africa again, this time following the mighty Congo River's watershed through the uncharted rain forests west of Lake Tanganyika.
Of all the places Stanley could have chosen to wait for Livingstone—Cairo, Zanzibar, Suez—Aden was the most horrid. It was volcanic, notorious for flies and wind and heat. The only reason it had been carved from the desert thousands of years before was because it overlooked the mouth of the Red Sea. That strategic location made Aden irresistible to empires. The Egyptians came first, in the third century B.C. Then the Romans, the Persians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, and Turks. It was the British, however, taking residence by force in 1839, who were about to benefit more from their conquest than any previous tenant. By controlling the narrow slot dividing the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean, Britain would control trade through a new French-built waterway, the Suez Canal: The shortcut from Europe to the Orient via the waters Moses once parted was due to open in November 1869. “A strange place this,” Stanley noted in a rare wry moment during his otherwise bleak two and a half months stuck in Aden. “Fit only for a coal depot.”
With the conclusion of his dream so near, Stanley should have been ecstatic as he waited for Livingstone—but he was miserable. The locale's claustrophobia was punctuated by British disdain for the American in their midst. Other than a short trip across the Red Sea to officially set foot in Africa and have his picture taken atop a camel, Stanley passed the days alone in his room. He smoked cigars, wrote in his journal, and read. No book was too obscure to pass the time, with Stanley absorbing authors from Milton to Homer to Virgil to Dickens. Aden became his university, a place to resume the education that had ended at fifteen. By Christmas 1868, however, one month into his stay, the intellectual depth of the reading commingled with boredom, rejection, the solitary holiday season, and Stanley's massive insecurity. Depression swallowed him whole. He pondered death.
Low moods were nothing new to Stanley. They seemed to strike whenever he had too much time to think. Action—physical exertion, travel, accomplishment—was his typical stepladder whenever the depths consumed him, but with nothing to do in Aden Stanley was forced to look inward. Between Christmas and New Years' he plumbed his heart for vice. He binged on self-improvement goals. The Stanley who had used Lewis Noe as sexual bait to steal horses in Turkey was no more. The journalist's New Year's resolutions were to quit smoking; to rid his mind of “vile thoughts that stained”; and to be “better, nobler, purer.”
Stanley craved a corner of the globe where he would be the ultimate authority, beyond ridicule. Only then would he know peace. “I know not what I lack to make me happy,” he admitted to his journal in an exceptionally intimate revelation. “If I could find an island in mid-ocean, remote from the presence or reach of man, with a few necessaries sufficient to sustain life, I might be happy yet; for then I could forget what reminds me of unhappiness and, when death came, I should accept it as a long sleep and rest.”
Stanley found no rest in the first days of 1869. He was tense and withdrawn, craving a smoke. In lieu of cigars Stanley busied his hands with scissors and glue, clipping inspirational phrases from books and pasting them into his journal. The theme, expressed through Johnson, Shakespeare, and Addison, was warriors—brave men battling long odds. Stanley against nicotine. Stanley against himself. Stanley against the world.
Stanley lasted exactly one week without tobacco. But the quest toward long-term change continued. His goal was to fit in. He wanted to say the right things, do the right things. Stanley was well aware he tended to grate on people. Once, through the inexpensive walls of a railway station hotel room, Stanley overheard two travelers he'd just shared a train compartment with compare him to a leper. In Abyssinia, a British general found Stanley so annoying he called him a “howling cad.” And on his way from Alexandria to Aden, Stanley had endured a Scotsman sneering about the “active little Yankee.” Just six months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, having failed to develop a single lasting relationship with either man or woman, American or British, he wanted to be liked.
His journal entries turned philosophical. Stanley reminded himself to “count the raindrops falling during a storm or snow flakes as they drift through space.” He analyzed his personality and wrote that “curiosity undefined may turn itself into a deleterious agent” and “man has two voices: the silent and the articulable.”
And through all the introspection, Stanley waited for Livingstone. His source of information was the A
merican Consul in Zanzibar, a former ship's captain from Salem, Massachusetts, named Frances Rope Webb. The thirty-six-year-old Webb was a diplomat in title only. The bulk of his time was spent directing a merchant shipping business. His consular title was a convenient tool for waging trade wars against the British on behalf of himself and other U.S. expatriates in Zanzibar. For though the United States once dominated the flow of goods into East Africa, reallocation of American naval assets to wage the Civil War had seen Britain take over the market. Webb had been unable to reverse that trend. If anything, Britain's influence grew more each day. A frustrated Webb was developing a profound dislike for all things British—particularly his nemesis and peer, Vice-Consul John Kirk. Webb had never met Stanley. But when the journalist wrote inquiring about help locating Livingstone, Webb was thrilled—anything to thwart the British. Because there was no telegraph service from Zanzibar to Aden, the plan was for Webb to send word to Stanley by ship when Livingstone appeared.
In effect, Stanley and Webb were positioning themselves against the British Empire. They were not paranoid for sensing anti-American sentiment, and it was not of their making. Rather, it was part of a genuine, enduring tension between Britain and the United States. Part of the problem was perception—almost a century after the War of Independence and fifty years after its 1812 coda, many Britons still considered the United States their prodigal child. British politician Charles Dilke's book Greater Britain, which trumpeted this belief in 1866, was widely popular in England. To Britain's annoyance, though, not only did the United States reject the claim, it sought to expand its sphere of influence at Britain's expense.
That America was ascendant in the late 1860s defied logic. The Civil War should have decimated the nation. Lincoln's assassination had been staggering, a bare-knuckled punch to the windpipe. Postwar Reconstruction, with its carpetbaggers and Ku Klux Klan, was a reminder that racial hatred didn't disappear with the end of slavery. The nation was still very much divided. But like an adolescent staring into a mirror, examining the heft and might of newly adult muscles, America gazed at its potential in awe. “The United States,” American customs inspector Herman Melville noted in a post–Civil War essay, “wore empire on its brow.”