Let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put
on the armour of light – Romans 13:12
 |
| Henry Stanley "finds" Dr Livingstone in Africa, 1871 |
Step forward two extraordinary Brits, the first outsiders to
shine a pinpoint of light into the gloom. One was a pious Scottish doctor, the
other a hard-bitten newspaper reporter from north Wales. Both men appear to have been
carved from granite. And over the next five decades both pulled off a string of
mind-bogglingly brave journeys that today seem barely believable. Where
previous explorers had been forced to turn back, or died of fever, or ended up
speared like cocktail sausages, this pair crisscrossed Africa repeatedly, often
on foot, covering thousands of miles, enduring terrible trials, surviving every
kind of hazard the “dark continent” could throw at them. Their paths crossed
only once, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in
1871. That meeting, one of the most famous in history, began with probably the
most celebrated greeting of all time: “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
David Livingstone was born in the small industrial town of Blantyre, near Glasgow, in 1813. His childhood was harsh. The God-fearing Livingstones – five children, two adults – lived in a single room in a crowded factory tenement. By the age of ten, David was working six days a week in the local mill. Conditions were grim, beatings common, fourteen-hour shifts were the norm. Yet somehow the young Livingstone also managed to teach himself Latin, botany, theology and maths. By his twenties, he was studying medicine part-time at Glasgow, using his wages as a cotton spinner to pay for the classes. And just four years later, aged twenty-seven, this amazing lad from Lanarkshire was sailing away from Britain for Cape Town, on the southern tip of Africa, to take up his first position as a professional missionary-doctor.
Livingstone would be no ordinary evangelist. Refusing to
settle at a traditional mission station, he cast himself instead in an entirely
new role as a kind of itinerant preacher-explorer. And for the next decade he
wandered tirelessly across what is now Botswana, pushing into unknown
areas, meeting un-contacted people, spreading his Gospel to as many souls as
possible. He trudged across the vast Kalahari Desert,
becoming the first non-African to do so.
He marched on into unexpected grassland, scrubland, forest and swamp, reaching
as far as the mighty Zambezi River, 1,500 miles north of the Cape.
In February 1844 he was mauled by a lion which nearly tore off his left arm.
With gritted teeth, and without anaesthetic, Livingstone set the shattered bones
himself, waited for his terrible wounds to heal – then continued his lonely
wanderings, unfazed and undaunted, a fearless Christian soldier marching as to
war.
It was while recovering from his terrible mauling that Livingstone
proposed to Mary Moffat, the dumpy daughter of a fellow missionary. Six months later
they were married. Poor Mary. Livingstone threw himself into marriage with the
same zeal he had applied to his work and within six years his young bride had
produced five children. Wherever the restless protestant missionary now wandered,
Mary and her growing brood were expected to follow. In 1850, he dragged the lot
of them back across the sandy Kalahari in a bumpy old ox wagon - despite Mary
being heavily pregnant. The following year, in the desert again, the children’s
tongues turned black from dehydration after five days without water. They
survived on frogs, locusts and caterpillars. They went months without eating a
vegetable. All of the kids got malaria. One of them, a little girl, caught a
chest infection and died screaming in agony within weeks of being born.
Most Africans who witnessed Livingstone’s antics thought he
was raving mad. People stared in amused fascination as he strode into their
thatched villages, his parched lips split, his red face blistered by the fierce
sun. When he bowed his head in prayer, his puzzled audiences imagined he was
talking to spirits living under the ground. When he began to preach, they
either ran off in panic or doubled up with helpless laughter. Just one man took
him seriously: Chief Sechele of the Bakwain tribe. Sechele listened attentively,
responded warmly and even surprised Livingstone by offering to help him win
converts. But the headman’s proposal to flog his own people – and keep flogging
them – until they believed in the Christian God wasn’t quite what the good
doctor had in mind and the kind but unorthodox offer was politely declined.
In 1848 Sechele himself became a Christian. Eight long years
in the field and Livingstone finally had his first successful conversion – the
first, he hoped, of many. But it was a false dawn. Incredibly, Scotland’s most famous missionary wouldn’t
manage to convert another soul – not one – in three long decades spent in Africa. Worse: Sechele soon lapsed. Within a year, the
Bakwain chief had abandoned the path of righteousness and returned instead to
his old pagan ways and the decidedly un-Christian embrace of his five pretty
wives.
Such a hopeless missionary record would surely have sunk a
less determined man. But David Livingstone didn’t do hopeless. Instead he
ditched his ineffective wandering-preacher idea and came up with an ambitious
new plan to travel to the very heart of Africa
and open up the continent to European traders. The introduction of western
commerce, he believed, would squeeze out slavery and heathen practises. Tribes
would then become rich and “civilised”. And that in turn would lead to mass
conversions to Christianity. This was optimism at its most blind. Livingstone
was, in effect, proposing to single-handedly transform Africa
and its people. He would be a pioneer, a trail-blazer, a visionary leading the
way for others to follow. He would boldly go where no white man in his right
mind had gone before.
Mercifully, Mary and the children were spared further torment.
In early 1852 they sailed home from Cape Town as
Africa’s self-appointed saviour set off on
what would prove to be one of the most spectacular journeys in the history of
exploration. He began with a punishing tramp north from the Cape,
back into the African interior. That alone took nearly a year. After reaching
the Zambezi, he steered west and struggled for a further 1,000 miles through
unmapped bush to the Atlantic port of Luanda, now the capital of Angola. Livingstone was practically
a dead man when he arrived at Luanda.
Stick thin and shivering with fever, he had to be carried into the town. But
with typical insane self-belief, he then abruptly turned around and retraced
his steps back to the very centre of the continent where he rejoined the
Zambezi and followed the great river as it twisted and looped its way to Africa’s distant eastern shore.
Livingstone faced every kind of African danger on that
incredible odyssey – attacks by fierce tribesmen with teeth filed to points, hairy
canoe journeys down crocodile-filled rivers, long punishing marches through
furious tropical downpours. He endured chronic dysentery. He suffered more than
thirty bouts of malaria. The huge experimental doses of quinine he took for
fever made him vomit blood and temporarily lose his hearing. But no obstacle
could stop the dauntless Scot. Travelling with few supplies and only a handful
of porters, he tramped across desert, bush and jungle for a total of 6,000
miles. Along the way he “discovered” the great falls
at Mosioatunya, or “the smoke that
thunders”, and renamed them Victoria Falls.
And when he staggered into the Indian Ocean port
of Quelimane on 25 May 1856, an
incredible four years after leaving Cape
Town, he became the first explorer to have crossed the
African continent from coast to coast.
Livingstone was greeted as a national hero when he returned
to Britain.
Crowds mobbed him in the street. Queen Victoria
invited him to tea. His vivid account of his epic journey, Missionary Travels, was a mega-bestseller. There’s a formal portrait
from this period showing Dr Livingstone booted and suited and surrounded by his
family. He sports a tremendous moustache and sideburns and is gazing into the
distance, looking relaxed, comfortable, contented. This was his finest hour. A
less extraordinary man would have surely hung up his compass and boots right
then, quit while he was ahead. But of course the great missionary-doctor was
not for quitting. The following year, 1858, he sailed back to his beloved Africa – this time at the head of a large
government-funded expedition.
Livingstone now boasted an official title, Roving Consul, and
began wearing a distinctive blue cap with gold trim, his trademark “consular
cap”. Six British experts travelled with him, including a geologist and an
engineer. Their aim was to steam up the Zambezi in a paddleboat and transform
the river into a commercial waterway, “God’s highway” to Africa’s
interior. The Zambezi Expedition, which was to drag on for six years, was a
disaster. Waterfalls and wild rapids made the river un-navigable. Tribal war
and famine killed any chance of trade. Livingstone, always a bit of a loner,
proved a hopeless leader of men. And farce turned to tragedy when groups of
idealistic Christians, inspired by their hero, began following him out to Africa and dying like flies. In one of the worst cases,
two evangelical families – four adults, seven children – laboured 1,000 miles
upcountry from the Cape before all but three
of them were killed by fever. An Anglican bishop went barrelling off into the
bush in full canonicals - complete with crosier - and he too was soon hastening
to the Promised Land. In 1862, Mary Livingstone rejoined her husband and within
months she had also succumbed to malaria. By the end of her life, poor Mary had
become a desperate alcoholic, driven to drink by her husband’s long absences
and the pressure of raising a large family alone. Her death at forty-one
plunged Livingstone into despair. “For the first time in my life,” he wrote in
his journal, “I feel willing to die.”
The government eventually called time on the catastrophic
Zambezi Expedition and Livingstone returned home to face ridicule in the press.
“We were promised trade; and there is no trade,” scoffed The Times. “We were
promised converts and not one has been made.” More tragedy followed when his
eldest son, eighteen-year-old Robert, died in a prison camp in the American
Civil War. And Livingstone – now in his fifties - was increasingly troubled by
non-stop diarrhoea and persistently bleeding haemorrhoids, the price of so many
hard years in the tropics. But with his usual stoic denial, the fallen hero simply
refused to throw in the towel, refused to give up on Africa.
Another expedition was swiftly organised, this time partly funded by Royal
Geographical Society. With his new sponsors in mind, Livingstone settled on a spectacular
secular goal: finding the source of the River Nile. And in the summer of 1865
he left England
and disappeared into the African bush for a third - and final - time. There
were no Europeans with him now. Fifty-nine Africans marched alongside him, carrying
his gear. Only one white man would ever see the Roving Consul alive again: an ambitious
young newspaper hack by the name of Henry Morton Stanley.
Henry Stanley was born in Denbigh, north Wales, in 1841 – the year Livingstone had first
set foot in Africa. Originally called John
Rowlands, he endured a brutal and lonely childhood after being abandoned by his
unmarried mother and dumped in a local workhouse. At seventeen, he sailed to
the United States
where he changed his name. He distinguished himself by fighting for – and
deserting from – both sides during the American Civil War. With the return of
peace he established himself as a promising new journalist, filing a string of
colourful stories from the emerging Wild West and landing a job on the
country’s most popular daily, the New York Herald. Stanley soon caught the eye of the newspaper’s
flamboyant and filthy rich owner, James Gordon Bennett Junior. And it was
Bennett who handed Stanley
the secret assignment that would turn him into a celebrity. It was a
straightforward challenge, a do-or-die mission. Two words: find Livingstone.
David Livingstone had been missing for half a decade by the time
the Herald’s special correspondent began his formidable search. The intrepid Welshman
knew little about Africa, less about exploring – and his only clue to the
doctor’s whereabouts was a single letter, sent from Lake
Tanganyika, which had somehow found its way to the coast. But
confidence is everything, and Stanley
was full of it. A tough-looking lad – just five-six but solid, like a wrestler
– he had bull-neck, fierce blue-grey eyes and the beginnings of a magnificent
walrus moustache. Resplendent in pith helmet and white flannel suit and riding
a dazzling Arab stallion, he set off inland from the eastern port of Bagamoyo,
now in Tanzania,
on 21 March 1871. Behind marched a small army of porters and guards. The men carried
miles of cloth and brass wire to trade with tribes in the interior. They had
forty guns, tons of ammunition, a mountain of battle-axes, swords and knives. Stanley’s personal
baggage included a tin bath, a bearskin rug and a bottle of Worcestershire
sauce. He took a dog, Omar, to guard his tent. An American flag flew at the front
of the column. And two hard-nut British sailors – a Scot and a Cockney – were
brought along as back-up.
Stanley was ready for anything. He needed to be. Within a week of leaving the coast, the thoroughbred stallion was dead, its blood poisoned by biting tsetse fly. The expedition’s baggage donkeys quickly sickened. And after a desperate five-day slog through mosquito-infested swamps, the heavily-laden men started to come down with smallpox, malaria and chronic diarrhoea. An African carrier was the first to die, from dysentery. Omar, the dog, bought it next. Suspected elephantiasis killed the Scottish sailor. Then malaria got the Cockney. Stanley also found himself in the grip of a terrifying fever. He lost three stone. He saw “insane visions”. He endured “frenetic brain-throbs”. But he drove himself and his party onwards – sick, exhausted but unwavering – still just thirty years old, the only white in a group of a hundred men.
And sickness wasn’t the only enemy. Spear-waving African warriors repeatedly threatened and harassed the column. Frightened, fed-up porters began deserting in droves. Others refused to shoulder their loads. And with nerves starting to crack and morale running dangerously low, Stanley was forced to chain and beat some of his reluctant carriers to keep the show on the road. By October 1871 – seven months into the journey – the expedition had dwindled to just thirty-three disconsolate travellers. The Indian Ocean was seven hundred miles behind them now, a very long walk home. But then, at last, some brighter news. Ahead lay Lake Tanganyika. Somewhere on its eastern shore stood a large ivory- and slave-trading town called Ujiji. And there, amid the jumble of straw huts and flat-roofed mud houses, a decrepit old European man was rumoured to have set up home.
Stanley was ready for anything. He needed to be. Within a week of leaving the coast, the thoroughbred stallion was dead, its blood poisoned by biting tsetse fly. The expedition’s baggage donkeys quickly sickened. And after a desperate five-day slog through mosquito-infested swamps, the heavily-laden men started to come down with smallpox, malaria and chronic diarrhoea. An African carrier was the first to die, from dysentery. Omar, the dog, bought it next. Suspected elephantiasis killed the Scottish sailor. Then malaria got the Cockney. Stanley also found himself in the grip of a terrifying fever. He lost three stone. He saw “insane visions”. He endured “frenetic brain-throbs”. But he drove himself and his party onwards – sick, exhausted but unwavering – still just thirty years old, the only white in a group of a hundred men.
And sickness wasn’t the only enemy. Spear-waving African warriors repeatedly threatened and harassed the column. Frightened, fed-up porters began deserting in droves. Others refused to shoulder their loads. And with nerves starting to crack and morale running dangerously low, Stanley was forced to chain and beat some of his reluctant carriers to keep the show on the road. By October 1871 – seven months into the journey – the expedition had dwindled to just thirty-three disconsolate travellers. The Indian Ocean was seven hundred miles behind them now, a very long walk home. But then, at last, some brighter news. Ahead lay Lake Tanganyika. Somewhere on its eastern shore stood a large ivory- and slave-trading town called Ujiji. And there, amid the jumble of straw huts and flat-roofed mud houses, a decrepit old European man was rumoured to have set up home.
Stanley
was bursting with anticipation when he rode into Ujiji on one of his last clapped-out
donkeys. His sun helmet had been freshly chalked the previous night, his
flannel suit pressed, his knee-high leather boots oiled and buffed. The Stars
and Stripes was again unfurled. His men fired their rifles into the air in
greeting. And when a crowd of locals gathered and led Stanley directly towards an elderly white
man, the eager reporter could barely control his excitement. Before him stood a
pale-faced, grey-bearded old-timer in tweed trousers, a red waistcoat – and a faded
blue-and-gold cap. Was it Livingstone? It had to be. Stanley’s initial thought, he later wrote, was
to vent his joy by “turning a somersault” and “slashing at trees”. His search
was over. He’d pulled off the near-impossible. He had the greatest scoop of his
short career. But of course there were no unseemly displays of acrobatics that
day, no improper assaults on the foliage. This was 1871. Chaps had standards. Manners
were crucial. So instead Stanley
calmly climbed down from his donkey, met the stranger’s eye, politely raised
his hat, and said…
Well, what did he say? New evidence unearthed by historian
Tim Jeal suggests it wasn’t “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” at all but something mundane,
something that no one even bothered to record. Jeal thinks Stanley made up his epic one-liner later. And
he’s convinced the working-class Welshman did so because he wanted to portray
himself as the archetypal Victorian “gentleman” – unfazed and unflappable –
someone like Alexander Kinglake whose ice-cool greeting to a fellow English
traveller in the Sinai desert had so impressed Britain a quarter of a century earlier.
The result was a masterstroke of British understatement. Four simple words at
once inspired, unforgettable and unintentionally hilarious. In Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s
Greatest Explorer, Jeal calls the remark “probably the most famous phrase
in the history of journalism”. But there’s no mention of it in Stanley’s diary or letters. Livingstone’s
journal doesn’t refer to it either. And so it’s a phrase, Jeal concludes, that
was “almost certainly never uttered”.
What we do know for sure is that Livingstone did lose his
cool that day. He’d been back in Africa for
nearly six years now and was in a bad way. His teeth were all gone,
flesh-eating ulcers had gnawed at his feet, a succession of grim diseases –
pneumonia, dysentery, rheumatic fever - had left him pitifully weak and
tortured by continual bleeding from his backside. Exhausted and flat-broke, the
haemorrhoidal old hero was living on food handouts from, off all people, Arab
slavers. His original fifty-nine followers had shrunk to just four “faithfuls”
who spent much of their time stealing and smoking marijuana. Isolated and in
constant pain, his only comfort was his Bible which he read repeatedly from
cover to cover. When Stanley
advanced into town wearing a gleaming white suit and bearing medicine and letters
from home it must have seemed to Livingstone that his prayers had pierced the
clouds and an angel had tumbled to earth. He held it together long enough for
the pair to withdraw to a hut, away from onlookers. “You have brought me new
life,” he told the newcomer steadily, repeating the words in disbelief. But
then his eyes welled, his throat choked, and he dissolved into a puddle of
unmanly tears.
Stanley and Livingstone spent the next four months exploring parts of Lake Tanganyika together. A tight father-son bond was forged during that short time. And when the odd couple parted, in March 1872, it was the younger man’s turn to get misty-eyed. Stanley tried hard to persuade his new friend to return to Britain with him. The old boy badly needed to see a doctor about his bowels and could have used a set of false teeth. But Livingstone refused to quit Africa before he had settled the Nile question and his protégé turned for the coast alone. “I looked back and watched his grey figure, fading dimmer in the distance…” Stanley wrote, “I gulped down my great grief and turned away.” Five months later the triumphant Welshman was back in Europe writing How I Found Livingstone and on his way to becoming one of the most celebrated men on the planet. Livingstone – approaching sixty now but looking far older – had little more than a year to live.
Stanley and Livingstone spent the next four months exploring parts of Lake Tanganyika together. A tight father-son bond was forged during that short time. And when the odd couple parted, in March 1872, it was the younger man’s turn to get misty-eyed. Stanley tried hard to persuade his new friend to return to Britain with him. The old boy badly needed to see a doctor about his bowels and could have used a set of false teeth. But Livingstone refused to quit Africa before he had settled the Nile question and his protégé turned for the coast alone. “I looked back and watched his grey figure, fading dimmer in the distance…” Stanley wrote, “I gulped down my great grief and turned away.” Five months later the triumphant Welshman was back in Europe writing How I Found Livingstone and on his way to becoming one of the most celebrated men on the planet. Livingstone – approaching sixty now but looking far older – had little more than a year to live.
It was the bleeding haemorrhoids that got him in the end. Ash-grey
and desperately weak from blood-loss, David Livingstone passed his last night
prostrated in a straw hut near the great Bangweulu swamps of modern-day Zambia. He was done-in,
finished. His body said no more. In the early hours of 1 May 1873, sensing
death’s approach, the old warhorse gathered what remained of his strength and
with one last almighty effort dragged himself off his cot to kneel. Next
morning his men found him there - stone dead – still on his knees beside the
bed, his head in his hands as if in prayer. They buried Livingstone’s heart and
other internal organs under a tree. But his body, preserved in salt and wrapped
in cloth and bark, was carried more than 1,000 miles to the ocean in a final
epic act of loyalty by his faithful followers. A British ship took the doctor home.
His withered remains were interred in the nave of Westminster Abbey on 18 April
1874. Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister, was among the mourners. Queen Victoria sent flowers. Thousands
of ordinary people stood outside the ancient church, many of them in tears. And
Henry Stanley, the “workhouse bastard” who Livingstone had thought of as a son,
was invited to help carry the coffin.
A torch was passed that day under the great gothic arches of
Westminster Abbey. Within six months Stanley was
back in east Africa determined to complete Livingstone’s work and solve the Nile puzzle once and for always. This time Stanley set off into the interior with two hundred Africans,
three English toughs, five dogs - and the backing of newspapers on both sides
of the Atlantic. His first job was to carefully
survey Lake Victoria, seven hundred miles inland.
Next he marched south to Lake Tanganyika, which
was also circumnavigated. Then he pushed even further west, deep into the
steaming cauldron of Congo,
to investigate a river called the Lualaba which Livingstone believed flowed
into the Nile. Stanley reached the banks of the wide,
fast-flowing Lualaba in October 1876. By now more than a quarter of his
followers had already been lost to hunger, disease and desertion. Two of his three
Englishmen were dead, killed by fever and smallpox. And dozens of troublesome
African warriors had been silenced with bullets along the way. But the hardest
part of the journey still lay ahead. Now Stanley
would attempt to trace the Lualaba through dense, uncharted jungle – all the
way to the sea if necessary - and find out exactly where the mysterious
waterway went.
The 1,000-mile odyssey that followed topped even David
Livingstone’s epic coast-to-coast slog. With only a handful of small boats
between them, the majority of Stanley’s
men set off downstream on foot, hacking and groping their way through the nightmarish
tangle of branches and creepers that infested the riverbank. Insects assaulted
them. Deadly snakes threatened them. Local forest-dwellers, wary of slave
raiders, rained spears and poisoned arrows down on them. On New Year’s Day 1877
the weary column faced a terrifying charge by armed tribesmen in war canoes yelling,
“Meat! Meat!”. Stanley
raised his gun, took aim - and hit two of the advancing cannibals with a single
bullet, a fluke shot that abruptly halted the attack.
Things appeared to improve slightly when Stanley bought enough canoes for all his men
to continue by water. But then they ran into a new problem: rapids. A chain of
seven huge waterfalls, spread over sixty miles, meant the entire flotilla – two
dozen boats – had to be pulled repeatedly from the river and dragged around the
raging torrents. It took almost a month to hack paths through the thick bush. Day
and night the travellers listened to the eerie sound of war-drums drifting out
of the forest around them. Human skulls grinned from poles when they passed
deserted villages. One night an intruder crept into camp and planted an
eighteen-inch knife in a sleeping porter’s chest. But that great chain of
waterfalls – later named Stanley
Falls – also proved to be
hugely significant. It was here that the north-flowing Lualaba changed course
and swung sharply westwards, no longer in the direction of the Mediterranean
but towards the Atlantic Ocean. That meant the
Lualaba could not run into the Nile as Livingstone
had suspected. Stanley realised he must instead
be on the upper reaches of another huge African river, the Congo. And,
through a process of elimination, he now knew that the Nile’s starting point
had to be a large outlet he’d earlier seen spilling from Lake
Victoria’s northern shore, the one first sighted by John Hanning
Speke back in 1858. He’d cracked it. The greatest geographical question of the
day was answered. Now all he had to do was stay alive long enough to tell the
world about his spectacular discovery.
There was certainly no guarantee of that. Eight-hundred
miles of chokingly hot jungle still stood between Stanley
and Africa’s Atlantic coast. His porters, rotted
by scurvy and flesh-eating ulcers, were on the point of mutiny. His translator would
soon go insane and run off into the forest with a parrot on his shoulder, never
to be seen again. Meanwhile the surging Lualaba-Congo River
– now seven miles wide in places - was dragging his small fleet of canoes towards
the ocean at terrifying speed. Boatloads of men were swept over waterfalls. The
expedition’s last English officer was among the drowned. Stanley began to sink into a depression. And
when he finally arrived at the river’s mouth in August 1877 he looked like
death, skull-faced and prematurely grey, his boots rotten, his clothes in
tatters. He’d been on the move for nearly three torturous years. His colossal trek
– 7,000 miles – had cost more than a hundred lives. But the boy from the north Wales workhouse
had also made history. The Nile mystery was settled and, more, Stanley
had become the first explorer to successfully trace the immense Congo River
from its shadowy beginnings deep within the great forests of central Africa all
the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
It was a staggering achievement, arguably the greatest journey
of all time. Stanley - still just 36 - returned
to Europe and for a short while lived the high life, hobnobbing with royalty
and producing another bestseller, Through
the Dark Continent. But just two years
later he was back in Congo,
this time hired by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, to open the region to
trade. Africans who met Stanley
during this period called him Bula Matari - “breaker of rocks”. For five gruelling
years he built roads, set up trading posts and cut land deals with Congolese
chiefs. A quarter of all Europeans sent out to help him died. But nothing could
kill off the determined little Welshman with the heart of a lion and the constitution
of an ox. What did not survive, however, was Stanley’s reputation. Despite Leopold’s lofty
rhetoric, the Belgian king did not bring commerce to Congo. The opposite: he looted it. The
new colony was turned into his vast private estate and stripped of its valuable
rubber, ivory and timber. Enslaved Africans who didn’t work hard enough for the
king’s agents had their hands, feet and even breasts cut off. Women were
flogged to death, villages burned, the old and sick were bayoneted. Stanley played no part in
these atrocities. The worst were
committed long after he had returned to Britain. But we judge a man by his friends and, for right or wrong, the
name Henry Stanley will be forever linked with the sinister figure of King
Leopold II and Belgium’s vicious
“rape of the Congo”.
Stanley finally quit central
Africa in 1884 and settled in London.
He was middle-aged now, comfortably off, keen to be married. His wandering days
seemed over, his exploring a thing of the past. But extraordinary events in Sudan, Congo’s neighbour to the north, drew
him back for one last impossible adventure. Sudan
– Africa’s largest country – was theoretically
under joint British-Egyptian rule at the time. But a bloody uprising by Muslim
extremists was spreading rapidly. Its leader – the messianic Mahdi, or Guided
One – was calling for the holy slaughter of infidel invaders. And his fanatical
followers had stunned Britain
by sweeping into the capital Khartoum
and butchering General Charles Gordon on the steps of his palace. In the far south of the country, Gordon’s governor
of Equatoria province – Emin Pasha - found himself cut off from the outside
world, isolated and alone, the last colonial standing in a country aflame. The
Pasha’s desperate pleas for help found their way to the British press. A rescue
operation was mounted. Stanley
agreed to lead it. And in March 1887, Africa’s greatest explorer once again found
himself back at the mouth of the Congo River and
about to embark on his toughest test yet, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.
Having already crossed
the continent from east to west, Stanley
now set out to do the same thing in reverse. His idea was to take his rescue
party more than 1,000 miles upstream into the far north-eastern corner of Congo, where the country borders Sudan. From
there the men would strike out overland, hacking a path through untrodden forest
towards Equatoria and the embattled Pasha. With luck they would reach their man
before he was cut to pieces like Gordon. The governor would then be evacuated
to Africa’s east coast and returned in triumph to Europe.
To this end Stanley set off up the Congo River with an incredible eight hundred porters and
soldiers, ten of them British officers. The journey began with everybody
squeezed aboard steamboats together with tons of food, guns, gunpowder and
ammunition. But at the first set of impassable rapids all the men were forced
to disembark, shoulder heavy bundles of supplies and weaponry – and trudge on
through the humid jungle in a single line that stretched for four miles.
Tropical rain hammered down. The ground turned to sludge. Hundreds of men became
feverish. But worse – much worse – was in store further up the gloomy, muddy
river.
By June the expedition had reached an isolated village called Yambuya, deep in the interior, where Stanley divided his men into two groups. Anxious to reach Emin Pasha as quickly as possible, he now pressed on with an advance column of four hundred lightly equipped men. The rest of his party stayed at Yambuya with orders to guard the heavy stores and follow later when more porters had been recruited. Splitting the expedition was a mistake. A harrowing year would pass before the two groups were reunited. The men with the rear column would suffer appallingly in their leader’s absence. But Stanley’s main concern in mid-1887 was not those he was leaving behind but rather what lay ahead: a haunting, evil-smelling swamp-jungle which locals called the Ituri Forest.
Stanley was the first white man to set foot in the Ituri Forest.
And no sooner had he done so than poison-tipped arrows were once again thumping
into the ground around him. One of his deputies, Lieutenant William
Stairs, was hit in the chest, just below the heart; his life was saved by the expedition’s
doctor who bravely sucked out the poison with his mouth. Others weren’t so
lucky, dying of lockjaw several days after being wounded. Dysentery returned to
claim more lives. Some men collapsed from hunger and exhaustion. Those too weak
to keep up were simply left behind. The rest shambled on, often waist-deep in stinking
mud, surviving on a grim diet of slugs, caterpillars and unpalatable wild beans.
There was only one bright spot on that terrible forest-crossing: one of the
world’s first meeting between white man and pygmy. The young Mbuti woman stood
two-foot-nine-inches tall. Stanley
found her “very prepossessing”.
The intrepid party eventually emerged from the dark swamp and found Emin Pasha on the sunny banks of Lake Albert. This meeting was to prove much less satisfying. Despite the Pasha’s odd Turkish name, Stanley had always imagined he was coming to the aid of a very British hero, a ramrod military chap who was bravely holding out against all odds. He was therefore surprised to find himself face to face with a short, dark bearded fellow in a neat suit and fez. Far from being British, the governor of Equatoria was a German doctor, born Eduard Schnitzer. Far from being a hero, he had deserted a large family back in Europe. And far from being in desperate straits, he now cheerfully informed his rescuers that he didn’t need relieving after all since the rebel threat had apparently eased. Stanley was not amused. But nor was he going to settle for any nonsense. Too much money and too many lives had been invested in this mission for it to be abandoned, and the Pasha was informed bluntly that he should prepare to be “rescued” - whether he liked it or not. First, however, there was the question of the rearguard. Ominously, nothing had been heard from the men at Yambuya in a year. Stanley realised he now had no choice but to head back into the primeval Ituri Forest and find out exactly what was going on.
The intrepid party eventually emerged from the dark swamp and found Emin Pasha on the sunny banks of Lake Albert. This meeting was to prove much less satisfying. Despite the Pasha’s odd Turkish name, Stanley had always imagined he was coming to the aid of a very British hero, a ramrod military chap who was bravely holding out against all odds. He was therefore surprised to find himself face to face with a short, dark bearded fellow in a neat suit and fez. Far from being British, the governor of Equatoria was a German doctor, born Eduard Schnitzer. Far from being a hero, he had deserted a large family back in Europe. And far from being in desperate straits, he now cheerfully informed his rescuers that he didn’t need relieving after all since the rebel threat had apparently eased. Stanley was not amused. But nor was he going to settle for any nonsense. Too much money and too many lives had been invested in this mission for it to be abandoned, and the Pasha was informed bluntly that he should prepare to be “rescued” - whether he liked it or not. First, however, there was the question of the rearguard. Ominously, nothing had been heard from the men at Yambuya in a year. Stanley realised he now had no choice but to head back into the primeval Ituri Forest and find out exactly what was going on.
What happened next
was grotesque, an unfitting finale to twenty amazing years of adventure. Stanley tracked down the remnants
of the rear column at a place called Banalya, just ninety-five miles from
Yambuya. And as he strode into camp he found himself entering a “charnel
house”, a place of horror and death. Half the men he had left behind were now
dead, the others walking corpses. Bodies lay unburied on the ground. Skeletal
survivors stared ahead blankly, their skins covered in “ulcers as large as
saucers”. Just one of the rearguard’s five Europeans remained, Sergeant William
Bonny. And it was from him that Stanley
first learned of the stomach-churning events of the previous year. Major Edmond
Barttelot, the officer in charge, had apparently gone mad and for months had
rampaged around flogging, shooting and working men to death. One of his victims
died after being given 300 lashes with a hippo-hide whip; another was forced to
dig his own grave before being executed for desertion. The major was finally shot
by an African. But an even worse crime – one so appalling it’s barely
comprehensible – was committed by his deputy, James Sligo Jameson, a member of
the Irish whiskey family, who before dying of fever had bought an
eleven-year-old girl for six handkerchiefs and handed her to cannibals so he
could sketch her being killed, cooked and eaten. Sergeant Bonny showed Stanley the Irishman’s
journal, which corroborated the horrific story. He was more circumspect,
however, about the brutal beatings that he too had inflicted on the men in his
command. And he made no mention at all of the African women that all five
European officers had routinely bought or kidnapped for sex.
With the rear column’s wretched survivors in tow, Stanley
now undertook a third grim march through the haunting Ituri Forest.
He reunited his expedition at Lake Albert. He
delivered his reluctant Pasha safely to the coast. But by that point four
hundred of his original eight hundred men were dead. Stanley, aged forty-eight, his hair and
moustache now snow white, looked like a man of eighty-four. And in a farcical
twist the Pasha showed his thanks by promptly disappearing back into the
interior and getting himself beheaded by Arab slavers. Stanley
would never again put his life on the line in Africa.
He settled in Britain,
married, adopted a son. He advertised tea, tents, Bovril and soap. He was
knighted and became a Liberal-Unionist MP. In 1903 his cast-iron constitution
finally failed him and he suffered a paralysing stroke. The following year,
aged sixty-three, he was dead. Henry Stanley’s last wish was to be buried in
Westminster Abbey alongside his great friend and saintly father-figure, David
Livingstone. It was denied. Instead the workhouse bastard turned empire
builder, Livingstone’s saviour and Leopold’s stooge, the fierce little Welshman
who made light of Africa’s darkest terrors, lies in the quiet Surrey
churchyard of Pirbright near his final home. His gravestone is a huge block of granite, taller than a man. It bears
his Congolese nickname, Bula Matari. And there’s a fitting epitaph, just one
word, carved into the hard stone. It says simply: “Africa.”
* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!
* Thanks for visiting Great British Nutters. I hope you have enjoyed what you've read. I no longer post here but have started a new blog called History Nuts. It's along similar lines but with much shorter posts. Please take a look. You can also follow @historynuts on Twitter or via my facebook.com/historynuts. Thanks again!
SOURCES
Jeal, Tim,
Livingstone (Yale, 2001)
Jeal, Tim, Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London,
2007)
Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost (London, 1999)
Morris, Jan, Heaven’s Command (London, 1973)
Pettitt, Clare, Dr Livingstone, I Presume? (London, 2007)
Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost (London, 1999)
Morris, Jan, Heaven’s Command (London, 1973)
Pettitt, Clare, Dr Livingstone, I Presume? (London, 2007)
Ross, Andrew,
David Livingstone: Mission
and Empire (London,
2002)
