Livingstone and Stanley: Saint and Sinner

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

CENTRAL AFRICA WAS STILL mystery to all Europeans right up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Its great lakes and teeming rainforests were unknown, its diverse tribes and abundant wildlife undreamed of. White settlers had been holed up in forts and ports dotted along Africa’s coastline for centuries - but not one had yet penetrated its fearful interior. Some imagined a huge silent desert within, a scorched landscape of fierce winds and blistering temperatures. Others pictured only slavery, savagery and poisonous snakes. Maps were blank. People were clueless. In many European minds, central Africa – colourful, chaotic, vibrant central Africa - was a benighted, empty place. It was a void, a vacuum, a great unknown – the dark heart of a troubled continent.

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 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.

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.

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!

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)

Ross, Andrew, David Livingstone: Mission and Empire (London, 2002)

Alexander Gordon Laing: Mission to Timbuktu

“I shall show myself to be… a man of enterprise and genius” – Alexander Gordon Laing

Alexander Gordon Laing

THE FIRST EUROPEAN EXPLORER to reach Timbuktu was a dashing young Scotsman called Alexander Gordon Laing. It was a staggering feat, achieved alone against appalling odds. And it was supposed to turn Laing into a star.

Timbuktu was the ultimate prize for adventurers back in the early nineteenth century. The “lost city”, hidden somewhere in Africa’s vast unexplored interior, was believed to be dripping with gold and precious jewels. Finding the place - and putting Britain’s stamp on it before the French did – was something of a national obsession.

Laing was always confident that he would succeed where dozens before him had failed. A tall, tough, handsome bloke with wild curly hair and whopping sideburns, by the mid-1820s he’d already made a bit of a name for himself in West Africa as a brave soldier and adventurer. He had just turned thirty when he set his sights on Timbuktu.

The plan was bold and direct: Laing would sail to the north African port of Tripoli where he would brush up on his Arabic and hire some camels. From there he would head south into the furnace of the Sahara Desert. Then he’d simply keep going, travelling from well to well, oasis to oasis, till he found his city of gold.

And he wasn’t going to stop at Timbuktu. After locating the legendary city, he planned to press on and find the mysterious river Niger. No one had yet mapped that great West African waterway or worked out where it spilled into the sea. Laing, never short of self-confidence, planned to solve that puzzle too. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he wrote to his parents, “and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.”

Genius or not, it was never going to be easy. The adventurous Scotsman would be heading into the world’s largest and harshest desert without a clear idea of where he was going. The Sahara was home to some of the cruellest and most ruthless bandits on the planet, men who wouldn’t think twice about killing someone for their boots. And if a gang of murderous thieves didn’t get him, malaria, dysentery or some other grim tropical disease almost certainly would.

The history of British exploration in that part of the world didn’t exactly bode well. For decades, young white men with a thirst for glory had been heading into Africa’s hostile interior to try to unlock the mysteries within. Most never came back. Twenty years earlier another Scot, Mungo Park, had disappeared while also trying to trace the Niger to its mouth. Forty-six Europeans set out on that journey with Park; not one of them survived.

Now Laing was going to try something similar, only without the support of a small army of compatriots. But rather than spending time worrying about it, the young soldier of excessive optimism did something no one could have predicted – he fell madly in love. Within days of arriving in Tripoli, his heart was fixed on Emma Warrington, the “delicate, flower-like” daughter of the city’s British Consul. Within weeks, Laing was down on one knee.

Emma’s dad, Hanmer Warrington, was amazed. “Although I am aware that Major Laing is a very gentlemanly, honourable and good man still I must allow a more wild, enthusiastic and romantic attachment never before existed,” he wrote to Laing’s boss in London, the colonial secretary Lord Bathurst. But Emma didn’t care; she was swept away by her handsome suitor. The love-struck couple tied the knot on 14 July, 1825. And just two days later Laing kissed his new bride goodbye, mounted his camel and set off into the Sahara on his death or glory mission.

We’ll never know the full horror of what the adventurous Scot went through on his long, lonely trek across the desert. His private journal was lost and Laing, as we shall see, never got to tell his tale. But several letters he sent back to Tripoli in the hands of messengers do survive. And these speak of a brutal, spirit-crushing journey plagued by hunger, thirst and horrific violence.

Laing left Tripoli with a small group of brave supporters: a Caribbean-born servant called Jack le Bore who’d been with him for years; two African ship’s carpenters named Roger and Harry (they’d come in handy when he reached the Niger); a freed slave called Bongola; and a Jewish interpreter, Abraham Nahun. Outside the city’s gates, they teamed up with Sheikh Babani, a merchant from the desert who promised to guide Laing to Timbuktu in ten weeks.

The intrepid party moved steadily south under the brain-boiling sun, travelling along trade routes that have been used by desert caravans for centuries. Temperatures at midday hit 120F. Their drinking water turned hot and muddy in their goatskin pouches. Food was grim-smelling patties made of dried fish and camel’s milk. They were forced to travel hundreds of miles out of their way to avoid trails stalked by bandits.

It took Laing and his men eight weeks just to get to Ghadames, an oasis town still more than a thousand miles north of Timbuktu. Sick and exhausted, they rested there for nearly two months. When a bunch of love letters arrived from Emma, Laing decided to throw in the towel; it was time to return to his wife. But then the young explorer changed his mind again and resolved to press on after all. A large comet in the sky filled him with confidence. “I regard it as a happy omen,” he wrote, “it beckons me on & binds me to the termination of the Niger and to Timbuktu.”

Four weeks later the Scotsman and his team rolled into In Salah, another desert settlement in present-day Algeria. It was now December, 1825. Laing had been on the road for five months. But at In Salah he faced yet another long delay as the whole town dithered about whether it was safe for him to go on.

The word on the street was that the lawless Tuareg – fierce nomads who lived by plundering trade caravans – were stepping up their attacks in the desert. Dozens of Arab merchants had been sitting tight at In Salah for months, waiting for the threat to pass. Everyone suggested Laing do likewise. Only a madman would strike out into the desert now, they said. Timbuktu would have to wait.

So Laing tried waiting. Christmas came and went, New Year arrived. But the dashing young Scot wasn’t good at hanging around. Pretty soon he’d had enough. He tried to persuade some of the merchants in town to move south with him. When that didn’t work, he announced that he would go it alone.

His fearlessness gave everyone a jolt. Shamed into action by the mad Christian in their midst, the cautious Arab traders finally decided it was time to pack up their gear and move on. On 9 January, Laing left In Salah, not alone but with a caravan of forty-five men and one hundred camels. If he thought he’d found safety in numbers, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Towards the end of the month, twenty heavily armed strangers appeared out of nowhere and began riding silently alongside the caravan. They wore the blue robes of the Tuareg, their faces veiled with only a slit for the eyes. No one wanted them around – but no one dared tell them to go.

The sinister, uninvited escort accompanied Laing’s caravan through the wilderness to a filthy, mosquito-infested oasis called Wadi Ahnet. And it was there, on either 2 or 3 February 1826, that the plucky Scotsman was betrayed, savagely assaulted and left for dead.

The attack happened at night. The Tuareg waited till Laing was asleep before surrounding his tent and firing off two musket volleys. The Scotsman was hit in the hip. And before he could reach his sword the attackers were on him, hacking at his head and body with their sabres. They kept chopping until Laing stopped moving.

Laing’s servants tried to intervene. Roger the carpenter and Abraham the interpreter were killed. The second chippie, Harry, was wounded in the leg. A camel driver called Hamet was crippled by a cutlass. Laing’s long-time servant Jack le Bore and the ex-slave Bongola saved themselves by fleeing into the surrounding dunes.

After plundering Laing’s tent, the Tuareg rode off on their camels, whooping it up like Apaches on the warpath. None of the other travellers in the caravan was robbed or hurt that night; none lifted a finger to help poor Laing.

Sheikh Babani was behind the bloodshed. Babani, the very man who’d promised to guide Laing through the Sahara in safety, had struck a deal with the Tuarag, agreeing to stand aside while the bandits murdered the explorer. In return, he was to get a share of the Scotsman’s belongings. But Laing spoiled things by refusing to die - despite being left looking like the victim of a shark attack.

His wounds were gruesome in the extreme. He sustained five deep sabre cuts on his right arm which smashed the bones in his wrist, broke three fingers and almost severed the hand. His left arm was also broken and slashed in three places. There was a deep gash on the back of Laing’s neck, another on his left leg - and a musket ball was lodged in his hip. But perhaps the worst damage was about the head: three sabre cuts on the left temple had chipped away bits of bone; another blow had fractured his jawbone; his left ear was split in two and left dangling; his right temple had a gaping wound.

In total, Laing suffered twenty-four injuries in the night attack at Wadi Ahnet, eighteen of them severe. The next morning the Arab merchants in his party left without him. Only his surviving servants stuck around to help. But giving up wasn’t an option now. As soon as he was strong enough, Laing asked his men to lift him onto a camel and strap him into an upright position. Then the bloodied explorer and his bewildered comrades continued their merciless journey across the burning sands.

Somehow Laing rode on in that desperate state for 400 miles, flopping about on top of his camel, sometimes weeping in agony and despair. It was an incredible feat of endurance for such a savagely wounded man. Laing feared he would be disfigured for life. He dreaded his beloved Emma’s reaction to his scars (if, that is, she ever saw him again).

In April he arrived at the oasis town of Azaud, where he was welcomed by an Arab chief called Sheikh Mokhtar. Laing stayed here three months to try to recover. But soon there was a new disaster: a dysentery epidemic. The disease carried off his servants Jack le Bore and Harry the carpenter. Sheikh Mokhtar also succumbed. Laing got sick too, but survived. When Hamet the camel driver turned around and headed for home, Bongola was his only remaining companion.

The horror of it all started to get to Laing and he wrote a weird letter to his father-in-law, Hanmer Warrington, back in Tripoli. He alone was destined to get to Timbuktu, he claimed. “I make no vain glorious assertion when I say that it will never be visited by a Christian man after me!” he boasted. And then, brushing off warnings of more yet danger ahead, he set off on the final leg of his epic journey.

On 13 August, 1826, the battered Scotsman finally approached the city walls of Timbuktu, his “far-famed capital of Central Africa”. A journey he had expected to take a few weeks had lasted three hundred and ninety-nine days. He’d travelled two thousand miles through the most hostile and unforgiving terrain in Africa. He’d faced sandstorms, life-destroying heat, loneliness, hunger, thirst and extreme violence. And the poor bloke must have been gutted - gored by his own stupidity and naivety – when he at last clapped eyes on his legendary “city of gold”.

Timbuktu was once a place of dazzling riches, that’s a fact. In its heyday merchants from across North Africa had descended on its vast markets to trade in gemstones, ivory, gold and human beings. When Timbuktu’s greatest ruler, Mansa Musa, passed through Cairo in 1324 on his way to Mecca he was accompanied by twelve thousand silk-clad slaves and eighty camels laden with gold. Word spread to medieval Europe of Timbuktu’s unimaginable wealth and the city’s reputation was sealed.

But its glory days were long, long gone by the time Laing arrived. He found no palaces studded with gems, no market places heaving with treasures. The Timbuktu that greeted Laing was (and remains) a disappointment: a dusty, grimy, insignificant little place on the southern edge of the Sahara in what is now the Republic of Mali.

To make things worse, Laing also found that he wasn’t welcome. Sultan Bello, the region’s powerful ruler, made it clear he didn’t want uninvited Scotsmen hanging around his manor. Laing stayed in Timbuktu for thirty-five days, spending his time studying old Islamic manuscripts. But on 21 September, 1826, he wrote to Emma’s dad saying Timbuktu had become “exceedingly unsafe” and it was time to move on. That letter is the last anyone ever heard of Alexander Gordon Laing.

We know the young soldier did leave Timbuktu as planned. Fearing Sultan Bello, he abandoned his idea of finding the river Niger and instead joined a caravan of Arabs heading to Morocco. Laing travelled north with them for two days. Then he was betrayed for a second time and butchered by a man who was supposed to acting as his guide and protector.

The killer was an apparently friendly sheikh who had offered to escort the Christian explorer through the desert. His name was Ahmadu Labeida. And there are two versions of how he despatched poor Laing.

According to the first, the explorer had gone on ahead and was resting in the shade of a tree with his two servants, Bongola and an unnamed Arab boy. Labeida and three accomplices suddenly rode up and began threatening him. Labeida demanded Laing become a Muslim. The Scotsman refused. There was a fierce stand-off. Then two of the gang grabbed Laing’s arms, Labeida drove a spear into his chest – and the fourth guy cut off his head.

The attackers also murdered the Arab lad. Then they’re said to have divided Laing’s money, burnt his papers out of fear they contained magic, and abandoned the two bodies at the foot of the tree.

This story was relayed to a French army officer in Timbuktu nearly a century after the event. It was told by an old man in his eighties who claimed to be Labeida’s nephew. According to the oldster, his uncle had often boasted of how he slaughtered the “Christian infidel”. It was a dramatic story and one that would have gone down well at a time when Europeans were carving up Africa into colonies. But it’s all a bit over the top - and almost certainly untrue.

A more likely but less colourful version comes from Laing’s surviving servant, Bongola, who turned up at Tripoli two years after the explorer’s death. Bongola testified that Labeida’s gang struck at night, stabbing Laing and the Arab boy to death as they lay sleeping. Bongola was wounded in the struggle but escaped. In the morning he found his master’s body – it had been decapitated and was covered in deep sabre cuts.

The news of Laing’s grisly death broke Emma’s heart and destroyed her health. She tried to regain her balance by remarrying and moving to Italy, but nothing could stop the slide. Emma Gordon Laing died of consumption in Pisa in October 1829, aged twenty-eight – just four years after kissing her intrepid husband goodbye and watching him ride off into the African desert in search of his city of gold.

* 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
Bovill, Edward William, Missions to Niger: the Letters of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, 1824-26 (London, 1964)
Kryza, Frank T, The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold (New York, 2006)