Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (13 page)

On 8 November 1868, waiting for the new caravan to begin marching for Ujiji, Livingstone summed up his thoughts on the great search. ‘The discovery of the sources of the Nile is somewhat akin in importance to the discovery of the North-west Passage, which called forth, though in a minor degree, the energy, the perseverance, and the pluck of Englishmen. And anything that does that is beneficial to the nation and its posterity. The discovery of the sources of the Nile possesses, moreover, an element
of interest which the North-west Passage never had. The great men of antiquity have recorded their ardent desires to know the fountains of what Homer called “Egypt’s heaven-descending spring”. That which these men failed to find, and that which many great minds in ancient times longed to know, has in this late stage been brought to light by the patient toil and laborious perseverance of Englishmen.’

Another four weeks later, on 11 December, the march for Ujiji finally began.

THE FIRST LIVINGSTONE
‘disappearance’ story in a United States newspaper ran in the New York
Herald
on 9 April 1868. The
Herald
ran another two weeks later. So when rumours out of Bombay predicted that Livingstone would emerge from Africa some time close to New Year’s Day, 1869, the
Herald
dispatched Henry Morton Stanley on a top secret mission to the continent. Banking on the hope Livingstone would emerge in either Cairo or Zanzibar, Stanley based himself in Aden. The ancient port lay roughly halfway between the two cities. He arrived on 21 November 1868, took a small room in a local guest-house then sent out feelers in both directions. Stanley was prepared to launch north by train to Cairo or south by ship to Zanzibar at a moment’s notice.

Stanley, charging through life with a massive chip on his shoulder, was eager to prove Abyssinia wasn’t a fluke. The years of drifting and failure weren’t that far in the past. His grasp on success was still tentative. ‘I must keep a sharp lookout that my second coup shall
be as much a success as my first,’ he wrote in his journal.

There was no doubt that Livingstone was alive — in addition to Young’s evidence, Arab caravans had returned to Zanzibar bearing year-old letters from the explorer, written after the date of his supposed slaying. Still, three years was a long time to dodge western civilization. Livingstone’s previous expeditions were frequently punctuated by visits to villages, trading centres, missionary outposts and ports on the Indian Ocean. During the Zambezi expedition, Livingstone had even left the African mainland entirely, travelling several hundred miles by boat down the Mozambique Channel to pick up fresh supplies. Clearly, something out of the ordinary was taking place. It was as if Livingstone had secretly cast himself into exile.

As the mystery deepened, public fascination over Livingstone’s whereabouts had grown. The world joined Britain’s wondering. Newspapers in Europe, India and South Africa were running stories. In the absence of facts, rumours sprouted like weeds, tawdry and epic alike. London wags were gossiping that Livingstone had fallen for an African woman and begun a new family. Sir Roderick Murchison, on the other hand, was publicly predicting Livingstone might be walking across Africa again, this time following the mighty Congo River’s route through the uncharted rainforests west of Lake Tanganyika.

Of all the places Stanley could have chosen to wait for Livingstone — Cairo, Zanzibar, Suez — Aden was the most horrid. It was volcanic, notorious for flies and wind and heat. The only reason it had been carved from the desert thousands of years before was because it overlooked the mouth of the Red Sea. That strategic location made Aden irresistible to empires. The Egyptians came first, in the third century BC. Then the Romans, the Persians, Ethiopians, Yemenis and Turks. It was the British, however, taking residence by force in 1839, who were about to benefit more from their conquest than any previous tenant. By controlling the narrow slot dividing the Red
Sea from the Indian Ocean, Britain would control trade through a new French-built waterway at the other end of the Red Sea, the Suez Canal. The shortcut from Europe to the Orient via the waters Moses once parted was due to open in November 1869. ‘A strange place this,’ Stanley noted in a rare wry moment during his otherwise bleak two and a half months stuck in Aden. ‘Fit only for a coal depot.’

That quiet nature was on display in Aden. With the conclusion of his dream so near, Stanley should have been ecstatic as he waited for Livingstone — but he was miserable. The locale’s claustrophobia was punctuated by British disdain for the American in their midst. Other than a short trip across the Red Sea to officially set foot in Africa and have his picture taken on a camel, Stanley passed the days alone in his room. He smoked cigars, wrote in his journal and read. No book was too obscure to pass the time, with Stanley absorbing authors from Milton to Homer to Virgil to Dickens. Aden became his university, a place to resume the education that ended at fifteen. By Christmas 1868, however, one month into his stay, the intellectual depth of the reading commingled with boredom, rejection, the solitary holiday season and Stanley’s massive insecurity. Depression swallowed him whole. He pondered death.

Low moods were nothing new to Stanley. They seemed to strike whenever he had too much time to think. Action — physical exertion, travel, accomplishment — was his typical stepladder whenever the depths consumed him, but with nothing to do in Aden Stanley was forced to look inward. Between Christmas and New Year he plumbed his heart for vice. He binged on self-improvement goals. Gone were the cigars and sexual immorality. The Stanley who had used Lewis Noe as sexual bait to steal horses in Turkey was no more. The journalist’s New Year’s resolutions were to quit smoking, to rid his mind of ‘vile thoughts that stained’ and to be ‘better, nobler, purer’.

Stanley craved a corner of the globe where he would be the ultimate authority, beyond ridicule. Only then would
he know peace during his lifetime. ‘I know not what I lack to make me happy,’ he admitted to his journal in an exceptionally intimate revelation. ‘If I could find an island in mid-ocean, remote from the presence or reach of man, with a few necessaries sufficient to sustain life, I might be happy yet; for then I could forget what reminds me of unhappiness and, when death came, I should accept it as a long sleep and rest.’

Stanley found no rest in the first days of 1869. He was tense and withdrawn, craving a smoke. In lieu of cigars Stanley busied his hands with scissors and glue, clipping inspirational phrases from books and pasting them into his journal. The theme, expressed through Johnson, Shakespeare and Addison, was warriors — brave men battling long odds. Stanley against nicotine. Stanley against himself. Stanley against the world.

Stanley lasted exactly one week without tobacco. But the quest towards long-term change continued. His goal was to fit in. He wanted to say the right things, do the right things. Stanley was well aware he tended to grate on people. Once, through the inexpensive walls of a railway station hotel room, Stanley overheard two travellers he’d just shared a train compartment with compare him to a leper. In Abyssinia, a British general found Stanley so annoying he called him a ‘howling cad’. And on his way from Alexandria to Aden, Stanley had endured a Scotsman sneering about the ‘active little Yankee’. Stanley was disgusted with rejection. Just six months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday, having failed to develop a single lasting relationship with either man or woman, American or British, he wanted to be liked.

His journal entries turned philosophical. Stanley reminded himself to ‘count the raindrops falling during a storm or snow flakes as they drift through space’. He analysed his personality and wrote that ‘curiosity undefined may turn itself into a deleterious agent’ and ‘man has two voices: the silent and the articulable’.

And through all the introspection, Stanley waited for Livingstone. His source of information was the American
Consul in Zanzibar, a former ship’s captain from Salem, Massachusetts named Francis Rope Webb. The thirty-six-year-old Webb was a diplomat in title only. The bulk of his time was spent directing a merchant shipping business. His consular title was a convenient tool for waging trade wars against the British on behalf of himself and other US expatriates in Zanzibar. For though the United States once dominated the flow of goods into East Africa, reallocation of American naval assets to wage the Civil War had seen Britain take over the market. In the nearly four years since war’s end, Webb had been unable to reverse that trend. If anything, Britain’s influence grew more each day. A frustrated Webb was developing a profound dislike for all things British — particularly his nemesis and peer, Vice-Consul John Kirk. Webb had never met Stanley. But when the journalist wrote inquiring about help locating Livingstone, Webb was thrilled — anything to thwart the British. Because there was no telegraph service from Zanzibar to Aden, the plan was for Webb to send word to Stanley by ship when Livingstone appeared.

In effect, Stanley and Webb were positioning themselves against the British Empire. They were not paranoid for sensing anti-American sentiment, and it was not of their making. Rather, it was part of a genuine, enduring tension between Britain and the United States. Part of the problem was perception — almost a century after the War of Independence and fifty years after its 1812 coda, many Britons still considered the United States their prodigal child. British politician Charles Dilke’s book
Greater Britain
, which trumpeted this belief in 1866, was widely popular in England. To Britain’s annoyance, though, not only did the United States reject the claim, it sought to expand its sphere of influence at Britain’s expense.

That America was ascendant in the late 1860s defied logic. The Civil War should have decimated the nation. Lincoln’s assassination had been staggering, a bare-knuckled punch to the windpipe. Post-war reconstruction, with its carpetbaggers and Ku Klux Klan, was a reminder that racial hatred didn’t disappear with the end of slavery.
The nation was still very much divided. But America was unbowed. Like an adolescent staring into a mirror, examining the heft and might of newly adult muscles, the nation gazed at its potential in awe. ‘The United States’, American customs inspector Herman Melville noted in a post-Civil War essay, ‘wore empire on its brow.’

Britain did too, and in a much more proprietary fashion. Inevitably, the two nations quarrelled. Britain and the United States came to loggerheads over the sovereignty of Oregon, British claims of global naval supremacy, reparations for US shipping sunk by British-built vessels sailed by the Confederacy during the Civil War, Newfoundland fishing rights, the Canadian frontier and control of the Pacific Ocean. Most appalling to the British were America’s designs on Canada. ‘Nature designs this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union,’ promised Secretary of State William Seward after purchasing Alaska from Russia in 1867. With an auspicious chunk of Canada dividing America from her new Alaskan territory, it seemed only a matter of time before Canada became part of the United States. Britain’s Hudson Bay Company, though, had blazed the first trails through that wilderness, setting up trading posts and towns. The British, historically far more in love with commerce than colonies, didn’t plan on letting Canada go.

Stanley’s
Herald
bosses had forbidden him to use Aden’s British-run telegraph services, for fear the London papers would get wind of his top secret mission. But when a letter arrived from Webb in mid-January saying Livingstone wouldn’t be coming anywhere near Zanzibar, Stanley quickly telegraphed the news to the
Herald
’s London bureau. By the end of the month Stanley received a response: the search for Livingstone was over. Stanley was being reassigned to Spain to cover their Civil War. Stanley sailed from Aden on 2 February. ‘I am relieved at last,’ he rejoiced in his journal.

Stanley’s commitment to self-improvement, though, continued long after boarding the
Magdala
and leaving
Aden in his wake. He continued clipping and pasting exhortations in his journal for several months after leaving Aden, as if preparing for some great endeavour not yet revealed to him. Occasionally, he transcribed Biblical passages from Proverbs or Jonah by hand. ‘Heavens,’ he wrote in his journal on 16 February 1869. ‘What a punishment it would be to have no object or aim in life.’

Even as Stanley buoyed his mood with positive thinking and self-assurances, frustration set in. He was annoyed to learn that his employers considered the journey to Aden a failure. The notion filled him with impotent rage. ‘I am hardly to blame because Livingstone has not shown himself to the world,’ he wrote. ‘It is unjust that I am in disgrace when I cannot alter events or change destiny.’

Unjust or not, Stanley had a penchant for turning even the slightest snub into a chance to prove his worth. The
Herald
’s disappointment raised his personal stake in finding Livingstone.