Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (29 page)

The battle was held near Savannah, Tennessee, but took its name from a nearby church — ‘Shiloh’ means ‘peaceful place’ in Hebrew. The battle Stanley entered that Sunday morning was anything but. Forty thousand Confederate troops surprised forty-five thousand Union troops just before dawn on 6 April 1862. Stanley and the Confederates marauded through the Union’s front lines during breakfast, bayonets drawn. ‘How the cannon bellowed and their shells plunged and bounded, and flew with screeching hisses over us,’ he wrote. ‘One man raised his arm as if to yawn and jostled me. I turned to him and saw that a bullet had gored his whole face and penetrated into his chest. Another ball struck a man a deadly rap on the head, and he turned on his back and showed his ghastly white face to the sky.’

Even with men dying around him, Henry Stanley marched forward untouched. He strode at the front of the Dixie lines as they pushed into the thick of the Union Army, proving to one and all that Margaret Goree’s intimation of cowardice was dead wrong.

Then a shell fragment tore into Stanley’s belt buckle, knocking the wind out of him. He fell to the ground as the Confederate line surged forward. He was tempted to lie still, then noticed that the only men not moving were already dead. Unless he wanted to join them he had to rise up and press the attack.

As night fell the Confederates pulled back to rest and regroup. Stanley had completed his first day of warfare unscratched. Far from being thrilling, war repelled him. ‘It was the first field of glory I had seen in my May of life, and the first time that glory sickened me with its repulsive
aspect, and made me suspect it was all a glittering lie.’

The next morning, Union General Ulysses S. Grant counter-attacked moments before sunrise. The Union’s surprise was as overwhelming as the Confederacy’s the day before. This time Stanley was not so lucky. As the attack switched from a bayonet charge to close-quarters fighting, he dashed for cover. To his surprise, he dashed in the wrong direction and found himself the only grey uniform in a sea of Union blue. ‘Two men’, he wrote, ‘sprang at my collar and marched me unresisting into the ranks of terrible Yankees. I was a prisoner.’

He was sent to Camp Douglas, a prison camp just outside Chicago. Fleas, ticks and lice swarmed through the hovels in which men were forced to sleep. The open sewers bred dysentery and cholera. Rations were minimal. Starvation was rampant. When Union officials offered Stanley freedom in exchange for renouncing the Southern cause, he refused. Six weeks later, after watching thousands die and comprehending that Camp Douglas was a death sentence, Stanley changed his mind. In June of 1862, just two months after Shiloh, he became a member of the Illinois Light Artillery. He was shipped to Virginia to fight for the United States of America.

If it was odd that a man could skip sides so easily, the events that followed for Henry Stanley were more incredible. Within three days of being sent to Virginia he was felled by dysentery, sent to a military hospital for four days, then discharged from the service for being too weak to perform his duties. Without a dime in his pockets, owning nothing but the clothes on his back, the former POW was cast out to wander the back roads of West Virginia. ‘The seeds of the disease were still in me. I could not walk three hundred yards without stopping to gasp for breath,’ he wrote.

Stanley collapsed along a country lane. He would have died if a family hadn’t taken him in. Over the next two months the Bakers nourished Stanley back to health, gave him clean clothes and purchased a train ticket to Baltimore so he could start all over again in the big city.
By New Year 1863, Stanley was in New York for the first time in his life. After more than a year working at odd jobs, Stanley decided it was time to try his hand at the Civil War again. On 19 July 1864 he enlisted in the Union Navy for a three-year hitch. Stanley was made a ship’s writer, a petty officer position responsible for keeping the ship’s log. He served aboard the USS
Minnesota
as it bombarded Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in the winter of 1864 and 1865. On a whim, he wrote a story about the experience and sent it to a number of newspapers and magazines. Some bought and ran it, marking the beginning of Stanley’s journalism career.

One story in particular that fascinated Stanley was that of David Livingstone. He told friends that his ambition was to go to Africa one day and make his fortune. Neither Livingstone nor the call to Africa, however, led him to desert from the navy in February 1865. Just boredom. When the
Minnesota
docked in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the restless ship’s writer jumped ship with a teenage shipmate named Lewis Noe. They soon parted ways, and Stanley fled to the American West. He wangled a job as a stringer for the Missouri
Democrat
, then began the year of travelling that culminated with his arrival in Central City in January 1866. Five months later he quit his job at the
Miner’s Daily Register
and took the stagecoach to Denver with Cook on 6 May of that year.

It was on arriving back in America after the ill-fated journey to Turkey that Stanley devoted himself to journalism. He thought it a gallant, romantic profession. ‘The more daunting the assignment, the better,’ he later wrote of journalism. ‘The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom. The flying journalist or roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom.’

Journalism was also the first thing in his life that Stanley had ever been good at. He had failed so completely, so many times, in so many arenas, that he had taken to embellishing his accomplishments. But with
journalism he shone, and he drove himself harder to make a name for himself.

When Bennett finally summoned him to Paris in October 1869, there was no doubt Henry Morton Stanley was the ideal man to find David Livingstone. His whole life had pointed to that moment. His reinventions — name, country, career — gave him the flexibility to adapt and persevere. Travel across Abyssinia taught him the inner politics of travel with a large party, and to be comfortable sleeping outdoors. From the army he learned the power of a gun, marching, the need for organization. And reaching back into childhood, Stanley knew that failure was not a temporary setback, but a calamitous turn of events. He didn’t want to fail again.

Never having known his own father, Stanley had attached himself to a number of older men through his life. At St Asaph’s he was the pet of the one-handed headmaster, James Francis. He had fallen prey to Hardinge, the captain of
Windermere
. He pined for Henry Hope Stanley and their brief father-son flirtation. He idolized Hancock, Sheridan and the other US generals during the Plains War so much that he memorized one of Sherman’s speeches to the Indians verbatim. And his entire journey in search of Livingstone had been salvaged through the largesse of American Consul Francis Webb — nearly ten years Stanley’s senior.

To find Livingstone — whose worldwide reputation was that of a man kindly and paternal — would be to find the ultimate father figure: older, wise, brave, accomplished, even beloved by an entire nation. The possibility of acceptance was counterbalanced by the realization that rejection would have a crushing finality. The rebirth engendered by Africa’s austerity and trial was weeding out the insecurity that had governed Stanley since birth.

No longer was he scared of Africa. In fact, with every obstacle overcome, Stanley — the man who’d never had a home — was beginning to feel as if he belonged there, just like Livingstone. ‘My black followers might have
discerned, had they been capable of reflection,’ Stanley wrote, ‘that Africa was changing me.’

And even as he suffered through the Marenga Mkali, unconscious and carried, Stanley was growing stronger. His fever broke during the night. At 3 a.m. he asked to be booted and spurred so he could ride the last miles. Soon darkness gave way to light. By dawn the waterless passage was done. So complete was Stanley’s relief to have survived the crossing that in his writings he compared himself with Moses. What the rest of the massive caravan saw was the region of Ugogo, with its baobab trees and green hills. But Stanley, whose pre-journey perceptions about Africa produced nightmares, saw ‘this Promised Land’.

Stanley bore little similarity to Moses. However, his actions and predicament bore a great similarity to the heroine of a children’s book which was shortly to be published in England. Her name was Alice, and she stepped through a looking-glass into a surreal, fantastic wonderland. Everything in that world was off kilter. Stanley, whose malaria reasserted itself as he finished crossing the Marenga Mkali, had just stepped through a looking-glass of his very own. He was about to enter the surreal world of Ugogo.

OUT OF THE
frying pan into the fire. Stanley had heard horror stories about Ugogo from the moment he began purchasing supplies back in Zanzibar, but nothing had truly prepared him for the first day of June 1871, as the New York
Herald
expedition entered the most bizarre section of its journey. On a map — if Stanley had been carrying one — there was nothing auspicious about Ugogo. It was a hundred-mile-wide interlude between the vast emptiness of the Marenga Mkali and the abundance of Tabora.

The inhabitants of Ugogo were the Wagogo, a group of tribes infamous for rudeness and extortion. The Wagogo were greatly feared by the Arabs, and caravans approached Ugogo with trepidation. Supplies and water were limited in the region and the Wagogo extracted a series of tolls — known as tribute — for permission to pass through and use their resources. Those refusing to pay were ambushed and murdered. It was a queer place, where the weak were strong, a man had to watch his back at all times, and an
item that cost one doti in one village cost ten times as much in the next village over.

One well-known story among Arab caravans was the brave trader who made it his mission to subdue the Wagogo once and for all. His plan was to fight his way through Ugogo without paying tribute. He set off from Tabora with a caravan nine hundred strong, making no secret of his intentions.

The Wagogo never even attempted to fight. Instead, they buried their wells, burned their houses and crops, then retreated to the jungle until the Arabs arrived. The enormous caravan was able to pass through the region for free, with no opposition, but there was also no food or water. Seven hundred of the Arabs died. The remainder slunk back to Tabora or tried to push across to Mpapwa. Only ten of the nine hundred original men survived that passage.

Not only were the Wagogo savvy, but they possessed an eccentric quality that was easily visible to the human eye. Their villages were the usual collection of mud and wattle homes with a single low doorway and a conical roof of sticks and straw. They ate the same diet of corn and cassava found in other tribes. They raised cattle and goats, just like other tribes. However, unlike any tribe Stanley had seen, the Wagogo were fond of decorating their bodies. Most noticeably, they pierced their ears, then enlarged the lobes by forcing strips of wood or wire into the opening. Once the ear stretched all the way down to the shoulder it became the Wagogo equivalent of a pocket: gourds carrying personal belongings or snuff were placed inside. A Wagogo could walk from village to village wearing almost nothing as per custom but with massive gourds or ornaments in their ears. If the lobe ever tore, another hole was opened and the process was begun all over again.

The Wagogo also had a fondness for their hair. Some twisted it into spikes, some adorned their heads with brightly polished shanks of copper, some shaved the very top of their heads and let the sides grow long enough to
be shaped into a tail. The Wagogo enhanced their singular appearance by smearing their bodies with red clay, and, for an olfactory element, they also lubricated their skin with animal fats and oils.

The peculiarity of the tribe’s physical image and rank aroma was counterbalanced by the heft of their armament. The Wagogo were fiends for weapons. They favoured double-edged knives, long spears, bows and arrows, curved Arab-style knives, and a war club known as a knobstick. Their shields were made of buffalo hide, scraped smooth of hair, the taut surfaces painted in bright yellows, reds and whites.

Although Stanley entered Ugogo battling a severe attack of malaria, the region would have been surreal even without his malarial dementia. Fortunately for Stanley, the anopheles mosquito which had infected him as he marched into his Promised Land of Ugogo had not transferred the most deadly strain of the disease. A mosquito bite in Africa was like Russian Roulette. There are three thousand different types of mosquito, yet only one carries malaria. There are 156 strains of malaria injected by that one breed of mosquito, yet only four cause malaria in humans. Of those four strains, only one leads to death. And while these odds sound favourable, malaria has hovered near epidemic levels in Africa for millennia.

Stanley’s case, though not fatal, was debilitating nonetheless. Even his habit of dosing himself with large amounts of quinine did nothing to control it. His misery was obvious. ‘The first evil results experienced from the presence of malaria are confined bowels and an oppressive languor, excessive drowsiness and a constant disposition to yawn,’ he wrote of his experiences with the disease. ‘The tongue assumes a yellowish sickly hue, coloured almost to blackness. Even the teeth become yellow, and are coated with an offensive matter. The eyes of the patient sparkle lustrously and are suffused with water. These are sure symptoms of the incipient fever which shortly will rage through the system, laying the sufferer prostrate and quivering with agony.’