Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (36 page)

The Arabs’ warnings haunted him as he wrote, and he began to wonder if they were trying to deceive him in an attempt to keep him in Tabora. Mirambo had recently been driven back with great losses, but was still too close for Stanley to attempt the main caravan route. Stanley grew defiant in his writing, imagining the Arabs were trying to take advantage of him, just as others had throughout his life. He grew righteous in his desire to prove the Arabs wrong. He heaped contempt upon them for underestimating him. The Arabs had placed themselves squarely in the path of his mission to find Livingstone, depriving him of a job and a future by trying to make him fail. He could see that clearly.

Stanley had grown to hate Tabora. It represented disease in his mind. The taste of medicines like calomel, colycinth, rhubarb, tartar emetic, ipecacuanha and quinine made his stomach turn just thinking of them. Calling it ‘inane’ and ‘repulsive’, he was anxious to be going and to leave behind the place that had begun to feel like a jail.

Stanley rededicated himself to his mission. ‘I have taken a solemn, enduring oath; an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me,’ he railed, ‘never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or until I find his dead body. And never to return home without the strongest possible proofs that he is alive, or that he is dead. No living man, or living men, can stop me. Only death can prevent me.’

It was almost midnight, and Stanley felt weak again from the malaria. He would leave in the morning, no matter how bad he felt. He turned to his journal one last time and wrote emphatically, ‘FIND HIM! FIND HIM.’ A wave of calm filled Stanley. ‘I feel more happy. Have I uttered a prayer? I shall sleep calmly tonight.’

THE CAT WAS
out of the bag. Just as Livingstone reached the western shore of Lake Tanganyika and Stanley spent his last nights in Tabora, the New York
Herald
printed a Livingstone rumour from its London bureau. The date was 19 September 1871. ‘Advices from Zanzibar announce to the receipt of positive intelligence about the fate of Dr Livingstone. The authority of the statement is unquestionable. A party of Americans is hurrying into the interior with the object of rescuing the doctor from his perilous position,’ the intentionally vague piece read. As with the byline and source of the information, the rescuer’s name was notably missing.

Until then, James Gordon Bennett, Jr had mentioned nothing about Stanley or a rescue mission in the
Herald
. But Henry Rawlinson’s 26 June RGS address had given away the secret. The rigid class divisions of Victorian England, which precluded a member of the aristocracy from speaking informally with members of the lower classes, kept Rawlinson’s admission within the upper class domain of those attending the meeting. But Livingstone
gossip was too delicious to remain secret for long. Maids, butlers, footmen and grooms weren’t deaf to their employers’ conversations. The rumours about a non-English rescue expedition spread like smoke. When they wafted Bennett’s way via his bureau he had no choice but to run the brief mention. Otherwise it was only a matter of time before British papers broke the story. The identity of the ‘party of Americans’ became a much-discussed mystery in New York and London.

Bennett had a crisis on his hands. There were many layers and tangents to the situation, all of which would have to be handled as a whole for the news leak to be resolved to his advantage. In simplest terms, however, the crisis was about money. For all his free-spending ways, Bennett could be miserly if his bottom line was threatened. The only way he would sell more newspapers was by controlling the news cycle. That would be done by exposing minimal details about the rescue until it actually took place. Mentioning the
Herald
’s involvement or Stanley’s name before that time would allow other publishers to cover the story, or open the
Herald
up to ridicule if Stanley failed. And Bennett certainly didn’t want a premature leakage of the news to cause Baker to begin racing towards Livingstone.

The greater dilemma was Stanley: Bennett didn’t know if he still had the journalist’s loyalty. The first bill for the expedition had reached New York in late March. An outraged Bennett took one look at the enormous sum and instructed I. F. Lockevon, a
Herald
accountant, to reject it. ‘Please take notice’, Lockevon’s letter to Stanley read, ‘that a draft drawn by you on James Gordon Bennett Esquire, Jr at Zanzibar January 17, 1871 for 3,750 gold dollars is protested for non-acceptance and that the holders look to you for payment thereof.’

The dismissal, written on 29 March 1871, made sense at the time. The Gould-Fisk Gold Crisis of 1869, the catalyst for Stanley’s search, was long forgotten. Bennett and President Grant had become very dear friends. Bennett was the commodore of the New York Yacht Club.
The
Herald
was flush. It didn’t make sense to pay an outrageous bill by an overzealous correspondent who would likely die somewhere in Africa, thereby wasting thousands of dollars of Bennett’s money.

But Stanley was alive, on his way to Livingstone. If Stanley returned safely to Zanzibar he would need to come up with those thousands of dollars in a hurry. The obvious way to accomplish that was selling his stories to the highest bidder — or, in keeping with freelance tradition, to several of the highest bidders. Bennett’s great commission would fill the headlines of every paper but his own.

Just like his flight to Paris in 1869, Bennett escaped New York to think. He headed for Nebraska to hunt buffalo at the invitation of the obese General Philip Sheridan, whom Bennett met at President Grant’s summer home in Long Branch, New Jersey. Recreational hunting was a fashionable new pastime among the wealthy, copied from the British aristocracy. By hunting on the prairie, Bennett and his cronies were again imitating the British, for in addition to traditional big game expeditions through Africa and India, British sportsmen had become fond of the American West. The first British hunters came as far back as 1855, when Sir George Gore’s party killed three thousand buffalo and forty grizzly bear.

Bennett assembled a coterie of New York’s most powerful men for the trip west. By coincidence he even brought his own Livingstone — the stockbroker Carol, a member of the New York Livingstons, related to the explorer in name only. Another friend making the trip was Leonard W. Jerome. The ‘King of Wall Street’ was President Grant’s emissary to Germany’s Otto von Bismarck. He had just returned from observing the Franco-Prussian War with Sheridan. They even visited Bismarck at Versailles during the siege of Paris in February 1871.

On the night of 16 September, Bennett’s band of financiers, generals and executives chugged out of New York’s brand new Grand Central Depot in a special railway car — but Bennett himself was not with them. The Stanley
crisis needed to be resolved. He waited a day, ordered the story to run, then began the thirty-six-hour train trip to Chicago.

Bennett arrived in Chicago on the morning of Tuesday the nineteenth, at roughly the same time the ‘American traveller’ story reached New York news-stands. In all, the buffalo caravan numbered seventeen shooters, equally divided between Bennett’s peers and Sheridan’s. Five greyhounds came along to flush jack-rabbits. A French chef prepared all meals. Waiters served the food on china and silverware.

Bennett’s caravan moved into the Union Pacific Railroad’s superintendent’s private car after switching trains for the journey’s final leg. The tracks paralleled the north banks of the cottonwood-lined Platte, which was nothing more than a trickle after the summer heat. The prairie was flat and spare. Miles passed without change. As the others read and smoked, Bennett left to ride on the cow-catcher. Wind in his hair, smoke stack just behind him, Bennett’s first glimpses of true wilderness came from that steel perch on top of the v-shaped forward tip of a Union Pacific locomotive, squinting into the afternoon Nebraska sun. It was the same territory Stanley had travelled five years earlier in search of glory. Now, nine thousand miles east, Stanley crawled across Africa in a state of near starvation, while Bennett skimmed west across the American frontier like a sultan.

On 22 September 1871 the hunting party disembarked near Fort McPherson, a cavalry outpost at the convergence of the North and South Forks of the Platte. This was where Stanley had nearly been arrested while rafting the Platte with Cook five years before, but the place had changed dramatically. During the Transcontinental Railroad’s construction it had become a boom-town, with saloons and brothels and the Railway Hotel springing up. Even after the railroad construction crews continued their westward push, the area remained vibrant — if not so raucous.

Sixteen wagons of provisions awaited Bennett and his
companions, including one wagon specially designed to keep champagne iced. They would travel to Fort Hays, ten days’ journey south in Kansas. The terrain was sprawling grassland creased by a handful of muddy rivers. There were few settlers. For protection, just in case the Cheyenne and Pawnee violated their peace treaties, 350 soldiers from Company F of the US 5th Cavalry would ride alongside.

As Stanley walked or rode a donkey, fretting about every doti of cloth and watching his subordinates die from malaria, smallpox and elephantiasis, Bennett’s caravan proceeded under the guidance of legendary Indian scout Buffalo Bill Cody. ‘Tall and somewhat slight in figure,’ wrote General Henry Davies in describing Cody, ‘possessed of great strength and iron endurance; straight and erect as an arrow, and with strikingly handsome features.’

Cody wasn’t impressed by the easterners. The scout with the Vandyke beard and flowing blond hair made fun of his charges by wearing a white buckskin suit fringed in white leather, complete with a white sombrero, a blood-red shirt and a flashy white horse. ‘As it was a knobby and high-toned outfit,’ Cody wrote, ‘I determined to put on a little style myself.’

Bennett wasn’t a very good shot. His journey through the wilderness was more a social interlude than an adventure. Every day the caravan rose at three thirty, Cody would lead the ‘dudes’ in a shot of pre-breakfast bourbon, and the hunting would begin. The drinking began again late each afternoon when the tents were pitched and the waiters began the first course of the evening’s seven-course meal. ‘Claret, whiskey, brandy, and ale’ were staples of the daily menu. So many bottles of champagne were consumed that Cody called the easterners ‘The Mumm Tribe’ and commented many years later that settlers ‘recognized the sites upon which these camps had been constructed by the quantities of empty bottles which remained behind to mark them’.

The caravan reached journey’s end at Fort Hays on
2 October 1871. They had travelled 194 miles, and killed six hundred buffalo and two hundred elk. They had eaten prairie dog and fillet of buffalo
aux champignons
, broiled cisco, fried dace and stewed jack-rabbit. They had seen the Platte and forded the Republican; hunted along Beaver Creek and Medicine Creek, the Solomon and the Saline. But at Fort Hays they reached the end of the wilderness. It was a land once as wild and untamed as the Africa Stanley was trudging through, but had become civilized.

Fort Hays was the home of Indian fighter General George S. Custer and his 7th Cavalry. It would become the epicentre of the diminished American frontier in a few short years, the original ‘wild west’ town. Cattle drives from Texas would conclude at the local railhead. Wild Bill Hickok would become sheriff — and would be run out of town for arresting Custer’s brother. Legendary showman P. T. Barnum would be suckered out of 150 dollars by local card sharks on his one and only visit, when he came west in search of ‘wild men’ to populate his circus. However, though bawdy, anarchic and unromantic, Hays was under the governance of a single nation. Its growing pains would form a cohesive national identity once the transition from wilderness to civilization was complete. Africa in 1871, already being nibbled and divided by the British and Germans and Portuguese and Arabs and Italians and French, was being robbed of that potential for a singular identity.

It was near Fort Hays where the caravan’s railroad car waited. They rode the Kansas Pacific locomotive home via Kansas City and Chicago. There the men shaved their ten-day beards and bathed, completing their return to civilization. They didn’t see the journey as a farce, but as a legitimate adventure. In fact, the
Herald
ran dispatches from Bennett’s great journey on 23 and 28 September. Despite the fact that other newspapers lampooned the trip as ‘New Yorkers on the warpath’, General Davies published an adventure book about the intrepid foray,
Ten Days on the Plains
.

In typical Bennett fashion, the Stanley and Livingstone crisis was solved during his time away from New York.
Bennett needed Stanley on his side, and knew the financial rewards from the circulation boost brought on by the exclusive story of Stanley finding Livingstone would outweigh the expedition’s exorbitant cost. Also, with the New York
Times
gaining readership through their ground-breaking investigation of deep-seated crime and corruption in New York’s Tammany Hall, Bennett couldn’t afford to be cautious. If Bennett refused to pay Stanley’s bills there was a real possibility Stanley could compound the New York
Times
’s advantage by selling the Livingstone story there.