Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (46 page)

Such a scenario, however, was not meant to be. Murchison was already dead, though Livingstone never knew it. And January was a treacherous month for him to gamble with his life. The first month of the year normally brought as much as forty inches of rain in that
sub-equatorial belt, but January 1873 was the worst in memory, an exhausting continuum of cold and wet and clouds soaking feet and morale, bringing on chills and fever and misery in the healthiest of men. Even days that began with blue skies and puffy white clouds eventually blackened with storm, like a sudden act of sin consuming the clean soul of a believer.

The water poured down ceaselessly, flooding low-lying meadows and forests until they became chains of puddles and marshes and impromptu rivers that seemed to cover all of Central Africa. The only way to distinguish flood land from river was by the deceptive current that would suddenly knock a man off his feet. Minor depressions like elephant footprints were clotted with algae and muck until they became miniature swamps unto themselves.

Making matters worse was the lack of food. The ground was underwater, rendering foraging difficult. Game animals had run for higher ground. Livingstone’s caravan numbered fifty-seven porters; his four faithful assistants Chuma, Susi, Gardner and Amoda; Halima, Amoda’s wife, who cooked for Livingstone; and Ntoeka, Chuma’s wife. There were others who had joined the caravan since Tabora, most notably a teenage boy, later distinctly remembered by African villagers but never mentioned in his journals by Livingstone. All the members of Livingstone’s group, like the explorer, were starving. The porters were growing too weak to carry him or manage their bundles of cloth, beads and gear. They tramped through mile after mile of mud and decay and water, watching all the while for crocodiles and snakes.

But they pressed on. Throughout January, Livingstone and his men averaged just a mile and a half of travel daily. By the end of the month it was even less. Livingstone had grown too weak to walk. Chuma, with his broad shoulders and powerful legs, carried Livingstone on his shoulders, even through deep swamps.

‘Rain, rain, rain, as if it never tired,’ Livingstone wrote wearily in his journal on 23 January. And the next day: ‘Went one and three-quarter hours’ journey to a large stream
through a drizzling rain. At least three hundred yards of deep water amongst sedges and sponges of one hundred yards. One part was neck deep for fifty yards and the water cold.’

The rains continued into February. Like the lion outside his camp one miserable evening ‘that had wandered into this world of water and anthills and roared all night as if very much disgusted’, Livingstone complained about the misery, even to God, but saw no easy way out of his predicament. In the end it was a simple choice. If he went home without finding the Source he would live out his days as a disgraced pauper. It was as simple as that. Livingstone pushed on for the Source, even after a massive colony of driver ants — carnivorous ants which travelled in swarms hundreds of thousands strong, capable of eating even large beasts — invaded his tent one night and bit him so extensively he had welts all over his body. Chuma and Susi saved his life by setting grass fires that smoked the ants from the camp, then spent hours plucking the remainder off Livingstone’s body.

In early March, Livingstone and his men came upon an oasis of sorts when they discovered an abandoned settlement and the remains of a garden. They gorged on long-forgotten cassava and sweet potatoes before continuing their journey. Livingstone’s strength returned after that impromptu starch feast, but not for long. Even in his pain, he wrote rapturous journal entries about Africa, like the day he wrote of the beautiful wild-flowers blooming all around him. Vibrant hues of pink, blue, white and yellow burst forth ‘in one whorl of blossoms’. He wrote of that beauty because it reminded him that God was near, just as he described the saturated lion, and the ‘weird, unearthly voice’ of a fish eagle. God’s will had brought Livingstone to Africa in the first place, and in His presence Livingstone found strength.

Livingstone’s birthday was 19 March. He celebrated in a swamp, sleeping in a hut choked with poisonous spiders. He waited for his men to purchase the canoes they would need to paddle onwards. Once, when the frustrating
negotiations with the local chief renting the canoes, a man named Matipa, dragged on and on, Livingstone vented his rage by sitting up in bed and firing off round after round from his pistol. He would beat death, that was for sure. Through the kindness of strangers and enemies, he had done it over and over on the Source expedition. There was no reason to think he couldn’t do it again if he had a little help. ‘Can I hope for ultimate success? So many obstacles have arisen. Let not Satan prevail over me, Lord Jesus,’ he prayed.

In a letter he’d received when Stanley sent the resupply caravan back to Tabora, his oldest daughter Agnes, who had graduated from her Paris boarding school and was living in London, had urged Livingstone to stay in Africa until he was done. ‘Much as I wish you to come home,’ she wrote, ‘I would rather that you finished your work to your own satisfaction than merely returning to gratify me.’

Agnes was his favourite child, and he’d made a habit of telling her she was capable of achieving anything she set her mind to. Now she was doing the same for him. ‘May blessing be on her,’ Livingstone answered in his journal. ‘And all the rest.’

His search expedition was seven years old. The rainy season was just ending. He had fought the ants of February. He had vented his rage and secured his canoes in March. He had crossed Lake Bangweolo with Chuma and Susi and his small caravan. He had observed, on 6 April, that the endless span of water south of Lake Bangweolo was not a seasonal flood, but the Nile itself ‘enacting its inundations, even at its Source. The amount of water spread out over the country constantly excites my wonder — it is prodigious.’

Unbeknown to Livingstone, he would never discover the Source of the Nile. He was, in fact, almost six hundred miles due south of the Source. His death was now imminent. Not even a repeat of Stanley’s exploits could save him. ‘I am pale, bloodless and weak from bleeding profusely,’ he wrote in early April. ‘An artery gives off a
copious stream, and takes away my strength. Oh, how I long to be permitted by the Over Power to finish my work.’

In addition to blood loss, anaemia, malaria, dysentery and hookworm, a blood clot the size of an apple had also formed in his abdomen. Livingstone didn’t know it was there, but he could feel the pain — the slightest touch of a human hand on his lower back made him want to faint with agony. ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration,’ he wrote on 19 April.

Livingstone planned to complete his discoveries within six or seven months of being resupplied at Tabora. But by the time he reached the village of a chief named Chitambo on 29 April 1873, the six months were up.

Like the lions of the animal kingdom, Livingstone had become a symbol of Africa. The male lion is a solitary presence, with meaty forearms designed for swatting, slashing and tearing. He looks docile and even affectionate as he sleeps the hot days away. But he has lethal speed, a taste for flesh and is always prepared to strike. It was an obvious choice for Murchison to call his African explorers lions. The comparisons between the unassuming men with their great accomplishments and the king of beasts were apt.

Livingstone thought too much was made of lions, however, and he lampooned their public mystique. ‘The same feeling which has induced the modern painter to caricature the lion, has led the sentimentalist to consider the lion’s roar the most terrific of all earthly sounds. We hear “the majestic roar of the king of beasts”. It is, indeed, well calculated to inspire fear if you hear it in combination with the tremendously loud thunder of that country, on a night so pitchy dark that every flash of the intensely vivid lightning leaves you with the impression of stone blindness,’ he wrote. ‘But when you are in a comfortable wagon or house the case is very different, and you hear the roar of the lion without any awe or alarm. The silly ostrich makes a noise as loud, yet he was never feared by
man. To talk of the majestic roar of the lion is mere majestic twaddle.’

Few men could make such a claim about lions, but Livingstone knew first-hand the terror of being in a lion’s jaws. He had seen the animal up close, at its most vicious.

‘In general,’ Livingstone once described the way a lion killed prey, ‘the lion seizes the animal he is attacking by the flank near the hind leg, or by the throat below the jaw. It is questionable whether he ever attempts to seize an animal by the withers. The flank is the most common point of attack, and that is the part he begins to feast on first. The natives and lions are very similar in their tastes in the selection of tit-bits: an eland may be seen disembowelled by a lion so completely that he scarcely seems cut up at all. The bowels and fatty parts form a full meal for even the largest lion.’

He even took a cocky attitude in his journals. ‘One is more in danger of being run over when walking in the streets of London than he is of being devoured by lions in Africa, unless engaged in hunting the animal. Indeed, nothing I have seen or heard about lions would constitute a barrier in the way of men of ordinary courage or enterprise.

‘Hunting a lion with dogs involved very little danger as compared with hunting the Indian tiger, because the dogs bring him out of cover and make him stand at bay, giving the hunter plenty of time for a deliberate shot.’

But lions taught him the most valuable lesson of his life. Each moment of the 1843 attack was unforgettable to Livingstone, from the instant he first laid eyes upon the lion ‘just in the act of springing upon me’ to the helplessness of watching the animal pounce and the horrible impact as its incisors latched on to Livingstone’s shoulder mid-flight before the two, intertwined, smashed to the ground, lion on top. ‘Growling horribly close to my ear,’ Livingstone wrote of what happened next, ‘he shook me as a terrier dog does to a rat.’

Later in London, when asked what thoughts were running through his head during such a traumatic
moment, Livingstone answered with a bit of black humour. ‘I was thinking, with a feeling of disinterested curiosity, which part of me the brute would eat first.’

When the lion, who had one paw on the back of Livingstone’s head, was shot by another hunter, Livingstone walked away from the drama afraid of nothing. Death held no sway over him. When John Kirk was asked what impressed him most about Livingstone, he mentioned his fearlessness. ‘He did not know what fear was.’

‘His absolute lack of any sense of fear’, Kirk told an interviewer years after his travels with Livingstone, ‘amounted almost to a weakness. He would go into the most perilous positions without a tremor or a touch of hesitation. I never knew him to blench or show a sign of timorousness in any circumstance whatsoever.’

Through the years, what gave Livingstone pause was not fear, but regret. ‘There are regrets’, he had written in 1862, ‘which will follow me to my dying day.’

Lying in Chitambo’s village, his primary regrets were family and indiscretion. His family ceased to exist as a unit when Livingstone sent them home in 1852 so he could attempt his walk across Africa. He cried as their ships sailed.

Parenting in Victorian England was not a hands-on activity. Children were expected to look after themselves and their younger siblings. When they were old enough, children were either sent away to boarding school or out to find a job. It was normal for fathers to work long hours and have limited contact with the children. Mothers spent an hour or two with the children each day, at most. So when Livingstone travelled for years at a time, there was never a question about him being a poor parent. Only cruel, abusive or drunken men received such a label. Nevertheless, ‘the act of orphanizing my children, which now becomes painfully clear, will be like tearing out my bowels, for they will all forget me’, Livingstone wrote before his trans-Africa trek.

That his children had learned to do without him was
pain enough. But Livingstone’s infidelity was a breach of character. And there was one manifestation of this that remained fairly well concealed during Livingstone’s lifetime. It may have occurred in the fiery Princess Manenko’s village or in some other village during his many years in Africa, but Livingstone, it was later documented, fathered at least one African child. That son was the teenage boy who had joined the caravan some time after Tabora. ‘He also had with him his son. He was a half-caste. The people said it was Bwana’s son,’ Chitambo’s nephew later swore in a deposition, speaking of the day Livingstone entered his village. ‘Bwana’ was a term of respect. ‘The people said it was Bwana’s son. He was respected by the others as the son of a chief. I did not see the mother or any other woman with the Bwana’s people.’

Chitambo wasn’t the only villager who would swear to a subsequent generation of British travellers about Livingstone’s son. Another African, Mumana, remembered that ‘the Bwana had one son with him … his skin was quite white like a European child and his hair was fair’.

So as Livingstone lay in Chitambo’s village, the boy was there too, having joined Livingstone between Stanley’s departure from Tabora and Livingstone’s arrival in the region surrounding Chitambo’s village. Livingstone never wrote about the child. But the boy was sick and had been carried, like his father, and the locals would always remember the odd sight of the ill white father and his ill white son. They would speak of the respect accorded to Livingstone’s son, and how Chuma and Susi had built a house of grass and sticks not only for Livingstone, but for the boy as well.

The night of 1 May 1873 would also be remembered vividly. In Chitambo’s village, Chuma and Susi had made a small bed for Livingstone and arranged his mosquito netting, then left him alone for the night. Lying in the dark, his coming death was like an angel on his chest.

Livingstone woke between midnight and dawn. He
slipped to the floor and got on his knees to pray. Chuma and Susi had gone to bed, as he’d instructed them.