Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (6 page)

Livingstone was living with his children at Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron’s former estate north of London, now owned by his good friend James Young. He was writing his Zambezi memoirs. Livingstone detested the tedium of being indoors for long hours as he distilled his journals into publishable form, but considered it a necessary task. If the Zambezi book sold as well as his first book,
Missionary Travels
, Livingstone would achieve a measure of financial serenity.

‘Why cannot you go?’ Murchison implored upon arriving at Newstead. ‘Come, let me persuade you. I am so sure that you will not refuse an old friend.’

Livingstone’s defences were wavering. Despite their deep friendship, it was an extraordinary breach of Victorian social protocol for a man of Murchison’s wealth to make such a vulnerable appeal to a man of lesser social standing. With Murchison and Livingstone both getting on in years, finding the Source would likely be the last expedition on which they would cooperate — and their greatest triumph if it succeeded. ‘Never mind about the pecuniary matters. It shall be my task to look after that,’ Murchison reassured him. ‘You may rest assured your interest will not be forgotten.’

Livingstone, the man who walked through Africa
without fear, cared so deeply for Murchison that he felt powerless to say no.

‘You’, Murchison enthusiastically reminded his friend, ‘will be the real discoverer of the Source of the Nile.’

Four months later, on 16 April 1865, Livingstone made a public statement of his intentions. ‘I have no wish’, he wrote, with sentiments that would change as the Source became a fixation, ‘to unsettle what with so much toil and danger was accomplished by Speke and Grant, but rather to confirm their illustrious discoveries.’

On 14 August 1865,
Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries
safely delivered to the publisher, Livingstone sailed for Africa.

‘
WE PASSED A
woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead,’ Livingstone wrote in his journal exactly three months after leaving Zanzibar. ‘The people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become the property of anyone else if she recovered after resting for a time. I may mention here that we saw others tied up in a similar manner and one lying in the path was shot or stabbed, for she was in a pool of blood.’

It had been two and a half months since Livingstone’s journey inland had begun. He was marching along the Rovuma River delta, through a towering, omnipresent wall of bamboo forest, creeping vines and mangrove trees. The air was heavy and humid, and smelled of genesis and rot. His physical health was robust, but the combination of insubordinate porters, gruesome daily evidence of the slave trade and painfully sluggish pace had him battling bouts of depression. He had averaged just three miles of travel per day since leaving the coast. It certainly wasn’t
the quickest way to verify Speke and Burton’s theories about the Source, but marching inland via the Rovuma was the only possible way for Livingstone to ascertain facts about his own, wildly improbable, Source theories. He believed the Nile and Zambezi were connected by a chain of lakes — from south to north: Nyassa, Tanganyika, Victoria. The Source, in Livingstone’s estimation, lay much further south than Speke or Burton theorized.

The obvious, and quickest, way to Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika was by travelling from the Indian Ocean to Lake Tanganyika via the Arab caravan route followed by Burton and Speke. Livingstone, however, was taking the long way. His march had begun three hundred miles south of Burton and Speke’s point of departure. He planned to march due west along the banks of the Rovuma River until reaching Lake Nyassa, which he had first explored during the Zambezi trip. From there he would travel north towards Lake Tanganyika and the likely location of the Source. He was undaunted that a German geologist, Dr Albert Roscher, had been butchered by hostile tribes six years earlier while following the same path, or by reports that a rogue Zulu splinter group known as the Mazitu were marauding and killing near Lake Nyassa. When trouble came, Livingstone would sidestep it and move forward. Always forward.

He was glad to be back in Africa, but the rest of his caravan lacked Livingstone’s enthusiasm. There was no trail along the Rovuma, so paths had to be hacked through the brush. His pack animals were dying from sleeping sickness, and after the first hundred miles of travel the terrain had angled upward as they left the coastal plain behind. The temperature was dropping as the elevation rose, and cold south winds began to blow. Livingstone had hired a band of porters to supplement his original contingent, back at the mouth of the Rovuma, but they chafed at the hard work and turned back on 11 June. That left Livingstone with his original band of twenty-six porters and soldiers, who had grown tired and surly in the extreme conditions.

Part of the blame rested on Livingstone. Not only had he chosen his companions poorly, but his habit of wandering ahead to scout the trail left the group unsupervised. The result was chaos: the Johanna porters stole Livingstone’s precious cloth and beads, dawdled, and conveniently lost his non-essential supplies when they grew tired of carrying them; the sepoys, those Indian soldiers hand-picked by their country’s governor to protect Livingstone from hostile tribes, were useless. Livingstone complained ‘they would not get up in the mornings to march, lay in the paths, and gave their pouches and muskets to the natives to carry’. The sepoys grew so desperate to go home they tried to sabotage the expedition by poking the pack animals with their bayonets, and encouraging the porters to run off with them. Only a small handful of men, led by Chuma and Susi, were committed to staying by Livingstone’s side for as long as it took to complete his work.

Livingstone endured the personnel issues, treating them as a necessary distraction. He focused his attention on exploration. With a chronometer and sextant he pinpointed the latitude and longitude of villages and rivers. A thermometer helped him divine altitude. His interests veered far from the merely scientific, however, and Livingstone wrote down anything else of interest that struck his fancy. He wrote about the holes dug in the ground so tribes could slow-cook the heads of zebra, the feet of elephants and the humps of rhinoceros. He noted that fire was so important for safety from wild animals and mosquitoes at night that villagers carried their kindling with them wherever they went. He wrote about how pottery was made, and casually noted that pottery shards were everywhere. But for every anthropological notation, a remark about slavery was sure to follow: the little girl orphaned because she was too weak to walk alongside her parents as they were taken away; the tribes who sold other tribes into slavery and wore the expensive white calico that was their reward; the well-dressed woman with the slave-collar around her neck,
demanding that someone free her but receiving no reply from bystanders. Livingstone wrote of those injustices with growing rage, furious with the Arabs and Portuguese for their behaviour, and with the Africans who assisted them. ‘At Chenjewala’s’, he wrote of a village visited on 27 June, ‘the people are usually much startled when I explain that the number of slaves we see dead on the road have been killed partly by those who sold them; for I tell them that if they sell their fellows, they are like the man who holds the victim while the Arab performs the murder.’

The journal entries often stretched to several pages per day, jotted with a small fountain pen with a steel nib. Livingstone kept his journals in a watertight tin box he’d purchased just for that purpose. The box would protect his words from the elements, and with luck even float if swept down a river. For the words were his gold, his future. They would be moulded into a book about his search for the Source, and provide raw scientific and anthropological data to the Royal Geographical Society. But the journals, on a much deeper level, were also Livingstone’s connection to his roots. He had been a prolific reader as a boy. Through the simple act of absorbing the printed word, the first seeds of exploration were planted in the unlikely explorer over four decades earlier.

Livingstone was born in poverty, in a three-storey tenement outside Glasgow in 1813. He was the second of seven children. His forefathers had been highland rogues before moving to the city, but the adventure gene was recessive in Livingstone’s impoverished father. While Neil Livingstone’s brothers became soldiers of fortune, he sold tea and ran a small market. He was such a zealous member of the Independent Congregational Church that he impulsively dropped the ‘e’ from the family name, imagining a connection between a ‘living stone’ and witchcraft.

The explorer spent his childhood working fourteen-hour days inside the din and chaos of the Blantyre Works cotton mill. The introspection, stoicism and need for wide
open spaces that later became Livingstone’s trademarks could be traced to the claustrophobia of the mill, where the noise was so great that all communication was conducted at a yell. As a man, walking through Africa, he rarely spoke at all.

Evenings in Blantyre were for school. Sunday, the only day off for the adolescent Livingstone, was for church. Afterwards, Livingstone was fond of escaping into the countryside for solitary hikes and rock hunts. The rare leisure time was passed reading. Books were readily available at the mill library. Travel books were the most popular genre in the Livingstone household, telling of a marvellous world far beyond industrial Glasgow. Among others, he read books by Australia explorer Matthew Flinders, South America explorer Francis Head and Arctic explorer John Franklin. Scottish explorers such as Mungo Park, who’d explored Northern Africa’s Niger River, and James Bruce, who emerged from his explorations of the tributary known as the Blue Nile unscathed only to die falling down a flight of stairs in the safety of his own home, were Livingstone’s early heroes.

The two most powerful books in Livingstone’s life, however, combined adventure with Christianity. The first book was Thomas Dick’s
Philosophy of a Future State
, which reconciled the disparities between science and creationism. For a teenager contemplating medical school and newly passionate about Christianity, Dick’s book was a powerful affirmation that his chosen path wasn’t heretical.

The second book, Karl von Gutzlaff’s
Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China
, sealed Livingstone’s fate. Gutzlaff’s tale of missionary life enchanted the twenty-one-year-old cotton spinner. Livingstone had long dreamed of a life beyond the mill and even beyond Scotland. Gutzlaff’s book showed how it could be done. After putting himself through medical school, Livingstone travelled south and entered the London Missionary Society’s seminary in suburban London. He wanted, Livingstone told his new employers, to go to China.

But by the time he finished seminary, Britain and China had gone to war over opium. The year was 1840. Instead of China, Livingstone was given a choice between saving souls in the West Indies or in Southern Africa. He chose Africa. The dashing twenty-seven-year-old idealist, virgin, teetotaller, medical doctor and ordained minister travelled from London’s hustle-bustle to the somnolent mission station of Kuruman, six hundred miles due north of Africa’s southernmost cape. He was still suffering from his first broken heart, having being spurned by a young woman named Catherine Ridley before leaving London. Africa seemed like the ideal location in which to focus all his energies on sharing the good news about Jesus Christ, and to leave the real world’s disappointments behind. It would become a recurring theme in Livingstone’s life.

Missionary work hadn’t yet taken on the imperialist reputation it later earned — and to which Livingstone’s explorations contributed. There was nothing sinister about Livingstone’s intentions as he sailed for Africa on 8 December 1840, no great political conspiracy to steal the independence of Africa’s tribes. He was simply a devout young man heeding Christ’s admonition that his followers ‘go and make disciples of all nations’. He would wander the hinterlands like the Apostle Paul, enduring great personal risk to touch those far-flung souls who might otherwise never know Christ.

If Livingstone hadn’t grown restless, his whole life might have been spent in that simple, unremarkable bubble of mission life, leading Bible studies and prayer services. But the boredom set in just weeks after arriving at Kuruman’s dreary, parched scrub-land location. Not only his own boredom, but the natives’. ‘Our attendance at public worship would vary from ten to fifty,’ he wrote, ‘and these very often manifesting the greatest indecorum. Some would be smoking, others laughing, some working, some would be employed in removing their ornaments.’

Desiring a more effective way to do his job, Livingstone requested, and received, permission to ‘go forward into the dark interior’ to survey new mission sites. The
prospect filled Livingstone with ‘inexpressible delight’.