Soon after they reached England a report came to Somersby Rectory that John Kemble – another of the Apostles – had been caught in the south and was to be tried for his life, and Tennyson in the early morning posted to Lincoln to try to find someone acquainted with the Consul at Cadiz, who might help to save his friend. But the rumour was false. It anticipated a more tragic story, for Torrijos and his band, commanded to leave Gibraltar in November 1831, sailed in two small vessels for Malaga, were chased by guardships and ran ashore. They barricaded themselves into a farmhouse, called curiously enough Ingles, and were surrounded. It was useless to resist and they surrendered, hoping for mercy. But they received none. They were shot on the esplanade at Malaga, after being shrived by a priest. Boyd received one favour: his body was delivered to the British Consul for burial.
He was the only Englishman to die, for the Apostles, tired of the long wait at Gibraltar, had already scattered through Spain with guidebooks, examining churches and Moorish remains. Sterling, who had his cousin’s death on his conscience, never quite recovered from the blow. ‘I hear the sound of that musketry,’ he wrote in a letter; ‘it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain.’ Hallam took the adventure lightly: ‘After revolutionizing kingdoms, one is still less inclined than before to trouble one’s head about scholarships, degrees, and such gear.’ Tennyson’s silence was unbroken. He may have reflected that only a Cambridge term had stood between him and the firing party on Malaga esplanade.
1937
MR COOK’S CENTURY
ALREADY they seem to belong to history – those tourists of the 1830s; they have the dignity and the pathos of a period, as they gather, the older ones in extraordinary hats and veils, the younger a little awkward and coltish, on the Continental platform at Victoria. Their baggage is all labelled for the Swiss pensions, the Italian lakes: in their handbags they carry seasick remedies and some of them tiny bottles of brandy; their tickets are probably in the hands of the courier, who now kindly and dexterously, with an old-world manner, shepherds them towards the second-class (first on boat), towards adventure – the first view of Mont Blanc, the fancy-dress dance at Grindelwald, the falls of Schaffhausen (seen through stained glass for a few francs extra). How sad it is that war prevents the one-hundredth anniversary of the first Cook’s excursion being celebrated in a suitable atmosphere – with lots of eau-de-Cologne and steam and shiny picture-papers, and afterwards the smell of oil and sea-gulls and a sense of suppressed lady-like excitement, and the scramble along the corridor with the right coupons towards the first meal on the Basle express – everything paid for in advance, even the tips.
Of course there was so much more to Cook’s than that: that little daily gathering on the Continental platform was rather like the unimportant flower a big business executive may wear in his button-hole for the sake of some early association. Thomas Cook and Son, who, in 1938, could have arranged you an independent tour to Central Africa as easily as to Ostend, had become a world-power which dealt with Prime Ministers: they transported Gordon up the Nile, and afterwards the relief expedition – 18,000 troops, 130,000 tons of stores, and 65,000 tons of coal; they reformed the pilgrim traffic to Mecca, deported ‘undesirables’ from South Africa during the Boer War, bought the railway up Vesuvius, and knocked a gap in the walls of Jerusalem to let the Kaiser in; before the end of the nineteenth century, under the son, they had far outstripped the dream of the first Thomas Cook, the young wood-turner and teetotaller and Bible-reader of Market Harborough, who on 5 July 1841, chartered a special train to carry his local temperance association from Leicester to Loughborough, where a meeting was to be held in Mr Paget’s park. (The distance was twelve miles, and the return fare 1s.: it could hardly be less today.) The words of Mr John Fox Bell, secretary to the Midland Counties Railway, have the right historic ring: ‘I know nothing of you or your society, but you shall have the train’, and Mr Thomas Cook was quite aware that he was making history. ‘The whole thing came to me’, he said, ‘by intuition and my spirit recoiled at the idea of imitation.’ (This refers to the shameful attempt of the Mechanics Institute of Birmingham, who had run an excursion on 29 June to Cheltenham and Gloucester, to question the originality of his inspiration.) The cheers that greeted the thirsty teetotallers as they scrambled from their open scorching trucks, the music of the Loughborough band, the congratulatory speeches in Mr Paget’s park bore Mr Cook on a great wave of local pride, inspecting hotels as he went, interviewing railroad secretaries, noting points of interest – the fourteenth-century cathedral, the abbey ruin, the majestical waterfall, on out of England into Wales – ‘From the heights of Snowdon my thoughts took flight to Ben Lomond, and I determined to try to get to Scotland.’ And get to Scotland he did with 350 men and women – we don’t know whether they were teetotallers, and at Glasgow the guns were fired in their honour.
But Europe was another matter: Europe, to the Bible-reader and teetotaller, must have presented a knotty ethical problem, and it was not until 1860, after a personal look-round, that Mr Cook brought his excursions to the Continent. It is easy to mock nowadays at the carefully conducted tour, but there have been times and places when a guide was of great comfort. ‘In 1865, through many difficulties, I got my first party to Rome and Naples, and for several years our way was through brigand-infested districts, where military escorts protected us.’
By the end of the century – under the rule of the second Cook – the firm had become the Cook’s we know today. I have before me a copy of a paper called Cook’s Excursionist, for 18 March 1899; already there were few places in the world to which an excursion had not been arranged – from the Tea and Coffee Rooms of Bora Bimki to the Deansgate Temperance Hotel in Manchester. The link with Mr Paget’s park is still there, not only in the careful choice of hotel but in the advertisements – for Dr E. D. Moore’s Cocoa and Milk, and the Compactum Tea Baskets. I like to feel that this – the spring of 1899 – marks the serene height of Mr Cook’s tours, for brigands have ceased to trouble, and there is no suspicion that they may one day come again. Keating’s Powder has taken the place of the military escort; Mrs Welsley Wigg is keeping ‘an excellent table’ in Euston Square, and a young lady, ‘who last year found them perfectly efficacious’, is cautiously recommending Roach’s Sea-Sickness Draughts – perhaps this year won’t be so lucky? At John Piggott’s in Cheapside you can buy all the clothes you need for a conducted tour: the long black Chesterfield coat, the Norfolk suit, suitable for Switzerland, and the cap with a little button on top, the Prince Albert, the Leinster overcoat with velvet lapels, and with them, of course, the Gladstone bag strapped and double-strapped, secure against the dubious chambermaid and the foreign porter. What would they have thought – those serene men with black moustaches, and deer-stalkers for the crossing, if they could have seen in a vision the great familiar station-yard, dead and deserted as it was a few months back, without a cab, a porter or a policeman, just a notice, ‘Unexploded Bomb’, casually explaining what would have seemed to them the end of everything: no trains for France, no trains for Switzerland, none for Italy, and even the clock stopped? It is, when you come to think of it, a rather sad centenary year.
1941
THE EXPLORERS
THE imagination has its own geography which alters with the centuries. Each continent in turn looms up on the horizon like a great rock carved with unintelligible hieroglyphics and symbols catching at the unconscious: in Shakespeare’s youth it was India, Arabia, the East, and a little later, in the days of Raleigh, Central America and Eldorado: in the eighteenth century, Australia and the South Seas: the nineteenth century, Africa – in particular, West Africa and the Niger. Men have always tried to rationalize their irrational acts, but the explanations given in prospectuses like those of the South Sea Bubble and the African Association are as unconvincing as last night’s supper as the cause of our fantastic dreams.
Little in history is more fantastic than the beginning of West African exploration. There had been
occasional travellers, but the exploration of this unknown territory six times the size of Europe, the biggest white space on the contemporary map, began at a meeting of the very select Saturday Club at the St Alban’s Tavern on 9 June 1788. We know the company who were present, Lord Galloway, Lord Rawdon, General Conway, Sir Adam Fergusson, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir William Fordyce, Mr Pultney, Mr Beaufoy, and Mr Stuart, and even the names of those who were absent – the Bishop of Llandaff, Lord Carysfort, and Sir John Sinclair. The nine members (at what stage of dinner is not recorded) decided to form themselves into an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa and each agreed to subscribe five guineas a year for five years. Before the Association had been in existence for eight weeks two explorers had been chosen and their routes assigned, but the subscription had already proved inadequate.
The first main object was to discover the course of the Niger; and the motive? ‘In 1783’, Mr Plumb writes in his admirable introduction to Mr Howard’s anthology,*1
America had left the Empire. For some years merchants and financiers had confidently predicted her economic collapse, but no collapse came. And as yet no one realized that the political separation of Britain and America did not entail disastrous economic consequences, so that in mercantile circles the discovery of new markets seemed an urgent problem.
But the dream was more compelling than the motive can explain. Think of the German who
intended to travel as a Moslem trader. With great, perhaps excessive, thoroughness he trained on a diet of spiders, grasshoppers, and roots, and before sailing, in order to leave nothing to chance, had himself circumcised. These tribulations were suffered without reward, for the moment he set foot in Africa he caught fever and died.
Think too of the slender chances of survival. The phrase ‘the White Man’s Grave’ has become a music-hall cliché to those who have never seen the little crumbling cemeteries of the West Coast like that on Bunce Island in Sierra Leone river. Mungo Park in the course of his second expedition reported: ‘I am sorry to say that of forty-five Europeans who left the Gambia in perfect health, five only are at present alive, viz. three soldiers (one deranged in his mind), Lieutenant Martyn, and myself.’ Forty years later the chances were hardly better. ‘On the 18th’ (Macgregor Laird reported)
Mr Andrew Clark, a fine young gentleman about eighteen years of age died. . . . Poor fellow! He expired with the utmost calmness, drinking a cup of coffee; and his amiable and obliging disposition having endeared him to the crew, his death threw an additional gloom of despondency over these ill-fated men. In the afternoon James Dunbar, one of the firemen, died. On the 19th, my chief mate, Mr Goldie, and my sailmaker, John Brien, followed; and on the morning of the 20th, our super-cargo, Mr Jordan, expired. I thought at the time that Doctor Briggs had died also; as, while he was endeavouring to revive Mr Jordan, he swooned and remained insensible for a long time. In the evening of the 20th, Mr Swinton also died . . .
No other part of Africa has cast so deep a spell on Englishmen as the Coast, with the damp mists, the mangrove swamps, the malaria, the blackwater and the yellow fever (the only coast in the world dignified by a capital letter and needing, no qualification). Is it that the explorer has the same creative sickness as the writer or the artist and that to fill in the map, as to fill in the character or features of a human being, requires the urge to surrender and self-destruction? – you cannot even surrender yourself so completely to a book or a picture as you can to the chances of death. Mary Kingsley was well aware of this suicidal streak that drove her to the Coast. In a letter to a friend she wrote quite frankly, ‘Dead tired and feeling no one had need of me any more, when my father and mother died within six weeks of each other in ‘92, and my brother went off to the East, I went down to West Africa to die’; and in the sedate poetic prose of Mungo Park – the greatest of all writers on Africa – one can detect the same desire to lose himself for ever. The almost incredible privations and dangers of his first journey among the ‘fanatic Moors’ left him with life still on his hands and he had to return to Africa, giving up his quiet practice as a doctor in Peebles, to lose it – no one knows exactly where. (A Chief near Busa is said to wear his ring to this day.) ‘When the human mind’, he had written, ‘has for some time been fluctuating between hope and despair, tortured with anxiety, and hurried from one extreme to another, it affords a sort of gloomy relief to know the worst that can possibly happen. . . .’ Again and again in Park’s narrative the prose quickens with that gloomy relief as his fingers touched the rock bottom of experience.
It is right that Mungo Park should be the best represented of all the explorers in Mr Howard’s excellent anthology. He was a born writer – the others, with the exception of Burton, became good writers only because of the interest and oddity of their material. Burton here is very much the Burton of the Arabian Nights with his range of intricate experience: his eye for the bizarre concrete detail, like the golden crucifix dangling from the neck of a Dahomey official, ‘but the crucifix is strangely altered, the crucified being a chameleon, the venerable emblem of the rainbow God’: his wicked common sense about the Amazons of Dahomey – ‘wherever a she-soldiery is, celibacy must be one of its rules, or the troops will be in a state of chronic functional disorder between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five’: his malevolent tolerance – ‘Human sacrifice in Dahomey is founded upon a purely religious basis, which not only strengthens but perpetuates the custom. It is a touching instance of the King’s filial piety.’ What a strange encounter it would have been in those days for a chance voyager to South Africa to call in passing on Her Majesty’s Consul in Fernando Po.
There has been one deplorable change as the years passed – the growth of British superiority. To Mungo Park an African king deserved the same respect as his own. ‘The king graciously replied’, ‘The good old king’, such phrases are scattered through his work, and because he respected African sovereignty he respected the African, king or slave. There is a sense all the time of Christian equality. The Moors are cruel – they are not savages.
It is with the not very likeable – and I feel not very reliable – Major Dixon Denham in the 1820s that the white sneer can be observed for the first time. ‘Nothing’, he wrote, ‘could be more absurd and grotesque than some, nay, all, of the figures who formed this court’, though one believes that the sight of Major Denham naked and begging for a pair of trousers makes a higher claim to absurdity if we really believe in the episode. (I write if, for Major Denham’s story frequently seems to echo hollowly not only the mood but the incidents of Mungo Park’s narrative.)
Even the more likeable Macgregor Laird displays the white pride – ‘Among other annoyances, they thrust a disgusting Albino close to me, and asked if he was my brother’; and with Captain Trotter’s expedition up the Niger in the 1840s the tone has dismally darkened. ‘Captain Trotter, Senior Commissioner, explained that Heir Majesty the Queen of Great Britain . . . repugnant to the laws of God . . . Her benevolent intentions for the benefit of Africa . . .’, and so on and so on.
We are not very far now from filibustering Stanley: the hundred lashes to a carrier, the chained and padlocked chiefs, the strong body of men armed with Remingtons, ‘the withering fire’, ‘the Winchesters were worked handsomely’. The dream has vanished. The stores are landed, the trade posts established; civilization is on the way, the Anglican missionaries will build their fake Norman churches of laterite blocks, and as malaria and yellow fever are defeated, the wives will follow their Rugbeian husbands to hill stations and help them to administer the equal justice of a good public school. Even the savagery of Stanley had something of Africa still about it, more than the playing fields of Bo or the art classes of Achimota. We have much to be proud of in West Africa, of the indirect rule established by Lugard, of our protection – unknown to the same extent in East Africa – of the native, but the Christian equality which enabled Park to accept with humility the rebuke of a slave has vanished for ever.
‘SORE BONES: MUCH HEADACHE’
IT is a sad thing about small nationalities that like a possessive woman they trap their great men: Walter Scott, Stevenson, Burns, Livingstone – all have to some extent been made over by their countrymen, they have not been allowed to grow or to diminish with time. How can they even shift in the grave under the weight of their national memorials? a whole industry of trinkets and souvenirs and statuettes depends on the conformity of the dead. A Civil Service of curators, secretaries, and guides takes charge of the memory. (65,000 people pass annually through the turnstiles of the Livingstone Memorial House at Blantyre with its coloured statuary and its Ancestry Room, Youth Room, Adventure Room.) An explorer can suffer from his legend as much as a writer – the explorer, too, has a passion to create, and just as a body carried to its grave at the summit of a Samoan hill obscures the writer struggling with the character of Hermiston, so the last trek of Livingstone’s faithful carriers to the coast, with the obvious drama and the missionary moral, has intruded between us and the patience, the monotony, and the weariness incurred in adding a new line to a map, surveying an uncharted range, correcting an erroneous reading, above all it has obscured Livingstone’s failure – you will not find photographs of the Lari massacre at Blantyre. (Dr Macnair does not help us to escape the legend by writing always in capital letters of the Explorer, the Traveller, the Missionary. I prefer the admirably clear and sensible geographical notes by Dr Ronald Miller.*2)
Collected Essays Page 25
