The virtue of this selection from Livingstone’s travel books and journals is its dullness – the reader must dig himself for the vivid fact or the revealing sentence. Livingstone was not primarily concerned with the beauty of the scenery or the drama of his journeys: he was concerned, at the beginning, with the location of healthy mission stations, later with discovering trade routes (which he considered might help towards the extinction of slavery) – the discoveries of Lake Shira and Lake Nyasa had no drama for him: they were incidental.
We discovered Lake Nyasa a little before noon on September 16, 1859 Its southern end is 14° minutes 25’ South lat., 35° 30’ E. long. At this point the valley is about 12 miles wide. There are hills on both sides of the lake.
The plot of the novel catches the attention, but the subject lies deeper. ‘The Nile sources are valuable only to me as a means of opening my mouth with power.’
Literary expression was not Livingstone’s object – a compass reading was more important for his mission. (‘It seems a pity that the important facts about two healthy ridges should not be known to Christendom.’) But in the early years when he wrote for publication, Missionary Travels and Researches, The Zambesi and Its Tributaries, he thought it necessary to take as his model the work of other Victorian travel books.
We proceeded rapidly up-river. The magnificent stream is often more than a mile broad and is adorned by many islands from three to five miles in length. The beauty of the scenery on some of these islands is greatly increased by the date-palm with its gracefully curved fronds and refreshing light-green colour, while the lofty palmyra towers above and casts its feathery foliage against a cloudless sky. The banks of the river are equally covered by forest and most of the trees on the brink of the water send down roots from their branches, like the banian. The adjacent country is rocky and undulating, abounding in elephants and all other large game, except leches and nakongs, which seem generally to avoid stony ground.
The airs and graces were to be shed when he was no longer concerned in advancing the sales of his books at home and increasing his opportunities for work. In the final journals we get the hard truthful writing of which he was capable. Written for no one but himself during that terrible seven-year journey, they present a picture quite different to those bas-reliefs of a missionary in a peaked consular cap, Bible in hand, surrounded by his native followers. Tired out, disillusioned (for now he was dependent upon the very slave traders whom he wished to put out of business for ever), uncertain of everything (even of the Zambesi whose navigability had been his obstinate dream) except of his simple evangelical faith, so free from the complex dogmas of a theologian – just God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. (The Apostles’ Creed was nearer to him than the Athanasian.)
How little experience is needed in a reader to make him realize the appalling nature of the seven-year journey. This writer has experienced only four weeks of African travel on foot, one strike of carriers, one bad Chief, a single night of high fever, only a few days when provisions grew short – but multiplying that small experience nearly a hundred times in days and how many hundred times in privation, it seems almost incredible that Livingstone could have gone on for so long without returning to civilization. Dr Miller admirably describes the condition of all African travel – the spider-web if tracks that may lead somewhere or nowhere:
One of the amazing features of Africa is the close network of footpaths that exists everywhere – and leads everywhere – highly convenient for movement within a limited neighbourhood, but most confusing for the stranger wishing to make a long cross-country traverse; and placing him at the mercy of guides who may mislead him, deliberately or accidentally, or simply immobilise him by withdrawing their services. . . . Thus we find Livingstone, like many other African travellers, subjected to expensive and infuriating delays by the refusal of chiefs to supply guides. He navigated and fixed the framework of his maps by means of sextant observations, of course, but these could not tell him which fork of the path led merely to an outfield, and which to the next village on his route; which to a swamp and which to the ford on the river.
Here are a few jottings of his journey.
Christmas Day 1866. ‘A little indigestible porridge, of hardly any taste, is now my fare and it makes me dream of better.’
January 1867 (the great journey was not yet a year old). Deserting carriers stole:
all the dishes, a large box of powder, the flour we had purchased dearly to help us as far as the Chambesi, the tools, two guns and a cartridge pouch; but the medicine chest was the sorest loss of all. I felt as if I had received a sentence of death, like poor Bishop Mackenzie.
October 1867. ‘Sore bones; much headache; no appetite; much thirst.’
December 1867. ‘I am so tired of exploration . . .’
July 1868. ‘Here we cooked a little porridge, and then I lay down on one side, and the canoe men and my attendants at the fire in the middle. I was soon asleep and dreamt I had apartments in Mivart’s hotel.’
5 July 1872. (Stanley by this time had come and gone.) ‘Weary! Weary!’ – but there were still ten months to go.
All the last months of the seven years’ trek were spent in a flat prairie waste of water; the earth, what there was of it was like adhesive plaster. In one night six inches of rain fell. Canoes sank and stuck; tents became rotten, clothes were never dry. There are moments when the reader feels as though Livingstone had forgotten his true purpose, which was not to explore the limit of human endurance but to reach the Lualaba river and sail down it in the hope that it might lead him to the Nile and its sources (even that was only a means to the great white trade routes, the blessings as he believed of commerce, the end of slavery). He was in Childe Roland’s territory now – ‘a lion wandered into this world of water and anthills and roared night and morning’. What a long way he had come from the gracefully curved fronds, the magnificent streams, the lofty palmyra towers. Like Stevenson struggling with Weir he had reached rock at the moment of death.
The comparison between these two Scotsmen is oddly close. Under the literary polish of the Vailima Prayers was a simplicity of faith very similar to Livingstone’s. Does it come from a Scottish upbringing – this ability to feel regret without remorse, to pardon oneself and accept one’s weakness, the ability to leave oneself to God? ‘For our sins forgiven or prevented, for our shame unpublished, we bless and thank Thee, O God.’ Thus Stevenson, and thus Livingstone:
We now end 1866. It has not been so fruitful or useful as I intended. Will try to do better in 1867, and be better – more gentle and loving. And may the Almighty, to whom I commit my way, bring my desires to pass, and prosper me. Let all the sins of ’66 be blotted out for Jesus’ sake.
At the end they shared the same sense of failure. Who suffered more? Stevenson two months before his death writing, ‘I am a fictitious article and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my fellow novelists, and by boys’, or Livingstone finding himself embroiled in the slave trade he hated: ‘I am heart sore and sick of human blood. . . . I doubt whether the divine favour and will is on my side.’
For the end their wish was the same. It is impossible not to recall the grave on Mount Vaea and the over-familiar verses. ‘Here he lies where he longed to be’, when we read in Livingstone’s journal on 25 June 1868:
We came to a grave in the forest. It was a little rounded mound, as if the occupant sat in it. It was strewn over with flour, and a number of large beads had been put on it. A little path showed that it had visitors. That is the sort of grave I should prefer. To lie in the still, still forest, with no hand ever to disturb my bones. Graves at home seem to me miserable and without elbow room, especially those in cold, damp clay.
Stevenson’s wishes were the more respected, for Livingstone’s embalmed body was brought home to the damp clay and the lack of elbow room in the nave of Westminster Abbey.
Less than a hundred years have gone by since Livingstone’s death and we can see the
measure of his failure in East Africa today. The trade routes have been opened up, the slave trade abolished, but the true lesson of Livingstone’s life was completely forgotten. ‘In attempting their moral elevation’, Livingstone wrote of the Africans, ‘it is always more conductive to the end desired that the teacher should come unaccompanied by any power to cause either jealousy or fear.’ In the same book he wrote, ‘Good manners are as necessary among barbarians as among the civilized’, but during those weeks in Stanley’s company he had failed to influence his companion except superficially. It was to Stanley and his Maxim guns and rawhide whips that the future in East Africa belonged, and it was Stanley’s methods that left a legacy of hatred and distrust throughout Africa.
1954
FRANCIS PARKMAN
‘MY 23rd Birthday. Nooned at a mud puddle.’ So Parkman noted in his journal*3 in 1846, and we shall look far for any comparable passage in the diaries of a creative artist. Certainly the wind has never played quite so freely at a historian’s birth. The smell of documents, the hard feel of the desk-chair, are singularly absent. Parkman had already ridden for three weeks on the arduous and dangerous Oregon trail, and in an earlier passage, a week or two back, he had let his imagination dwell on the vast range of experience already crossed between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two.
Shaw and Henry went off for buffaloes. H. Killed two bulls. The Capt. very nervous and old-womanish at nooning – he did not like the look of the hills, which were at least half a mile off – there might be Inds. there, ready to pounce on the horses. In the afternoon, rode among the hills – plenty of antelope – lay on the barren ridge of one of them, and contrasted my present situation with my situation in the convent at Rome.
Surely no other historian has planned his life work so young nor learned to write so hard a way. At the age of eighteen the whole scheme of his great work France and England in North America had captured his consciousness; there remained only to gather his material and to begin. One remembers the immense importance that Gibbon’s biographers have attributed to his gentlemanly service in the Hampshire Militia, but what are we to think of a young historian who, before starting to write his first volume. The Conspiracy of Pontiac, finds it necessary to make the long journey to Europe and Rome, there to stay in a Passionist monastery so that he may attain some imaginative sympathy with the Catholic missionaries who are the heroes of his second volume (published twenty-four years later) and after that to undertake his journey along the Oregon trail in quest of Indian lore, thus ruining his health for a lifetime in the mere gathering of background material?
Parkman was an uncertain stylist (as the admirable editor of these journals writes: ‘There seems to have been a natural instinct for the phrase that is just a shade too high, just as his ear was naturally faulty’), but his errors of taste are carried away by the great drive of his narrative, much as they are in the case of Motley and in our own day Mr Churchill. He had ridden off through the dangerous wilderness with a single companion, like one of the heroes of his epic or a character in Fenimore Cooper, who had woken his genius, he had eaten dog with the Indians and stayed in their moving villages, he had watched the tribes gather for war and heard the news of traders’ deaths brought in. He had listened to Big Crow’s own account of his savagery – ‘he has killed 14 men; and dwells with great satisfaction on the capture of a Utah, whom he took personally; and, with the other Sioux, scalped alive, cut the tendons of his wrist, and flung, still alive, into a great fire.’ Since the seventeenth century no historian had so lived and suffered for his art. Like Prescott he all but lost his sight, so that he was forced to use a wire grid to guide his pencil, he suffered from misanthropy and a melancholia that snaps out like a dog even from his early journals (‘the little contemptible faces – the thin, weak tottering figures – that one meets here on Broadway, are disgusting. One feels savage with human nature’). The work planned at eighteen, begun at twenty-eight, was only finished at fifty-nine, in the year before his death, by working against time and his own health. This was a poet’s vocation, followed with a desperate intensity careless of consequences, and the journals are as important in tracing the course of the creative impulse as the journals of Henry James. And how closely we are reminded of the James family and their strange melancholia when we read in one of Parkman’s letters:
Between 1852 and 1860 this cerebral rebellion passed through great and seemingly capricious fluctuation. It had its ebbs and floods Slight and sometimes imperceptible causes would produce an access which sometimes lasted with little respite for months. When it was in its milder moods, I used the opportunity to collect material and prepare ground for the future work, should work ever become practicable. When it was at its worst, the condition was not enviable. I could neither listen to reading nor engage in conversation even of the lightest. Sleep was difficult, and was often banished entirely for one or two nights during which the brain was apt to be in a state of abnormal activity which had to be repressed at any cost, since thought produced the intensest torture. The effort required to keep the irritated organ quiet was so fatiguing that I occasionally rose and spent hours in the open air, where I found distraction and relief watching the policemen and the tramps on the Malls of Boston Common, at the risk of passing for a tramp myself. Towards the end of the night this cerebral excitation would seem to tire itself out, and give place to a condition of weight and oppression much easier to bear.
Mr Mason Wade is an impeccable editor, sensitive to the qualities of Parkman’s style, its merits as well as its demerits, learned in his subject, passionately industrious in tracing the most transient character. His notes are often as fascinating as the text – on ‘Old Dick’ for example, an odd job man on Lake George, who collected rattlesnakes and exhibited them in a box inscribed: ‘In this box a Rattel Snaick Hoo was Kecht on Black mountaing. He is seven years old last July. Admittance sixpence site. Children half price, or notten,’ or on that strange character, Joseph Brant, alias Thayendanegea, Mohawk chief and freemason, who on one occasion saved from the stake a fellow mason who gave him the right sign. Brant was entertained by Boswell and painted by Romney. What a long way such a character seems from the murderers of the Jesuit Brébeuf (they baptized him with boiling water, cut strips of flesh from his living body and ate them, and opened his breast and drank his blood before he died).
Mr Wade himself discovered these journals, with the romantic and paradoxical simplicity of a Chesterton detective story, in Parkman’s old Boston home on Chestnut Street.
Parkman’s Indian trophies still hung on the walls; the bookcases still held the well-worn editions of Byron, Cooper, and Scott which were his life-long favourites; and in the centre of the room, covered with a dust sheet, stood the desk on which the great histories had been written. This desk was two-sided; the drawers on one side had obviously been inspected and emptied of most of their contents . . . the drawers on the other side had been overlooked; they contained the missing journals and a great mass of correspondence, including some of the most important letters Parkman wrote and received.
For the general reader the most interesting of Mr Wade’s discoveries is Parkman’s journal of the Oregon Trail which Mr Wade rightly prefers to the work based on it – Parkman’s first and most popular book, popular because of the way in which it was adulterated to suit the fashion of the time by his friend Charles Eliot Norton, ‘carefully bowdlerized of much anthropological data and many insights into Western life which seemed too crude to his delicate taste’. Mr Wade quotes several examples of these changes from the vivid fluid journal to the stilted literary tones – the false Cooperisms – of the book. These Cooperisms, still evident in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman gradually shed. Life and literature at the beginning lay uneasily with a sword between them, so that nothing in the early books has the same sense of individual speech and character that we find in the journals. Here from the journals is a certain Mr Smith of Palermo:
‘Don’t tell me about your Tarpe
ian rock. I’ve seen it, and what’s more, the feller wanted I should give him half a dollar for taking me there. “Now look here!” says I, “do you s’pose I’m going to pay you for showing me this old pile of stones? I can see better rocks than this any day, for nothing; so clear out!” I’ll tell you the way I do,’ continued Mr Smith, ‘I don’t go and look and stare as some people do when I get inside of a church, but I pace off the length and breadth, and then set it down on paper. Then, you see, I’ve got something that will keep.’
And here is an old soldier near the Canadian Border:
On entering the bar-room, an old man with a sunburnt wrinkled face and no teeth, a little straw hat set on one side of his grey head – and who was sitting on a chair leaning his elbows on his knees and straddling his legs apart – thus addressed me: ‘Hullo! hullo! What’s again’ on, now? Ye ain’t off to the wars already, be ye? Ther’ ain’t no war now as I knows on, though there’s agoin’ to be one afore long, as damned bloody as ever was fit this side o’ hell!’ . . . He then began to speak of some of his neighbours, one of whom he mentioned as ‘that G—d damnedest, sneakingest, nastiest puppy that ever went this side of hell!’ Another he likened to a ‘sheep’s cod dried’; another was ‘not fit to carry guts to a bear’.
Only with his third book – The Jesuits in North America – did the marriage satisfactorily take place. In the deeply moving Relations of the Jesuits that form the greater part of his material he found again the power of characteristic speech: like that of the tortured priest Bressani who wrote with bitter humour to his Superior. ‘I could not have believed that a man was so hard to kill’, and in another letter of ironic apology to the Jesuit General in safe Rome: ‘I don’t know if your Paternity will recognize the handwriting of one whom you once knew very well. The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer had only one finger of his right hand left entire, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds, which are still open, from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water and his table is the earth.’
Collected Essays Page 26
