The readership of newspapers was growing fast and as a journalistic proposition the explorer was irresistible. He braved danger and endured extreme hardship in thrilling contrast to the ordered calm of the suburban terrace. He could, like David Livingstone, be driven by hatred of the slave trade, or like Joseph Thomson – dead at thirty-seven – he could be so enigmatic as to declare, ‘I am not an empire-builder. I am not a missionary. I am not truly a scientist. I merely want to return to Africa to continue my wanderings.’ The motivation was secondary to the fact of their national identity. These were Britons who were taming the world.
Does any of this matter now, other than as a ripping yarn? The waterfalls which tumbled out of Lake Victoria, through which Speke intended to offer the Marquess of Ripon immortality by naming them Ripon Falls, largely disappeared when a dam was built in the 1950s. If the name of Speke is known at all, it is more likely to be as a deprived area of Liverpool, once home to the Bryant and May match factory and the Triumph sports-car plant, both long-gone British brands. Richard Burton has his splendid tomb in a Mortlake cemetery in the shape of an Arab tent, but mention the name and you are likely to have to explain that you’re not talking about the Welsh actor twice married to the actress Elizabeth Taylor. The accounts these explorers wrote of their journeys are underpinned by a now offensive tone of utterly superior certainty: the white man knows best. But it is impossible to read them without being struck by their delight in the exuberant strangeness of the people, animals and plants they encountered. As for the act of discovery, the planting of a flag changed no physical reality. Terra Incognita was only land unknown to European cartographers, Newfoundland had merely been found by people who just hadn’t happened to know it existed. Not a single characteristic of the lake which Speke had reached was altered by his calling it Victoria, any more than naming the highest mountain on earth Everest after a one-time surveyor general of India changed its height by an inch.
But the proliferation of British place names on maps gave an illusion that the world was being remade. At some primitive level the stories of discovery have nurtured a sense of British endeavour, of the solitary individual against the world, eccentric, outnumbered, bloody-minded and convinced he’s right, a sick and shrunken nation’s determination to hold its place in the world. It is perhaps most keenly demonstrated in the cases of those explorers who died executing their missions – Mungo Park and his sole remaining British companion throwing themselves into the River Niger and drowning, Captain Cook bludgeoned and stabbed to death on a beach in Hawaii, Sir John Franklin and his men perishing in the snow and ice, or the last glimpse of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine as they toiled towards the summit of Everest. There was something about these deaths which was taken to express the spirit of Britain. They seemed to be tableaux of self-sacrifice in the pursuit not of commercial gain but of human endeavour. It did not matter if the mission had failed – in some ways that made the impression more potent. Perhaps the acme came with the last message left by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, exhausted, hungry, frost-bitten and snow-blind in his Antarctic tent in 1912. ‘For God’s sake look after our people …’ ‘Our people’ was more than the valiant, frozen band on the Ross Ice Shelf.*
By the turn of the twentieth century it had become easy for the British to feel special. The 1851 Great Exhibition had not only celebrated home-grown enterprise but had seemed to demonstrate the readiness of other nations to bring their tribute offerings. When the exhibition’s Crystal Palace closed its doors, it had made enough profit for an expanse of Kensington to be turned over to the building of ‘Albertopolis’ on which stood the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, Imperial College, the Royal Albert Hall, the Science Museum and the Royal Colleges of Art and Music, demonstrating individually and collectively the nation’s eminence. When Victoria was redesignated as empress of India in 1876, her subjects basked in a little of the reflected glory. But if they wanted to feel they really were masters of all creation, they just took themselves off for an afternoon at the London Zoo. Here, as the century wore on, the growing numbers of strange animals testified to Britain’s increasing domination of the world.
The Zoological Society of London – the first of its kind in the world – was an imperial invention, founded by the creator of Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, in a marriage between the nineteenth-century thirst for knowledge and the accumulation of British colonies. By the middle years of the century, ‘nature study’, from pressed flowers to shell and butterfly collecting, had become a fashionable, improving activity, and as the empire grew fatter, ‘the zoo’ developed as one of the most popular places of entertainment in London. Greater and greater grew the number of explorers, colonial officials, scientists and retired sea-captains among its members, more abundant and stranger the specimens shipped to Britain. The zoo was imperial exploration for everyone. Its Handbook suggested that the weekend visitor exercise his imagination. ‘In his mind’s eye he may track the pathless desert and sandy waste; he may climb amid the romantic solitudes, the towering peaks, the wilder crags of the Himalayan heights … or peer among the dark lagoons of the African rivers, enshrouded by forests whose rank green foliage excludes the rays of even a tropical sun.’ The caging of wild and exotic animals in the middle of London brought the conquest of wild and exotic lands to the heart of safe and ordered Britain.* The world was stranger and more exotic than ever might have been imagined. But all of its creatures, whether magnificent and menacing or small and cuddly, could be brought before the people of London, caged and displayed for their entertainment, amid cropped lawns and gravel paths.
The greatest attraction among the animals on show was a celebrity hippopotamus named Obaysch which had been brought to the zoo with much pomp. He was named after the island on the White Nile where he had been captured as a baby in 1849 before being offered as an ingratiating gift to the British by the ruler of Egypt. Obaysch was shipped down the Nile with a guard of Nubian soldiers, installed in the British Consul’s garden, lured on to a Pacific and Orient steamer by his keeper and a couple of professional snake charmers and taken to Southampton. On the train journey from there to London, crowds at every station clamoured for a glimpse of the beast, but generally had to make do with the sight of his Egyptian keeper, Hamet, who, because he slept with Obaysch, was understandably keen to get an occasional breath of fresh air. Once installed in the zoo, Obaysch was a sensation. Thousands of people lined up at weekends to see what Punch dubbed ‘HRH’ – His Rolling Hulk. ‘The long lines of carriages which are daily to be seen at the entrance of the society’s garden are conclusive evidence that the hippopotamus … is the great icon of the day,’ observed the Illustrated London News in 1850. Indeed he was. Attendances at the zoo soared – even Queen Victoria took her children. The following year, the magazine was still burbling with excitement about Obaysch – it was a millennium and a half since an animal like him had been seen in Europe, a comparison which explicitly compared the British with the Roman Empire – at the expense of the latter, considering that Pliny believed that hippos walked backwards to confuse anyone trying to track them. Obasych did not really do much at the zoo, just lying around on the edge of his pond, ministered to by Hamet and occasionally grunting. The zoo authorities soon acquired a female hippo from the Nile, with whom, after sixteen years of indifference, Obaysch eventually produced a calf. Charles Dickens wrote an article arguing for other zoo animals to be given parity of esteem. But in vain. Obaysch was the zoo’s superstar, celebrated in souvenir models and, most unlikely of all, in the newly composed ‘Hippopotamus Polka’.
Chapter Six
‘Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live’
John Milton, 1645
It was the last thing he expected to see.
In 1896, a parched American explorer reached the banks of the Tana River in northern Kenya. Arthur Donaldson Smith, a doctor and big-game hunter, had begun his journey at Berbera in Somaliland: it had taken fifte
en months in the wilderness to reach the river. Now he estimated there were perhaps three or four more days of hardship to endure. Only seven white men were believed to have passed this way before and he wondered vaguely about the chances of a group of Africans arriving in canoes. Suddenly, shimmering through the heat haze, from around a bend upstream what should appear but a canoe. More extraordinary was what it contained – a white man in a white suit, holding a pink umbrella above his head. The American fired two rifle-shots into the air and was answered by two shots from the canoe. As the boat approached, the American drew up his porters in a line behind him. The canoe neared the bank, and the man stepped ashore. The American felt that ‘introductions by a third party are unnecessary in these remote regions’. The two men shook hands and the new arrival introduced himself. He was, he explained, the Reverend Robert Ormerod and he was looking for a site to build a new mission station. However unexpected this encounter was to the American, he really should not have been surprised. For missionaries might turn up anywhere. In fact, the remoter the terrain, the better. Making converts was hard work, but missionaries greatly increased their chances if no one had been prospecting for converts in the area before them. The need to find new souls to save took them to places which held no appeal for merchant-venturers, gold-prospectors or imperial strategists.
By the late nineteenth century, flag-planting was inseparable from cross-carrying. ‘It is religion which has given the comparatively small United Kingdom its imperial power and responsibilities,’ said the secretary of the Free Church of Scotland’s mission arm. By the turn of the twentieth century there were an estimated 12,000 British missionaries scattered across the world – the provisional wing of empire and often a damn nuisance to colonial administrators, who objected to their supercilious presumption that they knew better than them what was best for the natives. ‘Confound all these parsons,’ exclaimed the Governor of Uganda, Sir Hesketh Bell. But the missionaries had to be lived with. ‘They spread the use of the English language. They induct the natives into the best kind of civilisation,’ wrote one official. ‘In fact each mission station is an essay in colonisation.’ Or as Lord Salisbury put it, ‘First the missionary. Then the consul. Then the general.’ Or, often enough, first the missionary, then the trader.
Their energy and fortitude were astonishing – some missionaries might walk a thousand miles or more in a year. Alfred Tucker, for example, had been serving as a curate in Durham when, in 1890, he offered his services to the Archbishop of Canterbury as a potential missionary. Had he paused to think he might have deduced that the Archbishop’s decision to raise him immediately to the rank of bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa (what became Kenya, Uganda and much of Tanganyika) hinted at how unattractive the posting was (the two previous bishops had died in harness). Instead, he left his wife and baby at home and set out for Africa, reaching Uganda in December that year, after a four-month trek from the coast on foot, in the company of a gun-runner. Dressed in tweeds, with a broad-brimmed hat and an enormous moustache, the new bishop set about trying to settle the consequences of the Africans’ eager embrace of Christianity: Anglican and French Catholic missionaries and their communities were on the point of war. Peace accomplished, there was further work ahead, for Uganda was not at the time part of the empire. The Imperial British East Africa Company, which had been given the rights to exploit the territory, was making no money, so Tucker raised sufficient funds from evangelicals in Britain to make it worth their while staying for another year. Two years later the British government declared the territory a protectorate. In his youth, Bishop Tucker had been an enthusiastic walker, cricketer and footballer, which had blessed him with a sufficiently iron constitution to survive nearly twenty years of sleeping rough and tramping across the country with his Bible and paintbox (his memoirs are illustrated with his own paintings). At fifty-nine he could still ride six hours from one mission station to another, and then play – and win – three sets of tennis.*
When they returned from the bush to retirement in Harrogate or Eastbourne, these men and women (for this was an endeavour in which both sexes took part) produced memoirs which appeared under titles like The Congo for Christ (by the Reverend J. B. Myers) or In Dwarf Land and Cannibal Country (by the Reverend A. B. Lloyd). The stories they told, of danger and hardship, followed by reward and redemption, had the effect of evangelizing for empire, which, in some eyes, was making up ‘by victories of the Cross overseas, for the losses of their Church at Home’: the further religious scepticism advanced in Britain, the harder British missionaries laboured abroad. Mission work took the zeal which had driven the anti-slavery movement in Britain and gave it a new focus, convincing many at home that the expansion of the empire was God’s work. In truth, missionaries were often resented in the colonies, or tolerated for as long as they were present and afterwards forgotten about. The most famous missionary of all, David Livingstone, made only one convert in his entire career, an African chief who later decided he had made a mistake and preferred polygamy to paradise.*
Who could doubt the rightness of the British Empire when it was expressed through such a man as David Livingstone? In person he could come across as dour and brusque, social awkwardness accentuated by an arm which had been mangled in an attack by a lion. He stood about 5 foot 8, with cropped hair and moustache setting off a well-tanned explorer’s face. But he was blessed with an ability to convey his convictions in clear and passionate language. One Englishman who heard him on his 1857 speaking tour recalled how ‘when excited, a varied expression of earnest and benevolent feeling, and remarkable enjoyment of the ludicrous … passes over [his face] … When he speaks to you, you think him at first to be a Frenchman; but as he tells you a Scotch anecdote in the Glaswegian dialect, you make up your mind that he must be, as his face indicates, a countryman from the north.’ The story this Scotsman told was of an astonishing walk he had made, right across Africa, armed with not much more than a Bible, walking stick, magic lantern, sextant, compass and nautical almanac. It made him into a national hero, led to an invitation to call on Queen Victoria and saw him showered with honours. Soon Livingstone was planning a return to Africa, further to advance ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilization’, a trinity which ensured a healthy public subscription and the endorsement of a government eager to discover the commercial possibilities of trade up the Zambezi into the heart of Africa. The new expedition left England in March 1858, intending to travel upriver in a series of increasingly shallow-draught boats to the point where they could establish the headquarters from which they would explore, evangelize and disrupt the Arab slavers taking their sorry traffic down to the coast.
In Africa, those around him felt the full force of his manic obsession. One by one he fell out with his companions. Fresh volunteers arrived with supplies three years after his expedition had left England, but they too lapsed into sickness or fell foul of Livingstone’s mad determination. Even his most loyal assistant, the expedition doctor John Kirk, noted that ‘Dr L is out of his mind … he is a most unsafe leader’ and ‘about as ungrateful and slippery a mortal as I ever came in contact with’. Kirk had reason to be worried, for, by insisting they shoot a set of rapids by canoe, Livingstone had nearly drowned him. Eventually, the British government had had enough and recalled Livingstone to England after six years. His homecoming this time was much less fêted than his return from the walk across Africa. But in 1866 he was off again. Now he planned not merely to spread the gospel and fight the slavers, but possibly also to find the headwaters of the Nile. This, Livingstone’s last journey, ran into trouble almost from the point of his arrival in Africa. Progress was much slower than expected. Porters deserted. Scientific equipment was damaged. Diversions were necessary. The medicine chest was stolen. Wet weather necessitated further detours. Supplementary stores ordered up from the coast were not at the rendezvous point. As year succeeded year, Livingstone succumbed to one sickness after another – cholera, dysentery, pneumonia, ulcerated feet and haemorrho
ids. He had pulled out many of his own teeth and appears to have been hallucinating much of the time. ‘I am terribly knocked up,’ he scrawled with the juice of a berry in the margins of one of his surviving books. As he suffered in solitude, a vast audience at home had begun to hunger for news of his fate, for by now missions to ‘darkest Africa’ were much more than low-key matters of mere evangelism. What had become of the lone, lost Scot, Mr Valiant-for-Truth abandoned in the jungle, was a gift of a story to the rapidly growing mass media. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald recognized the commercial potential of a world scoop and Henry Morton Stanley’s marathon journey to discover Livingstone’s fate was the result.
Stanley’s celebrated greeting, when he eventually found Livingstone at Ujiji, in what is now western Tanzania – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – guaranteed the immortality of both men. Afterwards, they travelled together for a while, and then Stanley left Livingstone to continue his search for the source of the Nile. One year later, Livingstone was still in Africa, but by now he was a very sick man able to travel only if carried in a litter by his porters. His death in 1873 – he was discovered, it was said, kneeling in prayer – provided Britain with another imperial pietà. It was seven years since he had left home. His heart was removed and buried in Africa, but the devotion of his loyal servants in embalming the body and returning it to England was made to seem almost divinely ordained. Livingstone lay in state at the Royal Geographical Society headquarters and his elaborate funeral in Westminster Abbey in April 1874 consecrated imperialism. The tenacity and charm of the man who lies beneath the black slab in the floor of the Abbey had been matched by a cranky pigheadedness. And yet he retained the capacity to inspire the country, even more in death than in life. He really hated slavery, even if he was ineffective in making converts. The British Quarterly Review commented that ‘his death has bequeathed the work of African exploration and civilisation as a sacred legacy to this country’. The empire really was God’s work.
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