by Tim Jeal
I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body ... No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death - not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot diej3ff
So how had Dr Livingstone fared in the meantime? From July 1 1870 to February 1187 11 - the month in which Stanley had left Zanzibar for the African mainland - Livingstone had been totally immobilized by dysentery and anal bleeding, and by terrible flesh-eating ulcers on his feet. During this time of illness and depression at Bambarre (Kabam- bare), in Manyema, he fell victim to various delusions. He read the Bible through four times and persuaded himself that Moses had travelled from Ethiopia to Manyema in search of the Nile's source. Livingstone also read Herodotus' History, and found references that he thought supported his theory that the source of the Nile lay far to the south. Isolation and illness were loosening Livingstone's hold on reality and leading him to grasp at any straws that seemed to undermine the belief of Speke and Baker that the Nile's source lay in the northern lakes.
By February 1871 Livingstone was well enough to travel towards the river Lualaba with thirteen followers - ten of whom had been engaged by Dr Kirk at the coast early in 11870, and had arrived in Manyema a year later, against all odds. In March, Livingstone passed through a region devastated by Arab-Swahili slave raids, and arrived by the month's end at the town of Nyangwe on the great river. In order to trace the Lualaba northwards he needed canoes, but the local slave traders refused to sell him any in case he planned to spy on their activities. Meanwhile, his own followers were scared by the prospect of a long river trip, and did their best to stop him acquiring boats. Livingstone offered the immense sum of £400 to Dugumbe, the leading Arab in the town, if he would merely ferry him across the river, but on 115 July - the very day he made this offer - a massacre took place that shocked Livingstone more than any event he had ever witnessed. It was sparked by a trivial argument in Nyangwe's market but ended with the Arabs shooting into a crowd of fleeing people, many of whom dashed into the river and were drowned. The Arab estimate of 400 dead was probably zoo too few. Livingstone's outrage was too great for him to stay on any longer trying to buy Dugumbe's canoes. Two years of effort had come to nothing. There was now only one course open to him: to return to Ujiji, although he had not learned where the Lualaba went.39
On 8 August, Livingstone was ambushed not long after leaving Nyangwe, and was fortunate that two spears thrown from bushes only feet away both missed him.4° He was passing through cannibal country, but was not alarmed. Failure weighed upon him more heavily than fear of death. The traders had got their ivory and slaves, but: `I alone had failed and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in sight of the end towards which I strained.'4' The prospect of returning to Ujiji after having made so little progress in two years was intolerable. In his worst dreams he had not expected to be returning like this.
Stanley left Kwihara on zo September 187 11 with a group of men that he had, as he put it, `selected to be crowned as Immortals'. He listed these, in his book How I Found Livingstone, as numbering fifty-four - twenty more than the true figure.42 That same evening Stanley had another severe bout of fever, and many of his men took the opportunity to hurry back to Kwihara for `one last debauch'.43 The men drifted back next day, and as the column headed south its leader was too ill to inflict any punishments. Three days later, Asmani, the man in charge of Livingstone's supply caravan, deserted, taking his gun with him. Stanley sent Bombay, with three `soldiers', in pursuit. He then gave the order to the rest of his men to march. Seven pagazi refused to lift their loads, saying they were sick. Stanley put several in chains and beat the rest. Naively, he would describe this punishment later in his book - as if unaware that other travellers kept quiet about such matters. But, having survived in the workhouse by concealing his vulnerability, Henry still needed, as a young man, to be thought harder and more formidable than other explorers.
John Shaw's illness grew critical in the first few days of the march, and on z6 September Stanley decided that if he were ever to leave in pursuit of Livingstone, the man would have to be taken back to Kwihara. The sailor had been ill for so long that any more marching would have killed him. Being close to Arab supplies, he was not going to starve. Shaw himself was eager to be left behind, and his last evening with his leader was amicable.
The night before we parted, Shaw played some tunes on an accordion ... though it was only a miserable ten-dollar affair ... The last tune played before retiring was `Home Sweet Home'; and I fancy that before it ended we had mutually softened towards each other.44
Two days later, Shaw was in Kwihara, and Henry and his men were travelling through a dense forest. Malaria was tormenting Henry again. Apart from the violent shakings and sweats and Arctic cold ness, he experienced `strange fancies which sometimes assume most hideous shapes'. Between bouts of delirium, he felt `insanely furious'. On recovery, he would feel `ludicrously amiable'.41 The Arabs had warned him that the southerly route to Ujiji would force him into the territory of the Ha people, who were notorious for making exorbitant demands on travellers. Stanley had no objection to paying `hongo' - a levy for right of passage - but the Ha tried his patience to the limit. During two days spent crossing their land, he wrote, they `mulcted me of half the available property of the expedition'.46 But in late October, at the Malagarazi river, Henry was electrified to hear that a white man with grey whiskers had just arrived at Ujiji from Manyema. To avoid more time-wasting negotiations with Ha chiefs, he led his men on a lengthy detour along a reedy river bank and then through a bamboo jungle.
During the early stages of his march from Unyanyembe, Stanley and his men passed through forest and marshland, and then clambered over hills and rocky ridges. Nearing Lake Tanganyika, as he and his men swung northwards, the countryside became gentler, `the green hills crowned by clusters of straw-thatched cones'. And then a notable announcement: `We cross the Mkuti, a glorious little river'47 - 'glorious' because, at last, they were just hours from Ujiji, though they could scarcely believe it. In camp that evening, Stanley ordered Selim: `Lay out my new flannel suit ... oil my boots ... chalk my helmet, and fold a new puggaree around it, that I may make as presentable an appearance as possible before the white man with the grey beard, and before the Arabs of Ujiji; for the clothes I have worn through jungle and forest are in tatters.'48 Stanley was in no doubt from the information he had that Livingstone was indeed at Ujiji, and yet he was still fearful that this man, whom Dr Kirk had represented as a reclusive misanthrope, would resent being `found'.
Livingstone's return journey from Nyangwe to Ujiji was one of the most agonizing he ever undertook. He could not dismiss from his mind `the sad scenes of man's inhumanity to man'. He was emaciated from dysentery, and his ulcerated feet caused him misery. `I ... arrived, a mere ruckle of bones ... I felt as if dying on my feet.'49 Then, at Ujiji, a savage blow: Sherif Bashakyh bin Ahmed - the man whom Kirk had placed in charge of the supply caravan despatched early in 11870, which had arrived at Ujiji a year later - had systematically pillaged his supplies and sold them off. Thus Livingstone found on arrival that all he had left was `a little coffee and sugar and some few unsaleable beads'. Livingstone wrote: `I was like the man who went from Jerusalem to Jericho, but no good Samaritan would come the Ujijian way.'s°
Five days after David Livingstone had arrived at Ujiji, the man who had once been John Rowlands was camped on a hill less than ten miles away, looking down `as in a painted picture, at a vast lake in the distance ... set in a frame of dimly-blue mountains'. Several hours later, after `tearing through the cane-breaks of the valleys', Henry Stanley and his men were close enough to the lake to `hear the sounding surge on the pebbled shore and to see ... by the lake, embowered in palms, on this hot noon, the village of Ujiji'. Ahead of them, the path `curved under the
trees into the town'."I Henry was ecstatic.
At this grand moment we do not think of the hundreds of miles we have marched, of the hundreds of hills we have ascended and descended, of the many forests we have traversed, of the jungles and thickets that annoyed us ... of the hot suns that scorched us ... At last the sublime hour has arrived! - our dreams, our hopes and anticipations are now about to be realized!
Then, as his men fired repeated volleys - the immemorial custom when a caravan entered a town - Stanley ordered the Stars and Stripes to be unfurled and borne at the head of the column by the gigantic Asmani. Crowds surged around the newcomers, among them `a man dressed in a long white shirt, with a turban of American sheeting around his woolly head'. This man shouted in English: `How do you do, sir.' To which Stanley, replied:
`Hello! Who the deuce are you?'
`I am Susi, the servant of Dr Livingstone.'
`Now, you, Susi, run and tell the Doctor I am coming.'s'
Crowds were also forming outside Livingstone's house by the time Susi dashed back, shouting: `An Englishman coming.' The caravan was not far behind Susi, and from beside his flag bearer, Stanley, who was riding a donkey, saw a grey-bearded white man, in a navy cap with a faded gold band round it. As David Livingstone came towards him, Stanley noticed the explorer's old red waistcoat and grey tweed trousers. Seeing the American flag, Livingstone fancied he knew the stranger's nationality. He imagined that he was `no poor Lazarus' like himself, since the newcomer was dressed in a freshly pressed flannel suit, and wore glistening boots and a dazzling white helmet. This man now clambered down from his donkey's back.53 The evidence (as I will show) suggests that he did not then say `Dr Livingstone, I presume', but something less memorable and more human than the famous words, which he thought up later as fitting for this unprecedented occasion.
The meeting in the famous engraving in Stanley's book How I Found Livingstone
NINE
Canonizing Dr Livingstone
`Dr Livingstone, I presume?' is probably the most famous phrase in the history of journalism; and that Stanley is supposed to have said it is the most widely known `fact' about him. Yet if my doubts about its authenticity become widely accepted, I hope this will not affect Stanley's public fame. It seems to me that his invention of an adoptive father, and his setting himself the task of finding Dr Livingstone long before he had interested a newspaper in the idea, were remarkable enough in their own right to merit remembrance. To go on from there to invent a greeting so memorable that it would be recognized by millions over a century and a quarter later places him in a class of his own. The fact that Stanley would be ridiculed and patronized as a direct result of this greeting, which he almost certainly never uttered, is painfully ironic. He invented it because of his old insecurity about his background. Ill at ease among the British officers in Abyssinia, he had admired their laconic, understated style and had hoped to emulate it. He had been struck especially by an anecdote in Kinglake's Eothen concerning two English gentlemen whose paths had crossed in the wilds of Palestine, and who had uttered no words of greeting but merely lifted their caps and walked by. Henry had thought this the height of gentlemanly insouciance.' Of course, many English gentlemen would have thought it unfriendly and absurd. But how could the insecure outsider have known this?
Later, when people were laughing at him for coming up with a parody of drawing room gentility at this highly emotional moment, instead of a joyful exclamation, Stanley knew he had made a fool of himself, but by then it was too late to retract. The phrase had appeared in too many newspapers to be denied. Instead, in his draft Autobiography, he would try to explain away the phrase, most unconvincingly, with the claim that he had panicked because not knowing what to say, and because he had not been entirely sure whether it really was Dr Livingstone standing before him.' In How I Found Livingstone, he would combat the scoffers by describing his need to do what was `dignified' in front of a large crowd of Arabs and Africans. `My heart beats fast, but I must not let my face betray my emotions, lest it shall detract from the dignity of a white man appearing under such extraordinary circumstances.'i But, in reality, he thought hard for many months after the meeting, before deciding what memorable words to give himself.
Whatever incident one studies in Stanley's life, his earliest description invariably proves to be the most reliable version, and the only one that can be authenticated by reference to other sources. `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' has no credibility because Stanley destroyed his earliest description of the famous meeting. His original diary entry for the day of the meeting ends at the bottom of a page: `I saw a pale looking white man in a faded blue cap with an arc peak, tarnished gold lace, joke red jacket, sheeting shirt, tweed pants, as I saw him I dismounted ...' - and there the entry stops, in mid-sentence, the description plainly having been continued on the next page, which is torn out along with the one after it.4
David Livingstone, in his journal, does not record any words spoken by Stanley, or by himself, at the moment of their meeting. But in many contemporary letters Livingstone quoted the words shouted to him by his servant, Susi, on rushing back to their tembe after spotting Stanley: `An Englishman coming! I see him!' Livingstone also described, in most of his letters written that November, the American flag being borne aloft at the head of the caravan. In his letter to James Gordon Bennett Jr, merely dated November 118711, Livingstone again quoted Susi's remark and mentioned the flag, before adding: `I am as cold and non-demonstrative as we islanders are generally reputed to be; but ... I said in my soul, "Let the richest blessings descend from the Highest on you and yours!"' In a letter to his daughter Agnes (118 November), Susi and the flag appeared as usual, as did a wealth of other detail, such as the `baths, tents, saddles, big kettles ... and abundance of goods' carried by Stanley's men. But as always, there was nothing about what Stanley said. It was the same story in a letter to Lord Granville, the foreign secretary.' In fact, in no letter written by Livingstone after the meeting have I been able to find a single mention of those most unusual words, which Livingstone would surely have quoted had they really been addressed to him. After all, in letter after letter he took the trouble to record Susi's much less memorable exclamation.
It is impossible to say when Stanley wrote `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' for the first time. His carefully written large journal, which starts with the meeting, has hitherto been assumed to have been written in Africa, but was actually composed in London with the help of his earlier diary and various notebooks, after the publication of How I Found Livingstone, in November 1872 - a year after the meeting.' The date on which the world would first read the phrase would be z July 1872, when the New York Herald published its first triumphant account of the meeting, which included the greeting. But despite its nominal date of z3 November 1871 (thirteen days after the date on which Henry thought he had met Livingstone), it is impossible to say exactly when Stanley wrote this despatch. (No handwritten original has survived.) To have made publication possible on z July, he need not have finalized his despatch until z9 May 1872, when he left Zanzibar - seven months after the meeting. From Zanzibar, his despatch was carried by ship to the recently opened telegraph station in Suez.
It is more than possible that Stanley, to seem dignified, did indeed say something stilted but unmemorable. In his original diary he wrote: `What would I have given for a bit of friendly wilderness wherein I might vent my joy in some mad freaks, such as idiotically biting my hand, turning a somersault, slashing at trees, or something in order to purge these exciting feelings before appearing in the presence of Livingstone,' but added that he had needed `to keep control over [his] emotions' - supporting the idea of a contrived remark.' But what motive could he have had for destroying those next crucial pages, unless to change his account of the words actually spoken? The late Richard Stanley - the adopted son of Stanley's adopted son, Denzil - was quoted in the Radio Times (6 January 11972) as saying that his grandfather probably never said the famous words. This was not followed u
p by Stanley's biographers because Mr Stanley later got cold feet (perhaps at the enormity of what he had said), and retracted his statement, claiming, in a letter to me,' that he had been misquoted. Since then he has died, but his widow, Jane, has told me that he and his father before him had indeed had doubts.9
The date of the meeting is disputed, since both Livingstone and Stanley had lost track of the precise passage of time during repeated bouts of fever. A date in late October or early November is nevertheless all but certain" [see note for full details of the controversy]. Stanley had feared that, on seeing him, the explorer might leave Ujiji. `That he was specially disagreeable and brusque in his manner, which would make me quarrel with him immediately, was firmly fixed in my mind. Besides, he was an Englishman [sic] - perhaps a man who used an eyeglass, through which he would glare at me ferociously or icily." Only when Livingstone ushered him into his tern be, and the local Arabs and other onlookers withdrew, was it evident to the younger man that the doctor viewed his arrival as the answer to a prayer. Livingstone repeated several times, `You have brought me new life,' and tears sprang into his eyes.1z At first Henry was too mesmerized by the man to make any written notes. `The interest I take in him is too overpowering ... my eyes rove over his face to speculate on every line & facial movement."3
Livingstone explained, sadly, that he had been robbed by `Sherif, the half-caste drunken tailor ... sent by the British Consul', and admitted he was all but destitute.14 He then described being forced back from Nyangwe by the slaves Dr Kirk had sent him, and by the resident Arabs. This information fanned the anger Stanley already felt towards Kirk for failing to make sure that Livingstone's caravan had set off promptly from Bagamoyo.i' Henry was immensely impressed when Livingstone asked him to bring him up to date with world events, before as much as glancing at his letters. `He had acquired the art of being patient long ago, he said, and he had waited so long for letters that he could well afford to wait a few hours more."6 So Stanley told him about the Franco-Prussian War, the opening of the Suez Canal, the Spanish Revolution, the completion of the Pacific railroad, and the election of General Grant as president.
