by Tim Jeal
I sent a message to ask them if they came to fight with us, and if so for what cause; if there was cause, I was quite willing to remove it. They replied that one of my men had stolen milk and I must pay cloth. The cloth was paid & they said they were satisfied. Five minutes later, two of my men [Sulieman and Soudi], who had gone to cut wood were attacked. One was killed by a spear in the back, the other narrowly escaped with a few flesh wounds of spear & knobstick. After this, all simultaneously came forward towards our camp discharging arrows.36
As these projectiles fell on the camp, Stanley ordered his men to fire back. The ensuing fight was not as one-sided as might have been expected with many of Stanley's men being armed with modern rifles. As he explained to a friend:
They attack in such numbers and so sudden [sic] that our repeating rifles and Sny- ders [sic] have to be handled with such nervous rapidity as will force them back before we are forced to death; for if we allow them to come within forty yards, their spears are as fatal as bullets ... while their contemptible looking arrows are deadly weapons.37
Six of the Wanyaturu were killed in this initial skirmish, Stanley himself `dropping' one of the tribesmen with a long shot. He commented, `God knows there was no cause for war & I cannot presume any other cause for their wanton attack on us than a desire for plunder & savage thirst for blood'38 - though a desire to defend their land seems no less likely. On the following day, the Wanyaturu came again `with shouts of derision & invited us out'. Henry sent forty men with Snider rifles to drive them away and snatch food from their villages. The result was not what he expected. His men disobeyed his instruction to keep their formation and chased on wildly after initial success, allowing themselves to become separated and picked off in small groups. In this way, he lost three men speared at once, and fifteen others driven away and presumed hunted down and killed. In his facesaving despatch to the New York Herald, dated 11 March, Stanley estimated the Wanyaturus' casualties at thirty-five, but the true number was probably fewer.39
After losing twenty-two of his followers over some stolen milk, Stanley was in no mood to fight again unless he had to. `As God is my judge, I would prefer paying tribute and making these savages my friends rather than enemies.'4° His losses meant that once again personal baggage, books, extra tents and even some beads had to be abandoned, so that essential impedimenta, such as the parts of the boat that he meant to launch on Lake Victoria in order to circumnavigate this vast `nyanza', could still be carried. The number of carriers had to be stabilized at all costs, and from now on Henry worked his small party of trackers hard. On 5 and 6 February, the men he called his `dusky detectives' tracked down and arrested four miscreants. One had deserted with a box of ammunition - an offence endangering the whole column. Many of his followers thought the man should be shot, but Stanley chose to beat him and put him in irons for a few days.41
On 119 February, as they came closer to the lake, they found themselves crossing a green, rolling plain, dotted with feeding cattle and broken here and there by rocky outcrops. They were now able to purchase a chicken for a necklace of beads, `an ox for six yards of sheeting material, a sheep for two yards'. Yet despite receiving nourishing food, Frederick Barker, the clerk, did not recover from the fever that had been afflicting him for weeks. On 27 February he was too weak to walk when Frank Pocock raced down from the brow of a hill, `his face beaming with joy', shouting: `I have seen the lake, sir, and it is grand!14' Below was `a gulf edged by a line of green wavy groves of trees scattered along the shore ... the lake stretching like a silvery plain far to the eastward'.43 They had travelled 720 miles in 1103 days, averaging, despite many delays, seven miles per day. Given all their problems and the days lost while resting, it was a magnificent rate of progress.44 Yet Henry had lost sixty-two men either through desertion, fatal illness, or being killed or missing in fights with Africans.45 Out of the original zz8 men and women, only 1166 were left.46 It was sobering to reflect on these grave losses, after only 720 miles marched, and with more than three-quarters of the journey still ahead.
For Henry personally, an even more testing part of the journey was about to begin. But on the margins of the great lake, where violent events would soon change his life forever, he felt an overwhelming sense of peace.
I was as gratified as though I possessed the wand of an enchanter ... Only my gunbearer was near me ... and the voices of the Wangwana came to me now and again faint by distance, and but for this, I might, as I sat there, have lost myself in the delusion that all the hideous past and beautiful present was a dream.47
On 8 March 11875, Stanley set sail on Victoria Nyanza, Africa's largest lake, in his twenty-four-foot boat, the Lady Alice, accompanied by ten of the expedition's fittest Wangwana. If Henry had been able to take twice that number, he would still have been vulnerable to a determined attack by tribesmen in their large canoes. A young man called Zaidi Mganda was his steersman at first, while Safeni, one of his most trusted captains, came as his adviser and translator. Stanley's aim was to map and circumnavigate the lake, establishing whether it was one body of water or several, and whether its northern outlet really was, as John Speke had claimed, the source of the Nile. Local people predicted that Stanley and his men would `all drown in the lake, or die at the hands of the ferocious people living on the shores'.48 The risks in venturing into this unknown region with so few men in a small boat were clearly enormous; and Henry knew very well, when he parted with Frank Pocock and Frederick Barker, that he might never see them again.
Before embarking for Africa, he had written to a fellow journalist about living with extreme risk, and had admitted that he had only a small chance of returning to England.
At the same time I cannot say that I feel any melancholy at the hopeless prospect, but rather a careless indifference as to what Fate may have in store for me. I say truly that I don't care whether I return or not. I have disciplined myself to look at my long journey in this light ...49
This fatalism - and the sense that his deprived childhood had left him with precious little to lose - helped him endure misfortune, since it could never surprise him as it did more fortunate men. His pessimism was probably also rooted in his fear that Alice would not wait for his return.50 Yet the puzzle of why he was prepared to take death-defying risks and to inflict terrible harm on his body is not easily unravelled. Certainly he was hazarding his life not simply on account of his hunger for discovery, or his longing for fame - great though both were. For Henry, the quest of unlocking Africa's greatest secrets and completing Livingstone's work had always been more than a purely physical search.
THIRTEEN
The Island of Death
The eight months during r 875 that Stanley spent sailing on Lake Victoria and investigating the surrounding shores would have a major impact on African history. They would also change Henry's life through two linked incidents that would damage his moral reputation so seriously that his subsequent achievements would never properly be recognized.
Sailing north from a broad bay, which he named Speke Gulf in memory of the first white man to have seen the lake thirteen years earlier, Henry and his eleven crew members were soon battling with a ferocious gale. With the wind behind them and their single sail reefed to the smallest possible size, they surged along, in the twenty-four-foot Lady Alice, towards the mouth of the Simiyu river.' From there, they sailed eastwards along the southern side of the lake, until heading north along the lake's zoo-mile eastern shore. Several days later, passing the island of Ukerewe, Stanley made a grim discovery - the slave trade had already reached the lake, causing warfare between tribes, and tempting chiefs to sell members of their own vassal tribes to the slavers for guns, cloth and other trade goods. Stanley found that the Arab-Swahili slave trader Mse Saba kept an immense thirty-ton dhow on Ukerewe. He and another Arab, Tarib Sungoro, with the help of the island's chief, were capturing men and women from the Gaya tribe and enslaving them. `If ever a pirate deserved death for inhuman crimes, Sungoro deserves death,' wrote
Stanley.' The slave trade bred suspicion of strangers, and made life far more dangerous for travellers.
On z8 March, while passing between two islands on Lake Victoria's eastern shores, the Lady Alice was surrounded by thirteen canoes crewed by about a hundred warriors of the Wavuma tribe, whose mariners habitually attacked vessels belonging to the Ganda. These Wavuma were fearless people, and Stanley's encounter with them ended badly. He called them `pirates', and indeed they came close enough to snatch trade goods from the Lady Alice, and then blocked her escape route into open water, after threatening her crew with their spears. For a boat containing only eleven men, this was a life-threatening moment. Stanley responded by shooting one man dead, and killing maybe three others when he fired into the hull of a canoe and sank it.' Stanley believed that, if captured, he and his crew would have been enslaved, or put to death.4 His experience with the Wanyaturu had convinced him that once Africans had made overt threats of violence, they would treat as weakness any subsequent attempts to placate them.'
On 4 April 1875, Stanley landed on the northern shore of the lake not many miles west of Victoria's main outflow, which had been named the Ripon Falls by the British explorer John Harming Speke. Mutesa, the Kabaka or King of Buganda, sent his prime minister, or Katekiro, to welcome Stanley at the royal lakeside hunting resort of Usavara, where z,ooo Ganda warriors loosed off their guns in salute and beat tribal drums. After receiving a gift of ten oxen, sixteen sheep, and three dozen chickens, Henry walked to Mutesa's residence along `a broad street, eighty feet wide and half a mile long', lined by 3,000 royal attendants. The Kabaka rose from a chair on Stanley's arrival - `a tall and slender figure, dressed in Arab costume'. As soon as Mutesa began to speak, Henry `became captivated by his manner, for there was much of the polish of a true gentleman about it'.6
In 118 6 z Speke had dismissed Mutesa as a bloodthirsty despot, who even allowed his favourite pages to shoot and kill passers-by at random.' Stanley attributed the subsequent improvement in Mutesa's behaviour, to the civilizing influence of the Unyanyembe ivory trader, Khamis bin Abdullah al Barwani, who had lived at court for a year. Stanley liked the embroidered Arab jackets and curved daggers worn by courtiers, and he was not offended when Mutesa declared himself `a follower of Islam'.' But it horrified him that the Kabaka had allowed his country to become `the northern source of the [East African] slave trade'.
Near the start of his 1875 diary, Henry sounded uncannily like Livingstone when stating that he `often entertained lofty ideas concerning regenerative civilization, and the redemption of Africa'." Having arrived in this country corrupted by Arabs, he decided that the Kabaka was in urgent need of new moral advisers: Christian missionaries. Livingstone, Henry knew, would have seen the establishment of missions as the only remedy. Of course, nothing could be done unless Mutesa agreed to receive missionaries. But believing the Kabaka was more sophisticated than the chiefs with whom Livingstone had been friendly and yet had failed to convert, Stanley imagined the Bugandan ruler would be more receptive to the Gospel." Henry meant to use the press to reach out to thousands of potential missionaries. But, first, he needed to be sure that Mutesa would welcome them. If he could be persuaded, he `would do more for Central Africa and civilization [than] fifty years of gospel teaching'."
At the perfect psychological moment, Henry scored a timely success by shooting dead, at Mutesa's request (and in front of his 300 wives), a baby crocodile basking on a rock a hundred yards away.i3 Whether he realized that this proof of the superiority of his guns over the Arabs' muskets accounted for Mutesa's sudden keenness to meet more Europeans (from whom he hoped to buy modern weapons) is uncertain. The Kabaka also hoped that his new white friends might help him halt the encroachments of Colonel Gordon - at this time Governor-General of the Khedive of Egypt's southernmost province of Equatoria.14 So when Mutesa gave orders for the Ten Commandments to be translated into Kiganda, from a Kiswahili version provided by one of Stanley's missionary-school-educated followers, it seemed natural for him to agree a few days later `to observe the Christian Sabbath as well as the Moslem Sabbath'. In future, `Stam- lee' - as Mutesa called him - would disclaim having converted Mutesa, except in a purely `nominal' way. Indeed, a man who retained hundreds of wives would have been a most unusual con- vert.is The moment Mutesa had made his decision, Stanley wrote a letter to the New York Herald and to the Daily Telegraph that would have an immense impact in Europe, and later in Africa. Stanley wrote:
It is not the mere preacher that is wanted here ... It is the practical Christian tutor, who can teach people how to become Christians, cure their diseases, construct dwellings, understands agriculture and can turn his hand to anything ... He must be tied to no Church or sect, but ... be inspired by liberal principles, charity to all men, and devout faith in God ... Such a man or men Mtesa, King of Uganda ... invites to come to him.'6
Mutesa had pretended, for his own political reasons, to be a more humane ruler than he really was, but although he may have hoodwinked the explorer, it would be Stanley's hopes for the future of Buganda, rather than Mutesa's, that would be realized - the kingdom eventually becoming a British colony, and Christianity thriving there. Because Stanley omitted from his appeal the fact that Mutesa was guilty of selling captives to the Arab-Swahili, he misled the future missionaries about the situation they would face. Henry left behind with Mutesa one of his brightest young men, a mission-educated sixteenyear-old called Dallington, who knew the Bible well and was a clever linguist, in the hope that he would instruct Mutesa as well as enable him to communicate with the English-speaking missionaries when they came. Henry took away with him, on the Kabaka's insistence, Kadu, one of his teenage pages, with the intention of sending him back to Buganda once he had seen England and could report back favourably.'?
Stanley's letter of appeal was delivered safely and swiftly to Britain by an amazing coincidence. A few days after Stanley first set foot in Buganda, Colonel Ernest Linant de Bellefonds, one of Colonel Cordon's officers, arrived at Mutesa's court with forty Sudanese soldiers, on a diplomatic mission. Despite being rivals for Mutesa's favour, both men got on well, and Bellefonds, on leaving, took Stanley's appeal north with him along the Nile."
Before Stanley left Mutesa's capital, with its impressive palisades and circular courtyards, Mutesa promised that his grand admiral - a man called Magassa - would provide thirty canoes, so that on Stanley's return to his base at Kagehyi in the Lady Alice he would be able to transport all his men back to Buganda by water. On his return to Mutesa's kingdom Henry intended to travel overland to Lake Albert, which he meant to map before going south to Lake Tanganyika. Magassa, after endless procrastination, at last admitted he could only lay hands on ten canoes; he promised to do better soon. But Henry gave up waiting on zi April, and sailed south towards the first act of a twopart tragedy that would dog him for the rest of his life.
Half-way down the western side of the lake - which he mapped as he went - Henry had an unnerving experience at a place called Makongo near the mouth of the Kagera River, where he and the Lady Alice's eleven-man crew had camped for the night with the sanction of the local chief. In the middle of the night, they were awakened by furi ous drumming and found themselves surrounded by hundreds of warriors, armed with bows, shields and spears.
There was something very curious in their demeanour. For there was no shouting, yelling or frantic behaviour, as we had several times witnessed on the part of savages when about to commit themselves to some desperate deed. They all wore a composed though stern and determined aspect. It was a terrible moment to us ... We feared to make a movement lest it might precipitate a catastrophe ... so we remained a few moments silently surveying each other.
At this moment of immense danger, Stanley and his men were saved by the unexpected intervention of the chief. `He had a long stick in his hand, which he flourished before the faces of the savages, and by this means drove them several paces backward. He then came forward, and, striking the boat, ordered us to get off, and h
e himself lent a hand to shove the boat into the lake.' He explained that the Lady Alice had been pulled up too high on the beach. `We replied that we had done it to protect the boat from the surf, and were about to add more reasons, when the chief cut the matter short by ordering us to shove off."9 The whole episode amazed Stanley, since he was still in Mutesa's territory and being escorted by two Ganda canoes as proof of royal approval. The Africans ran down to the water's edge in large numbers, shaking their spears as his men started to row away. Henry reflected that if the Ganda had not also managed to get away, he would have been obliged to fire into the mass of men on the beach in order to save his escorts' lives. In every way, he had had a narrow escape, and left this place feeling deeply apprehensive.
The Lady Alice's course being into the wind, her single sail was useless and her crew worked hard at the oars all day, thudding into steep waves whipped up by the headwind. Stanley and his crewmen were ravenously hungry by the time they reached nearby Musira Island. Here, they ate some bananas before sailing on to an island thirty-five miles to the south-east - named Alice Island by Henry. They managed to buy a few fish from local fishermen," but for eleven people, after a hard day's rowing, this amount of food was wholly inadequate. The following day, Stanley tried to barter for food but was curtly refused. Leaving his Ganda escort at Alice Island, he headed south-west for a large island called Bumbireh, which he had heard was twenty-five miles away. `With every prospect of starvation' facing him and his men, Henry knew how vital it would be to win over these islanders.21 Happily, the wind was now blowing from the north-east so he and his men could rely on their sail for much of their journey, though `rain, thunder, lightning and a sounding surf on all sides' meant they spent many hours baling to stay afloat. They passed a wet and exhausting night under the lee of a small uninhabited island, before sailing on to Bumbireh itself, arriving at about 9 a.m. on z8 April. `As we entered the cove we saw the plateau's summit lined with men, and heard shouts like war cries, yet imminent starvation compelled us to ground our boat and endeavour to entice the people to part with some food for us for cloth or beads.'
