by Tim Jeal
Hunger had forced Stanley to take an immense risk, within sight of an overwhelming number of armed men. But he ordered his men to relaunch the boat at once the moment he saw forty or fifty men rushing down the beach. His crew, however
did not stir a hand to obey, but began to make friendly speeches to the natives who now numbered several score, to say that they were Wangwana, friends of Mutesa come to purchase food. The natives at this lowered their spears, and advanced towards the boat with friendly gestures, but as soon as they touched the boat, they dragged her with their united forces far on dry land ... While they were doing this my revolvers were twice aimed at them, but I was each time entreated by my men to be patient, and finding my people so deluded with the idea that we were among friends, I contented myself with sitting in the boat until they were taught by experience that friends never act so outrageously.
Stanley's reception on Bumbireh
Whenever Stanley believed the moment for shooting had arrived, his men restrained him. `Violent language and more violent action we received without comment or word ... Spears were held in their hands as if on the launch, arrows were drawn to the head and pointed at each of us ... I never saw mad rage or wild fury painted so truly before on human features.'
At one point Wadi Safeni, Henry's coxswain and interpreter, received a push that knocked him down, Saramba, the guide, was hit with a club, and Kirango, the youngest crewman, was struck with the staff of a spear. Henry, whose sense of his own dignity had been vital to him ever since his workhouse days, had to endure having his hair tugged to see if it was a wig." At this dreadful time, Safeni, Saramba and Baraka, Henry's interpreters, `employed to the utmost whatever gifts of persuasion nature had endowed them with and fear created in them'. To Stanley's surprise, `the imminence of death brought with it a strange composure. We did not fear it as I imagined we should'.14 For three hours, Stanley listened to the heroic efforts of his interpreters, occasionally making suggestions. Eventually, to his great relief, Shekka, the chief of this island offshoot of the Haya tribe, agreed to accept `four cloths and ten necklaces of large beads as his price for permitting us to depart in peace'. Soon after these goods had been handed over, `Shekka ordered his people to seize our oars, which was done before we understood what they were about. This was the second time that Shekka had acted cunningly and treacherously, and a loud jeering laugh from his people showed how much they appreciated his wit.' The Wangwanas' drum was also taken.
After Chief Shekka and his warriors had gone to their village to eat their midday meal, evidently believing that Stanley would not be able to leave without his oars, a woman came and warned Henry: the chief `had determined to kill us and take everything we had'. Yet when Stanley sent his coxswain to proffer terms of brotherhood to Shekka, the chief pretended that friendship would be restored the following day.z5 By three in the afternoon this illusion was no longer tenable. Shekka appeared on the hillside, and waved his men down the beach with spears poised for the kill. Stanley screamed to his men to launch the Lady Alice.
With one desperate effort my crew of eleven men seized the boat as if she had been a mere toy and shot her into the water. The impetus they had given her, caused her to drag them all into deep water. In the meantime the savages, uttering a furious howl of disappointment and baffled rage, came rushing like a whirlwind to the water's edge.z6
As his men desperately tried to pull themselves out of the water into the boat, tribesmen fired arrows at them and Stanley responded with his elephant gun, killing `one of the foremost'. Then, as his men continued clambering aboard, he kept off the pursuing men with a shotgun loaded with buckshot. Resourceful as ever, his crew tore up the boat's bottom-boards and used them as paddles to get the Lady Alice away from the shore.
These tribesmen on Bumbireh had upset Stanley more than any other Africans ever would. Their pretence of friendship, followed by an attempt to terrify him into parting with all his trade goods, succeeded by a promise of blood brotherhood - itself swiftly followed by the theft of his boat's oars - angered Stanley as much as the fact that he and his eleven men would have been murdered if they had not managed to manhandle their heavy boat into the water.
Just as Stanley would seek to escape the sense of humiliation that had dogged him since boyhood by pretending that he had beaten his cruel schoolmaster and then run away in triumph, he now began to ponder how to represent in a more satisfying light the indignities he had suffered on Bumbireh Island. He wanted to feel less of a victim than he had been in reality. Only by distorting the facts could he make the memory become less painful. He wrote up his diary that evening and, as usual, this first account was to be his most honest description. In it, the only damage he mentioned having inflicted on the islanders was one man killed and another wounded. He mentioned no injuries occurring as a result of firing buckshot. Yet two months later, on 29 July, he wrote a disastrous despatch to the Daily Telegraph and New York Herald, claiming to have killed nine or ten people - a figure he would later increase to fourteen.27 But in two personal letters, written on 115 and 119 May - much closer to the event - the figures he gave were one killed and one wounded in the first letter, and nobody killed in the second.28 In the Autobiography, the islanders' casualties would be represented accurately, as one killed and one wounded.Z9
So why did he exaggerate the casualty figures in that disastrous newspaper despatch, which would be so damaging to his future reputation, especially when taken in conjunction with what would happen three months later on his second visit to Bumbireh? He seems to have been influenced by a combination of factors: first, as already stated, a passionate desire to show that he had not really been made a fool of by `savages'; second, the knowledge he had gained, when reporting from the Indian Wars, that Americans liked to read about `Red Indians' being killed in retaliation for injuries; and third, his memories of the terrible week he lived through after leaving Bumbireh.
All but helpless in the Lady Alice, he and his men became the playthings of gales lashing the lake. Without oars, and with their sail ripped to shreds, they had to endure seven terrifying days being buffeted on the open lake before limping back, with improvised paddles, to Kagehyi, in a state of physical collapse. At any time they might have been driven onto an uninhabited island, their boat wrecked on rocks, and they themselves doomed to die of starvation. Or they might have been stranded on the mainland and murdered by tribesmen; or, if their boat had capsized, crocodiles would have made short work of them.3° It was small wonder that Henry's feelings towards Bumbireh's inhabitants made him wish he had punished them more severely than he had managed to do in reality. And so he exaggerated the number he had killed. In general, Stanley's critics have tended to believe his accounts of controversial events when they have made him seem brutal, but to disbelieve them whenever showing him in a favourable light.
On 5 May, the Lady Alice arrived back at Kagehyi on the southern shores of Victoria, after a fifty-seven-day circumnavigation of the lake. Stanley had gone a long way towards proving that Speke's claim to have located the primary source of the Nile in Lake Victoria was true. The huge task that remained, in order to make Speke's claim unassailable, was for Henry to investigate Samuel Baker's counter-claims for Lake Albert and Livingstone's for the Lualaba River. Yet even if Stanley had decided to return now to the coast, without adding to his exploration of Lake Victoria, his journey would still have been the equal of Speke and Burton's to Lake Tanganyika, and Speke and Grant's to Gondokoro and Lake Victoria.
No man before him had ever mapped the lake, and Stanley's formidable skills as a cartographer are plain to see in his notebooks, where his delineation of the lake closely resembles the outline in modern charts. He used an artificial horizon, a sextant and a chronometer to make thirty-seven separate observations for latitude and longitude. The lake's height he estimated with a boiling-point apparatus - his revised measurement being 4,093 feet above sea level. With his sounding line he established that, in places, the water was 275 feet deep.31
Stanley's immediate problem was how to transport to Buganda the 115 5 men whom Frank had fed and kept together at Kagehyi while he had been away. Magassa had still not brought the thirty canoes promised by Mutesa, but by now Stanley favoured going by land, along the western side of the lake, as the first stage of a journey through western Buganda to Samuel Baker's Lake Albert, which he intended to explore thoroughly. At this critical moment, Rwoma, ruler of the intervening state of Bukara and an ally of Mirambo, sent a message telling Henry he would fight him if he entered his territory.36 Immediately to the north of Rwoma's domain was the land of Chief Antari, an equally hostile ruler, who was paramount chief over a lakeside kingdom and several islands, which included hostile Bumbireh. But rather than abandon his proposed visit to Lake Albert - thus leaving it to be explored by Colonel Gordon's officers - Stanley decided he would have to go by water once again. Having been let down by Mutesa and his unreliable admiral, Henry bought from the King of Ukerewe twenty-three very leaky canoes, which arrived at Kagehyi on 113 June.37 A week later he embarked the majority of his men.
Two days on, a storm hit his fragile fleet, sinking five canoes and costing the expedition five guns, a case of ammunition and a great many stores. Somehow Henry managed to rescue everyone from the wrecked canoes and ferry them in the Lady Alice to his new camp on an island, roughly halfway to Buganda. It took him a month to transport all the stores from Kagehyi to this island base.38 The unhappy chance that had prevented him from travelling by land to Buganda was now threatening to force him to sail through the narrow strait between Bumbireh and the equally hostile mainland - a perilous position indeed. But to cross the centre of the lake in his frail canoes was out of the question. In this appalling situation, Henry decided that nothing less than holding as hostages Shekka, the chief of Bumbireh, and two of his principal headmen would guarantee him a peaceful passage and immunity from a combined attack by Antari and his subject people on Bumbireh.39 To achieve his objective, Stanley managed, by a subterfuge, to capture the chief of the neighbouring island of Iroba, and one of Antari's sons. To regain their freedom, Stanley told his captives, they must send orders to their men to capture Chief Shekka of Bumbireh and two of his sub-chiefs.
On 24 July, to Stanley's delight, Shekka was brought to him by the Irobans, though without his sub-chiefs. Henry kept his word and released the Chief of Iroba, but kept the son of Chief Antari, along with Shekka. Yet even now, Stanley doubted whether he could expect good behaviour from Bumbireh when he passed by, or even whether the islanders would sell him the food he desperately needed for his men. One reason for his doubts was that he had recently seen, from a vantage point on Mahyiga Island - the closest to Bumbireh - eighteen canoes packed with reinforcements heading from the mainland to Bumbireh.4°
On 27 July, when Stanley was still on Mahygia Island, forty men sent by Mutesa made their appearance in a large canoe. Their mission had been to obtain news of Stanley, whom Mutesa feared was dead. On the following day, six more Ganda canoes arrived, and a few days later a further eight, giving Henry a total of thirty-seven vessels.41 Although Stanley's position was much stronger now, the problem of how to feed his enlarged force was worse than ever. The truculent Antari refused to sell anything, and Henry feared that the reinforced islanders of Bumbireh would do likewise. To counter the threat of a combined attack, and to compel the islanders to sell food, Stanley decided to play his hostage card. He sent a message to Antari, Shekka's superior chief, asking him to redeem his son and Shekka with five bullocks, thirty billhooks and forty spears, and thus enable him (Stanley) `to proclaim peace'. `The alternative,' Antari was told, `is that I will punish the natives of Bumbireh, and take all my prisoners with [me] to Mutesa King of Uganda to be dealt with by him ... as he only sees fit.'42
On 3 August, Stanley noted down Antari's uncompromising reply: ,to the effect that if I did not surrender my prisoners he would attack me'. Deciding this was a bluff, and that the now-leaderless people of Bumbireh might well be cowed by a large party of Ganda coming to Bumbireh to buy food, Stanley agreed with Sabadu, the commander of the Ganda, that the latter should visit Bumbireh with ten canoes crewed by about r 50 men - an impressive delegation.43 But Bumbireh's warriors met these canoes scornfully with a hail of spears and arrows - killing one of the emissaries and wounding eight so seriously that six of them later died.44 It now seemed certain that there would be a showdown when Stanley's fleet (part of which was unseaworthy) sailed north between Bumbireh and Antari's mainland territory through a strait a few miles wide. Although his Ganda escort numbered about 400 men, Stanley doubted whether the islanders would be deterred. Their treatment of the large Ganda food delegation suggested they would not - especially now that they had been reinforced by Antari.45 So, the attack that Stanley now planned to launch on Bumbireh appears to have been genuinely defensive in purpose - although he also saw it as punishment for recent murder, and for the attempted murder of himself and his men in April.
On the arrival of the Lady Alice, Bumbireh's armed warriors were already assembling in bays and on foreshores, their hilltop look-outs indicating the course of Stanley's boats to the men below. Before Stanley's vessels came near the shore, crowds of islanders had raced down to beaches where they expected the white man and his followers to land. Armed with spears, bows and arrows and rocks, they shouted defiantly and, as Frank Pocock observed, they even `beckoned for us to go on shore, but that we would not do'. Pocock also heard many Ganda soldiers demanding `to go on shore', and noted in his diary that `Master [Stanley] would not let them'.46 Nobody was allowed closer inshore than fifty yards - from which distance Sniders were deadly weapons, but bows and arrows were useless.
By the time Stanley and his men had finished firing, thirty-three men lay dead or gravely wounded on the shore. If Stanley felt revulsion, he did not say so. Remembering the American Indian Wars, and African violence such as he had witnessed in the Mirambo war and during his unsought fight with the Wanyaturu, which had cost him the lives of twenty-two men, his attack on the islanders did not strike him as extreme. The hope expressed in his diary that evening was that, as a result of their losses, the men of Bumbireh would `in future behave with some regard to the rights of strangers', since `it had been common practice with them to seize on all canoes, Waganda or Wakerewe, and hold the crews as slaves'.47
The most dubious aspect of Stanley's attack was that he had killed men who had not at the time been threatening the lives of himself and his men. His object had been to treat them to a display of power that would dissuade them from attacking his canoes in concert with their ally, Antari, as his expedition's vessels passed through the narrows. Whether an attack would really have been pressed home is unknowable, but Stanley clearly felt he could not take a chance. On this awful day, Henry can be given credit for preventing a general massacre: first by stopping the Ganda landing at the start of the action, and then by preventing them doing so after it was over. `When our force saw that the savages were defeated, the chiefs begged earnestly that I would permit t
hem to land and destroy the people altogether; but I refused, saying I had not come to destroy the island.'48
In Chapter Fifteen, I will describe the furore that broke out in Britain over this bloody incident, and will also give details of the trigger-happy misbehaviour of other European explorers, and the general level of indigenous violence they, and Stanley, encountered in Africa. Against this contemporary backdrop, it will be possible to view more objectively the arguments of those who condemned him. The fact that Stanley's return to Britain was delayed for two more years left his enemies free to blacken his name as they wished, without his having any opportunity to explain why he had made his pre-emptive attack. Stanley felt no guilt, believing that in the long term more lives would be saved than he had taken, and that in future travellers would enjoy right of passage on the lake without fear of attack or capture.
The islanders were not popular with other nearby chiefs (Antari apart), and `the next day,' Stanley noted with satisfaction, `we were beset with congratulations and gifts from the Kings Kytawa and Kamiru. Three oxen, three goats, and 5o bunches of bananas, besides milk, chickens, and ripe plantains in abundance.' Since he had come close to starvation on this coast after his earlier escape from Bumbireh, this sudden glut of food was extremely welcome.49
Stanley landed at Dumo, Buganda on 11z August, hoping to set out as soon as possible for Lake Albert, with a royal escort furnished by Mutesa. He aimed to establish that lake's precise relationship with the larger Victoria, and then to discover whether Albert was fed from the south by a river, which might itself have a claim to be the Nile's source. He had received a letter from Gordon via de Bellefonds, in which the Governor of Equatoria told him that he was steaming down the Nile constructing stations and would help him with supplies if they should meet. Since Gordon's letter was dated zo April and had come from Rajef on the Upper Nile, Stanley expected that the Governor would already have beaten him to Lake Albert.5° But even if Gordon solved all the outstanding geographical puzzles connected with Albert, Stanley felt that he could still open up Mutesa's kingdom to European trade by pioneering a route to Lake Albert and the Upper Nile from Buganda." On leaving Albert, Henry meant to march south to Lake Tanganyika, and then to follow the Lualaba north from where Livingstone had left it in 118711.
