Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  On zr October, in Cape Town, Stanley told a journalist on the Cape Argus newspaper that he never `liked to fight for fighting's sake', since it only `risked unnecessarily the lives of those who were with me'. This was sensible, but did not address the issue of Bumbireh. HMS Industry sailed from the Cape for Zanzibar on 6 November and entered Zanzibar harbour twenty days later. Although Stanley did not mention it in his diary, nor anywhere else, there were eight letters from Alice Pike waiting for him at the US Consulate.93 These had all been written in the year in which Henry had started his great journey, and all had reached Zanzibar after his departure for the mainland. In the last three Alice expressed great indignation that he had been sending long letters to her friend, Mamie Anderson. In a final angry letter of 4 December she said she felt entitled to see other men in future and to write to them too. She signed herself `Alice Pike', without any endearment, and would write only one more letter to Stanley - this in reply to the one he had sent to her from Loanda at journey's end - but he would not receive it until reaching London in January.94 For a young woman looking for a way out of an engagement, his innocent correspondence with Mamie had offered an easy exit.

  Another letter in the packet at the Consulate was from Henry's publisher, Edward Marston. After congratulating his star author, Marston steeled himself for a less agreeable task:

  I now come to a delicate subject which I have long debated with myself whether I should write about or wait for your arrival. I think however I may as well tell you at once that your friend Alice Pike is married! ... Some months ago I received the enclosed letter saying that Miss Alice Pike is now Mrs Barney! ... It will I fear prove another source of trouble to your sensitive nature.

  Alice's husband's family owned America's largest manufacturer of railroad rolling stock, and Alice had by now had his first child. Marston ended with information that he mistakenly imagined might be of comfort to the rejected man. The Cretan beauty Virginia Ambella, whose family had rejected Stanley in 1868, had written making it abundantly clear that now Stanley was the most famous explorer in the world, she and her family would be happy to accept him. Stanley glanced at her letter with utter indifference.95

  Fortunately, Henry had much to do on the island. It would take four days to pay off all his people, and to ensure that relatives of the dead received compensation and the wages due to them. So how many people had died, along with all three of his white colleagues? Stanley had started with zz8 people, and brought home ro8. He acquired en route two Soko, one Manyema, and one Ugandan, who was cancelled out by Dallington, whom he left with Mutesa. He also added six men, whom he contracted at Nyangwe. In addition three infants had been born on the journey and were included by him in his list of the ro8 who returned." His losses through death and desertion therefore amounted to 113 z people. He listed 11114 deaths in his tables in Through the Dark Continent, so the number of desertions and men left behind seems unlikely to have exceeded twenty - an amazing achievement. He himself deliberately compiled no table of desertions to add to his lists of those who died and those who had returned home. Had he added such a table, his exaggerated starting figure could only have been substantiated by admitting to a number of desertions vastly exceeding those that had actually taken place. Since this would have given the impression that he had been a lax and undisciplined leader, he had been unable to fake such a list.

  His love of the Wangwana was unfeigned, and the fact that he had brought home only half of those who had set out made the homecoming of the survivors particularly poignant. The last Wangwana death occurred on Zanzibar itself, and was the more distressing because Muscati, the woman in question, was the widow of Wadi Safeni - Stanley's valued counsellor, who had gone insane and vanished into the bush with his parrot on his shoulder. She had recently lived through the pain of losing Safeni's baby in Loanda. Muscati herself lived long enough `to be embraced by her father, and the next morning died in his arms, surrounded by her relatives and friends': a tragic ending to an extraordinary odyssey. Stanley said that he owed much to the returning women - fourteen of them - since they had lifted spirits by `transforming stern camps in the depths of the wilds into something resembling a village'. Stanley had also been comforted by the games and chatter of their children.17

  The women who completed the Trans-Africa journey

  On 1 13 December, as Henry was about to step into the ship's boat that would take him out to the steamer Pachumba, bound for Aden, a number of his followers rushed into the water ahead of him `and shot the boat into the sea, and then lifted me up on their heads and carried me through the surf into the boat'. Another group commandeered a lighter, and rowed out to the steamer.

  A deputation of them came on board, headed by the famous Uledi, the coxswain; Kacheche, the chief detective; Robert [Feruzi], my indispensable factotum; Zaidi, the chief, and Wadi Rehani, the storekeeper, to inform me that they still considered me as their master, and that they would not leave Zanzibar until they received a letter from me announcing my safe arrival in my own country ... What wild and varied scenes had we not seen together ... The chiefs were those who had followed me to Ujiji in 1871 ... they were the men to whom I entrusted the safeguard of Livingstone on his last and fatal journey ... In a flood of sudden recollection ... every scene of strife with Man and Nature through which these poor men and women had borne me company, and solaced me by the simple sympathy of shared suffering, came hurrying across my memory; for each face before me was associated with some adventure or some peril."

  After this emotional parting, Stanley reflected on what he would miss when back in Britain: the rituals of camp life, his men threading shell and bead necklaces for currency and singing as they worked, and the cheerfulness of his young gun-carriers. He would also miss the fables and cautionary tales told by his followers around the camp fire.99 Above all, he would miss `the sweet novel pleasure ... [of] almost total independence ... and indifference to all things earthly outside camp, which is ... one of the most exquisite soul-lulling pleasures a mortal can enjoy'.'°°

  As the well-known features of Shangani and Melindi, and the tall square mass of the Sultan's palace, fell further and further astern, Stanley wondered whether he would ever again know such exaltation as he had experienced when solving the planet's last great geographical mysteries.

  FIFTEEN

  `I Hate Evil and Love Good'

  Before Stanley's return to England, Edward Marston, his publisher, had rented for him an apartment at 30, Sackville Street in Piccadilly, doubtless eager for his author to get to work as soon as possible on a colossal bestseller. The returning hero took up residence towards the end of January 1 1878 after a week of junketing in Paris - unenjoyable except for his reunion with Edward King. Marston had joined him briefly in the French capital and had handed over the only honest communication the jilted man had ever received from his former fiancee.

  November 17 1877 New York

  Dear Morton,

  Amid the many congratulations and praises showered on you receive my humble rejoicing also ...

  Poor Stanley! How much you have lost, but your gain has been great indeed. I shed tears when I read of the sad fate of Kalulu and the `Lady Alice'. I had hoped she would have proven a truer friend than the Alice she was named after, for you must know, by this time, I have done what millions of women have done before me, not been true to my promise. But you are so great, so honoured, so sought after, that you will scarcely miss your once loved friend and always devoted admirer of your heroism. For indeed you are the hero of the day. That alone should console you for my loss. No doubt you will think it a gain, for Stanley can easily find a wife all his heart could desire to grace his high position and deservedly great name ...

  If you can forgive me, tell me so; if not, do please be silent ... Adieu, Morton. I will not say farewell, for I hope in some future time we may meet - shall it be as friends?

  Alice Barney'

  Stanley's crushing sense of disappointment reminded him of earlier rejection
s, and made the immense fame, which he had imagined bringing him love and happiness, seem hollow and absurd. London's Daily News was not untypical: `It is very doubtful whether in all the roll of history's adventurous travellers there is recorded one who did a greater deed." `What is the good of all this pomp and show?' Henry asked Edward Marston in Paris, after a celebratory dinner given him by French geographers. `It only makes me more miserable." In London, Stanley did his best to escape his unhappiness by writing his 11,092-page two-volume work, Through the Dark Continent, in eighty unbelievably frenetic days.

  The worst problem Henry faced on his return was how to react to those people whose reading of his newspaper despatches had led them to view his behaviour at Bumbireh as murder. Although his two fiercest critics, Colonel Henry Yule, an RGS gold medallist, and the socialist writer H. M. Hyndman, praised his journey as `the greatest feat in the history of discovery', they mounted a campaign against him, so skilful and prolonged that his reputation would be permanently damaged.4 Ironically, Stanley's successful pretence that he was an American denied him the overwhelming public support that would otherwise have insulated him from attack.' Starting in the autumn of 11876, soon after the publication of Stanley's despatch about his second visit to Bumbireh, the two men used the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette and the Saturday Review to mount a formidable case against him. Sadly, because he had been advised by his close friends Edwin Arnold and Edward Marston `to answer these fools with proud silence', Henry made no immediate response on returning to England.6 Yule and Hyndman had known better, believing that Stanley would have no choice eventually but to join in a debate that was, in reality, about whether his name was `to have a place on the honourable roll which bears those of Columbus, Cook and Livingstone, or on another of a different character'.7 For this reason alone, it is necessary to rehearse again Stanley's reasons for the second attack on Bumbireh, and then to set the incident in a wider context.

  What had been so damaging to Stanley's reputation in his disastrous despatch of 15 August 1875 had been the impression given - mainly through condensation of the facts and timescale - that his attack on Bumbireh had been premeditated as an act of personal vengeance ever since his first humiliating encounter with the islanders, and had hap pened very soon after it. In truth, it had occurred over three months later. And far from wanting to return to Bumbireh, Stanley had done his utmost to avoid going anywhere near the island he detested. If King Rwoma had not prevented him from travelling overland to Buganda, he would never have embarked on water at all. Furthermore, if Mutesa and his admiral, Magassa, had provided thirty promised canoes, or if the King of Ukerewe's canoes had not been in poor condition, Stanley would probably have steered the shorter route across the centre of Lake Victoria, and risked weathering a storm, rather than sailing close to the lake's western shores and gambling on avoiding the hostile islanders and their equally ferocious overlord, Antari, on the mainland opposite.

  When Stanley had known he would have to run the gauntlet between the island of Bumbireh and the mainland, his canoes' proven tendency to sink in choppy water had persuaded him he would have to hug the western shore of the island as his fleet sailed north, until it could pass through the strait and sail on to Buganda close to the main- land.9 Knowing his vulnerability to waterborne attack, he had done his utmost to oblige the islanders to agree in advance to let his expedition pass unmolested. To this end, he cleverly captured their chief as a hostage, guaranteeing their good behaviour, he hoped - and making a pre-emptive attack on them unnecessary. To test the water with Antari, Stanley sent an emissary to ask him to redeem Shekka with a modest payment of spears in reparation for his vassal's earlier aggression. But far from agreeing to pay, Antari declared war on him. Next, by killing the leader of the Ganda delegation to their island and fatally wounding six others, the islanders scotched all Stanley's painstaking efforts to obtain safe-conduct through the strait, and left him - in his own opinion - with no choice but to launch a pre-emptive attack.

  The bitterest condemnation of Stanley would arise from his own earlier newspaper admission that he had already inflicted a severe punishment on Bumbireh by killing more than a dozen men on his first visit in April. So why, it would be asked, had he needed to punish them a second time in August? In fact Henry had immensely exaggerated the casualties he had inflicted in April. In reality, he had killed only one or possibly two people, rather than the fourteen he had later claimed in print. His psychological need to prove that no one ever got the better of him was a character weakness he felt unable to admit to in public in order to explain his exaggeration. So thanks to this mis guided lie, his second visit to the island seemed far more brutal than it would otherwise have done. (He exaggerated again when claiming, in his August despatch, that forty-three men had been killed in his attack, when in his diary the figure given was thirty-three, which tallies with Frank Pocock's total.)

  The sensitivity of the early twenty-first-century observer to racial questions makes judging the actions of nineteenth-century explorers with objectivity and fairness extremely difficult. Men coming from a society in which public hangings had only recently been abolished - and where floggings in the armed services, and beatings in workhouses and schools, were ferocious - were bound to have few inhibitions about using a whip on their porters. Nor were Africans themselves strangers to physical punishments in their own societies. Lacking prisons, chiefs often sentenced criminals to death or inflicted mutilations as standard forms of retribution. During the American Indian Wars, most of Henry's readers had regarded the killing of `Red Indians' as laudable, so it is not surprising that in Africa he described the Bumbireh islanders to his American friend, Edward King, as `a desperate set of savages rivalling the Apaches in ferocity and determina- tion'.I° Furthermore, he saw for himself General Napier's army and Sir Garnet Wolseley's expeditionary force kill large numbers of virtually unarmed Africans with the most up-to-date artillery available, and being praised on their return. So Stanley probably did not anticipate that most British humanitarians would view the killing of Africans as barbarous per se, except when taking place under the dubious cloak of government campaigns.

  In Cape Town, on his way to Zanzibar with the Wangwana, Stanley told a journalist that at Bumbireh he had done nothing worse than was being done daily by the Cape government `in pursuit of the frontier war in which they were engaged'." This was a good rejoinder, since military responses to border incidents and the suppression of colonial `insurrections' were not classified as wars by the Colonial Office, and consequently deaths caused during them could be defined as murder under the civil law. Yet, Henry knew that prosecutions of military commanders were incredibly rare, and that there had been little or no outrage over the scores of Indians (many of them entirely innocent) who had been blown from the mouths of cannons in revenge for the Indian Mutiny, without any judicial process. Only ten years before Stanley's attack on Bumbireh, Governor Eyre of Jamaica had been pardoned after hanging almost 450 black `rebels' and flogging boo others for their alleged part in a rebellion, on wholly inadequate evidence. Among Eyre's supporters had been Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Carlyle. So Stanley could have been forgiven for not realizing that it was wise to keep quiet about shooting anyone in Africa. He had simply not understood that Africans had enjoyed special status in the United Kingdom ever since Britain had led the long campaign against the Atlantic slave trade. Aborigines in Tasmania were being brought to the point of extinction by a combination of settlers' bullets, alcohol and white men's diseases, with little notice being taken of their plight - while the same indifference was being shown to similar crimes occurring in Australia and the Islands of the Pacific. But shoot Africans in Africa and admit it, and all hell could be guaranteed to break out.

  When Charles `Chinese' Gordon heard what Stanley had done to Africans in Africa, he was aghast - but not because Stanley might be a murderer. His crime in Gordon's eyes was that he had written openly about killing Africans. `These things may be done b
ut not advertised,' Gordon told Richard Burton. In China, Gordon's `Ever Victorious Army' had committed a string of atrocities, and in the Sudan he and his subordinates had killed numerous members of the Bari tribe without saying a word.12 Though Stanley can be accused of being naive about Bumbireh, he was never cynical. Samuel Baker would defend him on the grounds that `Mr Stanley's publishing of the details of his various encounters with the natives proved that he must have considered them unavoidable - otherwise he would most naturally have concealed them from the public."' Baker had himself killed many more Africans than Stanley, and had also kept quiet - though this had not saved him from a mauling in the British press in 11873 for `cold blooded murder' and `massacres', as a result of allegations by men who had served under him.14 Like Burton, Baker was a racist with extreme views that disgusted Stanley.''

  It is extraordinary that Stanley should have been singled out as virtually the only explorer who maltreated Africans when other famous travellers had behaved worse. Frederick Lugard, thanks to his biographer, Dame Margery Perham, is considered a humane man, though his actions in Uganda precipitated a civil war, and he was personally responsible for about a hundred deaths on the island of Bulingagwe.i6 Carl Peters, a national hero in Germany, had been unashamedly sadis tic and had cut off the heads of Masai warriors.'7 Even the successful missionary Alexander Mackay, who went out to Uganda as a result of Stanley's appeal, shot two porters for desertion, while Verney Lovett Cameron, who was also reputed to be a morally impeccable traveller, shot a man for stealing his goat. He also travelled for months with a slave trader responsible for killing r,5oo people at this very time. Brooding on acts of brutality by Europeans in Africa, Stanley recalled that the Scottish missionaries on Lake Nyasa had sentenced a man to death, and flogged another so severely that he had died.i8 He also listed murders by two British consuls, and reflected that none of these misdeeds could hold a candle to the mass killings by famous chiefs like Mutesa, Mzilikazi and Sebetwane nor compare with the bloody trail left by tribal migrations such as those of the Ngoni during three decades.