Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  Just as Emin was penning his appeals for help, Mackay was writing home with news of horrifying outbreaks of violence against Buganda's Christian missions and their African converts. Already Bishop Han- nington, the first bishop ever to travel to East Equatorial Africa, had been hacked to death with all his followers. Before that, many of Mackay's converts had been impaled on spits and roasted alive on the orders of Mwanga, Mutesa's psychotic successor. Not unnaturally, Mackay believed that Buganda's earthly (as well as its spiritual) salvation depended upon its becoming a British colony.'

  So when William Mackinnon approached Stanley in London, in early November 11886, to float the possibility of his returning to Africa as leader of an expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, the fate of Buganda's missionaries was of almost equal concern to both men - after all, they had gone out to Buganda at Stanley's urging. Mackinnon's special interest in the region dated back to the late ii 870s, when he had hoped to drive out the Arab slave traders by bringing `legitimate trade goods' from Mombassa on the coast to Lake Victoria by a new railway. When the Sultan of Zanzibar refused to lease any land or commercial rights on the mainland, this had persuaded Mackinnon to invest instead in King Leopold's Comite du Haut Congo. For the next eight years his primary hope, which he had shared with Stanley, had been to create within the Congo a free market dominated by British commerce. That hope had ended in September 11886 with the failure of his and Stanley's attempt to secure the Congo railway concession.

  In November 118 8 6, the Emin Pasha crisis caused both men to look once more to East Africa! Perhaps they could rescue Emin Pasha, and simultaneously pre-empt any German move on Buganda and help the British missionaries.' So on 115 November, two days before he was due to leave for his American lecture tour, Stanley wrote to Mackinnon accepting unpaid leadership of an expedition to relieve Emin, conditional upon his friend's managing to raise £zo,ooo.

  Given the public outcry that had very nearly destroyed Gladstone's administration after Gordon's death, it may be wondered why the Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had not already despatched a government force to relieve Emin Pasha. In fact, Lord Wolseley, the adjutant-general at the War Office, had ruled this out. `If Emin Bey, with 4,000 Egyptian troops and his knowledge of the country ... is unable to reach Lake Victoria Nyanza, it is useless to talk of our sending a column to his relief."' Wolseley also feared that if the King of Buganda opposed the column, the missionaries would be murdered as a consequence. Having known since late September that Emin was in danger, the prime minister was greatly relieved to find by December that the more responsible newspapers were recommending a `pacific' rather than a `military' expedition." Furthermore, by then it was clear that Emin was not as keen to be `rescued' as to be given enough ammunition to go on holding out in Equato- ria.1z It was suggested that the required ammunition could best be brought by an unobtrusive private expedition to Wadelai - Emin's Upper Nile headquarters - through Bunyoro, without offending Mwanga of Buganda; and so no large and expensive government force would be needed.

  Yet there was plenty of wishful thinking in philanthropic and government circles. No expedition carrying a mass of stores, including guns and ammunition, could go to the heart of Africa without the means to defend itself. The Mahdist uprising, slave raids, and Mwanga's expansion into Bunyoro had made the whole region dangerously unstable. Yet while the government was at pains to tell Mackinnon that they would feel no obligation to rescue Stanley (were he ever to need rescuing), they failed to recognize the dangers involved in backing a well-armed private expedition (and offering it `all the facilities in their power'), without accepting any responsibility for what it might actually do." Even when the Egyptian government, with its dependence on Britain, decided to pay £ro,ooo towards the cost of Mackinnon's expedition, and when the foreign secretary had formally approved it on behalf of the government, the British cabinet still felt entitled to preserve a detached stance in public.14

  In America, Stanley had just given his tenth lecture for Major Pond when, on 1111 December, Mackinnon's telegram reached him: `YOUR PLAN AND OFFER ACCEPTED. AUTHORITIES APPROVE. FUNDS PROVIDED. BUSINESS URGENT. COME PROMPTLY. REPLY. MACKINNON.'I' The next morning, the disappointed Pond saw Stanley and his stenographer hard at work, ordering `several hundred repeating rifles and a large stock of camp equipment'. The tour had been going well and Stanley would lose about £11o,ooo by cancelling, so Pond would lose a lot too. But since his client had inserted a clause in his contract permitting him to leave at once if recalled, there was no help for that.16

  Members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (EPRE) committee included Sir John Kirk and the Revd Horace Waller, old friends of Mackinnon's, with both of whom Stanley now made his peace.'7 Kirk had been impressed enough by Stanley's book about the Congo - especially in respect of his efforts to protect the Congolese from maltreatment by Belgian officers - to recommend him to Mackinnon as the only person who ought to lead the expedition." For the past eighteen months, as Consul-General at Zanzibar, Kirk had lived through the nightmare of believing that either Gladstone's or Salisbury's government would jettison Britain's long-established influence in East Africa and her interest in Buganda and the Upper Nile and allow the Sultan's entire mainland empire to fall into the hands of Germany, simply because German support for British control of Egypt was considered indispensable. But Lord Salisbury had other plans. By the Anglo-German East Africa Agreement of 11 November 11886, the Sultan's mainland possessions were divided into `two spheres of influence', with Britain acquiring the northern sphere, which extended to Lake Victoria from Mombassa, and Germany the southern sphere, extending from Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salaam to Lake Tanganyika. As a relieved Kirk told Mackinnon, this left the way open for Britain to make Buganda a protectorate when the time was ripe, and perhaps Equatoria too, if Emin chose to stay on there (though this last would depend upon the relief expedition's succeeding)."

  For Mackinnon, with his long-term interest in creating a great trading company in East Africa, the Emin Pasha expedition presented a unique opportunity. A memorandum in the tycoon's papers is revealingly headed: `Syndicate for establishing British commerce and influence in East Africa and for relieving Emin Bey."' Kirk helped Mackinnon by asking his deputy at Zanzibar, Frederick Holmwood, to assist Stanley when he came to negotiate concessions from the Sultan for the new British company. The intention was that Stanley would also establish trading posts between Wadelai on the Upper Nile and Mombassa on the coast. In January 11887, before Stanley left for Africa, he gave an undertaking to Mackinnon that after he had relieved Emin, and persuaded him to represent the company near Lake Victoria, he would himself serve as Chief Administrator, with his headquarters in Mombassa.21

  The relief committee - of which Mackinnon was chairman, Sir Francis de Winton secretary, and John Kirk and Alexander Bruce members - declared that `having the fullest confidence in Mr Stanley's experience and abilities', they would `cease to control the arrangements or interfere with the direction of the expedition' except `to provide the ways and means considered necessary by Mr Stanley'." So, in deference to Stanley's unparalleled record, the committee abdicated their overall authority from the start.

  Stanley sailed into Southampton Water on Christmas Eve 11886, and lost little time in writing to Leopold to ask him to release him from his contract for long enough to lead the expedition. Stanley's resentment of the king for failing to employ him in Africa after June 11885, and for his cynical deception of the British railway consortium, led him to hint strongly that a royal refusal would `[end] my engagement with your Majesty'. He also reproached Leopold for subjecting him to a `cold disapproving silence' for over a year.2j This convinced the king that only a personal meeting stood any chance of ensuring that the Congo Free State would benefit from Stanley's impending journey. So, only hours after receiving Stanley's letter, Leopold sent a telegram summoning the disgruntled explorer to his palace at Laeken.

  Before crossing to Brussels late on the 2.9 December, Stanley atten
ded a meeting of the EPRE committee held in his own rooms at 116o, New Bond Street. He and Mackinnon, along with de Winton and a few others, discussed the possible routes for the expedition to take, and the explorer argued for approaching along the Congo - because in steamships the expedition would be invulnerable to desertion and to demands from chiefs. Nevertheless, the majority preferred one of several east coast routes, which would enable Stanley to make two pioneering journeys through the East African territory that it was hoped Mackinnon's company would one day administer. Yet Henry did not make an issue of the route at this stage.

  As Henry's carriage rattled past the royal stable block at nine the following morning and came to a halt under Laeken's impressive portico, he strongly suspected that Leopold would want him to use the Congo route, as a prelude to securing Emin's services for his Free State. Nine months earlier, Count Borchgrave had alerted Stanley to Leopold's passionate interest in expanding eastwards, so he was not surprised to be told by the king that he would only release him from his contract for the duration of the expedition if he used that river, and then opened a line of communication from the Congo to Lake Albert. Stanley was therefore able, on his return, to compel the committee to abandon their preferred east coast route, without making it a personal matter.14

  Between visits to Brussels, Henry had very little time to devote to the vitally important task of interviewing men who had applied to be officers on the expedition. This would prove to be a great mistake since the behaviour of two of his officers would bring him more pain and greater public obloquy than anything since the Bumbireh incident. The few men he actually saw were whittled down for him by de Winton and Captain Grant Elliott, who had served under him on the Congo. On a single day, r January 11887, eighty applications were received, and there would be hundreds all told." Despite Stanley's personal preference for men from humble backgrounds, he chose to take with him, on this most problematic of all his expeditions, a preponderance of officers and gentlemen - a breed he knew nothing about.

  Major Edmund Barttelot of the 7th Royal Fusiliers came highly recommended by General Sir Redvers Buller and by Lord Wolseley. Educated at Rugby and Sandhurst, Barttelot had been promoted brevet-major at the early age of twenty-eight. He had served in Afghanistan and Egypt, where he had been part of the abortive Gordon rescue mission. The second son of a baronet, he was socially selfconfident. `Plenty of physical courage and an aspiring soul,' Henry wrote of him in his notebook, `but he will have to be treated gingerly."' This was because he seemed rather combative. Stanley had no similar doubts about James Sligo Jameson - a member of the Irish whisky family - who was prepared to contribute £r,ooo to the expedition's funds. Stanley's main anxiety about the thirty-one-year-old was that he seemed physically frail. But Jameson reassuringly pointed out that he had survived trips to Borneo and southern Africa, where he had indulged his passion for collecting big game heads, as well as birds, butterflies and beetles.'

  Arthur J. Mounteney Jephson was twenty-nine and heir, indirectly, to large estates in Ireland. But what probably inclined Henry to choose him was the fact that his clergyman father had died when he was seven, and he had been brought up as one of twelve children in a family of poor cousins to the moneyed line of his family. After leaving Tonbridge School, Mounteney (as he was always called) spent a brief period in the Merchant Navy, and was then taken in by his rich cousin, the Comtesse de Noailles. Mounteney had lived as her companion for several years before applying for a place on the expedition. He came across at interview as such a fashionable young man that Francis de Winton recommended refusal even when the Comtesse offered £11,ooo. But Henry disagreed. `I don't think how a man dresses matters a bit. It depends on the nature of the man,' he insisted, before accepting Jephson.28

  Stanley had high hopes of Lieutenant William Grant Stairs, at twenty-four the youngest of all the officers. Commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 11885, he had been raised in Nova Scotia, and trained at the Royal Military Academy of Canada. He had worked on the New Zealand Trigonometrical Survey, but had no experience of Africa or Africans. He seemed intelligent and disciplined.'9 Captain Robert Henry Nelson was thirty-four, had been educated at Harrow, and was on leave from a famous Indian army cavalry regiment, Methuen's Horse. He had served in the South African War of 11879-80 and was physically strong, and Henry chose him because he liked his good-natured face and modest manner. John Rose Troup, aged thirtyone, was the son of a general, and had served the AIC under Stanley, and then the Congo Free State.3° Another man who had worked for the State was Herbert Ward, whom Stanley had selected in 11884, and would engage for the expedition on arrival in the Congo. A born adventurer, Ward - whose father was a taxidermist at the London Natural History Museum - had travelled in New Zealand and Borneo, and was a gifted artist and writer. Though a colleague thought him a fantasist who imagined he owned `Aladdin's Lamp', Stanley considered him `a young man of great promise'."

  Two of the men he brought with him would not be gentlemen. The first of these was Stanley's valet, William Hoffman, who had once been `the boots' - the boy who cleaned shoes and ran errands - at his apartment block in Sackville Street. Kind-hearted Mrs Sheldon had recommended the seventeen-year-old to Stanley as a servant, while she had been living at the same address. The young man had claimed to have been an apprentice bag maker, but this was untrue. Nor had Stanley taken him to the Berlin Conference because he could speak German, as Hoffman later suggested: his English was so poor that he would have been a hopeless translator.3z Sergeant William Bonny of the Army Medical Department evaded the screening process by coming unannounced to Stanley's flat, explaining that his lack of skill as a letter writer would otherwise have ruled him out. He had just purchased his discharge from the army, in which he had served as a hos pital sergeant. Earlier, he had fought the Zulus in South Africa. But it was his `pertinacious' refusal to `take a mild negative', coupled with the fact that he had put on dress uniform and medals for his interview, that somehow touched Stanley.33 Dr Thomas Parke was taken on by Stanley in Alexandria en route for Zanzibar in late January. Twentynine years old, Parke was the son of an Irish small landowner and had trained as a doctor at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland before gaining a commission in the army medical service. Like Barttelot, he had served in Egypt.34

  The expedition's European contingent sailed from England on zo January 1887, taking with them more goods for barter than any of Stanley's earlier expeditions: an amazing fifteen miles of cloth, two tons of beads, and one ton of wire. In addition - largely for Emin Pasha's benefit - its porters would carry two tons of gunpowder, 350,000 percussion caps, Ioo,ooo rounds of Remington ammunition, 30,000 Gatling machine-gun cartridges, 50,000 rounds of Winchester ammunition, and a Maxim gun with portable stand and shield, donated by its inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim. At Cairo - en route for Zanzibar, whither all this mass of stores and weaponry was headed - Stanley had a significant conversation about firearms with the German explorers Wilhem Junker and Georg Schweinfurth. He noted indignantly in his diary: `Both have been labouring under the impression that since we take several hundred Remingtons & a Maxim, that we intend to force our way after a military fashion to Emin.' It seemed not to have occurred to them, he complained, that much of this weaponry and ammunition would be handed over to Emin, and what was left would be required `to defend our charges [carriers, officers, servants, etc.]'; nor, grumbled Stanley, had the two Germans realized that it was ludicrous for the world's press to praise Emin for having `fought his way through to Uganda', while at the same time getting ready to condemn `me if necessity compels me to use force to resist attack'.3 s

  On his arrival at Zanzibar on zz February - where he planned to recruit the expedition's Wangwana carriers, and then sail on for the Congo's mouth via the Cape - Stanley was shocked to see six German warships at anchor in a harbour where, on all his earlier visits, the Royal Navy had been predominant. Nevertheless, he realized that this German presence might help him convince Sultan Barghash that his best chance of
avoiding losing everything to Germany - including Zanzibar itself - would be to grant to Mackinnon's British company facilities in the ports of Mombassa and Melindi. The Sultan did not agree at once, but promised Stanley, and the acting British ConsulGeneral, Frederick Holmwood, to sign the relevant papers soon - which he did.36

  In mid-January, Stanley had discussed with Leopold the necessity of coming to an understanding with Tippu Tip, who controlled the whole region between Lake Tanganyika and the Upper Congo. The Arab was currently in Zanzibar selling ivory and holding discussions with the Sultan of Zanzibar. Six months earlier, Tippu had enraged Leopold by seizing the Congo Free State's post at Stanley Falls, after its English commander, Walter Deane, had refused to surrender a female slave who had sought his protection after a savage beating. The king's financial problems and shortage of manpower continued to make retaking the post an impossibility. As matters stood, Tippu had the power to stop Stanley's expedition getting from the Congo to Lake Albert and the Upper Nile where Emin was. The slave trader could also, if he wished, block Leopold's eager attempts to extend his new State eastwards to the Upper Nile.