Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  Ignorance about his officers was the price Stanley paid for isolating himself. He failed to grasp that any man facing privation needed encouragement, whatever his background. Henry later confessed to an amazed officer: `I never once suspected that you required occasional doses of pap & sweetness to keep you up to your duty ... No one had ever given pap to me, [so] how could I think that gentlemen of honour required it as a fillip of duty."° A fear of unguarded remarks, in case they were written up in officers' journals, or leaked to the press, led him to dine alone in his own tent, and to avoid praising one man in case it caused jealousy with the others. Nor did he discuss important decisions, in case the expedition became `a bemuddled debating society'." Insecurity made Henry fear familiarity, lest it undermined respect. The explosion caused by Jephson's aloofness had surprised no one. Though intelligent and amusing, he was thought arrogant by his fellow officers. Nelson called him `a conceited idiot', and Stairs often parodied his name-dropping.12 To Stanley's amazement, the one person who behaved well, after his row with Jephson and Stairs, was Major Barttelot. In fact the major persuaded him to reinstate the two men.,3

  The further upriver they steamed, the more important it became to stay on good terms with Tippu Tip, who would be required to collect boo porters to carry the Rear Column's stores to Lake Albert, and would also be expected to prohibit other slave traders from raiding villages below Stanley Falls and on the Aruwimi. So it appalled Stanley when Dr Parke spoke openly of Tippu's wives as `filthy dirty, highly smelling women', who ought to be ousted from their steamer cabin, unless they washed. If Tippu wished, he would soon be able to attack Barttelot and steal all his stores. Or he could stop local tribes selling food to the Rear Column. Small wonder Henry forbade all further `rudeness to our guests'.14

  The nearer to the Aruwimi they got, the more oppressive the river became. `It is peculiar what a feeling of hatred the river inspires one with,' wrote Jephson. `One hates it as if it were a living thing - it is so treacherous & crafty, so overpowering & relentless ... The river God is an evil one I am persuaded."5 At Upoto, the last village on the Congo before the Aruwimi confluence, Jameson observed that many people wore necklaces of human teeth, and the captain of the Peace confirmed that Soko tribesmen had eaten two west coast soldiers who had fled from Stanley Falls after it had been overwhelmed by the Arabs." The wildness of the riverside tribes made everyone fear an attack while the ships were moored for woodcutting.'7 Meanwhile, Dr Parke noticed that James Jameson was fascinated by the subject of cannibalism."

  Three days before reaching Yambuya, the steamers came level with the home village of Baruti, the boy whom Stanley was taking back to his parents. On being reunited with one of his brothers, he seemed eager to rejoin his family, but then changed his mind and decided to stay with Stanley. However, within less than a week he deserted at night, taking a Winchester rifle and two Smith & Wesson revolvers, as well as a silver watch and some money. Some months later, the rifle turned up at Stanley Falls, after Baruti had been ambushed, killed and eaten by cannibals on his way back to his family."

  On 1 15 June the expedition arrived at Yambuya, where Stanley intended to create, close to the village, a camp for his Rear Column. The villagers had other ideas and refused to `palaver'. Stanley therefore ordered that all the whistles of his steamers be blown loudly, and that Jephson, Nelson and Stairs land with their men, only shooting if attacked. Already scared by Arab raids, the villagers fled. When they did not reappear, Stanley selected the highest point in the village for his camp. The bush was cut back around it and ditches dug. On the 117th a few natives came across the river in canoes to sell food to the newcomers.2O But they were not followed by others. It was therefore lucky that there were extensive fields of manioc (bitter cassava) close by - large enough to provide food for hundreds of men for months.

  Yet though Henry felt there would be no food problem, he had personal misgivings about Barttelot, despite the part the man had played in reconciling him with Stairs and Jephson. When the major arrived at Yambuya after delivering Tippu Tip to Stanley Falls, Stanley was furious to hear that Tippu had been `disappointed' on learning that the gunpowder he had been promised as part of his agreement had not yet been shipped from Leopoldville. Why had Barttelot not pointed out that Tippu's attitude was totally unreasonable? Stanley had arranged for the powder to be shipped to Yambuya within eight weeks. Now he said vehemently to the major: `It will be time enough to talk about the powder when he reaches this camp [with the carriers he had promised to collect]. He surely did not expect to get ammunition before he came here for it.' When Henry asked whether Barttelot had seen many carriers at the Falls, the major shook his head and said that Tippu would have `to send to all the villages around'." This convinced Stanley he had been right to split the expedition, since it would clearly be several months before Tippu Tip brought enough carriers to Yambuya to enable Barttelot to leave with the rest of the stores and follow the Advance Column to Lake Albert.

  Stanley handed Major Barttelot his written instructions on 27 June, four days before he (Stanley) left for the east. In them, the major was reminded of the importance of guarding and then bringing eastwards ,the vast store of ammunition and provisions' that would be in the camp after the heavily laden Stanley returned from Leopoldville. If these stores were ever lost, Barttelot was warned, the Advance Column would have `to solicit relief' for itself, rather than provide it for Emin. Sentries were therefore to be posted, day and night, at Yambuya, to guard against any attack on the camp. If Tippu Tip arrived with the full boo carriers, then the Rear Column would be able to leave with all its stores. If Tippu brought fewer, then some goods would have to be left behind. Stanley therefore listed the indispensable items - ammunition and the most expensive trade goods heading this list. Rather than abandon too many things, it might be necessary to march after the advance party in a series of six-mile marches, doubling back on themselves to bring on more goods each time. Barttelot was given a final choice: he could stay at Yambuya, if marching meant `throwing too many things away'. Barttelot was to consult his fellow officers when making important decisions. Stanley promised to blaze trees so that Barttelot could easily find the right path when his carriers arrived."

  Still angry at being left behind, Barttelot did not comment on his instructions. Jameson thought they `cleared up ... every point' except ,our relations with Tippu Tip'." This was true. But Stanley knew that if Tippu broke his contract, nothing could be done. Barttelot and his officers would either have to await his (Stanley's) return to Yambuya at the end of the year, or try to move off on their own initiative, having first weeded the stores. The Rear Column's 113 3 men would by then have been joined by the 11311 left behind at Bolobo.14 Certainly it was Barttelot's fervent hope to leave Yambuya soon after the Stanley arrived with Troup and Bonny on board." And Stanley expressed this same desire in his diary on 24 June. Several weeks earlier, he had written to Troup, then still in Leopoldville, telling him that when he (Troup) reached Yambuya, the major `will no doubt ... push on after me with you all."' It is therefore very surprising that on 11q July Barttelot wrote to his brother-in-law, Major Henry Sclater, claiming that Stanley's last words to him before he left Yambuya were: `Goodbye, major; [I] shall find you here in October when I return.' Nobody else overheard this, though Jameson was close at hand. Parke claimed that on parting, Barttelot declared he would come after them as soon as he could.17

  A day before he was due to march, Stanley was in a great quandary over whether to take Lieutenant Stairs with him, since the young officer was very ill with fever. Eventually Dr Parke decided that he could be carried without danger.z8 Stanley left Yambuya for Lake Albert on z8 June 1887. He had no idea of the full extent of the Ituri Forest, which lay ahead and had never been crossed by an explorer. So Henry was telling the literal truth when stating in his diary that he and his 389 men were pitching themselves `into the absolutely unknown ... [without] even a ray of light to guide [them]'.z9 Indeed, he was embarking on an ordeal to riva
l the most dangerous events he had ever lived through.

  Yambuya Camp behind its palisade

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Enigma of Emin Pasha

  When the advance party marched out of the gates of the stockade that they had helped to build at Yambuya camp, they looked a brave and hopeful sight: the 389 men split into four companies of about ninety men, each with their own drummers at the head of a long line of carriers, and, out in front, a party of axe-bearing trail-blazers.' During their journey by water, contacts with local people had been very limited, but now they had disembarked and were entering the Ituri Forest, this immunity was over.

  Many of the forest dwellers had either suffered an Arab-Swahili slave raid in person, or knew people who had, so it was entirely understandable that they should wish to stop strangers approaching. But for Stanley's men, this attitude was like a death sentence. Local villages offered them their sole opportunity to buy food, and stood on the only track through the jungle. Henry therefore had to visit each settlement, regardless of the feelings of its inhabitants. In happier days, he had acknowledged the right of the Congolese to deny strangers access to their land if they so wished, but not on this occasion when his expedition's survival was at stake. Even so, Jephson thought him 'wonderfully patient & long suffering [with local tribes]'.'

  As the men of the Advance Column struggled through the steaming jungle, tribesmen fired poisoned arrows at them from behind trees. Stanley was constantly looking out for cleverly disguised pits in the path and small needle-like poisoned sticks stuck in the ground in places where men would jump down from tree trunks placed across the track. The poison was usually fatal, causing men to die in agony within a few days.3

  On the very first day of their march, the column drew up in front of the village of Yankonde to find their way blocked by 300 warriors, gesticulating and shouting, with drawn bows in their hands'. They stood at the end of a section of the path that had been widened. `We were not long in finding,' wrote Stanley, `that this apparent highway through the bush bristled with sharpened skewers ... covered with green leaves.' After these poisoned stakes had been gingerly pulled out of the ground, Stanley's men advanced on the bowmen, who released `a little cloud of arrows', which wounded two men. Rather than retreat - thus sending a signal along the Aruwimi that the expedition could safely be resisted - Stanley ordered twenty men to fire back. The result was a number of warriors killed and others rushing in flight to the river.4 Henry found the next village empty. Around him were the charred remains of former dwellings. This told him `that Arabs and Manyema [their African slave-trading allies] must have visited here'. The next village, reached on 5 July 11888, was deserted too, with the fowls and other livestock apparently taken into the jungle. Hunger was soon tormenting every member of the expedition.

  Stumbling along in the twilight, beneath the canopy of a tropical jungle, the heavily laden carriers sank into swampy hollows, or slipped in stream beds intersecting the path. `The unfortunate donkeys floundered about hopelessly,' recorded Jephson, `and arrived on the other side exhausted and perfectly black. The donkey boys were often up to their waists in thin, unwholesome smelling mud. To add to the unpleasantness a perfect multitude of ants devoured one.' At times the jungle could be beautiful, as when spiders' webs, bejewelled with drops of water, hung like curtains between the trees, with the river sparkling behind them. But such beauty could be the backdrop to shocking violence. After one of Jephson's men shot two tribesmen, all his compassion was aroused. These men had merely been `taking the liberty of running away from us in their own forest'. Now, one of them had a badly shattered leg bone, and the elder of the two a fatal stomach wound. `Both looked at me with doglike eyes, like suffering animals. I felt sickeningly sorry for them & awfully choky. It was such a cruel, ruthless, unnecessary thing.''

  When Stanley could buy no food, and get no information about the attitude of the people ahead, he captured a few villagers, who were compelled to come along with him for several days until giving all the information they could. Then they were released. A woman captured in this way ran away in the night with her little girl, but leaving behind her baby. Stanley believed that if the infant was left in the same place, its mother would reclaim it when the column marched on. Jephson was less optimistic. `Poor little thing, it looked so happy as we left it by the fire with its hands full of corn cobs - the natives will certainly eat it.'6 The marauding Manyema were cannibals, as were the local Soko.

  By early August, several men had died of dysentery, and several from wounds inflicted by poisoned arrows. Although Stanley was sending out food parties, with instructions to steal if they could find no game, the results were negligible. `The people are ravenously hungry ... We have several living skeletons with us already.' The donkeys were also suffering, as grass did not grow in the dark forest. One died and others seemed sure to follow.' Above Yambuya cataracts, Henry assembled his metal boat, and with five canoes - bought and stolen - he was able to rest his enfeebled carriers in rotation by carrying some by water while the rest struggled overland.

  On 13 August the river party was attacked by a strong force of wellhidden bowmen and five men were hit by poisoned arrows; a sixth, Lieutenant Stairs, received a wound just below the heart that seemed likely to prove mortal. When Stanley came up, he found Stairs's shirt torn open and blood streaming from his chest. Arrows were still being fired from across the river.' `It is a curious sensation,' wrote Jephson, `being shot at by arrows, one sees & hears nothing but the "pit, pit, pit" of the arrows as they strike the brushwood round.'9 Dr Parke came upon Stairs soon after failing to save a man with a spear driven into his neck. Stairs was `very blanched and suffering from shock'. Unfortunately, in falling, he had broken the arrow, turning the tip under a rib where it was inaccessible without intrusive surgery. Parke injected water into the wound and then bravely sucked out the poison with his lips. After administering silver nitrate to the wound, he dressed it, and gave a morphine injection to control the pain. For days the young officer travelled in a tilted chair roped in place in a canoe. Though Stairs was feverish for twenty-four hours, two days later he was getting better, despite a steady discharge. Dr Parke had saved Stairs's life, though he still feared that tetanus might kill him.'° A week later two other arrow victims expired from lockjaw `after intolerable agonies .

  Lieutenant Stairs hit by an arrow

  Of 373 men in camp, Stanley noted that sixty were now `fitter for hospital than to continue our wandering life'. It haunted him that he might be leading his men to their deaths in the rain forest. Along with Parke, he took his turn `giving morphia [sic] injections ... and ministering to their needs'. He confessed that `a few more days ... listening to the muffled screams' might bring him to despair. On a regular diet of green bananas and plantains, men carrying heavy loads weakened fast. Sixteen had died already." Henry's determination to save men from poisoned arrows meant that while travelling on the river he took no chances. When a man in a canoe drew his bow, he shot him dead - finding beside him a dozen freshly poisoned arrows. The only food in his canoe was a bundle of cooked slugs - a diet proving there was hardly any game in the forest.12

  During the final week of August and the first two of September, the column lost a further thirty men through death and desertion. By 118 September only 238 out of 340 were fit to march. `We have had no food for 3 days for the people. These Manyema ruffians have not only driven the people away, but they have destroyed the plantations & there is nothing left on either bank."3 The desertions continued, with thefts of rifles, ammunition and preserved food - one man disappeared with nothing but a large box of biscuits, meaning to gorge himself somewhere before dying. Meanwhile, it rained torrentially for part of every day, turning the track into a quagmire. As Dr Parke remarked sadly: `Zanzibaris can't stand cold and wet. They shiver, develop goose-flesh and turn a greenish yellow.114 The doctor noted that Stanley was too depressed to lose his temper. In truth, he was pondering whether it might not be for the best `to retreat
and fall back on our goods [which he hoped were by now moving forward with Barttelot and Jameson] rather than urge on the tired people in this mad fashion."'

  In mid-September the desertions went on - the absconders hoping to attach themselves to a Manyema caravan before they starved." At this time, hunger led Stairs and Parke to commit murder. They had hoped to scare the natives of a particular village into flight, so they could steal their livestock. But they failed to get between them and their fowls and goats. So Stairs coolly shot one man dead, and Parke hit another two, who were fleeing with a goat. These desperate and brutal acts did not yield the famished officer and the doctor the fowls and goats they had hoped for, but only some smoked elephant meat and a few bananas.'7 Because they themselves had been starving, it could not have been easy to resist the temptation of stealing food by killing its owners, when easily able to do so. Back home, natives in remote places were routinely called `savages'. Stairs in addition had nearly died from an arrow wound inflicted by a local assailant, and other men had expired in agony from similar wounds. In this context his aggression can be understood, even if not condoned. Stanley arrived many hours later and probably never heard what had happened.

  By I9 September the column had travelled 300 miles from Yambuya, and on that day reached an Arab-Swahili settlement founded by Ugarrowwa, a Zanzibari who had been a tent boy on Speke and Grant's 11864 expedition. He had deserted near Lake Victoria, and in the decades since had made a fortune from slaves and ivory. Ungar- rowwa had killed most of the adult males in the land surrounding his settlement, and had enslaved their women for the harems of Arabia. The male children had been `indoctrinated as menials & foot sol- diers'.I8 Stanley was now able to leave behind fifty-six sick men to be fed at the rate of $5 per month. He contracted to pay from the Rear Column's stores, if Ugarrowwa's men delivered a letter to Barttelot. Stanley warned the major of the many difficulties he had experienced and advised him to acquire canoes and use the river as much as possi- ble.'9 Unfortunately, the men taking this letter were attacked by tribesmen and never reached Yambuya. At Ungarrowwa's, Stanley met his first Mbuti pygmy, a `very prepossessing' young woman thirty-three inches tall."O He and his officers were the first Europeans to see these diminutive forest-dwellers.