by Tim Jeal
Even at this early stage, despite his fury, Stanley had resolved to keep the officers' worst crimes secret if he could. But he felt sick at heart to know that unless he told the truth he would have to treat Barttelot's death sympathetically. Yet it was crystal clear to him that if Barttelot and Jameson were ever exposed for what they had done he would be accused of having left two madmen in charge of the Rear Column. In a letter to Mackinnon, dated 3 September and marked `Strictly Private', he wrote of the Rear Column's officers being `utterly incompetent'. The closest he came to outright condemnation was to admit to having heard `terrible stories of both Jameson and Barttelot'. Yet he added the qualification that: `It is not right to lay too great stress on them inasmuch as we cannot hear their stories.'14
However, unknown to him, John Rose Troup and the interpreter, Assad Farran, who had left Yambuya by steamer on 3 June had already started to talk. Troup accused Barttelot in the British press of `gross neglect and undue punishments', as well as incompetence. Farran's terrible accusation against Jameson also appeared in print for the first time." The members of the EPRE's committee acted swiftly to snuff out what they called `unsubstantiated allegations'. Troup was reminded that he had signed a contract that restrained him from publishing anything about the expedition until after the publication of the committee's official report and a book by Mr Stanley. They also scared Assad Farran into retracting. 2.6
In one delicate matter Bonny protected Stanley from the truth. All the officers at Yambuya had kidnapped, or bought, Manyema women for sex. The last undated pencil note that Jameson wrote to Bonny included the sentence: `Two of Major B's slave women have been recaptured.'' On 7 March, Ward had `bought a woman for a pair of long boots ... Troup purchased a slave woman from the Arabs for six pieces of handkerchief [cloth].' Two days later Bonny wrote: `Our cannibal concubines are quite at home.' Wishful thinking, since on r r March `three cannibal concubines broke away from the camp.' Troup caught his and trussed her up to prevent a second escape. Bonny reflected that `when you kiss your cannibal, she may have blood on her lips'. The cannibalism of surrounding tribes enabled these Victorian officers to feel less guilty about their sexual behaviour." Today, as then, men away from home for long periods often use prostitutes, or find local women to satisfy their needs. Yet when Bonny describes Troup's very young woman `crying and saying she wants her mama & papa', the callousness of these `gentlemen' of the Rear Column with their sex slaves becomes starkly apparent."
Ignorant of his officers' cruel debauchery, it saddened Stanley to realize that if people at home knew the truth about Barttelot's brutality and Jameson's crime, they would automatically assume that they had been
originally wicked ... They will not reflect that circumstances changed them ... At home these men had no cause to show their natural savagery ... They were suddenly transplanted to Africa & its miseries. They were deprived of butcher's meat & bread & wine, books, newspapers, the society & influence of their friends. Fever seized them, wrecked minds and bodies. Good nature was banished by anxiety. Pleasantness was eliminated by toil. Cheerfulness yielded to internal anguish ... until they became but shadows, morally & physically of what they had been in English society ... Home people if they desire to judge fairly must think of all this.3°
It was a sign of Henry Stanley's innocence that he was so shocked to come across, in Jameson's box, a skilfully drawn caricature burlesquing his African costume of knickerbockers, Norfolk jacket and self-designed hat.3i While at Banalya, he was also agonizing over a letter written by Stairs to Major Barttelot, in which the capable young lieutenant delivered a blistering attack on his leader (Stanley). Wadi Mabruki, the Wangwana chosen by Stairs as his messenger, had been drowned at a falls on the Aruwimi, and the letter to Barttelot, which had been secreted in a cartridge pouch, had fallen into Stanley's hands. As the explorer pulled out the packet, he saw in Stairs's hand the words `a former pump of Stanley's'. At first he had thought `pump' might be `pimp', but Stairs was referring to the way in which Stanley's tent boys tried to win his favour by `pumping' people for confidential information that their master might find useful.
Writing in June, Stairs described the Wangwana, Mbaraku, as `a former pump of Stanley's ... a better specimen of a bum-sucker never existed in this or any other country. The present collectors of information are two: Sall his boy & Faruz Bill Alli [sic] one of Jameson's former chiefs ... Every word [spoken by Jameson] goes to Stanley, magnified roo fold'. He accused Stanley of meanness and cheating his officers out of their proper share of food, and claimed, justifiably, that William Hoffman was a thief, and divided food unequally. `You may think I am running down people a good deal, not a bit; the New Bond Street gang [Stanley's London address] are a bad lot.' Stanley scrawled on the lower margin: `The above letter is singularly untruthful in all particulars relating to me and the language is so shocking that I never could have believed any English officer capable of expressing himself in such a vocabulary.'
Stanley feared that Stairs's view of him might well be shared by Parke and Nelson. But he was wrong to think of them as a united group, since Stairs despised Nelson as a self-pitying grumbler, and thought Parke a ditherer.3z For months the memory of this letter upset Henry. Given his precarious health, Stanley needed to make sure he had a supply of goat's milk, and felt justified in holding back some Indian corn. So he was deeply hurt to be accused of meanness with food. Stairs, who had reminded him of his younger self, complete with his `hot and variable temper' and his talent for pioneering, had betrayed him - just as Harry Johnston had done. `I don't like to confess it to my private page how emotional I felt ... it is so rare, so very rare to find an assistant upon whom one can depend.'33
Stanley would never know what a far kinder and better man he was than young Stairs. Unknown to him, soon after he had left Fort Bodo, Stairs and Dr Parke had adopted some horribly cruel measures to stop local pygmies raiding their vegetable gardens - shooting to kill `thieves', and when catching a woman and her three children in the fort's gardens, cutting off part of their ears as a warning to others to keep out. Both men believed they would not survive until Stanley's return unless they could protect their food, and were quite prepared to shoot women. One was wounded in the leg at first. But rather than accept responsibility and attempt to cure her, Parke ordered that she be shot through the head. By contrast with such utterly ruthless behaviour, Stanley, before leaving Fort Bodo for Yambuya, had asked Parke to treat local people if they fell ill.
After his leader's departure, Parke never attended a single person outside the perimeter fence. Such people, in his eyes, were all potential thieves. He suspected that it would never be safe to release a local woman, whom Stairs had captured for sex. She might betray to her tribe the fact that the camp was thinly defended, so Parke implied that she would have to be killed. In late August, twelve local tribesmen were shot dead among Fort Bodo's tobacco plants. `The heads of the slain,' wrote Parke, `we cut off and placed on the paths traversed by the Washenzie.' Surrounding tribes decapitated those killed in battle and displayed their heads as a warning, and this was why Parke and Stairs felt no qualms. Parke reported cheerfully on r9 December - the day before Stanley's return from Yambuya - that there was more food available in the fort `since the Monbutti [pygmies] have discovered they may never leave'.14 Stanley was not morally spotless, but he never behaved with the casual brutality displayed by Parke and Stairs, who killed helpless people in cold blood, and mutilated women and children whom they had trapped.
Bonny noted in his diary that Stanley thought Jephson `the most honourable gentleman of the lot'.35 And remembering the anger and shock Jephson had felt when his men had needlessly shot two Congolese, one can only applaud Stanley's judgement. Apart from Jephson, only Troup had no obvious stain on his reputation. Indicating how different Stanley was from the young men he commanded, he had decided, before leaving for Yambuya, not to take with him his little terrier Randy (named after Randolph Churchill) in case the thousandmile journey through the
Ituri Forest proved too much for him. But from the moment Stanley left Fort Bodo, Stairs could do nothing with the dog and he died four days later.
I feel certain he died of a broken heart, wrote Stairs. He ate nothing yesterday, and in the evening came up and put his head in my lap several times. At midnight he gave three or four howls, and then turned over and kicked his last. He had been to the Nyanza twice. Stanley will be in an awful way about it and will think I either starved him or beat him to death.36
Fred Puleston, a later African traveller, would claim decades later that Roger Casement - then working for Sanford's ivory company - had told him that Stanley, while in the Ituri Forest, had cut off Randy's tail to enrich a thin stew. The story went that when nobody ate the tail itself, Stanley gave it to Randy, who chomped it up greedily. Since Casement had been 11,500 miles away at the time, the story can only have been an invention.37
Since smallpox had broken out among the Manyema, Stanley did not stay long in Banalya but three days after his arrival moved the surviving Wangwana, and the Madi carriers who had been engaged in Equatoria, to an island in the Aruwimi fourteen miles upstream. Meanwhile, the 170 Manyema (a figure including their dependents) were ordered to camp on the riverbank opposite. With his usual energy, Henry regrouped the Rear Column, which now numbered 465 people. After ten days' rest and medical care, z83 men were fit to carry loads. Henry had given his word to Emin Pasha that he would be back at Fort Bodo by zz December and he did not intend to be late.38 He liked to quote a couplet from Tennyson's `Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington':
Doing what he had undertaken to do, he saw as his duty; and he would never shirk it. He sensed a difference here between his officers and himself. `I make my work my fellow. They have lived in society all their lives ... I have been alone 30 out of my 46 years.'4° Exceptional men are often intolerant of those without their drive, discipline and gift for leadership. For this reason he blamed the officers of the Rear Column for not leaving Yambuya, regardless of whether they had received any carriers or not. Stanley knew that if he had travelled to Stanley Falls and had been promised porters by Tippu Tip for a certain date, and if the Arab had then failed to deliver them, he (Stanley) would not have returned to the Falls even once more to beg for help - let alone six times, like Barttelot and his officers. Stanley wrote: `I feel that none of these young men ever left the presence of Tippu Tip without feeling a sense of shame at their impotence & a burning indignation at the cause of it.' It amazed him that, after Tippu had first failed to fulfil a promise to them, they had gone on thinking that he meant to bring the porters in a month or two. Clearly, he had broken his word because he had no early plans to assist them.
Stanley was shocked that all their trips to the Falls had involved marching r,zoo miles, a distance greater than that to Lake Albert. If Stanley's men had ever been dying at the same rate, and he had had no means of hiring carriers to replace them, he knew he would have marched at once with the men he had. He wrote after reading Jameson's diary: `When the major decided to remain until Tippu Tip could furnish him with boo carriers - he embarked on a perilous course for which his inexperience was no guide - for which ... his inherited tastes, his education & his military habits & proclivities entirely unfitted him ... Enduring deadly monotony ... [while] buried in darkest obscurity' could only have been unendurable as `the graves increased in number ... The cure of their misgivings & doubts would have been found in action.'4' Thus Stanley blinded himself to the fact that the reason Barttelot had not chosen to march with zoo men was because he had been fearful to abandon more than half his stores and thus have earned his leader's censure.
On 3o August 11888 the expedition struck camp, 239 men setting out overland under Bonny's orders, and zz5, under Stanley's command, travelling by water.42 By mid-September, the foraging parties sent out to find bananas were being attacked, and an average of one a day was killed by the locals. Meanwhile, Stanley, travelling with Bonny, was having to rein him in. `Leave the Zanzibaris and Sudanese alone,' he advised him. `Try and reason with these men & you will get on better with them.' He pointed out to Bonny that he could never carry a load as the black people did, and, without them, `if you took your gun into the next village you would get killed'. Bonny, who had respected no one at Yambuya, was soon writing of Stanley as `just the man for the work he has undertaken'.
By late October they were still i 6o miles from the end of the forest and food was scarcer than ever. Three Wangwana chose this time to steal his goats and slaughter them. Though this could have been a death sentence for him, Henry did not order a flogging but gave each Wangwana twenty-four strokes with a switch.43 As November started, they had been travelling for two months and the death toll stood at over fifty from all causes: starvation, fever, ulcers, poisoned arrows and smallpox. A very dangerous situation confronted them. On 9 November, a large party of foragers failed to return after a week, and Stanley distributed a final cup of plantain flour to each man. He reckoned that all the zoo men who were with him in camp would be close to death by the end of the week. But a day later the foragers returned, bringing about four days' food.44
Life went on this way for a month, foragers going out, the others - many of them sick - waiting for days for food. All the while, William Hoffman was still stealing things to eat. Eventually, Henry forced him to sign a confession of his thefts after a large quantity of biscuits had been found in his box: `Sitting there, he began to cry & said, (to Bonny), "I have had no food for 3 days."' Stanley had already had to give him a caning, but on this occasion he forgave him on a promise to reform. It would be hard to think of another valet in the world who could have lived a harder year than Hoffman, and Stanley was well aware of this.
On 8 December, Sergeant Bonny reported with grim succinctness: `Our people are without food.'41 The success of 300 foragers sent out on the 9th was crucial for the fate of the 113o enfeebled men and women in camp. Around him and his followers `myriads of trees ... shut out all hope ... burying them out of sight of sky and sunshine.' While the foragers were away, the rest of the people fanned out in the woods to hunt for the red berries of the phrynia bush. Saburi, the boy who usually carried Stanley's Winchester, did not return. Stanley sent out men to fire signals after dark, but with no response. Saburi was one of three people who had lost their way that day, or collapsed in the woods. The next day was the sixth since the foragers had gone out. Stanley reckoned that if he allowed all the people in camp to stay in their present position for another three days, they would become too weak to search for food. It was therefore decided that Bonny would stay at the camp with about ninety incapable men and women, while Stanley and Hoffman went off for a week with a party of the fitter men to try to find food. On the day this plan was hatched, little Saburi walked into camp having been lost for forty-eight hours.46 On leaving next day, Stanley left a note with Bonny:
We set out today with 30 to 40 people able to stagger on to get bananas ... If we meet foragers before io tomorrow morning, we shall return on the 3rd day but shall send relief to you right on. It may happen that something has occurred to prevent our return till the eleventh or even twelfth day. Do not begin to despair until then. I commit you and ourselves to that Providence in whose hands we are.
Your friend Henry M. Stanley.47
He did not admit to Bonny that he was taking a revolver with him and poison, in case he failed to find the foragers .48 But the following day, to their great joy, they encountered the foragers, who were driving goats ahead of them, and carried plantains and bananas in their arms.49 On zo December 11888, Stanley reached Fort Bodo with 3 5 8 people, which was 1107 fewer than he had had with him on leaving the island near Banalya. How many of the 1107 had died, and how many, mainly Manyema, had joined communities of their own tribe living in the forest, it is impossible to say.
Parke was less than happy to see the state Stanley's party was in, since his leader expected him to give medical attention even to the hopeless cases. The quality of the doctor's compassi
on can be judged by his tone: `I never witnessed such a disgusting sight as the unfortunate ulcerated people came dropping in. The stench from the putrid flesh and dirty scraps of bandages was sickening and filled the air round the fort.' But for Stanley, Parke had only warm praise.5° Indeed, in crossing and re-crossing the immense Ituri Forest again, in order to rescue what was left of the Rear Column, he had risked his own life, and in his determination to save the lives of others had gone beyond what most expedition leaders would have thought necessary, or even possible.
TWENTY-SIX
Keeping Emin Pasha's Secret
Three weeks after his return to Fort Bodo, Stanley was desperately worried about the failure of Jephson and Emin Pasha to communicate with him, either in person or by letter. The arrangement had been that ,in about two months', after finding out what the Pasha's men wanted, they would come to Fort Bodo.' However, a few days later, when Henry was starting to imagine that a disaster had befallen them, a messenger arrived at his camp near the lake, bearing three letters from Emin Pasha and two from Jephson all written several months previously. But his relief did not last long. `As I read them,' confessed Henry, `a creeping feeling came over me which was a complete mental paralysis for the time.'
Writing on 7 November from Dufile - a station on the Nile 1140 miles north of Lake Albert - Jephson explained that a rebellion had broken out there in mid-August and that he and Emin had been taken prisoner by the Pasha's rebel soldiers, who believed that Stanley was ,only an adventurer, and had not come from Egypt'. The rebels also suspected, wrote Jephson, `that the letters you [Stanley] had brought from the Khedive ... were forgeries ... and that the Pasha and you had made a plot to take them out of the country, and hand them over to be slaves to the English'. Worse still, Jephson informed Henry that Emin had been deposed and his most trusted officers replaced by rebels. `Plans were also made to entrap you when you returned and strip you of all you had.' Jephson feared that he and the Pasha were unlikely to escape unscathed. Already, loaded rifles had been pointed at their heads. But in two subsequent letters, Jephson reported that the rebels had fallen out over how to respond to the Mahdists' most recent attack, and that in the confusion, he and Emin had been allowed to steam downriver as far as Tunguru on the lake. Jephson's last letter ended: `I will not disguise the fact ... that you will have a difficult and dangerous task before you in dealing with the Pasha's people."
