by Giles Foden
For many members of the Naval Africa Expedition, products of their own period in history, the Africans were little more than beasts. Like someone staring into a thick fog, they could not see the humanity there. The people on the shore and the animals on the shore were one and the same: simple embodiments of the wilderness—pawns in the romantic primitivist game the white man had been playing with Africa for the past 40 years. It all happened remarkably quickly. In 1875 only a tenth of Africa was under European control; by 1895 only a tenth was not.
However, some exceptional individuals can see through the fog of their time. David Livingstone could, with his never-faltering concern for African people. At this juncture, Spicer’s expedition was passing through a region that the great Scottish explorer had charted a generation earlier. It was the Congo basin, a vast trough of alluvial soil surrounded by dripping hill-slopes. But when Livingstone was travelling here, he thought the Congo-Lualaba was either a northern branch of the Zambezi or (which he rather hoped) part of the Nile. It was a time of great hardship for him. His followers had deserted him and stolen his medicine chest and he was suffering from ulcers on his feet, while also struggling with bouts of pneumonia, dysentery and cholera. Every joint in his body was swollen with rheumatic fever from constant exposure to the wet. Eventually, he had to attach himself to a party of Arab ivory hunters, who turned out to be slavers and thieves, kidnapping and murdering wherever they went.
‘I am heart-broken at the sight of human blood,’ he wrote in his moving Last Journals, his hand shaking with fever as he tried to steady the pen on the paper.
Earlier in his journey, Livingstone had spotted from some mountains a wide expanse of water and christened it Lake Liemba; it was in fact Lake Tanganyika. Like Waugh in 1930, he was coming from practically the opposite direction to Spicer’s expedition, but he was passing through the same forests as the Naval Africa Expedition and they had not changed much in the intervening half-century:
Into these primeval woods, the sun, though vertical, cannot penetrate, except as sending down their [sic] pencils of rays into the gloom. The rain-water stands for months in stagnant pools made by elephants’ feet, and the dead leaves decay on the damp soil. One feels himself the veriest pigmy before these gigantic trees; many of their roots, high out of the soil in the path, keep you constantly looking down, and a good gun does no harm to the parrots and guinea-fowl on their tops. The climbing plants, from the size of a whipcord to that of a man-o’-war’s hawser, make the ancient path the only passage.
Near to where he wrote this, Livingstone heard of how the great river—the Lualaba or Nile, as he was now erroneously convinced it was—spread into a large lake and joined with another river, the Lufira. It was at precisely this junction point that Spicer’s men found themselves on the morning of 11 October 1915. First they had to navigate through a swamp, and as the channels between the beds of tangled reeds grew narrower and narrower, Mauritzen argued it was dangerous to keep using Mimi and Toutou’s engines. There was too great a chance of their propellers gathering up strands of vegetation and twisting the shaft to the engine.
Their brief holiday over, the Congolese paddlemen were once again put to work. As they paddled through the reeds—sometimes getting out to tug the boats through by hand, as Bogart and Hepburn would do during the filming of The African Queen 36 years later—enormous numbers of birds flew up from their nesting places in the marsh. Not just the kind of waterfowl familiar to Europeans—ducks, geese, herons and cormorants—but great African monsters like the Maribou stork, the pelican and the crested crane.
Eventually Mimi and Toutou emerged from the swamp and into Lake Kisale, where the current of the two rivers converged. The lake was famous for its floating islands, which were inhabited by fishermen. In his record of the explorations of Stanley and Livingstone, John Geddie describes the methods of Kisale fishermen:
The matted growths of aquatic plants fringing its shores are cut off in sections, and towed to the centre of the lake. Logs, brushwood, and earth are laid on the floating platform, until it acquires a consistency capable of supporting a native hut and a plot of bananas and other fruit trees, with a small flock of goats and poultry. The island is anchored by a stake driven into the bed of the lake; and if the fishing become scarce, or should other occasion occur for shifting his domicile, the proprietor simply draws the peg, and shifts his floating little mansion, farm, and stock, whither he chooses.↓
≡ John Geddie, The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Record of Modern Discovery (Edinburgh, 1883); a book to be distinguished from Richard Burton’s earlier volume of a similar name.
Another type of floating dwelling greeted Spicer and his team. Coming faintly over the lake could be heard the tinkling of a piano and looking out across an expanse of rippling blue water, over a bed of white sand, they eventually spied a barge on which had been built a small house.
‘It’s my place,’ Mauritzen explained, coolly inviting Spicer and Dr Hanschell to lunch.
The music stopped as they climbed aboard and a young blonde-haired woman in a white dress and sandals emerged on deck.
‘My wife,’ added Mauritzen. As they embraced, a native servant fetched drinks and cigarettes. Spicer and the doctor followed the Mauritzens through to the cabin of their houseboat, where there were comfortable armchairs and pictures on the walls.
Lunch was delicious—fish from the lake, naturally—and they were both slightly dazed by this sudden display of civility after months of hardship. Having eaten their fill, the two hydrographers pored over charts and maps, while the doctor discussed music and literature with Mrs Mauritzen. She was a very gracious woman, cultured as well as good-natured, and he later remembered it as the best day of the whole expedition.
Mimi and Toutou’s engines were started up again in the afternoon and Mauritzen kissed his wife goodbye. On leaving the lake the expedition continued for five miles upriver to the village of Kadia. Here they were flagged down by Captain Holmquist, the Belgian river superintendent, who told them it was too dangerous to continue further. There were rocky outcrops in the river bed that might rip out the launches’ hulls. There was nothing to do but wait for the unsavoury Captain Blaes and the Constantin de Burlay to catch them up, hoping they might be able to load the boats on her deck.
But when he arrived Captain Blaes remained ‘extraordinarily uncouth and incommunicable’, according to Dr Hanschell. He was still unshaven and the contrast between him and Spicer, who was obsessed with the presentation of his facial hair, could not have been greater. Despite Tom’s best efforts to ruin his cut-throats and the difficulty of finding suitable campsites along the river, Spicer had continued his peculiar practice of letting his beard grow, then shaving it off. These shaves were complicated affairs employing the full regalia of wash-stand, soap-stick and circular mirror.
Quite apart from the Captain’s unwillingness to help, the Constantin’s cranes were too small to lift Mimi and Toutou. As usual it was Wainwright who came up with a solution. They would put the motor boats on the steamer’s lighter, using tree trunks as a kind of bridge from the banks. He immediately sent some of the ratings into the forest to cut down trees for the job.
They laid the tree trunks out into the river in a line and the cradles and other stores were meanwhile removed from the lighter. Toutou was put back into her cradle while still in the water and brought close to the river bank. With pulleys and a large complement of African labour, the motor boat was pulled up the ramp of logs onto the bank. The ends of the logs were then lifted and placed onto the deck of the lighter.
One of the men involved was the red-haired seaman from Donegal, who may or may not have been William Carey. Stripped down to his shorts, he waded into the water to raise each log-end one by one. His muscular physique and porcelain-pale skin, as well as his distinctive red hair, brought coos of admiration from the womenfolk of the village, who had lined up on the bank to watch.
Seeing this, Spicer was outraged and perhaps a little je
alous. ‘Disgusting!’ he shouted. ‘Go and get some clothes on! Where do you think you are? Back in Donegal?!’
It was another Spicer ‘performance’ and one that the ratings would recall later in the expedition, when their leader began stripping off for male and female alike. But for the time being they had serious work to do: it wasn’t until the morning of 16 October—a week after they had arrived at Kadia and ten days after they had begun their river journey—that the motor boats had been properly secured on the lighter and the Constantin de Burlay was ready to leave.
By this stage, Captain Blaes was hopping mad. The business of getting Mimi and Toutou on board had put him a week behind schedule. He was a boozer, the expedition reckoned, and they didn’t think much of his passengers either. They included four convicts—shackled at the neck and under the guard of an armed askari—and several East European traders in dirty white linen suits. To these were added a crowd of African families with children and livestock and bags of provisions. The ship’s cargo included several elephant tusks and—tied to the side, still wriggling—a young crocodile. Spicer’s lecture about the expedition seems to suggest they actually locked Blaes in his cabin at some point during this period, though for form’s sake the Belgian is transformed into a native caretaker: ‘Dudley invited him into the captain’s cabin to discuss the situation and have a drink. He had arranged to be called away by one of his engine-room staff, and as he went out he locked the caretaker in…’
The Constantin left just after 7 AM and her progress seemed to confirm the expedition’s opinion that the captain was a drunkard. His method of sailing was to ram the steamer into the bank whenever a bend was approaching. He’d then let the current carry the steamer round 360 degrees before continuing. They all burst out laughing the first time this happened (Spicer’s laugh, as ever, being the loudest), but when the procedure was repeated at every bend in the river they realised Captain Blaes was doing it on purpose. Perhaps he wasn’t so blind drunk as he seemed; perhaps it was simply the best way to get the Constantin downriver.
For all that, the steamer ran aground at 9.15 AM near the village of Mulango. Whatever they did—putting the engines into reverse, throwing out anchors and hauling on them—she wouldn’t budge. Captain Blaes’s response was to retire down below, saying they would have to wait until the rains came and the river level rose, lifting the steamer from its resting place.↓
≡ A similar scenario gets Allnutt (Humphrey Bogart) and Rose (Katharine Hepburn) out of a fix in The African Queen.
As the Belgian drank himself into a stupor in his cabin, Mauritzen went on to the bridge and began directing the crew. By 6 PM the Constantin was free of the sandbank.
That evening the men camped onshore in a clearing in the village. Much to Dr Hanschell’s dismay—for he believed venereal disease had been transmitted into the area by Arab slavers—many of them went with the women of Mulango that night. According to Shankland, the ladies were ‘bold and handsome, some of them, and dressed only in a few beads and a scrap of bark-cloth fore and aft’. Some of the servants attached to the expedition began acting as procurers on their masters’ behalf, running between them and the bare-breasted tribeswomen until a price had been agreed. Fortunately Spicer, who had gone to bed, saw none of this.
The convoy set off again after an early breakfast, back under the command of a hungover Captain Blaes. They had gone only a few more miles when, to everyone’s fury, the Constantin snagged again. This time there was really no budging her. It suddenly seemed obvious enough why the Captain had resorted to the bottle and never bothered to shave. His job must have been sheer hell, if the steamer ran aground so often, and he clearly loathed himself as much as he loathed the job.
Like the riverboat captain whom Joseph Conrad deputised for during his trip up the Congo in 1890, Captain Blaes was probably half-sick with fever and dysentery, too. As an employee of the Societe Anonyme Beige pour le Commerce du Haut Congo, Conrad travelled up as far as Stanley Falls on a steamer called the Roi des Beiges. The name of the boat was no accident: nominally independent, the Societe was really a creature of King Leopold II, like everything else in the so-called Congo Free State at that time. Conrad fell ill himself during his four months in the Congo and grew despondent and world-weary, so it is easy to see how Captain Blaes had turned out the way he had. ‘Everything is repellent to me,’ Conrad wrote to his aunt. ‘Men and things; but especially men. And I too am repellent to them.’
As the expedition sat in the river above Mulango, Wainwright sucked on his pencil, wondering how they would get Mimi and Toutou back into the water. The Lualaba flowed past on either side of the Constantin de Burlay and round her lighter, which carried Mimi and Toutou—from which heel-kicking vantage point Dr Hanschell, Cross and the rest watched the waters heading north-northwest towards Stanley Falls. They were stuck fast. Surely this couldn’t be journey’s end after they had come so far?
Just then they spotted the smokestack of another paddle-steamer travelling in the opposite direction. Within minutes the Baron Jansenn hoved into view. More of a barge than a ship, it drew less water than the Constantin and would be able to float clear of the rocks and sandbanks that seemed to cover the river bed.
And so it proved, once Eastwood had brokered a deal between the two captains. Money changed hands, but there was no shortage of that. Eastwood had been given a great deal of petty cash for just such an emergency. The Constantin’s lighter, with Mimi and Toutou on board, was pulled behind the new steamer. The only losers were the mainly Congolese passengers on the Baron Jansenn, with their livestock, pots and pans and poultry. As it was now turning round and going back to Kabalo—the end-point of the expedition’s river journey—there was little point in them staying on board. Nor was there much use in boarding the beached Constantin de Burlay, to wait with Captain Blaes and his bottles for the rains to come. A good few of these stranded passengers must have cursed Spicer and his men as they disappeared upriver.
ELEVEN
Winding through the forest, the Lualaba River passed a clearing where a few mud huts could be seen. There were also some barns made of mud, but roofed with corrugated iron instead of straw. Next to these dismal structures was a boatyard in which were stacked the rusting brown ribs of a large steamer. Together with its rivets and side panels, they looked like the bones of some ancient creature dug up from deep in the Rift. Each panel was painted with a number. Nearby, a railway siding cut away into the dense jungle. The only other building was a prison: a high-walled, grey-stone compound, its interior divided into small cells.
Viewed through a haze of mosquitoes as they pulled alongside in the Baron Jansenn, it was a depressing place to disembark. The sweltering heat made the whole scene feel extremely claustrophobic. Undergrowth threatened the torpid encampment on every side and even the ground on which they stood was little more than a kind of coarse vegetative mat, composed in the main of the same sort of weeds as the islands they had skirted on their way upriver.
This gloomy circle of hell was called Kabalo and the Naval Africa Expedition reached it at about 3 PM on 22 October 1915. When Evelyn Waugh landed there while globe-trotting in 1930, it hadn’t improved much:
It was just before sundown when we reached Kabalo, a place of forbidding aspect. There was no platform; a heap of wood-fuel and the abrupt termination of the line marked the station; there were other bits of line sprawling out to right and left; a few shabby trucks had been shunted on one of these, and apparently abandoned; there were two or three goods sheds of corrugated iron and a dirty little canteen; apart from these, no evidence of habitation.
Waugh, who came up by train from Lake Tanganyika—making the same journey as Spicer’s men, but in the opposite direction—then turns his attention to the river:
In front of us lay the Upper Congo—at this stage of its course undistinguished among the great rivers of the world for any beauty or interest; a broad flow of water, bounded by swamps; since we were in the rainy season, it was swollen
and brown. A barge or two lay in to the bank, and a paddle-steamer rusted all over, which was like a flooded Thames bungalow more than a ship. A bit of the bank opposite the railway line had been buttressed up with concrete; on all sides lay rank swamp. Mercifully, night soon came on and hid this beastly place.
As Wainwright worked out how to disembark Mimi and Toutou and to ready them for the final stretch of their journey, which would bring them to Lukuga on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the men wandered round Kabalo. The numbered iron fragments in the shipyard turned out to be bits of the Baron Dhanis, the ‘hidden’ Belgian warship that had yet to be assembled. The Germans regarded it as the greatest threat to their naval power on the lake, even though it still lay in pieces; but as John Lee had explained to the Admiralty, the Belgians dared not take the Baron Dhanis to Lukuga, lest the Germans bombard her from the water. Despite her rusty appearance, the Dhanis was actually brand new. She had been at Kabalo for a year, waiting for a boiler. It was still in Antwerp, which had been captured by the Germans. The British Admiralty had sent out two twelve-pounder guns for the Dhanis, but since there was little likelihood of them being employed in the near future, the Belgians had taken the guns to Lukuga to use as shore batteries.
It took three days for Mimi and Toutou to be hauled on to flat-bed wagons at the rear of the train that would take them to Lukuga. On 26 October Spicer’s men took their own places on the hard seats of two wooden carriages. The line was extremely uneven and the ride was so bumpy as to make it difficult to read or do anything except clutch on to something and stare out of the window. At first the country was relatively featureless: miles and miles of tall yellow grass on either side of the tracks, some of it as high as the carriages. They stopped from time to time to take on firewood for the 70-ton locomotive that pulled them along.
