Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  But while he had never suffered from false modesty, Livingstone, who had started life as a child factory worker in a Scottish textile mill and had lived in a single tenement room with his parents and four siblings, had not taken his selection for granted. The affluent members of the RGS were a snobbish crowd, who thought former Nonconformist missionaries socially infra dig – even should one of them miraculously qualify as a medical doctor – so Dr Livingstone had been touched by Sir Roderick’s loyalty. Although the two men had been friends for a decade, and Murchison had backed the doctor’s epic trans-Africa journey – the first crossing of the continent by a European -Livingstone was painfully conscious that the fame and adulation he had enjoyed in the 1850s had not survived the deaths and disasters of his more recent Zambezi Expedition. His objective on that later occasion had been to prove that European traders and missionaries could navigate the Zambezi in steamships, and live and work safely near the Victoria Falls – ‘discovered’ by him in 1855. But despite an immense expenditure of money, time and effort, this ill-starred expedition had merely underlined the complete impracticability of its aims. The Zambezi – far from being, as he had promised it would be, ‘God’s Highway’ into the interior ‘for Christianity and commerce’ – had turned out to be a malarial maze of shifting sandbanks leading to a chain of cataracts, whose local name ‘Kebrabassa’, meaning ‘where the work ends’, had proved to be cruelly apt. As disillusion had turned to anger, most of Livingstone’s expedition colleagues had either resigned or quarrelled with him in public. Several died of malaria, as had his wife, Mary, along with five missionaries, two of their wives and three of their children. Even more disastrous in the eyes of the press, had been the death of the first Anglican bishop ever to make south central Africa his field of work, due entirely to Dr Livingstone’s passionate appeal to him to come out there.

  After his triumphant crossing of Africa, Livingstone had been lauded in the press not simply as a sublime explorer, but as a great missionary, ‘a saintly and truly apostolic preacher of Christian truth’.5 In the aftermath of the Zambezi Expedition, ‘saintly’ was the last adjective likely to be applied to him by any journalist. But if anything could help the doctor to atone for past failures, it was going to be an enterprise demanding extremes of selflessness and courage, as the Nile search undoubtedly would. The fact that he might very well die in Africa, if he accepted Murchison’s invitation, had not tempered his eagerness to say yes. In truth, finding the source meant more to him than the restoration of his reputation – desirable though that undoubtedly was. Despite possessing many human weaknesses – and vanity was not the least – David Livingstone loved Africa and Africans, and saw his geographical quest as offering an unrepeatable chance to serve the continent and its people.

  ‘Men may think I covet fame,’ he told a friend, ‘[but] the Nile sources are valuable only as a means of enabling me to open my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to apply to remedy an enormous evil.’6 The ‘evil’ was the East African slave trade, which was then being energetically expanded by the coastal Arab-Swahili and by the Portuguese colonists of Mozambique. But if Livingstone could survive, and return as the discoverer of the Nile’s source, he believed his agenda would be adopted by politicians with the consequence being a naval blockade of the East African coast and the closure of Zanzibar’s slave market. Yet Livingstone’s obsession with the Nile had other dimensions: such as its historical and scriptural significance.

  The Nile’s Central African Watershed as Livingstone believed it to be in the late 1860s.

  ‘For more than sixteen hundred years,’ he told his elder daughter, Agnes, ‘Emperors, Kings, Philosophers – all the great men of antiquity – longed to know whence flowed the famous river and longed in vain.’7 But the Biblical resonance of the search impressed him even more than its antiquity: ‘An eager desire to discover any evidence of the great Moses having visited these parts bound me, spell bound me, I may say, for if I can bring to light anything to confirm the Sacred Oracles, I shall not grudge one whit all the labour expended.’8 As he explained to Agnes, if success were finally to be his: ‘[I will have] shown myself a worthy servant of Him who has endowed me to be an explorer.’9 Such a confirmation of his usefulness to God would put worldly fame in the shade.

  In June 1870, over four years after leaving the coast, Livingstone was at the very centre of Africa in the tiny village of Mamohela, which, as the crow flew, was about a thousand miles both from the east coast and from the west. Never had he felt so close to achieving his goal: ‘I had a strong presentiment during the first three years that I should never live through the enterprise, but it weakened as I came near the end of the journey.’10 He made this astonishingly self-confident statement about nearing the completion of his work, despite just having taken a year to travel 250 miles to Mamohela from the western shores of Lake Tanganyika. But now, he believed, the delays and disappointments were over. Only fifty miles lay between him and the banks of a mighty river, which local people called the Lualaba. Its width, they said, was two miles or more, and it was studded with tree-covered islands. Livingstone was tantalised. Because of its size and its location at the heart of Africa, and because it was said to flow north for hundreds of miles, it had to be the Nile. The only alternative was the Congo. But this seemed most unlikely. The 200 miles of the Congo, which had to-date been navigated from the Atlantic, had taken explorers not south-east, but north-east, away from the river on which he hoped to embark. So unless the Congo changed course completely, it could have no connection with the Lualaba.

  Two years before, Livingstone had been exploring in an area 500 miles to the south of his present position, and had investigated a hitherto ‘undiscovered’ lake (Bangweulu), from which he was sure the Lualaba rose. ‘The discovery [of the Nile’s source] is unquestionably mine,’ he had informed Agnes at the time.11 Now, in order to prove that the Lualaba really was what he said it was, he needed to trace it downstream all the way to the Sudan and Egypt – a journey of more than 5,000 miles. But once he had bought canoes and was paddling down the river, the current would do much of the work. So what could stop him now, when he longed with every fibre of his being to finish his work? A lot as it happened.

  In June 1870, just as he expected his problems to decline, they multiplied. All African explorers depended upon porters to carry the trade goods they needed in order to buy food and pay tolls to pass through the territories of individual chiefs. Indeed, without these goods, a traveller in Africa died, or, if he wished to go anywhere, was compelled to depend upon the charity of Arab-Swahili slave traders, who were most unlikely to be going just where he wanted. By mid-1870, most of Livingstone’s original thirty-five porters, and all of the further twenty-four he had recruited in the interior, had died or deserted. So dependence on Arabs seemed inevitable.

  On 26 June, he entered in his journal: ‘With only three attendants, Susi, Chuma and Gardner, I started off to the northwest for the Lualaba.’ He had been reduced to this pathetic number, because, on that same day, six of the nine men, who had been with him till then, had deserted, taking most of his trade goods with them. But fifty miles was not far, so perhaps he would be able to manage this distance with his three ‘faithfuls’, and without Arab help.

  In the opening days of his journey, he was surprised to find local people friendly, although he was passing close to villages which Arab-Swahili slave traders had burned. It was the rainy season, and many streams flowed into the path he was travelling along, making it resemble a small river. A species of palm with long thick leaf-stalks had colonised the valley he now entered, obliging him to follow a track created by elephant and buffalo. In consequence, he and his men often fell into elephants’ footprints up to their thighs. The going was so rough that Livingstone, a keen naturalist, was unable to write descriptions of the many birds and monkeys he was seeing for the first time.

  Caught in the open, for hours on end, in drenching rain, he was obliged each evening to
strip off his clothes, and dry them by a smoky fire in whatever hut he had managed to beg from villagers for himself and his men. Another bout of pneumonia, like one he had suffered eighteen months earlier, would very likely be the end of him.12 Malaria had prostrated him many times, but now he was more worried about his worsening bowel and digestive problems.13 Whenever his food was coarse, as it was at present, his piles bled heavily. His damaged teeth made so little impression on green maize and elephant meat that his stomach was left with too much to do. The result was constant heartburn. Many of his molars were so loose that he was obliged to perform extractions, employing ‘a strong thread with what sailors call a clovehitch’, and then ‘striking the thread with a heavy pistol’.14

  After a few days of independent travel, he was struggling to progress at all, and fell in with some slave traders, who suspected that he was only in Manyema to spy on them. Livingstone parted with beads and cloth from his depleted store, and obtained the assistance of additional porters, as well as their leaders’ grudging consent to his accompanying them. ‘They hated me,’ he admitted, ‘and tried to get away … I however kept up, and on the fourth day passed through nine villages destroyed by the worthies, who did not wish me to see more of their work.’ One of these Arabs was stabbed to death in the night by a local African in revenge for the enslavement of his relatives.15 Fortunately, at this point, Livingstone met up with Muhammad Bogharib, a less brutal slave trader, with whom he had often travelled in the past. Bogharib warned him that he would never reach the Lualaba by heading north-west. Instead he should swing south-west to allow for a loop in the river.

  Livingstone did his best to follow Bogharib westward, but thick mud made each step an ordeal. When he was not slipping and falling in the rain, he was fording small rivers, ‘neck deep’. In many places ‘trees had fallen across the path forming a breast-high wall, which had to be climbed over’.16 Ahead, the whole country was flooded. Livingstone pressed on for a few more days, but then, in mid-July, he wrote despairingly in his journal: ‘For the first time in my life my feet failed me … Instead of healing quietly as heretofore, when torn by hard travel, irritable eating ulcers fastened on both feet.’ He blamed his inability ever to dry his shoes. Having only three attendants, Livingstone knew there was no question of his being carried. So he had no choice but to limp back to Bambarre (Kabambare), the nearest significant Manyema town, which was also an Arab-Swahili slave-trading depot. He arrived there on 22 July 1870, numb with misery at his failure to reach the river.

  For weeks the pain of his ulcers kept him awake at night, as did ‘the wailing of slaves tortured with these sores’. The ulcers, he noted, ‘eat through everything – muscle, tendon and bone, and often lame permanently if they do not kill’. With good reason he feared he might never recover. When placing either foot on the ground, ‘a discharge of bloody ichor [sic] flowed’. The Arabs used crushed malachite to treat ulcers, or a salve of beeswax and sulphate of copper. The malachite, though it did not cure him, after many applications seemed at least to contain the spread of the sores.17

  This was an Arab settlement. So, hating the slave trade as much as he did, it was cruelly ironic that Livingstone should have to remain on affable terms with slavers, who routinely murdered anyone resisting enslavement. Forty Manyema were killed one day, nine another, a hundred the day after that.18 And so it went on. Often Livingstone saw smoke curling above burning villages, and heard distant shots. His one consolation was the thought that his written descriptions of the mayhem might one day compel the British government to act against the trade. The heartlessness of it provoked some of his most haunting descriptions, written while he was immobilised in Bambarre, close to many recently captured men, women and children. ‘The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.’ He questioned many captives who were wasting away, apparently without physical cause. ‘They ascribed their only pain to the heart, and placed a hand correctly on the spot, though many think that organ stands high up under the breast bone.’19

  An Arab-Swahili slave trader murders a sick slave (from Livingstone’s Last Journals).

  Livingstone’s ability to be the friend of a man like Muhammad Bogharib owed a lot to his realisation that Arab treatment of domestic slaves was relatively mild. So, while the process by which Africans were torn from their homes was unspeakably brutal, and although they endured terrible suffering on their land and sea journeys to Zanzibar and the Gulf, Livingstone saw mitigation in the fact that their treatment on arrival was often better than that meted out to workers in British factories. His explanation of this paradox was that the Arabs were not yet thoroughly dominated by the profit motive – as were the plantation owners of the American Deep South. ‘When society advances, wants multiply; and to supply these, the slaves’ lot becomes harder. The distance between master and man increases as the lust of gain is developed.’20

  All around him in Manyema, elephants were being shot, and chiefs forced to surrender their ivory. The trade in slaves was inextricably entwined with that in ivory, and Livingstone knew that the European passion for ivory piano keys, and for ivory knife-handles, had led to a vast increase in the number of slaves needed to carry tusks to the coast. So, in his eyes, responsibility for events in Manyema did not rest solely on Arab-Swahili shoulders. Nor could he find it in himself to dislike all Arabs. When he had been gravely ill a few months earlier, Muhammad Bogharib had nursed him and saved his life.21

  The Arabs justified maltreating the Manyema by claiming that they were cannibals. Taking the side of Africans, as Livingstone always did, he remained sceptical. Even after surprising a Manyema man carrying a severed human finger, wrapped in a leaf, he was unconvinced that people were killed deliberately for magical or alimentary reasons.22 He thought the Manyema ‘a fine-looking race’, and declared: ‘I would back a company of Manyema men to be far superior in shape of head and generally in physical form too, against the whole Anthropological Society.’23 Bogharib’s men – and indeed his own -were terrified of being killed and eaten whenever large numbers of Manyema assembled. ‘Poor things,’ wrote Livingstone of these local people, ‘no attack is thought of, if it does not begin on our side.’24 As for cannibalism, he saw no need for it. ‘The country abounds with food – goats, sheep, fowls, buffaloes and elephants: maize, sorghum … and other farinaceous eat-ables.’25 Yet when James, one of his six deserters, was killed and eaten close to Bambarre, there was no denying his fate.26 Other compelling evidence came Livingstone’s way, unbidden. Slaves, who had died from hunger or disease, were being exhumed and then cooked and eaten. Reluctantly Livingstone conceded: ‘I think they are cannibals, but not ostentatiously so.’27 But the red parrot feathers, which many men wore in their hair, were nothing if not ‘ostentatious’, though they had struck him as charming until he had learned that a warrior only qualified to wear one if he had first killed a man.28 Yet even when realising that Manyema were selling each other to the slavers, Livingstone never lost his conviction that they ‘retained their natural kindness of disposition’, and were never ‘ferocious without cause’, unless ‘abused by Ujijians’ or other intruders.29 (The Ujijians were slave traders based at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika.)

  While confined to his hut, Livingstone longed for news of home, but no letters ever came for him via Ujiji, with the arrival of successive caravans.30 At times he despaired of leaving for the Lualaba. ‘This is the sorest delay I ever had,’ he wrote in his journal, and he had experienced many in the past. His friend Muhammad Bogharib offered to go with him to the river when he was better, but Livingstone needed more than a temporary escort. He desperately required new men to replace his deserters. And because Bogharib stood to lose money in the ivory trade if he parted with any carriers, Livingstone offered the equivalent of £270 – a vast sum.31 But this was to plan far ahead – until his feet healed, he would have to resign himself to many more months as an object of curiosity to th
e people of Bambarre. Though remarkably patient with villagers who stared, he drew the line when locals ‘came and pushed off the door of my hut with a stick while I was resting, as we should do with a wild beast [in a] cage’. Occasionally, moments of pure comedy delighted him: as when he washed his hair and the watching audience fled, having mistaken the soapy lather for his brains being taken out for a wash.32

  As 1870 dragged by, Livingstone immersed himself in the Bible, which he read through a total of four times.33 He also pondered for days at a time Greek theories about the Nile’s source. Homer had called the river, ‘Egypt’s heaven-descended spring’, and because it flowed for 1,200 miles through the largest and driest desert in the world, at the hottest time of year, without requiring replenishment from a single tributary, Livingstone also thought it God-given and miraculous. At times, during his months of sickness, he lived in a trance-like state, with the Nile occupying what he called his ‘waking dreams’.34 It comforted him to rehearse a roll call of the ancients, who had ‘recorded their ardent desire to know the fountains’. They too had had to endure frustration:

  Alexander the Great, who founded a celebrated city at the river’s mouth, looked up the stream with the same desire to know the springs, and so did the Caesars. The great Julius Caesar is made by Lucan to say that he would give up the civil war if he might but see the fountains of this far-famed river. Nero Caesar sent two centurions to examine the ‘Caput Nili’.35