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

by Tim Jeal

  The rain as usual made us halt early… We roast a little grain and boil it, to make believe it is coffee … Ground all sloppy; oozes full and overflowing – feet constantly wet … Rivulets can only be crossed by felling a tree on the bank and letting it fall across … Nothing but famine and famine prices, the people living on mushrooms and leaves. We get some elephant meat from the people, but high is no name for its condition. It is very bitter but it prevents the heartburn.8

  The place where Lake Bangweulu was supposed to be was engulfed by a gigantic swamp. Hoping to find the river flowing out of it, he marched north and unwittingly passed almost 120 miles to the east of the lake proper, not realising when he crossed the Chambesi river that it flowed into Bangweulu. By the time he recognised his mistake the lake lay 100 miles to the south-west of his present position. He was ill for much of the following month; then war broke out between local Africans and Arab-Swahili slave traders. So by the time he reached Lake Tanganyika it was April. Then he was ill again. The war continued, preventing him from finding out whether there was a river flowing into the western side of Lake Tanganyika.

  At this time he heard of a large lake called Moero (Lake Mweru), 100 miles to the west of where he was. His immediate thought was that it must be linked with Bangweulu, and could therefore lead him to the river he was seeking. But with the war being waged more fiercely than ever, he was unable to leave for this new lake until the end of September. By now his party numbered only a dozen men, and by necessity he was obliged to travel with the infamous slave and ivory trader Hamid bin Muhammad el-Murebi, known as Tippu Tip, who was close to establishing political and commercial control over the whole area.9

  In November 1867 – just over a year and a half after landing on the East African coast – he and Tippu reached Lake Moero and, as he had hoped, he managed to establish from local reports that it was indeed linked with Bangweulu. Even more thrillingly, he heard that an immense river flowed out of Moero’s northwestern corner on a course that took it to the north, no one knew where. This river was called the Lualaba and from the moment Livingstone heard its name, he knew that he would have to follow it. He felt sure that it would either enter Lake Tanganyika, before exiting through the Rusizi and then flowing on through Lake Albert to the White Nile, or it would miss Tanganyika entirely and flow into Lake Albert directly.10 For the remaining years of his life the Lualaba would obsess Livingstone, giving him no peace.

  Livingstone’s lack of porters and the exhaustion of his stores obliged him to remain with Tippu Tip until well into the New Year. He dithered about whether to go back to Lake Bangweulu (to make a map of it and Lake Moero, along with the connecting Luapula river) or whether to travel to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, where he would be able to replenish his stores and engage more porters. But neither Tippu nor Muhammad Salim, another slave trader, kept to the plans they had announced to him earlier, and in the end out of sheer frustration, in mid-April 1868, Livingstone set out for Lake Bangweulu with nine men, five of whom deserted on the same day. But with the remaining four, he bravely headed south, pursued by a messenger sent by Muhammad Salim to dissuade him from his suicidal venture. Livingstone ignored him and pressed on south. After months of illness and indecision, his recovery was almost superhuman. He even found it in his heart to forgive the five deserters. ‘I did not blame them very severely in my own mind for absconding; they were tired of tramping, and so verily am I … Consciousness of my own defects makes me lenient.’11

  During the twenty-seven days it took Livingstone to reach Kasembe’s village, fifty-four miles to the south on the Luapula river, he and his men waded, at times waist deep, through ‘black tenacious mud’ exuding ‘a frightful faecal odour’ and contended with leeches that ‘needed no coaxing to bite but flew at the skin like furies’.12 Livingstone left Kasembe in mid-June with Muhammad Bogharib, the only Arab slave trader he would come to think of as a friend. Always, he believed that by using Arabs to further his geographical aims, he was increasing his chances of living long enough to do the maximum possible harm to the hateful trade. By July Livingstone was back at Bangweulu and taking new observations for longitude and latitude. On 8 July – confident that an Arab caravan would take his next packet of letters to the coast – he wrote a despatch to Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary:

  I may safely assert that the chief sources of the Nile arise between 10° and 12° south latitude or nearly in the position assigned to them by Ptolemy … If your Lordship will read the following short sketch of my discoveries, you will perceive that the springs of the Nile have hitherto been searched for very much too far to the north. They rise some 400 miles south of the most southerly portion of the Victoria Nyanza, and indeed south of all the lakes except Bangweolo.13

  In August Livingstone re-joined Bogharib, who was planning to visit Manyema in search of slaves and ivory. But a change of plan led the Arab to return instead to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. This was just as well for Livingstone, whose health collapsed soon after Bogharib’s decision was made. Pneumonia and malaria might have killed him if he had been taken to Manyema on a litter. But by the summer of 1869, after four months of recuperation in Ujiji, he felt strong enough to set out once more for Manyema. It seemed an incredible piece of luck that Bogharib was leaving for that place at exactly this time.

  Within a few months Livingstone expected to be on the banks of the Lualaba, which he estimated to be 200 miles from the western shores of Lake Tanganyika. His optimism was sadly misplaced. He had entirely underestimated the anarchy and mass murder going on in Manyema, now that it had become an ivory boom area. The Arab-Swahili newcomers were far more ruthless than men of Bogharib’s generation and murdered any villagers who tried to negotiate a reasonable price for their tusks. As a result, widespread fighting broke out between Africans and Arabs, and so Livingstone found it very hard to travel as soon as Bogharib went off trading on his own. The hardest time in Livingstone’s life was just beginning.

  Because his attempt, between June 1870 and July 1871, to become the first European to reach the mighty Lualaba and to navigate its course downstream, is a virtual compendium of all the deadliest pitfalls that the nineteenth-century African explorer could expect to face during an entire lifetime, I chose this annus horribilis as the subject of Chapter One of this book. It graphically demonstrates the almost superhuman determination of the greatest explorers never to surrender – even when facing death by drowning, malaria and tick fever. Desertions, food shortages, droughts, floods, slave raids, threats of violence and actual violence, all punctuated Livingstone’s days in 1870 and 1871.

  But, amazingly, there were rewards too during this awful period. In March 1871, he was awed by his first sight of the broad, brown waters of the Lualaba – 3,000 yards wide at this point – flowing slowly and powerfully northwards between densely forested banks. Because this immense river appeared on no maps, and had not been described in the literature of any of the world’s geographical societies, its discovery was all the more thrilling. As explained in Chapter One, due to his readings of Herodotus, and the apparent confirmation given to the Greek historian’s account of the Nile’s sources by Josut and Moenpembe – two well-travelled Arabs, whom the doctor met in Manyema in 1870 – Livingstone had become convinced that the Lualaba was indeed the Nile. His own work in isolating the source bolstered this conclusion. So the fact that his many efforts to reach it at times came close to killing him was simply a reflection of his certainty that this was his moment when he must not fail, as the gentlemen explorers had done when their great moments had come.

  For seven frustrating months, Livingstone was unable to move any closer to the fabled river because suffering from pneumonia and enduring the terrible pain of tropical ulcers eating into the soles of his feet. Ill-health kept him a prisoner in the town of Bambarre, midway between Lake Tanganyika and the Lualaba, until February 1871. At this time his following dwindled to three men.

  Then, out of the blue, on 4 February ten porters arrived from
the east coast, sent many months earlier by Acting-Consul Kirk.14 Although these men enabled Livingstone – with additional help from several Arab slave traders – to reach the Lualaba a month later, they then did their utmost to prevent him following the river downstream. In his daily field notebooks, he railed against these new arrivals, who turned out to be slaves owned by banians for whose services Livingstone was being asked to pay more than if they had been free men. He thought them devious, dishonest and cowardly, since they were not prepared to accompany him in a canoe down the Lualaba. Their perfectly natural fear was that tribes along the banks, after suffering repeated raids by Arab slave traders operating from Nyangwe, would attack all strangers on the river. The ‘Banian slaves’, as Livingstone called them, made it impossible for him to secure canoes by telling the local Manyema that he ‘wanted neither slaves nor ivory but to kill them’. Though Chuma and Susi, who had been with Livingstone since 1861 and 1863 respectively, knew what the slaves were saying about their master, they never told him.

  Livingstone had little or no control over these new arrivals who absented themselves for days at a time and even murdered three Manyema villagers, apparently in emulation of the slave traders. It horrified Livingstone that the Indian owners of these murderers were British subjects.15 The Arabs also did their best to thwart Livingstone by buying up all the available canoes, to stop him going downstream and reporting on the mayhem they were causing to the north of Nyangwe. This did not stop him hoping that he would soon manage to buy a canoe from one of these slave traders.

  Then, on 15 July, Livingstone witnessed the massacre of over 400 African residents of Nyangwe, some shot down in the market place and others drowned in a nearby creek in their panic to escape. After that, Livingstone’s will to continue down the river collapsed. He could no longer bring himself to beg Dugumbé and other leading Arabs to sell him the canoes he so desperately needed. So his only option was to return to Ujiji on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, where he expected to find fresh stores sent from the coast by Kirk. He turned his back on the river on 20 July 1871, and in deep depression began the 200-mile march to the east. His fourteen men included the ten banian slaves, and he was also accompanied by an unknown number of women with whom they cohabited.16

  During the next three months, he survived two attempts to kill him by African spearmen, who took him for a slave trader. By 7 August he was ‘ill and almost every step in pain’. He suffered not just from bleeding piles but also from chronic diarrhoea which left him thin and very weak.17 He ought to have been operated on in England, but had been too busy raising funds for his expedition and had never found the time. Sorghum flour, which he had been unable to buy from villagers before mid-September, now became available and strengthened him a little. But his condition remained parlous.

  I felt as if dying on my feet. Almost every step I was in pain, the appetite failed, and a little meat caused violent vomiting, whilst the mind, sorely depressed, reacted on the body. All the traders were returning successful: I alone had failed and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in sight of the end towards which I strained.18

  He crossed Lake Tanganyika in a hired canoe, and reached Ujiji on 23 October ‘now reduced to a skeleton’. After a couple of hours, he discovered that the supplies which Kirk had sent from the coast had arrived but been stolen and sold off by the man who had brought them, and by other Arab traders in the town. The goods had been worth £600 and all were gone. All Livingstone had left with which to buy food was a few yards of calico. After fleeing from Nyangwe to avoid depending on Arabs, it was horribly ironic that he seemed doomed to have to beg from Arab slave traders in Ujiji in order to survive. To make matters worse, Sherif Bosher, who had sold off all the goods, had used the proceeds to buy ivory which was still in the town under lock and key. But none of Ujiji’s three principal men would allow Livingstone to reclaim what had been bought with his stolen property. There seemed no realistic hope now that he would be able to pay for the milch goats, wheaten flour and fish needed for his recovery. As for returning to the Lualaba – that had become a pipe-dream. He admitted in a letter to a friend: ‘I was like the man who went from Jerusalem to Jericho, but no Good Samaritan would come the Ujijian way.’19

  Incredibly, he was wrong. Less than a week later a young Welshman, masquerading as an American, was camped on a hillside a few miles from Ujiji, gazing down ‘as in a painted picture, at the vast lake … set in a frame of dimly blue mountains’. It was an ecstatic moment for him.20 How this man came to be an explorer and then to change David Livingstone’s life, and even his place in history, is a very strange story indeed. It is also an essential strand in the saga of how the Nile mystery finally came to be solved.

  NINETEEN

  Never to Give Up the Search Until I Find Livingstone

  John Rowlands, who would one day be known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley, was born in the small market town of Denbigh in north Wales in 1841. He was the firstborn of a feckless eighteen-year-old barmaid, Elizabeth Parry, who deserted him as a very young baby, and would go on to have five more children – by two, or possibly three other men – only the last being born in wedlock. John never knew his father, whose identity remains uncertain. He was reputed to have been either a local solicitor, or a farm labourer, both of whom became alcoholics and died prematurely.1

  John Rowlands was brought up by his maternal grandfather, a retired butcher, who had a fatal heart attack when his grandson was five. For six months after this disaster, John was boarded out with a middle-aged couple near his old home, but his two uncles, who were prosperous local tradesmen, suddenly stopped paying for his keep, and the couple told their eldest son, Dick, to take little John Rowlands to St Asaph Workhouse. During the eight-mile walk Dick told John that he was being taken to live with an aunt, whose farm lay in the same direction. When they arrived at the doors of the workhouse, Dick rang a bell that clanged deep within the building, and then turned to leave, saying sheepishly, when asked where he was going: ‘To buy cakes for you.’2

  ‘Since that dreadful evening,’ Stanley wrote fifty years later, ‘my resentment has not a whit abated … It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than me, had employed compulsion, instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child’s heart.’3 This day of betrayal was the most formative in Rowlands’s young life, since it seemed to echo that earlier abandonment by his parents, reinforcing his conviction that his family thought him worthless. Certainly, nobody could possibly have imagined that this deserted, penniless boy would one day be able to attract the substantial sums required for African exploration. As a workhouse boy for nine years, Rowlands knew that in a cruelly snobbish society he was the lowest of the low but, instead of being crushed by it, this knowledge fired him with fierce determination to prove wrong all those who had rejected him.

  In December 1850, when he was not quite ten, the master took him aside during the dinner-hour and, ‘pointing to a woman with a coil of dark hair behind her head’, asked him if he knew her.

  ‘No, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘What, do you not know your own mother?’

  I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed as with a snap.4

  His mother had not come to the workhouse to see him, but had been admitted herself as a destitute pauper with two of her other children. Yet, far from freezing out every fond feeling for her, John vowed that he would win this aloof woman’s love. As the cleverest boy in the workhouse school, this should have been possible, but his mother after her discharge a few days later never returned to see him. Even the fact of his being picked out by the master as a future trainee-teacher made no difference.

  Workhouse inmates wore suits made from fustian (rough flannel); they rose at six, washed in cold water, performed menial tasks, and if admitted with parents or brothers and sisters were immediately separated from them. However, some of the
abler children learned to read, write, and do simple sums. While at the workhouse, John read David Livingstone’s first book, Missionary Travels, which made a lasting impression on him.5 Very few of his fellow pupils could have mastered a book like that. Educational standards had been very low when Rowlands had arrived at St Asaph, but improved steadily during his long residence.6

  People shut up for years in institutions often harbour fantasies of escape, of climbing over walls, living in woods and walking for miles towards far horizons. It is not fanciful to suppose that John’s virtual imprisonment as a boy predisposed him to explore a limitless continent.7 John was discharged from St Asaph aged fifteen, and two years later was working as a butcher’s boy in Liverpool where an aunt and uncle had taken him in. They were so poor that they took his savings of a guinea and pawned his only suit. One day, when delivering meat to an American packet-ship in the docks, he decided to emigrate. He was not quite eighteen and it was one of the bravest decisions of his life.

  Although Stanley would later claim that in New Orleans -where he jumped ship – he was adopted by a wealthy cotton broker called Henry Stanley, in reality he never met the man.8 Ever since his arrival at St Asaph Workhouse, Rowlands had longed to be part of a functioning family. In America he simply pretended that his longstanding fantasy had come true. This was no ordinary lying. John’s parents had denied him an identity and he had felt an overwhelming need to invent one.

  On first arriving in New Orleans in February 1859, he worked in a wholesale warehouse, which supplied goods to Mississippi riverboats for delivery to upriver towns and settlements. When the owner of this business died suddenly eight months later, Rowlands lost his job, and briefly became an assistant cook on riverboats, before finding employment in an upriver store at Cypress Bends, near Little Rock, Arkansas. Here he started calling himself Henry Stanley, which was a name he had first seen printed on sacks of cotton in the wholesale warehouse. He must have liked the way it looked and sounded. Henry Hope Stanley – to give that prosperous New Orleans businessman his full name – owned most of the machinery used to compress and bag raw cotton in the city. It clearly appealed to John Rowlands to assume the name of a rich cotton broker and factory owner, partly in the belief that the name itself had the power to confer on its new user some of its original possessor’s glamour. It had long been Rowlands’s desire, he wrote later, to ‘rid myself of the odium attached to an old name and its dolorous history’.9