by Tim Jeal
In his book How I Found Livingstone, Stanley’s second remark to Livingstone is recorded as having been: ‘I thank God I have been permitted to see you.’ And this, or some more colloquial variant, seems more likely to have been spoken.3 But whatever was said, there can be no doubt at all that Livingstone had never been so pleased to see a white face as he was to see Stanley’s. He was not exaggerating when he said: ‘You have brought me new life.’4 So the moment was one of high emotion for both men. Stanley knew from the tears in Livingstone’s eyes that there was no possibility he might refuse to answer his questions. But Stanley waited till the following day before admitting that he was a special correspondent of the New York Herald. ‘That despicable paper,’ Livingstone called it, but with a smile.5 Stanley soon grasped that the doctor was Scottish, not English as he had at first thought, and that they shared a Celtic background – though Stanley would continue to represent himself as an American.
When he described Livingstone’s appearance as ordinary, ‘like a book with a most unpretending binding’, he put his finger on an important truth about the man. His appearance gave ‘no token of what element of power or talent lay within’.6 He looked younger than his actual age of nearly sixty; his eyes were brown and very bright; his teeth loose and irregular; his height average; shoulders a little bowed, and he walked with ‘a firm but heavy tread, like an overworked or fatigued man’.7 At once Stanley sensed that Livingstone was not the misanthrope Kirk had made him out to be. Few childhoods could rival his own for suffering and deprivation, but Livingstone’s had been no picnic either. He had been a child factory worker in a cotton mill near Glasgow, and had lived with his family of six in a single room in a tenement block. Yet he had managed to put himself through medical school on his earnings as a cotton spinner.
Livingstone had first sailed for Africa in 1841 – the year of Stanley’s birth – and had spent ten frustrating years as a medical missionary in Botswana, having been ordained a Congre-gationalist minister before leaving England. Despite the public’s view of him as an unequalled missionary, in reality he made but one convert, who lapsed. After this failure, he had not been prepared to spend a lifetime as his father-in-law had done, converting a few dozen people. Livingstone understood very well why Africans considered monogamy and small families a threat to their entire way of life. A chief with many wives could give great feasts, grow large quantities of food and enjoy the support of many descendants. Why would he wish to throw this away? Failure as a conventional missionary led Livingstone to believe that only massive cultural intrusion could lead Africans to adopt the white man’s customs and religion in any numbers. If traders could come up rivers into the interior in steamships, and build two-storey houses, and sell factory goods in exchange for local produce, Africans might become more respectful towards the beliefs of people who could bring them such wonders. In time, Africans might even consent to work for wages, have smaller families, limit themselves to a single wife, and consequently their loyalty to chief and tribe might weaken enough to give Christianity a chance.8
Livingstone sitting with Stanley outside his tembe in Ujiji (from How I Found Livingstone).
So between 1849 and 1851, Livingstone had made three journeys aimed at opening up the continent, culminating in his trek to the Zambezi, which he had reached near Linyanti on 4 August 1851. Between 1853 and 1856, he crossed Africa from coast to coast, along the line of the Zambezi. Next, between 1859 and 1864, he tried to prove its navigability and find a location in South Central Africa suitable for missionaries and traders to settle in. Rivers would, he hoped, be ‘God’s Highways’ into the interior.9 But the Zambezi was choked with sandbars and blocked by rapids, which combined with malaria to destroy his dreams of a settlement. Yet rivers and lakes still lured him powerfully, as he discovered when Speke’s and Burton’s rival Nile theories gripped his imagination.
Normally secretive about his geographical discoveries, Livingstone paid Stanley the immense compliment of confiding to him all his ideas about the Nile’s source, and then, just four days after the younger man’s arrival, the older man suggested that he travel with him to the Lualaba to help him finish his work. Stanley was torn, but in the end declared that he had to do his duty to the New York Herald and hurry to the coast with his news of the meeting.10
Yet, two days later, Stanley, who had hated refusing the doctor, suggested a compromise: they should travel instead to the infinitely more accessible northern end of Lake Tanganyika. From reading the published Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Stanley had been aware since 1865 of Burton’s claim that the River Rusizi flowed northwards out of Lake Tanganyika into the southern end of Baker’s Lake Albert before continuing northwards as the White Nile. This view was shared by Livingstone, as Stanley already knew from the RGS’s publication of the doctor’s letter to John Kirk of 30 May 1869. In this letter (the last to reach the outside world before Stanley reached Ujiji) Livingstone had said that he needed to ‘go down’, what he called ‘the [Nile’s] eastern line of drainage’, by which he meant the northward-flowing river system beginning with Lake Bangweulu, and flowing on north, via Lake Moero, into the west side of Lake Tanganyika, and continuing via the Rusizi into Lake Albert.11 But after learning more about the great Lualaba from direct experience, and realising that it flowed due north for 400 miles from its source in Lake Bangweulu, and very likely hundreds more, the doctor had lost interest in Lake Tanganyika. The Lualaba, he told Stanley was ‘the central line of drainage [and] the most important line … [In comparison] the question whether there is a connection between the Tanganyika and the Albert N’yanaza sinks into insignificance.’12
But when Stanley reminded Livingstone that Sir Roderick Murchison and the RGS wanted the Rusizi to be settled, and offered to pay all the expenses of their journey to the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone agreed that they should go.13 This was the very journey that had defeated Burton and Speke, but because Livingstone and Stanley refused to have anything to do with the local chief, Kannena, and instead accepted the loan of a large canoe from an Arab, Said bin Majid, and took with them only Stanley’s cook, his translator, two local guides and sixteen reliable Wangwana as rowers, they always kept control over their men. Speke’s and Burton’s people had refused to go on because of real or imagined dangers.
Stanley and Livingstone embarked on 16 November, six days after Stanley’s arrival at Ujiji.14 Delighting in his self-acquired knowledge of Greek mythology, Stanley excitedly compared their ‘cranky canoe hollowed out of the noble mvule tree’ with Jason’s ship the Argo. They hugged the shore and Stanley was bewitched by ‘a wealth of boscage of beautiful trees, many of which were in bloom … exhaling an indescribably sweet fragrance’. The idyllic circumstances of the people also pleased him, with their fishing settlements, palm groves, cassava gardens and quiet bays.15 Apart from an encounter with some stone-throwers, who Livingstone mollified by showing them the white skin of his arm and asking them whether they had ever been harmed by anyone of his colour, they experienced no hostility.16
On reaching the head of the lake on 28 November, they found that the Rusizi flowed into Tanganyika rather than out of it. This was a major discovery and at a stroke ruled out Lake Tanganyika as being any kind of source or reservoir of the Nile. Yet even the discovery that the Rusizi flowed in would not force a retraction from Burton when he heard of it, since a river might conceivably flow out of the west side of the lake into the Lualaba and then continue northwards as the Nile. But realistically, it seemed that either the Victoria Nyanza or the Lualaba’s headwaters were now the only serious candidates for being the Nile’s source. However, there was a serious problem with the Lualaba. The height Livingstone had calculated for Nyangwe had been 2,000 feet, which was the same as Baker’s height for his Lake Albert. Of course one or both of the measurements might be wrong. But if they were not, to get round these inconvenient heights (which ruled out a direct connection between the Lualaba and Lake Albert) Livingstone argued th
at the Lualaba could quite logically pass Lake Albert to the west and join ‘Petherick’s branch of the Nile’, the Bahr el-Ghazal.
Stanley and Livingstone at the mouth of the Rusizi (from How I Found Livingstone).
So, back at Ujiji, on 13 December, after a trip of 300 miles that had taken just under a month, the two men decided that they would march together to Kazeh. From there, Stanley would return to the coast and send back to Livingstone supplies and picked men, who would accompany the doctor to the Lualaba and trace it downstream with him until he had proved it to be the Nile.17
Even as they had started their trip on the lake, Stanley had written in his diary that Livingstone’s manner towards him was ‘benevolently paternal’ and had enabled him ‘to think [himself] somebody, though [he] never suspected it before’. During the voyage Stanley became seriously ill with fever and noted that ‘had he been my father, he could not have been kinder’.18 This father and son aspect of their relationship was of immense importance to Stanley, but affected Livingstone too. ‘That good brave fellow has acted as a son to me,’ he would tell his daughter, Agnes.19 Livingstone’s son Robert had fallen out with him, and gone to live in America under an assumed name. In the Civil War, Robert had fought for the Union and had been killed in the battle of Gettysburg. Moved to hear that Stanley had also fought for the Union in the same war (he did not of course mention his desertions), Livingstone asked him to find his son’s grave and place a headstone on it. The doctor also confided how despairing he had felt after his wife’s death.20 He did not admit that Mary had become an alcoholic during her years in Britain when she had been separated from him during his major African journeys. But even this degree of self-revelation was very rare for Livingstone.
Having grown so fond of his father figure, Stanley did his best to persuade him to come home with him before returning to the Lualaba. The doctor would be able to see his children – his youngest, Anna Mary, being only twelve – and also catch up with old friends. Then there would be a chance to get his teeth fixed and have an operation to remove his piles. But Livingstone was not impressed with these arguments. If he stuck it out for another eighteen months in Africa, he would be able to sort out the Nile’s watershed. His determination and his willingness to risk his life without complaint or self-pity were virtues which Stanley revered. Yet he was horrified when Livingstone told him that he did not intend to go straight to Nyangwe, but to trek hundreds of miles south instead and make a circuit around Lake Bangweulu and all the Lualaba’s sources, such as the Lomani, before following the main river downstream to the north. Stanley had noticed that Livingstone suffered his worst ‘dysenteric attacks’ when he got wet. So wading through the Bangweulu swamps in the rainy season would be the most dangerous course open to him.21
After they reached Unyanyembe, and as the time for leaving grew closer, Stanley feared that he would never see his friend again after they parted. He knew that Livingstone would die in the attempt rather than turn back. ‘I am not made for an African explorer … I detest the land most heartily,’ Stanley confessed in his diary in November 1871, and three months later admitted to fearing that he would end up ‘under the sable soil’ of Africa if he returned there.22 So why did Stanley, who was not conventionally religious and had suffered attacks of fever at a rate of almost one a week since mid-November, come to feel soon after returning to Britain that, if Livingstone were to die, it would be his duty to finish the dead man’s work? The answer was his love and admiration for Livingstone. The impact on Stanley of this idealist with a philanthropic vision for a whole continent – for which he was ready to give up his life – was overwhelming. To be treated like a son by such a famous and unusual man was the crowning experience of Stanley’s life.
Not that he suspended his critical faculties entirely. Shortly before Stanley marched for the coast, he admitted in his diary that Livingstone was ‘not of such an angelic temper as I believed him to be during my first month with him’. The doctor had shocked him by expressing ‘a strong contempt’ for the missionaries who had come out to the Shire Highlands at his behest, and six of whom had died.23 Yet Stanley realised that the man’s weaknesses made his strengths the more remarkable – his bravery, his idealism, his struggle on behalf of victims of the slave trade, his lack of interest in money and social status. Though inclined to be dismissive towards other explorers, Livingstone treated Stanley, the journalist, as an equal. ‘As if,’ marvelled Stanley, ‘I were of his own age or of equal experience.’24 Stanley adored this lack of condescension. When Livingstone told him about his armchair critics within the RGS and said: ‘If some of them came to Africa they would know what it costs to get a little accurate information about a river,’ Stanley fumed on Livingstone’s behalf.25
The doctor did have a saintly side to his character, as his diaries undoubtedly prove, and Stanley sensed ‘something seerlike in him’, as well as his ‘Spartan heroism’.26 When Livingstone told him sadly: ‘I have lost a great deal of happiness I know by these wanderings. It is as if I had been born to exile,’ Stanley felt a strong bond. His own peripatetic life as a journalist had been a kind of exile and had cost him the love of the woman he had hoped to marry. He also empathised with Livingstone’s dedication to his work, feeling the same need in himself: ‘It is in my nature to toil as it is in the other’s nature to enjoy.’27
For all these reasons, and because the grief he experienced on parting was, in his own words, ‘greater than any pains I have endured’, he would represent Livingstone as a near saint in his bestseller How I Found Livingstone, and this would be the image that would go down in history. Livingstone is faultless in the book, as are his adoring longest-serving followers, despite Stanley’s knowledge of their whoring, stealing and drug-taking. Fondness for Livingstone made him turn a blind eye to such things, and he also knew that it made a better story to have found a forgotten saint in Africa than an embittered recluse.
On the evening of 13 March 1872, the day before Stanley left for the coast, Livingstone poured out his thanks ‘with no mincing phrases’, and this caused Stanley to ‘sob [like] a sensitive child of eight’. Though Stanley had suffered ‘successive fevers [and] the semi-madness with which they often plagued [him]’, he sensed strongly, on leaving Livingstone, that he would be the doctor’s ‘obedient and devoted servitor in the future, should there be an occasion when I could prove my zeal’.28 So, already, Livingstone’s personal influence had led the journalist and fame-seeker to discover within him a need to follow in his hero’s footsteps -even though, when Stanley arrived safely at the coast, he was not yet fully aware of this fact. Whether he would have any chance to play his own part in the Nile quest would depend upon his reception in London.
TWENTY-ONE
Threshing Out the Beaten Straw
On his return to Britain on 1 August 1872, Stanley expected to receive the unstinting praise and admiration of the British people for having rescued their hero. In fact he would soon learn that ‘fame’ was something to ‘detest & shrink from’.1 He was met at Dover, not by cheering crowds but by a first cousin and by a half-brother, both embarrassingly drunk. He would find, waiting for him at his London hotel, his Welsh step-father who had come to hound him for a pension.2 If his family shocked him, so too did his fellow journalists. Many mocked in print the absurd formality of the first words he claimed to have addressed to Livingstone, and their mirth was infectious. Dressmakers’ dummies in shopwindows asked one another: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ and complete strangers roared at him: ‘Stanley, I presume?’3 More upsetting still was the way in which some newspapers made out that his claim to have found the explorer was fraudulent. Until Livingstone’s journals, which Stanley had brought back from Africa, could be authenticated by the Foreign Office and the family, the press hinted that he might only have pretended to have found the doctor.4
But most serious of all – because it would affect his future prospects of getting back to Africa – was the hostility of the Royal Geographical Socie
ty. Because the RGS had despatched a ‘Livingstone Relief Expedition’, which had only just landed at Bagamoyo when Stanley had swept through in triumph, the council of that august body ignored the recently arrived ‘American penny-a-liner’ out of pique. En route to London, Stanley had foolishly attacked John Kirk, the British Consul in Zanzibar, in a speech he gave at a Paris banquet given for him by the American ambassador.
John Kirk.
Although Kirk had been helpful to Stanley before he began his journey, the traveller had spotted at Bagamoyo a large quantity of stores, bought for Livingstone with British government funds, which had evidently been dumped there and plundered by the men engaged to carry the sacks and boxes into the interior. According to Stanley, Kirk should have checked up at intervals, rather than discovered the situation by chance on a hunting trip to the mainland. Stanley also mentioned that the US Consul, Francis Webb, had sent him eleven packets of mail while he was with Livingstone, but that the doctor had received nothing at all from Kirk during the same period.5 John Kirk was related by marriage to Horace Waller, who had been in the Shire Highlands with Livingstone and was on the main committee of the RGS. Unfortunately for Stanley, Sir Roderick Murchison had died a few months earlier, and the new President, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, was a close friend of Waller and was horrified to be told by him that Stanley had slandered Kirk. Rawlinson trumpeted for the benefit of journalists: ‘If there has been any discovery and relief it is Dr Livingstone who has discovered and relieved Mr Stanley.’6
