Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Stanley arrived in Zanzibar on 7 January 1871 and set about organizing one of the best equipped caravans yet to enter the interior. Shotguns, rifles, muskets, pistols, ammunition, food, tents, medicine and trade goods were purchased in quantity and at great expense. There were also two boats for river travel which, when added to the other supplies, brought the expedition’s baggage to a remarkable six tons. To carry this immense load Stanley hired 157 porters, and against the eventuality of hostile tribesmen he also hired a 20-strong escort under a man named Bombay, who had served with Speke and Burton (and who had a large gap in his teeth where Speke had struck him for insubordination). What with interpreters, hangers-on and two white assistants he had picked up in Zanzibar, the expedition that left for the interior on 6 February numbered almost 200 men.

  Stanley’s plan was to head for Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, where he hoped, if not to find Livingstone, then at least to learn something of his whereabouts. The journey took him nine long months, during which his progress was hindered by rains, floods, disease and obstructive rulers. His two assistants died early on; he himself spent long periods in a feverish coma; and the porters deserted in dribs and drabs, taking their loads with them. But Stanley did not let such troubles deter him. He responded to any signs of disobedience or discontent with the lash. Deserters were chased, recaptured and flogged before being chained by the neck. If local rulers sought to impede him he attacked them. Rather than indulge in time-wasting haggling, he permitted his men to plunder villages. In this manner, Stanley hacked his way through both the landscape and its inhabitants until, in the first week of November, he was within a few days’ march of Ujiji. Here, he learned from a number of sources, dwelled an old white man with a long beard. It could only be Livingstone. ‘At last,’ he wrote, ‘the sublime hour has arrived!’

  Arraying himself in his smartest outfit, he led his men into Ujiji, ordering them to fire their guns in greeting. Assuming they were under attack, the people of Ujiji prepared to flee, but were reassured by the sight of Stanley, in polished boots, white flannels and freshly chalked pith helmet, marching at the head of his column. In the main square Stanley saw a European walking towards him, dressed in grey tweed trousers, a red-sleeved waistcoat and a blue cap encircled by a gold band. All of a sudden the Stanley who had battled his way through Africa was unmanned by the niceties of etiquette. Uncertain how to behave, he extended his hand and said, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ To which Livingstone smiled, raised his cap very slightly, and replied, ‘Yes.’

  Reports differ as to what happened next. Stanley’s account suggests that Livingstone was overjoyed to see him and declared, ‘You have brought me new life.’ Others say that Livingstone was in no need of rescue, that he gave Stanley the first good meal he had had in months, and on learning that he had been ‘saved’ by the New York Herald was openly contemptuous. (The Herald, under Bennett’s ownership, had acquired a reputation for scandalmongering.) Whatever the truth, the two men got on well. Stanley hero-worshipped Livingstone, openly and without qualification. Livingstone, for his part, took to the newcomer – especially when Stanley offered to help explore Lake Tanganyika.

  A week after Stanley’s arrival the two were aboard a canoe with 20 men, paddling towards the lake’s northern shore. Here, at last, they determined that the Rusizi flowed into the lake rather than out of it, finally settling the question of whether Tanganyika might be the source of the Nile. During their 28-day round trip they covered 300 miles. Back in Ujiji, Livingstone declared it had been ‘a picnic’. However, he was no nearer finding an alternative source, which he suspected might be the River Lualaba, to the west of Lake Tanganyika. He asked Stanley if he would accompany him, but Stanley declined: he had to go home to file his report. On 27 December they left for the town of Tabora, Livingstone to obtain supplies for his new odyssey, Stanley to continue east to Zanzibar. When they parted Stanley took out his regrets on his men. ‘No more weakness,’ he wrote. ‘I shall show them such marching as will make them remember me. In forty days I shall do what took me three months to perform before.’ In fact, it took them 35 days. An observer who was present at Stanley’s arrival was shocked by his appearance: he was emaciated, his hair had turned grey, and he looked more like a man in his forties than his twenties.

  While Stanley basked in praise (albeit mixed with sneering from the Royal Geographical Society, who resented an American having ‘discovered’ a Briton), Livingstone proceeded on his quest for the Nile. It was to be his last journey. He crossed Lake Tanganyika, surmounted a range of hills beyond and then, weakened by dysentery, began to falter. By 22 April 1873 he could no longer walk, and had to be carried in a litter. ‘I encourage myself in the Lord my God, and go forward,’ he wrote. On the night of 30 April, just three days from the Lualaba, he knelt by his bed to pray. He was in the same position when his men discovered him the following morning, dead. They buried his heart and left the body to dry for two weeks in the sun. Then they wrapped it in canvas and bark, slung it on a pole, and began the long trek back to the coast. Almost a year after his death, Livingstone was given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey. Stanley, the principal pallbearer, swore to continue the struggle: ‘Another sacrifice to Africa! His mission, however, must not be allowed to cease; others must go forward and fill the gap. “Close up, boys! Close up! Death must find us everywhere.”’

  In August 1874, backed by not only the New York Herald but also Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Stanley sailed once again for Zanzibar. With 347 porters, guides and dependants, laden with rifles, the expedition that marched for the Lualaba on 17 November was even bigger and more extravagant than the one he had raised to rescue Livingstone, and it followed the same pattern. Two of the three Britons Stanley took with him died after a few months; he himself was stricken by fever (by Christmas he was 42 pounds lighter than when he had left Zanzibar); the porters deserted, and when recaptured were flogged and chained; the column pillaged indiscriminately; and battle after battle was fought when the way was blocked. Stanley forced his men (and himself) to ever greater endeavour. After 103 days in the field he consulted his pedometer and discovered the column had covered 720 miles – a distance that he reckoned would have taken a standard caravan between nine months and a year.

  Among the porters’ baggage were the five sections of the Lady Alice, a craft designed by Stanley, which was used to explore both Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika and which was reassembled in November 1876 when at last they reached the Lualaba. Anticipating trouble, Stanley acquired the support of a prominent Arab trader, whose 700 warriors turned the already well-armed expedition into a small army more than 1,000 strong. Thus reinforced, Stanley proceeded downriver to the Nile. Actually, he was uncertain whether the Lualaba led to the Nile or the Congo: from what he had seen and read, it seemed too powerful to be part of the Nile system. Nevertheless, having come so far, he was not going to turn back. In a morale-boosting speech he announced, ‘I am not going to leave this river until I reach the sea.’ His escort departed shortly thereafter.

  Stanley’s journey, through territory no European had ever seen, was hard. He was attacked by tribesmen who fired poisoned arrows from the riverbank. Sometimes they came at him, 2,000 strong, in canoes. After one night ashore, Stanley found his camp had been quietly encircled by nets and a carpet of cane splinters. The attacks continued for a distance of more than 1,000 miles. Always, his well-armed force managed to blow its way through human opposition; nevertheless, the spears and arrows took a gradual toll on his men – as did the river itself.

  On 6 January 1877 the expedition met the first of a series of seven cataracts that extended, interspersed with rapids, for more than 50 miles. At every cataract the Lady Alice and its accompanying canoes – cumbersome, 50-foot lengths of hollowed-out tree trunk – had to be hauled overland using cables made of rattan creeper cut from the surrounding forest. By day they were tormented by ants; by night they toiled in the light of gum-soaked bundles of reeds. During the portages, and in t
he narrower stretches of rapids, they were attacked repeatedly; canoes overturned; men drowned, baggage and weapons were lost. After one particularly bad capsizing, three men were stranded on a rock on the very brink of a waterfall (one of them actually went over the edge, but at the last moment grabbed a rope thrown to him by his crewmates). Stanley described his predicament in dramatic terms: ‘A Fall 50 yards in width separated the island from us, and to the right was a Fall about 300 yards wide, and below them was half a mile of Falls and Rapids and great whirlpools and waves rising like hills in the middle of the terrible stream, and below these were the cannibals of Mane-Mukwa.’ It took a day and a night of failed attempts before Stanley finally flung the stranded men a line strong enough to bear their weight.

  By the end of the month they were free of the cataracts (which Stanley felt justified in naming after himself) and on 7 February they enjoyed a day in which they did not have to kill someone. That same day Stanley noted that the river (rechristened by him the Livingstone River) had taken a decisive turn to the west. It could not, therefore, be the Nile, but was – as locals for the first time began to call it – the Congo. He continued downriver, in conditions that became ever more alarming. One day they fought a five-hour running battle against tribesmen who harried them from the banks and chased them in canoes. On another they strode through a deserted village strewn with skulls and bones that, to Stanley, displayed all the marks of cannibalism. Increasingly, their adversaries used muskets instead of bows – a good sign in that it meant they were within reach of European traders, but bad in that Stanley could no longer rely on the total superiority of his weapons. In mid-March, having survived a total of 32 major battles and countless minor skirmishes, the flotilla reached a pool 15 miles wide and 17 long where the locals, for once, seemed friendly. They had travelled 1,235 miles in 128 days, had lost half the 100 guns with which they had started, had used most of their ammunition and trade goods, and were reduced in number to less than 150. Pausing only to name their haven Stanley Pool (later to be the site of Stanleyville, capital of Belgian Congo and, across the river, Brazzaville, capital of French Congo), Stanley led his depleted force to the sea, as he had promised he would.

  Stanley Pool flowed into a chain of gorges, rapids and waterfalls that ran for 155 miles before widening, at the town of Boma, into a placid, navigable waterway. The portages were worse even than Stanley Falls: at every cataract – all 32 of them – they had to hack a path for their vessels, using felled trunks to create a rolling tramway over which they dragged the canoes. They hauled in and out of jungle and up and down hills, were plagued by insects and disease, and suffered the usual calamities in the rapids. On 3 June a canoe containing Stanley’s last white companion, a man named Pocock, overturned in a whirlpool. Pocock came to the surface, unconscious, but could not be rescued before he was carried downstream. Two African canoeists were also lost. By mid-July 12 canoes and 13 men had vanished into the Congo, along with most of the expedition’s trade goods and weapons. ‘Had I the least suspicion that such a terrible series of Falls were before us, I should never have risked so many lives and such amount of money,’ Stanley wrote. Shortly afterwards, one of his most capable men went mad and wandered into the jungle, carrying nothing but a parrot on a stick. ‘Poor Safeni, how will he fare now!’ Stanley lamented. ‘I cannot stay as my goods are terribly short. I must haste, haste away from this hateful region of death, terror and barbarism.’

  Still, he was not blind to what he had achieved. Summarizing the journey, he wrote in self-congratulation that he and his men had ‘attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages, fought 32 battles on land and water, contended with 52 Falls and Rapids, constructed about 30 miles of tramway through Forests, hauled our canoes and boat up a mountain 1,500 feet high, then over mountains 6 miles, then lowered them down the slope to the river, lifted by rough mechanical skill our canoes up gigantic boulders, 12, 15 and 20 feet high ... [and] obtained as booty in wars over $50,000 worth of ivory.’ All this had come about thanks to his extraordinary physical toughness and determination. It was also due to the bravery of the Zanzibaris and other Africans, who had faced great hardship, constant danger, and not only the risk but the actuality of death, while helping their white employer find the goal he had set himself.

  On 31 July the expedition was within six days’ march of Boma. With four more cataracts to go, Stanley abandoned the canoes and the Lady Alice – ‘to bleach and rot to dust’ – and led the men overland. Unfortunately, his few remaining trade goods had no value this far west, and after three foodless days the column was starving. Stanley sent four messengers ahead, with a plea for help from any European who might be in Boma. He asked first for grain or rice ‘to fill [my men’s] pinched bellies immediately’, secondly for cloth that he could use as barter, and thirdly for any spare luxuries that might appeal to a man who had been without them for so long. The messengers returned with all he required. (‘Ye Gods! Just think, three bottles of pale ale,’ Stanley marvelled.) And on 17 October 1877, precisely 1,000 days after it had left Zanzibar, the column limped into Boma.

  From Boma it took them two days by steamboat to reach the mouth of the Congo, where Stanley sent dispatches to the Telegraph and Herald announcing his completion of the first east-west traverse of the continent, in which he had not only settled (barring unforeseen eventualities) the question of the Nile but had traced the Congo from start to finish. Never one to undersell himself, he also sent an article outlining the benefits that would spring from his discoveries. Forgetting conveniently the horrors of the cataracts, he painted the Congo as ‘the great highway of commerce to broad Africa’. In due course these words would come back to haunt him.

  After eight days’ rest he and the remainder of his team caught a Portuguese gunboat to Luanda, the capital of Angola, where Stanley rejected the offer of speedy transport to Europe. It would be dereliction of duty, he explained, if he went home without seeing his men safely back to Zanzibar. More than two-thirds of them were sick, and all suffered from what Stanley described as ‘a state of torpid brooding from which it was impossible to arouse them’. To this peculiar malady – whose symptoms resemble shellshock – he ascribed the deaths of a further eight men on the long journey via Cape Town and Durban to the coast of East Africa. More likely, however, they died from the various diseases, ranging from dropsy to dysentery, that they had contracted during their trek. When the British warship HMS Industry finally dropped anchor at Zanzibar, the expedition had been reduced to less than a third of its original strength: of the original 347 there remained only 88 men and 13 women, along with six children who had been born on the way. They all disappeared into obscurity, leaving Stanley to collect the honours on their behalf.

  Stanley was, himself, in a state of shock and disability after the epic journey. In a photograph taken shortly after his return he appears little more than a skeleton: his normally fleshy jowls are drawn tight to the jaw; his cheekbones protrude; his nose is pinched and hook-like; his semi-hooded eyes stare hauntedly into the distance; and his hair is white. The only indication that he is in his mid-thirties rather than his fifties is the black, drooping moustache that covers his upper lip.

  In August 1879 Stanley was back at the mouth of the Congo. King Leopold II of Belgium had noted his earlier remarks about the river being a highway of African commerce, and was further intrigued by reports of the region’s wealth – particularly in rubber, which was then a boom commodity. He asked Stanley to explore the Congo basin and claim as much of it as he could for Belgium before a rival explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, did the same for France. Actually, the land would belong to Leopold personally rather than to Belgium, but the king assured Stanley of his good intentions and offered him a high-ranking post in the future colony. Stanley drove his men with such ferocity that he became known as Bula Matan, ‘Breaker of Stones’. The so-called ‘Congo Free State’ that he helped create became a byword for oppression, in which Leopold’s lieutenants
operated without restraint, encouraging their workers with the threat of amputation if they did not meet quotas. Leopold reneged on his promise, fobbing him off with a medal and a consultancy fee. Eighteen eighty-seven found Stanley yet again on the Congo, leading an armed force to the other side of Africa, where a minor governor of the Sudan, Emin Pasha, needed assistance. Emin Pasha having been rescued in typically forceful style, and the continent having been traversed yet again, this time from west to east, Stanley returned to London.

  It was his last foray into Africa. Retiring to an uneasy marriage, recurring bouts of malaria and a limp political career, Stanley found himself the subject of controversy. Members of the 1887–9 rescue mission made public horrendous acts that, although committed neither by Stanley nor with his approval, had nevertheless been part of the undertaking. One officer described how some of their African associates had butchered and eaten a young girl before his very eyes. Then, in the early 1900s, reports began to emerge of Leopold’s ‘Congo Free State’ – of the millions killed and the millions more maimed in order to line the King of Belgium’s pockets. Stanley had had little to do with the colony’s day-to-day operations and, like much of the rest of the world, had been taken in by Leopold’s assertion that he was engaged in a worthy programme of enlightenment. But his association with the place – and his support of Leopold’s programme in the press – left an indelible stain.