Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (20 page)

Unfortunately, Damji knew very little about the Rufiji. It was too far south of the caravan routes to interest him. But that was exactly why Stanley planned to travel that way. There was concealment in that distance. None of the Zanzibar-Ujiji caravans would see him. No one would report his whereabouts. Word would never make it back to London, prompting a new British rescue mission or a messenger ordering Baker to make a beeline for Ujiji. It was, after all, shaping up as a race. Stanley was coming from Zanzibar. Baker was progressing up the Nile. The first man to find Livingstone would win.

It was Kirk who added a new, unexpected time element to Stanley’s search. Their first meeting occurred on 9 January. Stanley and Webb had just left the customs house. The extreme heat of the sun on that day was like a passive instrument of torture. The street was narrow and squalid, ‘lined with tall, solid looking houses’, Stanley remembered. Kirk was a slim man of Webb’s age, with round shoulders and a beard covering his jawline but not his cadaverous cheeks. ‘Dr Kirk,’ Webb called out, as the acting British Consul crossed their path. ‘Permit me to introduce Mr Stanley of the New York
Herald
.’

The former botanist of the Zambezi expedition said nothing. He raised his eyelids until the whites of his eyes became perfectly round, as though he was lapsing into a trance. There was no movement of the mouth or nod of the head, just that look of vague disdain. ‘If I were to define such a look,’ an unimpressed Stanley wrote, ‘I would call it a broad stare.’

The fact that Kirk was in Zanzibar at all was due to the fame earned through his time with Livingstone. But Kirk, who still considered himself an explorer of sorts, hadn’t yet got over his bad memories of the Zambezi expedition and all things Livingstone. He could still recall vividly the day in 1860 when Livingstone attempted to run the Zambezi’s treacherous Cabora Bassa rapids in twenty-four-foot dugout canoes. For the rest of his life Kirk would recall the terror of rocketing uncontrollably through the walls of white-water, then having his ‘body sucked under a canoe’. Even as Kirk clawed onto the safety of a rock, he could see boats downstream snapped in half and crushed by water and jagged boulders. Just as horrifying, from a professional point of view, was the notion that somewhere inside that frothing maelstrom were eight volumes of his botanical notes — lost for ever.

Kirk spent the remaining three years of the journey nurturing his hatred for Livingstone. He especially disliked Livingstone’s random exploration style, and daily willingness to risk his life — and the lives of his caravan — without a second thought. The explorer’s ‘reason and better judgement’, Kirk wrote to a friend, ‘is blinded by headstrong passion’.

That didn’t prevent Kirk from pleading for Livingstone’s help in securing employment after they returned to England. Livingstone, not knowing of Kirk’s resentment, swallowed his pride and went to the Zambezi expedition’s most vocal critic, Foreign Secretary Lord Russell, seeking a consular position for the botanist. None was available — at least, none to Kirk’s liking. He turned down postings to the Comoros and Mozambique, and even rejected Zanzibar initially. What the botanist wanted was a position with prestige, easy duties, plenty of free time for hunting and collecting botanical specimens, and most of all, generous pay. Livingstone vowed to keep looking. During a stopover in Bombay en route to Zanzibar in January 1866, Livingstone pressed his friend Sir Bartle Frere, the Governor of Bombay, to give Kirk the medical officer position in Zanzibar. Frere agreed. Kirk
was in Zanzibar by June 1866, missing Livingstone by two months.

When Stanley met Kirk for the first time on that stifling January morning in Zanzibar nearly five years later, he knew nothing of the animosity or of Livingstone’s intercession. He just knew Kirk had been with Livingstone and was more knowledgeable than any other man in Zanzibar — perhaps in the world — about Livingstone’s exploration proclivities. Like a detective ferreting evidence from an eyewitness, Stanley sought to extract information from Kirk. The challenge made him edgy with anticipation. In order to keep his secret safe, he had to extract the information without letting on about Livingstone. His tactic was to ask questions about the Rufiji. ‘Met Kirk, companion of Livingstone,’ Stanley wrote in his journal. ‘He had never been on that river. He thought of going for some time, was pretty sure it was a large river.’

That was all. Nothing about Livingstone. And while Kirk let the moment pass without notice, Stanley began to view Kirk as an adversary. Just as Webb viewed Kirk as an impediment to American power, so Stanley began to see the former botanist as an opponent in his quest to find Livingstone.

Their next encounter was on 17 January. Kirk was holding a wine party at his home. Stanley attended as Webb’s guest. Stanley was antsy in polite company, prone to distraction and eager for provocative points of view. The guests were members of the diplomatic community. All night long, Stanley watched disdainfully as they made small talk, waiting for a moment alone with Kirk. Finally, they stood together, the stocky American and the thin Scot, inspecting an elephant rifle and talking hunting. Kirk was travelling for the mainland in mid-February to hunt big game, and was fond of talking about the trip and his shooting ability. Livingstone’s name, to Stanley’s enormous relief, came up tangentially, without prompting.

‘Ah, yes. Dr Kirk, about Livingstone,’ said Stanley, who later recorded the conversation in great detail. ‘Where is he, do you think, now?’

‘Well really, you know that is very difficult to answer,’ Kirk replied. ‘He may be dead; there is nothing positive whereupon we can base sufficient reliance. Of one thing I am sure, nobody has heard anything definite from him for over two years. I should fancy, though, he must be alive. We are continually sending something up for him. There is even now a small expedition at Bagamoyo about starting shortly,’ Kirk said, making mention of the convoy of relief supplies commissioned by Murchison.

‘I really think the old man should go home now,’ Kirk continued. ‘He is growing old, you know, and if he died, the world would lose the benefit of his discoveries. He keeps neither notes nor journals. It is very seldom he takes observations. He simply makes a note or dot, or something on a map, which nobody understands but himself. Oh yes, by all means, if he is alive he should come home and let a younger man take his place.’

‘What kind of man is he to get along with, doctor?’

‘Well, I think he is a very difficult man to deal with generally. Personally, I never had a quarrel with him, but I have seen him in hot water with fellows so often, and that is principally the reason, I think, he hates to have anyone with him.’

‘I am told he is a very modest man. Is he?’ Stanley asked.

‘Oh, he knows the value of his own discoveries. He is not quite an angel,’ Kirk replied.

‘Well now, supposing I met him in my travels — I might possibly stumble across him if he travels anywhere in the direction I am going — how would he conduct himself towards me?’

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think he would like it very well. I know if Burton, or Grant, or Baker, or any of those fellows were going after him, and he heard of their coming, Livingstone would put a hundred miles of swamp in a very short time between himself and them. I do. Upon my word, I do.’

Stanley walked back to Webb’s house that night, thoroughly depressed. He considered quitting. It seemed
that with every passing day, Stanley had to overcome a new hurdle to success. If it wasn’t Bennett failing to send money, or the ensuing anxiousness that Bennett would fail to honour Stanley’s debts, then it was Kirk coolly, calmly, surgically replacing hope with something worse than fear: doubt.

Stanley brushed aside his depression. ‘I did not suppose, though I had so readily consented to search for the doctor, that the path to central Africa was strewn with roses. Had I not been commanded to find him? Well, find him I would, if he were above ground,’ he wrote.

The race had taken on a new dimension. Not only was Stanley racing Baker, he was also competing against the slave caravans and the tribal telegraph. He couldn’t let word of his arrival precede him. Livingstone was likely to run in the other direction. And since Stanley’s great commission was to pursue Livingstone until he found him, the game of cat and mouse could go on for years.

Stanley cherished the secret more than ever as he began his first bits of shopping for supplies in the bazaars and markets, eliciting scores of questions from traders eager to know where the white man was going. The French Consul, taking note of Stanley’s spending habits, thought the American ‘rather eccentric in his way of doing things, refusing everyone’s advice and consequently reduced to his own resources’.

Two of Stanley’s first purchases were boats — the first twenty-five feet long and six feet wide, the other ten feet long and four and a half feet wide. Farquhar, Selim and a new member of the team, the British sailor John Shaw, who was stranded in Zanzibar after beating a mutiny charge, were put to work ripping the wooden sides away and replacing them with collapsible canvas. The ribs, keel, stem and stern pieces were disassembled for easier overland transport. As needed, the boats would be reassembled and floated.

When Stanley learned that the Rufiji and Lake Tanganyika did not connect and, in fact, were separated by two hundred miles of mountains and woodland, he still
pretended that the Rufiji was his destination. Not even Selim, Farquhar and Shaw knew the truth. So as his three assistants spent their days in Webb’s courtyard, tarring the canvas, sewing sails and tents, Stanley changed his course. He would follow the caravan routes west from Bagamoyo to Ujiji. The boats would still be used for the second half of the journey, to Cairo.

At Webb’s suggestion, Stanley began relying on a powerful trader named Sheikh Hashid, for advice on necessary purchases and caravan construction. Hashid, who was also Webb’s landlord, had sent dozens of caravans into the interior. He became Stanley’s guidebook, and profited enormously from Stanley’s naivety. From Hashid, Stanley learned the proper assortment of cloth, beads and wire needed for use as currency in the interior. They would be payment for food from villages en route, hiring new porters as needed and paying tribute to those chiefs demanding a toll for the privilege of passing through their land. Cloth, beads and wire were worth more than gold in Africa. The goods had to be functional, abundant and appealing to the eye. ‘The women of Africa’, Stanley learned, ‘are as fastidious in their tastes for beads as the women of New York are for jewellery.’

Then there were the basic, vital logistics. The pagazis — porters — carried a maximum weight of seventy pounds on their shoulders. They operated between Bagamoyo and the crossroads of Tabora, roughly two-thirds of the way to Ujiji. At Tabora the men would be paid off and Stanley would need to hire new men for the final push to Ujiji. If Livingstone wasn’t at Ujiji, and Stanley needed to push further inland, there would be an additional charge. Payment was in doti — bolts of blue Indian calico or ‘Merikani’, the preferred American cotton from the mills of Salem and Nashua. Each doti was four yards long and three feet wide. Depending upon experience, a pagazi received from fifteen to twenty-five doti for his tour of duty.

Stanley purchased eight thousand yards of Merikani to pay his porters and to barter with in the interior. The cloth
came folded from the mill, but would have to be unfolded and tightly rolled into seventy-pound bales for carrying. After rolling, the bale of cloth was bound with coir rope and pounded by two men until the bale was shaped like a bedroll — three feet long, one foot wide, one foot deep. The bale was placed in a mat bag known as a makanda, which the pagazi hoisted onto his shoulders for travel. Beads, on the other hand, were placed in long narrow bags weighing sixty-two pounds each. Wire was carried on poles in loads of six coils weighing sixty pounds.

But cloth, beads and wire were just the start. Under Hashid’s direction Stanley purchased food, medicine, ammunition and pack mules. Anticipating the great moment he would meet Livingstone, Stanley also purchased a bottle of champagne. Stanley spent money zealously, until his little search party became the largest-ever expedition to set forth from Zanzibar — so big that Stanley was forced to divide it into five sub-caravans and stagger their departures to avoid robbery. The mules would carry those loads too heavy for porters.

As January passed, and Stanley was almost ready to sail for Bagamoyo, all of Zanzibar talked about the white man setting off into the mainland. ‘This fact was repeated a thousand times in the streets, proclaimed in all the shop alcoves and at the custom house,’ Stanley wrote. ‘The native bazaar laid hold of it and agitated it every day until my departure. The foreigners, including the Europeans, wished to know the pros and cons of my going in and coming out.’ He was getting worried. The Rufiji River facade was wearing thin. There were too many goods for such a short journey, too much money being thrown around by a simple newspaper reporter. He stuck to his story, however. The need for secrecy was still vital, no matter how obvious things were getting.

Right to the end, Stanley continued purchasing in an eager, but not impulsive fashion. A childhood of poverty had made him careful with money. Finally, ‘there remained for me’, Stanley wrote months later in his first dispatch to the
Herald
, ‘to raise a small company of faithful men,
who should act as soldiers, guards to the caravan and servants when necessary’. The legendary Sidi Mubarak Bombay — ‘the honestest of black men who served with Burton, and subsequently with Speke’ — came on board as leader of Stanley’s protective militia. In time, Bombay would serve as unofficial caravan leader, and as liaison between Stanley and the pagazis.

Thirteen years had passed since a young Bombay had dazzled Burton and Speke with his easy humour and insatiable work ethic. But he was still able to walk thirty miles a day at a brisk pace, had worked with more expeditions than any man, and knew the interior by heart. Bombay, however, had also passed into middle-age. He was bald, and the young pagazis didn’t respect him. As the rare man in history to follow the Nile from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean, Bombay thought himself a celebrity. He had an ego, as Stanley knew from reading the works of Burton and Speke, and could be outspoken, prone to drink and chasing women, and a procrastinator. So there were liabilities incumbent in Bombay’s hiring. All in all, however, the exploration veteran was vital.