Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (40 page)

Noe had been left behind in Liverpool to await Stanley’s return, and, while there, he wrote several letters to his friend, addressing him as Henry Stanley on the envelopes. Stanley had resumed calling himself John Rowlands while in Wales, but was now obliged to explain the unfamiliar name. His mother accused him of having changed his name to mask a life of crime. Because he could not admit that he had voluntarily abandoned his original Welsh name without offending his mother and other local people, he came up with the adoption story, which in any case held a deep emotional appeal for him. He said he had been treated like a beloved son by Henry Stanley, the owner of the warehouse where he had first worked in New Orleans. Indeed, he went on, Mr Stanley had given him his own name and had made him his heir – dying just too soon to give expression to his wish in a new will. When Stanley became famous, his mother told
several journalists about her son’s ‘adoption’ and how he had acquired his name. This invention then appeared in newspapers and in a number of books, so Stanley was saddled with the lie for life. He made matters more complicated for himself by taking the fib a step further, claiming that he had been raised as an American in Missouri – thus concealing his illegitimacy and workhouse background, but denying himself the admiration and support he would have enjoyed in Britain had his British identity been acknowledged.

Re-united with Lewis Noe in Liverpool in January 1867, Stanley told his young friend something that amazed him. One day, said the man whose Turkish expedition had been a complete fiasco, he would track down Dr Livingstone in Africa, and interview him for the
New York Herald,
making himself rich and famous in the process.
¹⁴

Although Livingstone had returned to Africa only a year earlier, the British press was full of speculation about his whereabouts just when Noe and Stanley were in Liverpool.
¹⁵
Stanley told his incredulous friend that, between leaving Wales and returning to Liverpool, he had been to London for a meeting with Colonel Finley Anderson, the
New York Herald
’s bureau chief in the capital. Incredibly, this turned out to be true, although because Stanley lacked experience as a traveller, Anderson had rejected the idea. But the bureau chief had been mildly encouraging and had asked Stanley to keep in touch.
¹⁶
Stanley himself would later attribute the brilliant idea of finding Livingstone to James Gordon Bennett Jr, the evil-tempered millionaire owner of the world-famous
New York Herald,
but this would be because by then his entire career seemed to depend upon this autocrat’s continuing patronage. Nor would Stanley ever wish to have it known that the inspiration for finding Livingstone had been due to his craving for fame, rather than to a philanthropic desire on his part to bring succour to the embattled explorer.

Back in America in 1867, Stanley succeeded in getting the
Missouri Democrat
to send him to report on the Indian Wars in
Nebraska. While serving in the navy, he had sold war stories to various mid-western papers, and had been told that he showed promise as a journalist. His reports on the Indian Wars would be striking enough to change his life. Other newspaper editors and owners became aware of his vivid descriptions of General Hancock’s campaign. This enabled him, early next year, to travel to New York and to persuade James Gordon Bennett to send him to Africa to report on a British punitive expedition in Ethiopia. Through bribing a crucial telegraph clerk Stanley would break the news of the Ethiopian emperor’s defeat and suicide days before any other correspondent had even filed his copy. Stanley next convinced Bennett that to find Livingstone in the heart of Africa would be an historic scoop. This was no mean achievement since in Bennett’s opinion Americans cared nothing for Africa. In addition, Bennett feared that Stanley, after spending many thousands of dollars, would fail to find his man, and would very likely die in the wilds of the Dark Continent. Some sixth sense led Bennett to delay Stanley’s departure for over a year until the autumn of 1870 – by which time Livingstone had been in Africa and seen no white face for four and a half years. No letter had been received at the coast from the missing man in eighteen months. So if Stanley could find him, it would be sure to create a sensation.

In 1869 Stanley became engaged to Katie Gough Roberts, a Welsh girl, whom he had got to know during visits to Denbigh between assignments. Stanley longed for the security of marriage but he also needed to escape his old persona through travel and adventure. In the end, Katie’s solicitor father forced him to choose between the two by saying he could not marry Katie unless he began staying in Britain for long periods of time. Since this choice was forced on him at the very moment when his great idea, the Livingstone mission, was getting off the ground, Stanley chose his African quest. ‘My great love for you cannot blind me; it cannot lead me astray from the path I have chalked out,’ he told Katie.
¹⁷
Yet he did not give up hope that he might be able to find Livingstone and marry
Katie on his return. She, however, was not prepared to wait, and married a Manchester architectural student in September 1870 while Stanley was still abroad and sending back stories for the
New York Herald
.
¹⁸
At last, after he had reported on the opening of the Suez Canal, and visited Jerusalem, Odessa and the battlefields of the Crimea, Stanley was allowed to travel to Bombay, and from that city set sail for Zanzibar, the gateway to Africa.

On 6 January 1871, three weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he sighted the masts and rigging of the ships at anchor in the harbour, and the Sultan’s blood-red banner streaming out over his unfinished palace. In Zanzibar, Stanley was horrified to find that James Gordon Bennett had sent no money as agreed, obliging him to ask the US Consul to pledge his personal credit. Stanley would only be able to spend £1,000 on his mission -half as much as Livingstone had spent on his and had thought totally inadequate. Finding it too humiliating to admit that Bennett had treated him so disrespectfully, Stanley later claimed that his boss had spent £4,000 on his journey, enabling him to engage 192 porters, whereas in fact he had only managed to hire about a hundred. Thus his insecurity led him to diminish his real achievement.
¹⁹
Bennett’s perfidy told Stanley that if he failed to find Livingstone, the magnate would probably leave him to repay the US Consul, Francis Webb. Failure would therefore mean financial ruin.

Luckily, Stanley did not know about Livingstone’s most recent geographical plans. Had he done so, he would have realised how slender his chances were of finding him. But when he went to see Dr Kirk on Zanzibar, Stanley found it reassuring to be told that the doctor was somewhere to the west of Lake Tanganyika and would probably return to Ujiji at some time in the future. In fact, at the very time when Stanley and Kirk were having this chat in January 1871, Livingstone was preparing to leave Bambarre for the Lualaba, and had no intention of returning to Ujiji. Blissfully unaware of this, Stanley was euphoric as he set out for Ujiji from Bagamoyo on 21 March.

Livingstone and Stanley.

The former workhouse boy rode into the bush on his thoroughbred stallion, resplendent in pith helmet and white flannels, while at the head of the caravan fluttered the Stars and Stripes. For a man like Stanley, who needed to prove himself after the trauma of parental rejection, Africa was a test of character that could scarcely have been bettered. His examination began within days, when the tsetse started killing his animals, including his fine stallion, and when his porters either fell ill with fever, or deserted the column. Stanley could see just how easily he might be deserted by all of them and then be left to starve, lacking
the food and trade goods they had been carrying. Few Victorian explorers made greater efforts to instil discipline and to track down deserters than did Stanley, but his caravan’s numbers dwindled nevertheless. Soon he quarrelled with his two white companions, John Shaw and William Farquhar, both of whom were former merchant seamen – one of them drank and the other was addicted to whores, a serious crime in Stanley’s eyes, given his detestation of his mother’s promiscuity. Stanley had read Speke’s and Burton’s books and had consequently chosen Bombay and Mabruki as his African captains because they had been Speke’s most highly valued ‘faithfuls’. Having studied the performance of Speke’s and Burton’s porters, Stanley chose mainly African Zanzibaris or Wangwana. Though they would suffer heavy casualties on all his journeys, many of the survivors would volunteer to travel with him as many as three times more – a great tribute.

John Shawand William Farquhar.

On the way to Unyanyembe, Stanley suffered many bouts of fever, his horse and his donkeys died, and the rainy season made travel a nightmare. Farquhar died, and Shaw was so ill that he seemed certain to follow him, which he did. And worse was to come. Shortly before arriving at Tabora, only 250 miles from Ujiji, Stanley heard from members of an Arab-Swahili caravan
who had been in Manyema that Livingstone was dead. Though badly shaken by this news, Stanley refused to believe it.
²⁰
If it was true he would be ruined. But would he ever get to Ujiji or Manyema to learn the truth?

At Tabora he became enmeshed in a war being fought between the Arab-Swahili slave traders, who ran the town, and Mirambo, the marvellously named, charismatic African ruler of the Nyamwezi, who was determined to snatch control of the slave caravan route to Lake Tanganyika. Since Stanley’s caravan was down to thirty men, he saw no way of getting to Ujiji unless Mirambo’s warriors could be driven away from the path ahead. So, he agreed to join the Arabs in an attempt to achieve this. His Arab allies seriously underestimated Mirambo, who ordered a tactical retreat, and then ambushed them as they rushed after his warriors in hot pursuit. A few of Stanley’s men were stabbed to death, and 500 Arabs were massacred in like fashion, with many of their corpses being mutilated. Stanley heard that faces were cut away, along with genitals and stomachs, and then boiled and eaten with rice. He himself had been suffering from fever at the time of the ambush, and would have been killed if his young translator, Selim, had not lifted him onto a donkey and led him back to Tabora.
²¹

In late August, Mirambo attacked Tabora and burned a quarter of the town. Stanley, who had managed to add another twenty followers to his thirty, cut loopholes in the clay walls of his stockaded Arab
tembe,
and waited for what seemed sure to be a fight to the finish. Fortunately for him, Mirambo mysteriously chose to back off just when his enemies were at his mercy. Grateful to be alive, Stanley rededicated himself to his task, writing by candlelight in his diary:

I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body … No living man or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death – not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!
²²

He now planned to avoid the war entirely, by marching south and south-west for ten days and only then starting to head north to Ujiji. On 21 September 1871, with thirty-four men, most of whom had spent the night before in ‘one last debauch’, Stanley left Tabora, suffering from malaria, yet again. Apart from the shakes and aches and sweats, he saw hideous faces and experienced shockingly rapid changes of mood. It still tormented him to think that Livingstone might be dead. His column passed through forest and marshland, and then over hills. In late October at the Malagarasi river, Stanley was overjoyed to hear that a white man with grey whiskers had just arrived at Ujiji. Nearing Lake Tanganyika, with mounting excitement, he told Selim to lay out his flannel suit, oil his boots and chalk his pith helmet. He was determined to look his best for what was destined to be the greatest day of his life so far. In truth, Stanley was very nervous, since he was haunted by John Kirk’s statement that Livingstone detested other explorers – so much so that if Burton, Baker or Speke were ever to come near him, he would rapidly put a swamp between them and himself. Stanley forced himself to confront the ghastly possibility that he might refuse to be interviewed.
²³