Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (24 page)

When he finally slunk from the jungle and stood again, Stanley looked back at the green hell. His entire body was a collage of gashes and abrasions and puncture wounds. If his torn clothing and mud-streaked body didn’t mark him as an African ingenue, his uneven tan certainly did. Humiliated and exhausted, Stanley endured the stares and snickers of his caravan as he found the boma and returned to its protection once again. Stanley marched to his tent to clean himself and change clothes. He had already vowed he would never enter an African jungle again. ‘When I had finally regained the plain and could breathe free,’ he wrote, ‘I mentally vowed that the penetralia of an African jungle should not be visited by me again, save under most urgent necessity.’

Africa would give Stanley no choice. The jungle would be an omnipresent part of his travels until the tropical coastal plain turned into the sparse, low-rainfall scrub known as
nyika
that served as a transition to the savannah’s wide open spaces. Even if that weren’t the case, Stanley was too enraptured by Africa to remain upset for long. Within moments of swearing off jungle travel, he was again experiencing great affection for Africa’s beauty and hardships. ‘Notwithstanding the ruthless rents in my clothes and my epidermal wounds,’ he admitted in his journal, ‘as I looked over the grandly undulating plain, lovely with its coat of green verdure, with its boundaries of noble woods, heavy with vernal leafage, and regarded the pretty bosky islets amid its wide expanse, I could not but award it its meed of high praise. Daily the country advanced in my estimation, for hitherto I felt I was but obeying orders, and sickly as it might be I
was duty bound to go on,’ he wrote. ‘But day by day the pall-like curtain had been clearing away and the cheerless perspective was brightening.’

In the days that followed, Stanley continued coming to terms with Africa. It wasn’t the place of nightmares at all, but a populous, sprawling country of previously unimagined splendour. It was the island he dreamed of years before in Aden, a place where no other man controlled his destiny. Even before Aden — since leaving his family behind on a whim and sailing from England as a teenager — Stanley had sought such a place. Finding it was the realization of years of longing, and the hardship was empowering.

As if sensing Stanley’s euphoria, Africa tested him again by letting loose her rains. On 1 April a deluge opened the monsoon season. Stanley’s infatuation with Africa dwindled, replaced by the reality that the miles to come would be one challenge after another, punctuated by moments of brilliant, though deceptive, beauty. ‘Down poured the furious harbinger of the Masika season, in torrents sufficient to damp the ardour and newborn love for Africa I had lately manifested.’

Then Stanley suffered a more serious setback. As he continued to wait in the rain for his lagging fourth caravan, camped in one spot for day after valuable day instead of moving towards Livingstone, Stanley’s men began deserting. As they left they stole equipment, cloth and provisions. Others became sick with various ailments brought on by the rains — fever, chills, a mysterious ‘weakness of the loins’. Selim had malaria and even sturdy Bombay suffered from rheumatism. Finally, on 4 April, a week after Stanley began waiting, the fourth caravan arrived, joyously firing their muskets to announce their reappearance. Khamisi, the porter afflicted with the loin malady, found the strength to desert in all the hubbub, stealing two goats, supplies from the caravan and the personal belongings of several fellow porters before running off.

Stanley had had enough. He’d been stern with his men,
but reluctant to use force. However, the theft and desertion had to stop or he would shortly be impoverished. Stanley ordered two armed sepoys to find Khamisi and bring him back, using all necessary force.

As the searchers for Khamisi trekked east towards Bagamoyo, Stanley ordered the expedition to break camp and march west. The eighth of April was spent crossing a jungle that smelled so foul from plants and decay that Stanley was afraid the men would collapse from nausea. The trail was just a foot wide. There were ‘thorny plants and creepers bristling on each side, and projecting branches darting across it, with knots of spiky twigs and spike-nails, ready to catch and hold anything in height’.

After enduring thorns, rains, desertion and dense jungle, Stanley finally encountered Africa’s darkest demon. On 10 April, ‘we met one of those sights common in this part of the world. To wit, a chained slave gang, bound east. The slaves did not appear to be in any way downhearted; on the contrary, they seemed imbued with the philosophic jollity of the jolly servant of Martin Chuzzlewit,’ Stanley observed. He went on to note the surprising fact that both the slaves and their captors were African. ‘Were it not for the chains, it would have been difficult to discover master from slave; the physiognomic traits were alike — the mild benignity with which we were regarded was equally visible on their faces. The chains were ponderous. They might have held an elephant captive; but as the slaves carried nothing but themselves, their weight could not have been insupportable.’

Stanley was clearly travelling through a landscape unlike any other on earth. And while he regarded the slaves and slavers as a Dickensian curiosity, their stares made it clear Stanley was the more unique sight: he was white, he was alone and he was in charge of his destiny — with all that implied.

APRIL WAS AN
oppressive collage of downpour, drizzle, thunder, chills, fever, humidity, sweat, exhaustion and death — punctuated by the sucking sound of feet and hooves plodding through mud. The caravan was unable to find its collective rhythm as the monsoons slowed the men’s pace to half a mile per hour. The porters were sick so often in April that the caravan marched on only fourteen of the expedition’s first twenty-nine days. Stanley could have helped the pace if he had brought enough medicine for the porters, as well as himself — but he hadn’t. The only alternative was a full halt when illness struck the caravan.

Ironically, it was Stanley, the African newcomer, who was the titan of the group, impervious to sickness. He attributed his health to a few teenage doses of a malaria-like Arkansas swamp fever that had struck him down after he first arrived in America and began the process of completely changing his identity. Stanley said he was more robust for having endured the ‘ague’. So even as the
caravan morale plummeted from the rains and disease, Stanley grew more insistent on pressing the chase for Livingstone. As a man with attention-deficit problems, Stanley craved action. Inactivity gave him too much time to think, which gave him the blues. He wrote of being ‘more comfortable and light-hearted while travelling than when chafing and fretting in camp at delays no effort could avoid’.

Stanley liked it that every day on the trail was a new adventure. The path to Ujiji was sometimes thin, sometimes the width of a road, but always defined by mud and vegetation. The caravan threaded through forests of tamarind, acacia and mimosa trees. Rivers like the Ungerengi, where banana trees and seventy-foot-tall, thick-trunked mparamusi trees grew along the banks, were swollen by flash flooding. They had to be waded by the entire caravan — not an easy task for a porter carrying seventy pounds. Nights became two-blanket cool as the trail wound its way to an elevation of a thousand feet. Insects became even more common. Horseflies, tse-tse flies, wasps, black ants, white ants, red ants, centipedes and beetles would fill the four enclosed walls of Stanley’s tent each night, crawling over his body and flying into the canvas — so many genera of wriggling, buzzing, biting bugs that he bragged in his writings that a scientific insect collection couldn’t match the variety and numbers.

Hyenas began prowling the perimeter of the camp at night, scaring the expedition’s donkeys by their mere scent, waiting for the unwary expedition member — man or beast — to venture out. As villages stretched further apart, Stanley’s most valuable commodity — food — grew scarce. Hunting expeditions resulted in a small assortment of grouse, quail and pigeons, but the small birds hardly yielded enough meat to fuel a caravan.

Morale was tested again when Khamisi, the deserter and thief, was caught, bound and brought before a tribunal of porters and soldiers. They sentenced him to be flogged with the Big Master’s donkey whip. Khamisi’s ‘crying sorrow’ as his peers administered the thirteen
lashes drained whatever joy remained from the camp.

Then, as if sickness tapped him on the shoulder and entered his body on a whim, Stanley endured his first hectic day of African fever. ‘I surrendered to it at once,’ he admitted in his journal on 20 April. ‘First, general lassitude prevailed, with a disposition to drowsiness; secondly, came the spinal ache which, commencing from the loins, ascended the vertebrae and extended around the ribs until it reached the shoulders, where it settled into a weary pain.’ The pain got worse, causing ‘insane visions, frenetic brain throbs and dire sickness’. Twelve hours later the sickness passed. Whether it had been a fever or a brisk jolt of malaria, Stanley didn’t know. Regardless, he ingested heavy doses of bitter quinine for the next three days. As chills washed over his body each night, Stanley shivered under a heavy bearskin blanket. Unbeknown to Stanley, the caravan was about to encounter its greatest obstacle so far. It was vital for the Big Master to be healthy.

They came upon it after a walk through a pleasant forest with light red soil. Most of the year, what lay before them was known as the Makata River. The plodding, muddy tributary measured only forty feet across. But in the monsoon season the Makata exploded. The river carved great chunks of earth from its banks then overflowed them altogether. In some places it measured a mile wide. The low-lying areas surrounding it became engorged with water until the entire plain between the Usagara Mountains and the village of Simbaweni became flooded. The impromptu swamp measured forty-five miles from one side to the other. The Makata Swamp’s mire averaged just a foot deep, but the enormous footprints of giraffes, elephants and buffalo created holes five times that depth. The porters constantly plunged into them as they walked. The donkeys, with their heavy loads, did too, and were sometimes trapped underwater.

The endless hours of trudging through the dirty black water were like poison to the caravan’s already devastated morale and health. As the end of each day drew near, they
searched the horizon for dry mounds protruding from the swamp where they could make camp. The non-stop rain throughout the night, and the lack of bushes or trees from which to build sleeping huts, made the nights miserable as well.

As they travelled deeper into the swamp, conditions worsened. Tall reeds became a new barrier to progress, like slimy fences of vegetation. The water grew deeper, and finding the courage to step each morning from dry sleeping mounds into murky water grew harder. For five days the
Herald
expedition persevered through the Makata. Food was impossible to find and hunting was out of the question. The exhausted, starving porters shifted their burdens from their shoulders onto their heads to keep the precious cloth dry. Simple fevers became of minimal concern as more fatal diseases attacked. ‘First the white man Shaw caught the terrible fever of East Africa, then the Arab boy Selim,’ Stanley wrote. ‘Then the soldiers one by one, and smallpox and dysentery raged among us.’ A porter died. The donkeys died in twos and threes. Even Omar the dog got dysentery. He died, too.

Finally it was Stanley’s turn to endure dysentery. The illness was brought about by a vicious series of biological factors, and was nearly impossible to avoid in the flooded jungle. Bacteria entered men’s bodies through unpurified drinking water and from swamp water infecting open sores. Bacteria lodged in the mucous lining of intestinal walls, and the intestine bled as the bacteria burrowed into it. A bloody, mucus-laden diarrhoea ensued as the body tried to purge the illness. Fever set in, along with nausea and vomiting. The frequent diarrhoea caused dehydration as the men lost fluid. The lack of water made them lethargic. They grew weak because food passed directly through their bodies without providing nutrition. Sometimes dysentery passes in two or three days; sometimes it is fatal.

During the Civil War, languishing in a prisoner-of-war camp outside Chicago, Stanley had watched fellow prisoners from his adopted Confederate cause die from
dysentery. He had almost succumbed himself. Now the same thing was happening in Africa. Dysentery plundered his body from the inside, but Stanley did not die. However, in a single week he lost a quarter of his body weight, dropping from a fleshy twelve stone to a skeletal nine — ‘a mere frame of bone and skin’.

Stanley had no choice but to press on. He was in the middle of the swamp. But walking through the Makata, trying to maintain the sense of supreme authority even when many of the men were beginning to hate him and were eager to turn back, was exceedingly difficult. Stanley guzzled three entire bottles of a famous bowel medication known as Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, without improvement. He suffered the indignity of alternately vomiting and emptying his bowels on top of the brackish water again and again. The incident in his flannel pyjamas was a trivial embarrassment by comparison.