Greed was the only reason Britain was interested in Abyssinia in the mid-1800s. The country’s ruler, Emperor Theodorus (pronounced ‘Todoros’) had declared himself emperor following battles with feudal chiefs and claimed to be of the lineage of King Solomon. In 1851 he proclaimed himself ‘Messiah’ over everyone, was victorious over Egyptian, Palestinian and Arabian enemies and gained a popular following among his people. His fame spread abroad and on the strength of his reputation as a powerful monarch in an important if relatively unknown part of Africa, his friendship was sought by European and Asian traders willing to visit Abyssinia to win profitable contracts, particularly for their armaments manufacturing industries.
The British sent an envoy called Plowden to manage their interests, ‘promote commerce, suppress the slave trade, watch and counteract foreign intrigue’. Plowden become a favourite of Theodorus, advising him on how to create a more effective army, purchase the best weaponry and be more successful in battles with his Islamic neighbours. To expand his empire, Theodorus began attacking areas on the fringes of his territory. He brought in foreign weapons engineers to advise on building a cannon foundry, explosives experts to advise on setting up a gunpowder factory and arms manufacturers to procure guns.
Plowden told his government that Egypt was acting as an aggressor, capturing Theodorus’s men and selling them as slaves. The British envoy was murdered by rebel forces while observing a border conflict and, as a token of thanks for the favourable way in which he had been treated by the Emperor – and in the interests of ongoing relations – Queen Victoria appointed a replacement. When Captain Charles Cameron arrived to present his credentials at the court of Theodorus in February 1862, he brought gifts from Queen Victoria, including a silver revolver, inscribed:
Presented by Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland – To Theodorus, Emperor of Abyssinia, as a slight token of her gratitude for his kindness to her servant, Plowden, 1854.
Theodorus was delighted the monarch from across the seas had sent such a fine gift. He allowed British missionaries to enter his country and more businessmen to trade with Abyssinia. Unbeknown to Victoria’s diplomats, Theodorus was a tyrannical monster along the later lines of Uganda’s Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic. Anyone suspected of treason would be removed, never to be seen alive again.
The Emperor became a feared man. By the time his treachery was discovered, Captain Cameron had nearly completed the process of establishing a treaty between the countries, with the result that Abyssinia was preparing to open a London embassy. Cameron helped Theodorus to draft a letter to ‘his friend’ Queen Victoria, expressing the hope that ‘lasting goodwill may exist between our two countries, which will redound to the glory and advantage of both’.
The letter arrived in Whitehall, was read by Foreign Office staff and filed in a pigeonhole – where it remained unread by anyone else. Seventeen months later, by which time word had reached England of Theodorus’s brutality, the Emperor was still waiting for his reply. He summoned Cameron and threw him in prison. Three months later, acknowledgement of the Emperor’s letter arrived from London, without reference to future cooperation or aid. Slighted, Theodorus instructed his thugs to beat Cameron’s servants and British missionaries ‘as you would a dog’. Their work was so effective that two missionaries died. The rest were gaoled alongside Cameron and any remaining Europeans fled from Abyssinia or went into hiding.
From his cell, Cameron managed to smuggle out a letter to The Times explaining his situation. The newspaper accused the government of standing by while a British citizen was fed bread and water, beaten, tortured and chained to a wall. Britain made threats to Theodorus, but Cameron and the missionaries remained in chains. A minor official was sent to plead for their release. He brought a new letter from Queen Victoria but Theodorus did not think it was sufficiently respectful for a ‘Messiah’. More Europeans were imprisoned.
Then the British government declared war. English mercenaries offered their services to capture hostages and deliver them to freedom while reports circulated that a squadron of cavalry would be dispatched to rescue the unfortunates. In the end an imperial army comprised of 13,000 dragoons and foot soldiers, Bengali and Punjabi infantry and artillery, Madras and Bombay sappers, 8,000 Chinese labourers, thousands of horses, hundreds of camels and a herd of elephants was sent together with hospital ships, arms, ammunition, donkeys, saddles, chains, halters, tents and enough food to keep an army well fed for months.
The entire rescue mission was masterminded by the Commander-in-Chief of the British army in Bombay, General Sir Robert Napier, a brilliant military strategist and former civil engineer. Napier had learned lessons from the disaster at the Crimea and was longing to put them to good use. This was his opportunity and his orders from London were succinct: ‘Failure is not an option. Locate Theodorus before the summer rains in June, liberate the prisoners and leave Abyssinia.’
In November 1867, an advance force from the British–Abyssinian rescue expedition landed on the beach at Zoulla in Annesley Bay (now Mitsiwa, Eritrea) on the southern shores of the Red Sea – at the same time that Henry Morton Stanley was reading about Theodorus’s outrages in American newspapers and making up his mind to quit the Missouri Democrat and travel east to find a new job in New York.
Stanley was about to enter the competitive world of the foreign correspondent in which every reporter would be doing their utmost to scoop rivals and get their stories published first. This would not be easy from Abyssinia, where terrain was rugged, communication difficult and the nearest telegraphic station was 1,000 miles away in Suez. Correspondents travelling with Napier’s army were expected to entrust articles to official couriers travelling back to Zoulla, from where they would be carried on Suez-bound steamers to be telegraphed to London. Stanley’s copy was destined for New York and an editor who demanded correspondents file stories before anyone else. How they did it was up to them.
In Suez, Stanley’s first call was to the city’s telegraphic officer to discuss a private arrangement to transmit his dispatches before those of his rivals. He wrote in his journal: ‘My telegrams are to be addressed to him [the telegraphic officer] and he will undertake that there shall be no delay in sending them to London, for which services I am to pay handsomely if, on my return, I hear that there has been no delay.’
From Suez, Stanley headed south to Annesley Bay, where the former fishing village had been transformed into a military port. Troops and horses were already heading 400 miles inland towards Theodorus’s fortress at Magdala (a Hebrew word meaning ‘tower of strength’) situated 5,000ft above sea level ‘amid gigantic mountains piled one upon another . . . a region of indescribable wilderness and grandeur . . . an almost impregnable stronghold’. It was from here that Theodorus planned to defend his kingdom with forces and weapons of his own.
In Abyssinia, Stanley joined an exclusive group of newspaper correspondents covering what newspapers predicted would be a ‘small British war’. Gentlemen of the press included representatives from The Times, Morning Post, Daily News, Daily Telegraph and the flamboyant George A. Henty of the Evening Standard, later dubbed the ‘prince of story tellers’ for his writing of fictional ‘ripping yarn’ stories for schoolboys. Stanley confided to his journal that the British press corps might look down on an American correspondent, but he quickly learned that they ‘consisted of some remarkable literary lights . . . they all messed together, and though there were contrasting elements in their natures, yet they seldom disagreed; in fact there was more harmony in the Press tent than in any other bell-shaped domicile in the army. I hope I shall not be traducing these good gentlemen, as I bear them much love and respect, if I give them the credit of being the most sociable mess in the army, as well as the most loveable and good tempered.’
While Stanley did not wish to ‘traduce’ his press colleagues, he certainly expected to scoop them with his Abyssinian dispatches, hoping they would not stumble across his private arrangement with the Suez telegraphic office until it was too late and his New York Herald pieces had appeared.
The press corps caught up with expeditionary forces, riding over the barren plains on horseback. The route presented the army with numerous problems, which they overcame thanks to the tactics of General Napier. Sometimes the track completely disappeared and troops had to climb over rocks, descend into deep gullies and clamber up the side of ravines in order to advance in the right direction. Under Napier’s supervision, ropes, pulleys and elephants were used to haul supplies, ammunition and animals up the slopes and similar methods employed to lower them down again on the other side. Elephants could carry 1,800lb with ease, fed on a daily diet of 35lb of bread and 40lb of straw. The weather was hot and humid and tropical storms drenched the soldiers. The terrain was dusty one minute, soaking wet and muddy the next. As British forces edged closer to Magdala, Theodorus was preparing for battle, with 10,000 armed men, 20 giant cannon and enough supplies to keep them going for months.
On 10 April – Good Friday – Napier’s expeditionary force sighted the fortress in the distance and prepared to lay siege. The huge oval rock platform, a mile and a half in length and three-quarters of a mile wide, rose above a narrow plateau. It provided Theodorus with a grandstand view of approaching forces and he greeted them with cannon fire and a charge by 3,500 wild and furious men who came screaming down the mountain road.
While Theodorus’s crazed army rolled forward like an oncoming wave, Stanley noted that Napier ‘sat on his charger serene and impassable, surrounded by a group of men who were not nearly so unaffected as their chief’. His men were instructed to hold fire until an order was given. Stanley observed: ‘Closer the Abyssinians drew, until we momentarily expected to see them launch their spears, and annihilate the Sappers.’ They came nearer, but still no order was heard. Just as Theodorus’s men were in the act of launching spears towards the British, the order to fire was given. As gunfire from the army’s rifles cut down the approaching enemy, rockets were launched from tubes. Those not cut down by the rifles’ bullets turned and fled in fear of the rockets. Stanley observed Napier leaning from his saddle giving encouragement to his men. In next to no time the battle was over, gunfire ceased and the British army set up camp for the night. Stanley recorded:
Before rolling ourselves up in our rugs, and while thinking of the events that marked the day, our ears caught the sounds that betokened the presence of beasts of prey. In ravenous packs, jackals and hyenas had come to devour the abundant feast spread out by the ruthless hand of war. Stranger lullaby than that which lulled us to sleep that night man never heard, and the last sounds our dulled ears caught were the jackal’s shrill whelp, the hyena’s sonorous bay, mingling with the lichowl’s mournful ‘tu-whit-tu-whoo’. It was the nightmare battlefield of Shiloh all over again.
One officer and thirty-one privates were wounded in the encounter. A detachment was sent to count the bodies of Theodorus’s men and bring in the wounded. Stanley accompanied them and reported: ‘A frightful scene was presented to our eyes. The significant sounds of the past night had prepared me in a measure for some horrors, but reality exceeded my conception tenfold. The beasts of prey had been at work upon the bodies. They had revelled in the unusual abundance of flesh. . . . Carefully the dead were counted and buried where they fell, and most carefully the wounded, who had lain in torture and pain the livelong night and had feebly warded off savage jaws, were conveyed . . . to the hospital.’ Of the Abyssinians, 75 wounded were treated in the tented hospital and 560 were buried.
Theodorus had witnessed the battle from his mountain eyrie and knew his chances of victory were slim. Word was sent up the mountain that Napier demanded immediate release of all prisoners, ‘unconditional surrender to Queen Victoria’ of the Emperor and the fortress of Magdala. Assurances were sent that the Emperor and his family would not be harmed.
Theodorus demanded better terms from ‘the English commander who serves a woman’ (Queen Victoria), stating: ‘Rather than surrender, I will fight to the death. Can you not be satisfied with the possession of those you came for, and leave me alone in peace?’ He called for the captives to be brought from their cells. Standing before them in his best robes, Theodorus ordered the gates to be opened and with Consul Cameron at their head, 61 weak and filthy men, women, children with 187 servants and 323 animals slowly walked out of the fortress and down the mountain road to freedom. Stanley wrote: ‘These were the captives for whom the Crusade had been undertaken; these were those whose graphic letters had drawn tears from Christendom.’
Rumour circulated that Theodorus had fled from his mountain, making his way to the valley below by a secret path on the other side. Napier put a $50,000 bounty on the Emperor’s head – dead or alive – and ordered his soldiers up the mountain road. Stanley was taken to the edge of a precipice ‘and looking in that direction, I saw a sight which for ever beggars description . . . I am no lover of the horrible or the disgusting. But if you can conceive 308 dead [Africans], piled one upon another, stripped, naked, in a state of corruption, with gyves and fetters round their limbs, you will save me the unpleasant task of describing the scene.’ An eyewitness told Stanley that prisoners had been manacled and either sabred or shot by Theodorus’s men as they lay helpless on the ground. Pleas for mercy went unheeded and ‘they were butchered to the last soul’.
For Napier, this gruesome sight was the last straw. Troops making their way up the mountain were ordered to attack the fortress and root out the Emperor’s remaining followers. Soldiers of the Royal Engineers and the King’s Own Regiment were assigned the task – carefully observed by Stanley – and they captured the stronghold in less than two hours. As they burst through Magdala’s gates, chaos was everywhere. A man was seen next to a haystack holding a revolver. When he saw soldiers approaching, he turned and ran. As soldiers gave chase, they heard shots and after rounding a corner found the man on the ground, his smoking revolver still in his hand. A soldier picked up the weapon and noticed a silver plate attached identifying it as a gift from Queen Victoria to the Emperor of Abyssinia. The dying man was Theodorus himself. Knowing the battle was lost, he had decided that death was better than imprisonment and had placed the revolver in his mouth and fired. British soldiers standing around the body cheered over it as if it had been a dead fox.
Theodorus was ‘clad in coarse upper garments, dingy with wear, and ragged with tear, covering undergarments of clean linen. The face of deep brown was the most remarkable one in Abyssinia; it bore the appearance of one who had passed through many anxious hours. His eyes, now overspread with a deathly film, gave evidence yet of the piercing power for which they were celebrated . . . and thus was it that we saw the remains of Theodorus, Emperor of Abyssinia . . . dead by his own hand.’ The battle was over; the British had won another victory. Detachments were ordered to all parts of the fortress to quell pockets of resistance and free remaining captives. Hundreds were released from cells, many too weak to walk. Scores of them kissed the hands of their liberators.
Stanley noticed an excited crowd ahead who had discovered Theodorus’s treasure tents. The ground was strewn with an assortment of precious items and an ugly mob of soldiers, former prisoners and Theodorus’s followers were attempting to plunder the treasure trove. The mob smashed open the stone coffin of a priest and stole a diamond cross from the body. Thousands of pounds worth of goods were grabbed, including gold, silver and brass crosses, pots made from precious metals, diamond-encrusted goblets, Bohemian cut glass, French china, Staffordshire pottery, fine wines, ornamental textiles, Persian carpets and furs made from lion, leopard and wolf skins. Meanwhile, a separate group jostled around Theodorus’s body attempting to tear off pieces of his bloodstained shirt. Napier gave orders that the body be left alone and prepared for burial. He then ordered all buildings within the fortress to be blown up or burned.
Napier then marched his men back to camp, ordered plundered booty to be brought to the front of his tent and officers told to select mementos they considered most appropriate for their troops and mess halls. Fifteen elephants and 200 mules were loaded with ‘miscellaneous articles’. The rest were auctioned and £5,000 divided between those participating in the Magdala campaign. Each soldier ended up with a few extra pounds in their pay as they turned about-face to march the 400 miles back to the coast.
The siege and capture of Magdala produced exciting copy for the New York Herald. It was now time to get the news back in the fastest possible way. On the return journey, Stanley sought a messenger prepared to carry his dispatches to the coast and onwards to his telegraph contact at Suez. A British officer supervising the correspondents got wind of Stanley’s plan and informed him that all dispatches penned by reporters must travel in the same official bag. No single reporter would be given preference and the government in London must receive news of the Magdala victory first – and newspaper readers second. Fuming, Stanley attempted to devise other plans to outsmart fellow reporters and his military watchdog. But by the time they arrived at the coast, he had failed to come up with a scheme and his dispatches went into the official bag with the rest.
Stanley was determined to be first to the telegraphic office when the steamer arrived in Suez. Then the vessel hit a sandbank in the Red Sea and was grounded for four days under a boiling sun. The combination of heat and too much whiskey caused a pair of officers on board to disagree over something trivial and insist the matter be settled by a duel to the death on the main deck. Seeing an opportunity for a story about the stupidity of British upper-class officers unable to hold their liquor, Stanley offered to mediate and talk the officers out of the duel. Once effects of the alcohol had worn off, both men realised their foolhardiness and separately thanked Stanley for saving one – or both – of their lives.
At last the steamer passengers sighted Suez, only to be told by the harbourmaster that they must be quarantined for five days as reports of cholera in Abyssinia had reached the port authorities; the official bag containing all the journalists’ reports was also held in quarantine. Unlike other correspondents, Stanley had made a copy of his dispatches. That night he secretly bribed someone on the quayside to deliver them to his friend at the telegraphic office, where they were cabled to London and on to New York, marking Stanley’s first foreign ‘scoop’ for the New York Herald.
The other pressmen remained in ignorance of Stanley’s actions. When released from the steamer five days later, they were informed that the cable link between Alexandria and Malta had snapped and would not be repaired for weeks. By the time Stanley’s articles about the sacking of Magdala and Theodorus’s death had been splashed across the New York Herald, Bennett had syndicated the articles to London newspapers, making their own correspondents’ dispatches obsolete. It would be another week before official military dispatches confirming the defeat found their way to Whitehall, making Stanley as popular with his press colleagues and British politicians as a cat with fleas.
Not for the first time, politicians denounced the New York Herald while other publications accused the paper of making up the story. When the reports were later confirmed, accusers suddenly fell silent. Nor, in a curious foretaste of what would happen to the New York Herald and its front-rank correspondent four years later, were there any words of apology. Bennett was delighted with his scoop and in Alexandria on 28 June 1868, Stanley proudly wrote in his journal: ‘I am now a permanent employee of the Herald and must keep a sharp look out that my second “coup” shall be as much of a success as the first. I wonder where I shall be sent next . . . ?’