Within twenty-four hours of setting up camp in Bagamoyo, two donkeys and a coil of wire had gone missing. The loss was put down to the ‘many dishonest prowlers of the night’ operating in the coastal town. It was to be the first of many raids on the expedition’s supplies. A search also began for a further 140 ‘pagazi’ – native porters or carriers – to travel with the expedition. It took two months to find them, during which time unscrupulous African and Arab traders tried continually if unsuccessfully to swindle and mislead Stanley.
Stanley was astounded to learn that the Royal Geographical Society-funded 33-man caravan, which Dr Kirk had mentioned in Zanzibar and dispatched into the interior three months previously, had travelled no further than Bagamoyo. Instead, the men had spent the last hundred days ‘living in clover . . . thoughtless of the errand they had been sent upon and careless of the consequences’. The Consul’s party only bestirred themselves when word of Dr Kirk’s imminent arrival at Bagamoyo forced them to move on. After routine visits to local Arabs and taking a courtesy cup of tea in Stanley’s tent, Kirk and a group of friends took off to hunt big game – ignorant of the fact that his own caravan had left only the day before and that Stanley would soon be hard on its trail.
By the time Stanley was ready to begin his march to Ujiji, the expedition had swelled to nearly two hundred men, split into five separate caravans, each marching three or four days ahead of the one behind. The first two caravans would act as an advance party, sending word back to those following days behind about what lay ahead. The first two and fourth caravans were under the protection of Zanzibari soldiers, the third under Farquhar, and the last under Stanley’s personal command.
The first caravan departed on 18 February, consisting of 24 pagazi and 3 soldiers. The second, made up of a further 28 pagazi, 2 chiefs and 2 soldiers headed into the interior three days later. On 25 February, the third caravan left, supervised by Farquhar and comprising 2 pagazi, 10 donkeys, 1 cook and 3 soldiers. Caravan four departed on 11 March, made up of 55 pagazi, 2 chiefs and 3 soldiers.
On 21 March, Stanley’s caravan prepared to depart with 28 pagazi, 10 of them carrying the boat sections, 12 soldiers under the command of Bombay, 1 tailor, 1 cook, Selim (Stanley’s personal interpreter), 1 gun bearer, 17 pack mules, 2 horses, 1 guard dog called Omar who would guard Stanley’s tent at night and John Shaw – called ‘Bana Mdogo’ or ‘little master’ by the men – riding a donkey in rear-guard. ‘Total number, inclusive of all souls, comprised caravans connected with the New York Herald expedition, 192’, Stanley recorded in his journal.
The entire expedition was made up of 3 Europeans, 45 Zanzibaris, 140 pagazi, a tailor (required to fix canvas tents, cloth and mend clothing owned by the three Europeans), Stanley’s personal cook, interpreter and gun bearer, 27 pack animals, 2 riding horses, some goats and, according to his journal, ‘every needful article for a long journey that the experience of many Arabs had suggested. And that my own ideas of necessaries for comfort or convenience, in illness or health, had been provided’.
It was time for the fifth caravan to depart. Everything was ready. Stanley mounted one of the two fine horses given to him before leaving Zanzibar, called for the American flag to be borne aloft by one of the men at the front and gave the order: ‘Forward!’ The long march away from civilisation and into Africa’s dark interior had begun – at last.
A crowd of onlookers gazed as the expedition passed by, the soldiers singing and the American flag fluttering in the warm breeze. Stanley was full of excitement and admitted: ‘my heart, I thought, palpitated much too quickly for the sober face of a leader. But I could not check it; the enthusiasm of youth still clung to me – despite my travels; my pulses bounded with full glow of staple health.’ Stanley estimated that it would take three months for the expedition to reach the trading town of Unyanyembe several hundred miles west and another month’s march to Ujiji.
The bay horse – known as ‘Bana Mkuba’ or ‘the big master’ – provided good service to Stanley, allowing him to gallop at full speed from the rear of his column to the head in minutes. The ‘road’ was nothing more than an earthen track, passing at first through small farming communities in which ‘men and women in the scantiest costumes’ worked the fields. After three days on the march, the expedition sighted an abundance of wild animals, including red antelope and hippopotami bathing in the muddy waters of a river. A bridge had to be built across the water, which was too deep for the animals to traverse. Saddles and a thick layer of grass provided a secure floor for nervous creatures. While the men set about their work, Stanley amused himself peppering the necks and skulls of the hippos with his rifle. Fortunately, he soon became bored with his target practice, using his time to better effect observing their behaviour in the water and on sandbars.
The next few days took the expedition through a mixture of terrain – ‘a noble expanse of lawn and sward . . . as one may find before an English mansion’, groves of ebony trees teeming with guinea-fowl, open plains, dense forests full of jays, green pigeon, ibis, turtledoves, pheasant, quail and moorhens, some of which ended up in that evening’s cooking pot. By 23 April, the expedition had marched 125 miles into the interior.
At native settlements along the way, local chiefs demanded presents in return for allowing the caravan to pass through their land. Gifts of cloth, beads and brass wire were expected, and many chiefs attempted to exhort more from Stanley than he was prepared to give, causing delay after delay until a compromise was reached enabling the men to continue. Some chiefs invited Stanley’s party to lodge overnight in their villages, graze the animals and cook meals over tribal fires. Others were not so keen for the strange travellers to linger in their territory, accepting presents and then urging them to move on as fast as possible fearing the white man and his caravan might rape their women, kill their children and plunder store houses. Territory covered during the expedition’s early days provided members of the caravan with an abundance of fresh meat, but the deeper they progressed into the interior, the more they had to rely on supplies they were carrying.
At nightfall, Stanley’s tent was first to be erected, a woven carpet laid across the ground along with a Persian rug and bear skin, his wood and canvas camp bed brought in along with a folding camp chair, a bag containing his journal, notebooks, pencils and reading matter and his tin bath filled with cool water. Omar the guard dog was positioned outside the front flap and allowed nobody to enter on pain of a chewed leg. Early on in the expedition, Stanley had found that he was receiving a constant stream of visits from members of the party who entered his tent uninvited to examine his things. It was Omar’s job to ensure that no one entered, whether his master was ‘at home’ or not.
A messenger from the fourth caravan brought word that some pagazi had been taken ill and wanted Stanley to send ‘dowa’ (medicine) to them. Stanley, who carried a well-stocked medicine chest equipped to deal with almost any injury or minor emergency, mounted his horse and rode ahead to the next caravan where he found one pagazi suffering from inflammation of the lungs and another with fever. He ordered all the men to rest for twenty-four hours and rode back to his own caravan, catching up with caravan number four again the following day. The men were still sick, so Stanley ordered them to remain another day in camp while he went ahead with his own men. Three days passed without further news from the straggling caravan. Shaw and Bombay were sent back to ensure that all was well. They returned on the fourth day with members of the sick caravan trailing behind pleading for more rest.
In pouring rain, Stanley’s party marched on into dense jungle, which was difficult for the expedition’s ammunition cart to negotiate. Ahead they could see the land steeply rising and falling into deep valleys. Stanley called a halt to the day’s march to build camp for the night. It rained unceasingly for hours, ending at nightfall when an army of natives appeared from the forest wanting to trade. The head of the tribe appeared with a gift of rice for the ‘rich’ leader. Sensing trickery, Stanley told him through his interpreter that if he was so rich, why did the chief bring such a simple gift. The chief pleaded poverty – and so did Stanley. He gave him a piece of simple cloth in return for the rice. After the day’s soaking, which drenched both men and supplies, Stanley was in no mood to waste time with a chief who considered him a soft touch.
At daybreak, the caravan found that the grey Arab horse presented by the Sultan of Zanzibar had died. The magnificent animal had shown signs of illness in the rain the previous day, and now lay dead in the mud. Stanley ordered his men to cut open the animal. Inside its stomach, twenty-five short, thick, white worms stuck like leeches to the lining while its intestines were alive with scores of long white worms which would eventually transform themselves into tsetse fly, an insect deadly to all bloodstock.
Stanley ordered the animal to be buried deep in the ground, provoking uproar from the chief who had called on the caravan the night before and now demanded payment in the form of 8 yards of cloth in return for allowing the dead horse to rest in his soil. The chief arrived with his entire tribe to collect his ‘fee’. Again Stanley refused to pay, offering to dig up the carcass, fill in the hole and allow the dead horse to fester, stink out the valley and bring sickness to the village. The chief relented, told Stanley his horse could remain in the earth and quickly went on his way.
At nightfall, Stanley’s men heard deep groans coming from the animals. On investigation, Stanley’s bay horse ‘Bana Mkuba’, the ‘big master’, was found suffering. Stanley stayed with the animal through the night but as dawn broke over the interior, it died. When its stomach was opened it was discovered that death had been caused by internal rupture of a large cancer, which had affected the larger half of the coating of its stomach and extended up to within an inch or two of its larynx. Stanley had lost two valuable horses within the space of fifteen hours. Now there were none.
Several days passed and nothing further was heard from the lagging caravan. A pagazi in Stanley’s group deserted, the interpreter, cook and tailor all fell ill with fever, men developed severe sore throats and by nightfall, ten men lay sick in the camp. Stanley had no option but to remain where he was until the men recovered. When the caravan behind finally caught up, the men begged their master for more rest. Stanley was impatient. He had now lost several days due to adverse weather and sickness. Taking the more healthy men from caravan four and his own group, Stanley sent them on as his new advance column while he remained with the sick men, some of whom he suspected of being more lazy than ill.
To rouse men ‘from the sickened turpitude they had lapsed into’, Stanley sounded the alarm by hitting a tin pan with an iron ladle, signifying that they would soon be on the march and anyone left behind must fend for themselves. The entire caravan fell into place, and once again Stanley had a full complement of men, even if some of them were walking wounded. It took twice as long to reach the next camp and, somewhere along the track, another pagazi deserted, taking a property tent, 10lb of beads and some cloth with him. Two men were sent back to find him and bring him back to the caravan, while the remainder rested.
The caravan now entered a stinking jungle, with acrid odours from plants and decaying vegetation. The pagazi became dispirited and Stanley was forced to speak sharply in order to get them to move. He marched to the front of the column, pulling ten fully laden donkeys behind. Shaw was in charge of the cart ‘and his experiences were most bitter, as he informed me he had expended a whole vocabulary of stormy abuse known to sailors, and new ones invented ex tempore. He did not arrive at that night’s camp at far end of the putrid forest until two-o-clock the next morning, totally exhausted.’ Another camp was created for men and animals to recover. The local chief, ‘a white man in everything but colour’, sent a gift of fat sheep and grain in return for a demonstration by Stanley of loading and firing his Winchester rifle.
The next few days were easier; the men were rested and able to buy good food from tribesmen. And then the caravan came across a chain slave gang travelling towards the coast. Stanley reported that the slaves ‘did not appear to be in any way down-hearted, on the contrary . . . were it not for their chains, it would have been difficult to discover master from slave. The chains were ponderous – they might have held elephants captive; but as the slaves carried nothing but themselves, their weight could not have been insupportable.’
Meanwhile, men dispatched to bring back pagazi who had deserted with the tent, beads and cloth were unceremoniously dragging him back into Stanley’s camp, the pilfered booty intact. The man had been captured by a local tribe who had tied him to a tree and were about to kill him when Stanley’s men arrived to claim him and the goods, paying for his deliverance with some of the stolen beads.
Stanley convened a campside court, comprising eight pagazi and four Zanzibaris who would decide what punishment would be meted out to the thief. ‘Their unanimous verdict was that he was guilty of a crime almost unknown among pagazi, and it was likely to give bad repute to the carriers, they therefore sentenced him to be flogged with the “Great Master’s” donkey whip, which was carried out to the poor man’s crying sorrow.’ Stanley ensured punishment was conducted in full view of the entire caravan, an example to each that desertion and theft were punishable offences. When another pagazi deserted later, he was also hunted, dragged back to camp, given two dozen lashes and locked in chains.
One of the main obstacles encountered on the march through the interior was the notorious Makata swampland, a disease-ridden area extending over 45 miles, taking days to cross as the expedition party and its animals waded deep in rancid water and black mire. At night, camps were made on mounds of high ground rising from the swamps, but mud and filth were everywhere in evidence, and Stanley knew it would only be a matter of time before his men would succumb to fever brought on by their long exposure to slough and quagmire.
Stanley himself felt the first pangs of fever one morning at 10 a.m. He recalled: ‘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; thirdly came a chilliness over the whole body, which was quickly followed by a heavy head, swimming eyes and throbbing temples, with vague vision, which distorted and transformed all objects of sight. This lasted until 10 p.m. and the mukunguri [fever] left me, much prostrated in strength.’ A short time later, Stanley was attacked with dysentery ‘which brought me to the verge of the grave’. From a stout and fleshy person weighing 170lb, he was reduced to a skeleton weighing a mere 139lb. Stanley’s guard dog, Omar, also became ill from inflammation of the bowels and later died.
Shaw was the next casualty followed by Bombay and other pagazi. The remaining men moved at a pace so slow, Stanley thought they had completely stopped. He knew he had to get his men out of the swamplands before they could rest and recover, so to ‘encourage’ them to trudge forward ‘I was compelled to observe that when mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the lazily inclined, a dog-whip became their backs, restoring them to a sound – sometimes to an extravagant – activity’. At the far side of the swamp, the caravan rested for four days.
With temperatures exceeding 128 degrees, Stanley’s caravan trudged onwards towards the foothills of the steep Usagara Mountains, where in ‘a filthy village’ swarming with flies and insects and ‘well grounded in goat dung, and peopled with a wonderful number of children for a hamlet that did not number 25 families’, he stumbled across the third caravan. Its leader, Farquhar, lay ill in his tent with swollen legs (Bright’s disease). ‘As he heard my voice, Farquhar staggered out of his tent, so changed from my spruce mate who started from Bagamoyo, that I hardly knew him at first. His legs were ponderous, elephantine, since his leg-illness was of elephantiasis or dropsy. His face was of a deathly pallor, for he had not been out of his tent for two weeks.’
Stanley called for a camp to be built on a cool hillside far away from the stinking village and arranged for Farquhar to be carried up by four men. As he lay on a camp bed in Stanley’s tent, Farquhar told his commander that he had no idea what had caused his illness or his legs to swell to such an immense size, preventing Stanley from correctly diagnosing what medicine might be administered to reduce the swelling.
What was Stanley to do? Should he hold up the march in the hope that Farquhar might recover? Or should he leave him on the hillside with plentiful supplies until he was well enough to find his way back to Bagamoyo – and possibly die in the process? Stanley decided to secure Farquhar to a donkey to carry him up mountain passes, through valleys and uninhabited wilderness ahead.
By now John Shaw should have caught up with the rest of Stanley’s caravan with the handcart but ‘Bana Mdogo’, the ‘little master’, was nowhere to be found. A messenger told Stanley that Shaw was too ill to walk and a strong and burly Zanzibari called Chowpereh was instructed to take one of the donkeys for him to ride and a second for the load on the cart. The pagazi carried a message from Stanley to pitch the cart into the nearest ravine, gully, or river and return to the caravan.
The expedition waited but after four hours there was still no sign of Shaw, forcing Stanley to hike back to find him. Back down the track, Stanley came across the incredible sight of Chowpereh carrying the cart on his head – wheels, shafts, body and axle all complete. The Zanzibari found it easier to transport the cart in this way instead of pulling it over the rough terrain. Stanley ordered the African to push the cart over the track and into some tall reeds. No longer would it hold up his progress. Shaw followed some distance behind, sitting on the donkey sound asleep. Stanley bawled him out, accusing him of holding everyone up, to which Shaw wailed that he had done his best and a row between the men erupted on the mountainside.
There were more desertions followed by back-trailing expeditions to find the culprits, bring them to camp and clap them in a growing chain gang of runaways. More donkeys died and Stanley was forced to give his own beast to Farquhar, whose condition worsened by the day. To give the man a rest out of the sun, Stanley sent Farquhar ahead to the next village with a pagazi. He wrote in his journal: ‘To save the expedition from ruin, I was reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that it were better for me, for [Farquhar] and all concerned that he be left with some kind of Chief of a village, with a supply of cloth and beads, until he got well, than that he make his own recovery impossible.’
Farquhar and his pagazi found their way to a settlement on the slopes of the Mpwapwa Mountains, where Stanley’s caravan caught up with them. Arrangements were made with the village chief for Farquhar to stay for an extended period with a renegade pagazi, called Jako, who was freed from his chains and given instructions to take care of the sick white man and attend to his needs. He was left with a quantity of beads, cloth, a rifle, 300 cartridge rounds, a set of cooking pots and 3lb of tea.
As the caravan advanced, they occasionally met others heading in the opposite direction, some carrying hundreds of ivory tusks. On 12 April, an Arab called Salim Bin Rashid in charge of a caravan told Stanley he had recently been at Ujiji and stayed in a hut next to one occupied by Livingstone. He described the doctor as ‘looking old, with long grey moustaches and beard, just recovered from severe illness, looking very wan’. He also told Stanley that Livingstone planned to visit a country called Manyuema as soon as he was well enough to travel.
The news revived Stanley’s flagging spirits and he immediately dashed off a short dispatch for the New York Herald – his first since departing from Zanzibar – which he handed to a messenger to carry back to the coast for transmission to London and New York. The dispatch was just a few lines long but stated that ‘positive intelligence of the safety of Dr. Livingstone’ had been received and that ‘the authority of the statement is unquestionable and its truth certain’.
It took five months for the few lines to reach New York and Bennett, who had all but given up on his African correspondent. Cautiously, Bennett tucked the short item away on page 7 of his newspaper on 19 September 1871. But he used the story to announce to the world for the first time that ‘a party of Americans is hurrying into the interior with the object of rescuing the doctor from his perilous position’. News of the New York Herald’s search for Livingstone was now in the open. The eyes of newspaper readers and rival papers waited anxiously for the next dispatch. God help Stanley if he failed to find the man.
On 18 May, another Arab trader encountered along the route told Stanley that the ‘musungu’ (white man) was off on his travels again and was now one month’s march from Ujiji. ‘He has met with a bad accident, having shot himself through the thigh while out hunting buffalo. When he gets well he will return to Ujiji’, Stanley was told.
By mid-June, the New York Herald expedition had joined forces with an Arab caravan headed in the same westerly direction. One of the Arabs volunteered alarming information about Livingstone: ‘You are asking me about the musungu whom people call “Dochter Fellusteen” [Dr Livingstone]? Yes, I lived near him about three months ago at Ujiji. His men have all deserted him, except three slaves, whom he was obliged to buy. . . . He used to beat his men very hard if they did not do instantly what he told them. At last they all ran away; no one would stop with him. He had nothing with him, no cloth nor beads to buy food for a long time; so he had to go out and hunt buffalo every day. He is a very old man and very fat, too; has a long white beard. He is a great eater. . . .’
So Livingstone was now fat, with a long grey beard and beat his slaves. It sounded unlikely. Stanley began to wonder if this man was the one he had read about, whom he felt he knew in person and was now searching for in the heart of Africa. On 16 June, a fourth witness who had personally seen Livingstone said: ‘He is a very old man, with a beard nearly white. His left shoulder is out of joint from a fight he had with a suriba [lion]. He has gone to Manyuema with some Arabs . . . he is returning to Ujiji soon, owing to a letter he received from the “Balyuz” [Consul]. They say that although he has been out here so long he has done nothing. He has fifteen bales of cloth at Unyanyembe, not yet sent to him.’
Four days later and three days away from Unyanyembe, the head of a caravan bound for the coast confirmed: ‘Yes, there is a musungu, a very old man. . . . Lately a caravan coming from Ukonogo brought the news that he was dead. I don’t know whether the news be true or not.’
On 4 July 1871, Stanley sat down in his tent at Kwihara, near Unyanyembe, and wrote his first lengthy dispatch from the African interior for the New York Herald; the piece told the expedition’s story so far, describing the circumstances surrounding the search for Livingstone, Stanley’s travels prior to arriving in Zanzibar, his attempts to buy equipment and supplies in an African market, to recruit men prepared to walk 900 miles and back and the trials and tribulations of marching through the interior. It was a long article, designed to fill a page or more of the newspaper. The final paragraph of the dispatch read:
If at Ujiji in one month more I shall see him, the race for home shall begin. Until I hear more of him or see the long absent old man face to face, I bid you a farewell; but wherever he is be sure I shall not give up the chase. If alive, you shall hear what he has to say; if dead, I will find and bring his bones to you.
Stanley carefully placed the handwritten dispatch into an envelope, sealed it and passed it to one of his men acting as a messenger, who would run back to Zanzibar along paths and through swamps already trodden. Five months and three weeks were to elapse before readers of the New York Herald would open their newspapers and read the page 3 extended headline: ‘Dr. Livingstone – The Expedition of the New York Herald in Quest of the Great African Traveller – Description of the Undertaking – Livingstone Reported at Ujiji – Special Report of the Herald Commissioner Directing the Expedition’. As was Bennett’s usual policy, the name of the reporter was not mentioned.