Stanley found himself gazing at Livingstone almost in disbelief that he had actually found the needle in the haystack. ‘Every hair of his head and beard, every wrinkle of his face, the wanes of his features, and the slightly wearied look he bore were all imparting intelligence to me – the knowledge I craved for so much ever since I heard the words [from Bennett] “Take what you want but Find Livingstone!” What I saw was deeply interesting intelligence to me . . . I was listening and reading at the same time.’
Livingstone caught sight of Stanley’s caravan standing in the hot sun and said: ‘Let me ask you to share my house with me. It is not a very fine house, but is rainproof and cool, and there are enough spare rooms to lodge you and your goods. Indeed, one room is far too large for my use.’ Stanley gave orders for the storing of the goods and purchase of rations and Livingstone instructed Susi and Chuma to assist. He directed Stanley to a verandah enclosing his tembe, a cool and shady spot away from the heat. And then the conversation began, although Stanley later confessed that he forgot what was discussed in all the excitement, possibly about the road he had taken from Unyanyembe. ‘I know the doctor was talking, and I was answering mechanically,’ he recalled.
Stanley recorded his first impression of Livingstone:
a man of unpretending appearance. . . . He has quiet, composed features from which the freshness of youth has quite departed, but which retain the mobility of prime age just enough to show that there yet lives much endurance and vigour within his frame. The eyes, which are hazel, are remarkably bright, not dimmed in the least, though the whiskers and moustache are very grey. The hair, originally brown, is streaked here and there with grey over the temples; otherwise it might belong to a man of thirty. The teeth above show indications of being worn out. The hard fare . . . has made havoc in their ranks. His form is stoutish, a little over the ordinary in height, with slightly bowed shoulders. When walking he has the heavy step of an overworked and fatigued man. On his head he wears the naval cap, with a round visor with which he has been identified throughout Africa. His dress shows that at times he has had to resort to the needle to repair and replace what travel has worn. Such is Livingstone externally.
The crowd outside Livingstone’s tembe began to disperse and Stanley instructed his own men to prepare for a long and well-earned rest at Ujiji. He called for Livingstone’s letter bag to be brought forward and correspondence that had left Zanzibar exactly 365 days before was finally delivered. Livingstone’s face lit up when he took some letters from the bag and saw they were from his children, friends and colleagues at the Royal Geographical Society. He put them back and Stanley urged him to read his correspondence. Livingstone responded: ‘I have waited years for letters and have been taught patience. I can surely afford to wait a few hours longer. No, tell me the general news: how is the world getting along?’
While a crimson tablecloth was spread, hot dishes laid out and tea poured from a silver pot containing ‘best tea’ from London, Stanley told the doctor about the opening of the Suez Canal, Grant’s election to the US Presidency, laying the Atlantic telegraphic cable, wars, revolutions, insurrections and the state of the British and American nations. Livingstone had lost his appetite weeks ago and his stomach refused everything but tea, but now he and Stanley ate like vigorous, hungry men ‘and, as he vied with me in demolishing pancakes, he kept repeating: “You have brought me new life – you have brought me new life.”’
Suddenly remembering something forgotten in the excitement, Stanley sent Kalulu to ‘bring that bottle; you know which, and bring me the silver goblets. I brought this bottle on purpose for this event, which I hoped would come to pass. Though often it seemed useless to expect it.’ A bottle of vintage Sillery champagne from the famous and ancient vineyards of the Montagne de Reims, was brought to the tembe, its cork pulled and a silver goblet of the sparkling drink handed to the doctor.
‘Dr Livingstone, to your very good health, sir.’
‘And to yours,’ replied Livingstone, all the time wondering who this American stranger was, who had sent him and what he wanted from an old and ailing Scotsman hundreds of miles away from civilisation.
The men talked and ate all afternoon. Livingstone related how, on returning to Ujiji, he had discovered that his goods had been sold by the man charged with taking care of them; he had assumed Livingstone was dead and had sold them, using the money to buy ivory. The doctor was now reduced to poverty, relying on the dubious kindness of Arabs. He had been suffering from dysentery and unable to retain his food. The shadows outside the tembe grew longer. Stanley left Livingstone alone to read his letters, bade the doctor goodnight and retired to a cool room within the house to write up his journal.
He awoke early next morning, a thousand questions running through his head desperate for answers. Now that Stanley had found Livingstone, he knew he needed proof to convince the rest of the world that his discovery was true. His first task would be to admit his true purpose in coming unannounced to Ujiji and who had sent him. Stanley wrote:
I will ask him to write a letter to Mr. Bennett and to give what news he can spare. I did not come here to rob him of his news. Sufficient for me is that I have found him. It is a complete success so far. But it will be a greater one if he gives me letters for Mr. Bennett and an acknowledgement that he has seen me. . . . I think, from what I have seen of him last night, that he is not such a niggard and misanthrope as I was led to believe. He exhibited considerable emotion, despite the monosyllabic greeting when he shook my hand.
Despite the early hour, Livingstone was already up and about. He had read his letters from home, which brought both good news and bad. ‘Now doctor, you are probably wondering why I came here,’ said Stanley. ‘It is true,’ said Livingstone; ‘I did not like to ask you yesterday, because I thought it was none of my business.’
‘You have heard of the New York Herald?’
‘Oh, who has not heard of that despicable newspaper?’ said Livingstone – and how Stanley must have flinched at the word ‘despicable’, later excised from all retellings of the famous encounter. Stanley explained how James Gordon Bennett had sent Stanley in search of the doctor ‘to get whatever news of your discoveries you like to give – and to assist you, if I can, with means’.
Livingstone said he was obliged to Bennett ‘and it makes me feel proud to think that you Americans think so much of me’. On observing Stanley’s large bathtub being brought into the tembe, his personal knives, forks and crockery being unpacked for breakfast and laid out on a Persian rug, Livingstone remarked that his new American friend must surely be a millionaire. In turn Stanley inwardly reflected on his good fortune and the fact that had he travelled directly from Paris to Africa after receiving instructions from Bennett and not been delayed at Unyanyembe by Mirambo’s warriors, he might have lost Livingstone. Instead he had found the doctor, missionary, explorer and honorary consul and spent the rest of the day – and many of those that followed – sitting on the verandah and under the palms at Ujiji listening to his story.
On what Stanley understood to be 11 November 1871, he completed a long dispatch about his march through the interior and ultimate discovery of Livingstone to the New York Herald. He dated the piece 10 November, the day he shook Livingstone’s hand for the first time, and began writing the article that night, finishing it the following day after the doctor had provided the reporter with more information. Livingstone’s own account of his meeting with Stanley at Ujiji records the date as 3 November, which is correct. Stanley had become confused about dates as a consequence of earlier bouts of fever which had left him incapacitated for days at a time. He only discovered the date of their meeting was wrong days later when Livingstone himself corrected him, by which time the dispatch was on its way to the coast. The famous ‘meeting date’ of 10 November, however, remained unchanged in Stanley’s notebook.
It took eight months for Stanley’s triumphant dispatch to be carried 900 miles to the coast by a messenger careful to avoid Mirambo’s marauding mercenaries. From Zanzibar it travelled by steamer to Bombay, from where it was telegraphed to the newspaper’s London office, which in turn forwarded it to New York where it finally appeared in the New York Herald on 2 July 1872 under the headline ‘LIVINGSTONE – Finding the Great Explorer – A Picture for History, The Grasp of the Two Explorers’. The paper’s London bureau immediately appreciated the immensity of the story. Under the headline ‘The Glorious News’, Stanley’s article was prefaced by a piece from the London bureau chief stating:
It is with the deepest emotions of pride and pleasure that I announce the arrival this day of letters from Mr. Stanley, Chief of the Herald Exploring Expedition to Central Africa. I have forwarded the letters by mail. Knowing, however, the importance of the subject and the impatience with which reliable news is awaited, I hasten to telegraph a summary of the Herald explorer’s letters, which are full of the most romantic interest, while affirming, emphatically, the safety of Dr. Livingstone.
Under the terms of the arrangement between the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London, the dispatch appeared in the British newspaper the following day under the headline ‘Dr. Livingstone’s Safety – Outline of his Discoveries’. The news was now out and by 4 July, Independence Day in the United States, the story of the American newspaper’s great scoop was headline news around the world.
During his time with Livingstone at Ujiji, Stanley experienced a series of recurrent nightmares over which he had no control. What if Bennett had forgotten his ‘special correspondent’ in Africa and given him up for lost? What if Livingstone’s story was no longer hot news in New York, replaced by another of Bennett’s whimsical topics? Despite instructions to ‘take a thousand dollars, and when that is spent, take another, but Find Livingstone!’, had the proprietor been frightened off by the sums Stanley had spent on the expedition and refused to honour loans taken out in Zanzibar on the paper’s behalf? What if the ‘swift and trusty’ messengers employed to run back to the coast with Stanley’s handwritten dispatches were captured and killed by Mirambo’s men or refused to travel further than the fleshpots of Unyanyembe? What if the messenger became ill and died somewhere along the pathway to the coast – or simply gave up and dumped the dispatch in the jungle? These and other anxieties were always at the back of Stanley’s mind as he sat under the verandah at Livingstone’s tembe and listened to the doctor’s story of his ill-fated African expedition and his belief that ‘in the broad and mighty Lualaba he has discovered the head waters of the Nile’.
Livingstone’s health and spirits improved with each new day. Stanley recorded: ‘Life had been brought back to him; his fading vitality was restored, his enthusiasm for his work was growing up again into a height that was compelling him to desire to be up and doing.’ Stanley gently introduced the question of Livingstone returning home to rest from his travels, reacquaint himself with his family, enjoy the adulation that would be bestowed on him, receive honours, give lectures, encourage commerce, speak out against slavery – and get some false teeth to replace his decayed and worn ones. Livingstone was firm in his reply: ‘No; not until my work is ended . . . I should like very much to go home and see my children once again, but I cannot bring my heart to abandon the task I have undertaken, when it is so nearly completed. It only requires six or seven months more to trace the true source that I have discovered. . . . Why should I go home before my task is ended, to have to come back again to do what I can very well do now?’
Livingstone told Stanley how after exploring 600 miles of watershed along the Lualaba, tracing all the principal streams discharging into its central line of drainage, his men had mutinied and refused to go further. Before continuing he had had to trudge 700 miles back to Ujiji to collect stores – only to find them sold and the proceeds gone.
The doctor’s African tales were carefully recorded by Stanley in his reporter’s notepads by day and at night he would return to his room in the tembe and, by the light of an oil lamp, transcribe them into riveting personalised articles, which were then passed to other messengers to rush back to the coast. Eleven long and exclusive dispatches of varying length about Stanley’s quest for Livingstone and accounts of the doctor’s African adventures found their way to New York in this way. Stanley knew that if Bennett liked what he read, he would want more exciting copy about Livingstone to fill pages of his newspaper. But as each dispatch appeared in print, Stanley had no idea how his work was being received by Bennett and his New York Herald readers. Stanley knew his articles were major scoops, but he feared that nobody else shared his opinion and his words might be treated as little more than small page fillers once they arrived on Bennett’s desk at Broadway and Ann Street.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Stanley’s dispatches were critical of Livingstone’s former expedition companion, Dr John Kirk, the man charged by the Royal Geographical Society with ensuring that the doctor had adequate supplies within reach. Stanley’s articles described Kirk as Livingstone’s ‘quondam companion . . . a sad student of human nature . . . a most malicious person’, who had acted in ‘gross ignorance’ for failing to know the doctor’s whereabouts during Stanley’s time in Zanzibar. Readers were told how Kirk had failed correctly to monitor the progress of supplies and letters sent to Livingstone by the Society from Zanzibar, how unsupervised porters carrying the goods had been lazing in Bagamoyo for three and a half months and how the New York Herald expedition had taken charge of the goods at Unyanyembe. According to Stanley, Kirk preferred to spend his time big game hunting instead of looking after British interests.
There was no love lost between the arrogant Stanley and the aloof Kirk and the reporter’s dispatches were designed to discredit the Acting British Consul. If Kirk had been more cooperative towards Stanley in Zanzibar, he might have appeared in a better light in the pages of the New York Herald. Instead, Kirk figured as the worst type of British buffoon, lording it over his little Zanzibar fiefdom while the world’s best-loved missionary-explorer suffered hardships in darkest Africa. Even Livingstone openly expressed disappointment in his former friend and was quoted as calling him ‘lazy and indifferent’ and ‘no longer a companion’.
Under the headline ‘Dr. Kirk’s Neglect’ Stanley hinted that Kirk should be recalled to London and, on behalf of all British people, be reprimanded for his indifference towards Livingstone. ‘It is the case of the British public vs. Dr. John Kirk, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul at Zanzibar’, wrote Stanley, implying that if such an issue were further publicly aired, Kirk would be branded the guilty party.
According to Stanley, Livingstone was ‘not an angel; but he approaches to that being as near as the nature of a living man will allow’. As to the rumour that Livingstone had married an African princess, ‘it is unnecessary to say more than that it is untrue and it is utterly beneath a gentleman even to hint at such a thing in connection with the name of Dr. Livingstone’. He told New York Herald readers:
You may take any point in Livingstone’s character and analyse it carefully and I would challenge any man to find a fault in it. . . . His gentleness never forsakes him; his hopefulness never deserts him. No harassing anxieties, distraction of mind, long separation of home and kindred, can make him complain. He thinks ‘all will come out right at last’; he has such faith in the goodness of Providence. . . . To the stern dictates of duty, alone, he has sacrificed his home and ease, the pleasures, refinements, and luxuries of a civilised life. His is the Spartan heroism, the inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution of the Anglo-Saxon – never to relinquish his work, though his heart yearns for home; never to surrender his obligations until he can write Finis to his work. . . . Each Sunday morning he gathers his little flock around him, and reads prayers and a chapter from the Bible in a natural, unaffected, and sincere tone; and afterwards delivers a short address in the Kisawahili language, about the subject read to them, which is listened to with evident interest and attention.
According to Stanley, Livingstone was of a breed of men who rarely came along and, when they did, were forced to endure hardship and torment in God’s name – in other words, a living, breathing, walking, talking, travelling saint from the same mould as the Apostles and St Christopher. And Stanley felt it his duty to set about Livingstone’s beatification through the pages of his newspaper.
Thanks to Stanley’s care and attention, Livingstone soon felt strong enough to travel again. The young reporter made sure that the doctor ate four balanced square meals daily and even made butter for his new friend from milk produced by cattle in the Ujiji marketplace. The travellers agreed to join forces to explore the northern end of Lake Tanganyika in order to discover if the lake had an outlet. Using ‘nothing more than a cranky canoe hollowed out of a noble mvule tree of Ugoma’, the travellers – plus sixteen rowers, a cook and two local guides – were hoping to discover a possible waterway for boats travelling along the Nile and onwards down the lake to Ujiji.
For a week, the expedition moved across the calm water of the lake, past fishing villages, islands and peaceful coves. They arrived at a point further north than that reached by Burton and Speke, where they discovered that a river called the Lusize ran into the lake – and not out of it, disproving the theory that the Tanganyika and a second lake, known to the natives as Muta Nzige (Lake Albert) were linked by the watercourse. It was a minor discovery, but sufficient to rekindle Livingstone’s enthusiasm for travel once again and an opportunity for Stanley to observe the doctor in exploring mode. During the latter part of the expedition, they were attacked by tribes who thought they were slavers come for new captives. It was Livingstone’s calm and reasoning behaviour – and his ability to speak their language – which saved the day and impressed Stanley.
On the ninth day, Stanley was stricken with fever, his first illness since leaving Unyanyembe. ‘During the intervals of agony and unconsciousness, I saw, or I fancied I saw, Livingstone’s form moving towards me, and felt, or fancied I felt, Livingstone’s hand tenderly feeling my hot head and limbs,’ Stanley reported. ‘But though this fever, having enjoyed immunity from it for three months, was more severe than usual, I did not much regret its occurrence, since I became the recipient of the very tender and fatherly kindness of the good man whose companion I now found myself.’
In a short time, a special bond developed between Stanley and Livingstone, similar to the relationship between father and son. One day when Stanley was still partly delirious from the huge doses of quinine he had taken, he scolded a cook for failing to clean pots properly. The cook had the temerity to answer back and Stanley clouted the man. At the point where a major fight was about to break out between the two men, Livingstone appeared and calmly settled the dispute, reasoning with the cook, telling him he should be thankful that the ‘little master’ (Stanley) had come to the aid of the ‘big master’ (Livingstone), put food into their bellies and clothes on their back. The cook then apologised and wanted to kiss Stanley’s feet, but the reporter would not allow it. By nightfall, Stanley and the cook had shaken hands and, thanks to Livingstone’s paternal influence, the incident was forgotten.
Stanley was comfortable with Livingstone and the doctor found the American reporter serious, intelligent and the kind of stimulating company he had not enjoyed for so long. In the weeks spent together, they discussed many different subjects. Neither records if Stanley confessed his true identity and background to Livingstone or if the doctor spoke of his wife’s alcoholism or his failure as a father. If Stanley had unburdened himself to anyone, it would have been to the man he had learned to trust and confide in while sitting on a mud verandah under the hot African sun hundreds of miles away from civilisation.