Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure by Tim Jeal

Author:Tim Jeal [Jeal, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Travel, Adventure, History
ISBN: 9780300149357
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-11-01T07:00:00+00:00

Local people admitted that when they managed to rescue such slaves, they would only feed them up in order to sell them again.5

This evidence of African indifference to African suffering increased rather than lessened Livingstone’s determination to end the slave trade, and at this time he wrote two well argued despatches to the British Foreign Secretary urging that Zanzibar should be blockaded at once, and the main slave market closed. He gave detailed reasons why he did not believe that this would create anarchy in Zanzibar, or cause smaller slave markets to open up along the coast. There is something extraordinarily impressive about the unemotional and logical way in which he marshalled his facts at a time when he was involved with the far from abstract misery of the slaves themselves. Every few days, he was finding little groups of corpses. Some had been shot, others stabbed, and others tied together and left to starve to death.

Meanwhile his porters dawdled, stole and threatened to desert. In July the sepoys concocted a story about how a tiger had killed and eaten the expedition’s only buffalo calf. Livingstone asked whether they had seen the tiger’s stripes. They eagerly agreed that they had. Since African tigers have no stripes, the doctor was unimpressed. Next day a sepoy threatened to shoot a Nasik man and another stole a large number of cartridges and cloth from the stores. At last Livingstone had had enough and gave the sepoys eighteen yards of cloth and left them at a village to wait for the next Arab caravan to the coast.6

On 6 August, when he reached the blue waters of Lake Nyasa, he found ‘a dash in the breakers quite exhilarating’. By now, he was down to twenty-three men, less than half the number he had had in early May. A month later, when he arrived at the crossing point on the Shire river, the ten Johanna porters decided to desert en masse. They had learned from Arab slave traders and local Africans that the country ahead was being pillaged by the ‘Mazitu’ (Ngoni) and since they wished to see their families again would serve no longer. They had been almost as troublesome as the sepoys, so Livingstone did not try to detain them. In 1863, he had encountered the ‘Mazitu’ in the same area and knew that the dangers ahead were very real.7

In January 1867, shortly after the man carrying the expedition’s chronometers had slipped and fallen, damaging these vital clocks and guaranteeing that all Livingstone’s future calculations for longitude would be inaccurate, his medicine case was stolen by a deserter. With most of his party ill with malaria and dysentery, the second loss struck Livingstone as a possible death sentence. But despite this, and although the rains were making travel increasingly difficult, the doctor was focussed again and excited. He was heading for an unknown lake which he believed would be found to feed a river flowing into the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. This lake might therefore prove to be the source of the Nile.

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