The Secret Museum by Molly Oldfield

Author:Molly Oldfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

[Candomblé]

The name Candomblé means ‘dance in honour of the gods’. Worshippers sing and dance to music, possessed by the orixás.

[The orixás]

On the way over to Gil’s house I passed a lake, filled with huge sculptures of the Bahian orixás dancing on the water.

THIS HAS GOT TO BE one of the most famous lines in history. It was uttered by a journalist called Henry Morton Stanley, who was on a job for the New York Herald. He was looking for David Livingstone, a missionary and explorer who was in Africa trying to find the source of the Nile.

When they met, each man was wearing a hat. The two hats are now side by side in the archive of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London.

In How I Found Livingstone (1872), Stanley’s account of their meeting in Ujiji, deep in the heart of what is now Tanzania, he describes how they doffed these hats to one another:

As I advanced slowly toward him I noticed he was pale, looked wearied, had a gray beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it. …

I walked deliberately to him, took off my hat, and said, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’

‘Yes’, said he, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.

I replace my hat on my head and he puts on his cap, and we both grasp hands, and I then say aloud, ‘I thank God, Doctor, I have been permitted to see you.’ He answered, ‘I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.’

The hats – a sailor’s cap that belonged to Livingstone and a pith helmet that belonged to Stanley – are in front of me now, on a table at the RGS. A tailor named Hawkes made Stanley’s pith helmet and another named Gieves made Livingstone’s cap. This was before the two tailors joined forces to become the famous tailoring firm of Gieves & Hawkes. Their current shop at 1 Savile Row was once the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, before it moved out to South Kensington. The tailors had kitted out so many explorers over the years that the building felt like home, so when the Society moved they bought it for themselves.

Livingstone was very fond of his hat and is usually depicted wearing it: at the RGS there is a painting of him with it on, and the statue of him outside the building also shows him wearing it as he gazes out towards Hyde Park, above an old milestone measuring the distance to London (1 mile to Hyde Park Corner) and Hounslow. Have a look if you are walking past.

The hat reminds me of another piece of Livingstone memorabilia, held by the Hope Entomological Collection in Oxford, the second largest collection of insects in the UK. It is the ‘type’ or standard example of a tsetse fly. This small fly, little realizing how famous it would be in the future, landed on Livingstone’s arm. He swatted it, then scraped its squished body and two others like

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