Daily Globe

Difficulties Encountered by Stanley

Stanley's narrative gives us a vivid idea of travel in Africa under its best conditions; that is to say, through a country fairly known, which has been visited by white men, and is now traversed by frequent caravans. Sometimes they crossed broad and bleak plains, where food was scarce and cloth vanished fast, and sometimes they came to hilly countries, where the people were civil and hospitable. Sometimes they were in troublesome districts, where there were warring tribes, where the people were treacherous or hostile, and then Stanley could only sleep with his hand on his rifle. There were furious tempests, and some days Nature and man alike warred against us, while on others both seemed combined to bless us. Other troubles came to the intrepid commander and his small army, more especially that potent and untiring enemy of all African travel—Typhus. This was the enemy who menaced Stanley at Zanzibar, and never left his footsteps until he embarked at Loanda; who followed him night and day, doing his awful will on the expedition. And so from these misfortunes—from famine and fatigue, from fever and massacre, from mutiny and death—the little army dwindled away; and it is a wonder that it did not return, or at least content itself with visiting Livingstone's country and exploring Victoria N'yansa, and return with the report which has been brought for so many centuries—that Africa continued hostile to those who came to woo her, and would not be won.

Nor does it surprise us that amid all these discouragements, the heart of Stanley should have faltered. "The expedition seemed doomed. Promises of reward, kindness, threats, punishment had no effect." But at the same time the spirit of the leader was felt in the command. "The white men," he says, "although selected out of the ordinary class of Englishmen, did their work bravely, heroically. Though suffering from fever and dysentery, insulted by natives, marching under the heat and equatorial rain-storms, they at all times proved themselves of noble, manly natures, stout-hearted, brave, and better than all, true Christians." These are the men by whom empires are made, but for them there was no empire but the memory of duty well done; no trophy, no reward, unless what is to come as the reward for well-doing in the final day of account. Two of them were to sleep near the banks of Victoria N'yanza, victims of disease; the other was to be whirled into eternity over the rapids of the Congo, when his journey was almost at an end.

Sometimes Stanley was in the wilderness without guides. This, however, seemed a happiness compared to his position when he did have guides who betrayed him, as happened early in his expedition in Ukinbu, near the elephant country. In Ukinbu the guides ran away and Stanley found himself on the edge of a wilderness with but ten days' provisions. He had trusted his guide, and purchased a small quantity of food. He endeavoring to pierce the wilderness, but his track was lost in a maze of elephant and rhinoceros trails. He could only depend upon his compass. The second day found a jungle of acacia and euphorbia, through which the men had to crawl and scramble along the ground, "under natural tunnels of embracing shrubbery, cutting the convolvuli and creepers, thrusting aside stout thorny bushes, and by various detours taking advantage of every slight opening the jungle afforded."

There was no water. Overcome with hunger and thirst the command began to straggle and faint. Some managed to reach camp, where medicine and restoratives brought them strength. Five never returned. One of them was found dead in the woods, and of the other four it is believed "they hopelessly wandered on until they also fell down and died." On the fifth day they came to a village, but the village comprised only four negroes, their wives and little ones, and had no food for such a large command. Stanley learned that there was another village twenty-nine miles away, named Suna, and he sent a picked band of twenty, the strongest and most enduring, to visit Suna and bring food. He scoured the woods for game, but there was no game. A lion's den was found. In this den were two young lions, which were killed and skinned.

But to what avail were two lion cubs to an expedition of starved men? Surely here was death at last—death, defeat, annihilation; and this proud expedition which had set out so gloriously from Zanzibar, resolved to force the mystery of a continent and fight its way to the Atlantic, why, all that could happen to it was to perish in an African jungle of lions and elephants, to perish as so many had done before, leaving only the name of Stanley to be added to the sad, dismal roll of martyrs to African discovery.

"Returning to camp," says Stanley, "from the fruitless hunt" nothing in all that wilderness but the two lion cubs—"I was struck with the pinched faces of the poor people that I could have almost wept, if I might have done so without exciting fear of our fate in their minds. I resolved to do something toward relieving the pressing needs of fierce hunger." Stanley had medical stores, which in such an expedition are a sacred trust. He opened a sheet iron trunk and made it serve as a pot. Into this pot he doled out five pounds of Scotch oatmeal—perhaps the most precious of all his possessions—and three tins of "revalenta arabica," and made a gruel. "It was a rare sight," he says, "to see those poor famine-stricken people hasten to that Torquay dress trunk and assist me to cook the huge pot of gruel; to watch them fan the fire to a fierce heat, and, with their gourds full of water, stand by to cool the foaming liquid when it threatened to overflow."

The porridge kept the expedition alive for forty-eight hours, when Stanley heard the musketry of his returning embassy coming in from Suna with food. "The grain was most greedily seized by the hungry people, and so animating was the report of the purveyors that the soldiers clamored to be led away that afternoon." And so our leader marched on.—John Russell Young, in Harper's Magazine for October.