Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard Read Free Book Online Page A

the same path, or by reports that a rogue Zulu splinter group known as the Mazitu were marauding and killing near Lake Nyassa. When trouble came, Livingstone would sidestep it and move forward. Always forward.
    He was glad to be back in Africa, but the rest of his caravan lacked Livingstone’s enthusiasm. There was no trail along the Rovuma, so paths had to be hacked through the brush. His pack animals were dying from sleeping sickness, and after the first hundred miles of travel the terrain had angled upward as they left the coastal plain behind. The temperature was dropping as the elevation rose, and cold south winds began to blow. Livingstone had hired a band of porters to supplement his original contingent, back at the mouth of the Rovuma, but they chafed at the hard work and turned back on 11 June. That left Livingstone with his original band of twenty-six porters and soldiers, who had grown tired and surly in the extreme conditions.
    Part of the blame rested on Livingstone. Not only had he chosen his companions poorly, but his habit of wandering ahead to scout the trail left the group unsupervised. The result was chaos: the Johanna porters stole Livingstone’s precious cloth and beads, dawdled, and conveniently lost his non-essential supplies when they grew tired of carrying them; the sepoys, those Indian soldiers hand-picked by their country’s governor to protect Livingstone from hostile tribes, were useless. Livingstone complained ‘they would not get up in the mornings to march, lay in the paths, and gave their pouches and muskets to the natives to carry’. The sepoys grew so desperate to go home they tried to sabotage the expedition by poking the pack animals with their bayonets, and encouraging the porters to run off with them. Only a small handful of men, led by Chuma and Susi, were committed to staying by Livingstone’s side for as long as it took to complete his work.
    Livingstone endured the personnel issues, treating them as a necessary distraction. He focused his attention on exploration. With a chronometer and sextant he pinpointed the latitude and longitude of villages and rivers. A thermometer helped him divine altitude. His interests veered far from the merely scientific, however, and Livingstone wrote down anything else of interest that struck his fancy. He wrote about the holes dug in the ground so tribes could slow-cook the heads of zebra, the feet of elephants and the humps of rhinoceros. He noted that fire was so important for safety from wild animals and mosquitoes at night that villagers carried their kindling with them wherever they went. He wrote about how pottery was made, and casually noted that pottery shards were everywhere. But for every anthropological notation, a remark about slavery was sure to follow: the little girl orphaned because she was too weak to walk alongside her parents as they were taken away; the tribes who sold other tribes into slavery and wore the expensive white calico that was their reward; the well-dressed woman with the slave-collar around her neck,demanding that someone free her but receiving no reply from bystanders. Livingstone wrote of those injustices with growing rage, furious with the Arabs and Portuguese for their behaviour, and with the Africans who assisted them. ‘At Chenjewala’s’, he wrote of a village visited on 27 June, ‘the people are usually much startled when I explain that the number of slaves we see dead on the road have been killed partly by those who sold them; for I tell them that if they sell their fellows, they are like the man who holds the victim while the Arab performs the murder.’
    The journal entries often stretched to several pages per day, jotted with a small fountain pen with a steel nib. Livingstone kept his journals in a watertight tin box he’d purchased just for that purpose. The box would protect his words from the elements, and with luck even float if swept down a river. For the words were his gold, his future. They