Stanley in Africa

But on May 7th, Stanley received an intercepted letter from Selim Bey which stated that the rebels at Wadelai had changed their mind, risen in mutiny, and robbed the loyal forces of all their ammunition. They also asked with the greatest effrontery that Stanley be called before them and questioned as to his future objects before they consented to go with him. The letter in addition contained hints of a plot to attack and capture his expedition in case he started without giving them satisfaction. Instantly Stanley assembled all the officers in his camp and asked them if they felt he would be justified in remaining there after April 10th. They all replied in the negative. Going to Emin, he said, “There Pasha, you have your answer. We march on the 10th.” Emin asked whether they could acquit him in their consciences for abandoning his people, alluding to those who had not yet arrived from Wadelai. Stanley replied that they could most certainly do so, as to all who had not arrived by the 10th. All of Stanley’s accounts of this part of his expedition bear evidence of trouble with Emin. He still trusted the rebellious soldiers, even those who had agreed to leave for Egypt. He mistrusted Stanley’s ability to reach Zanzibar with so numerous a caravan, on account of a lack of food. He had left many valuable servants behind, whom he desired to take along, but he said, “They are unwilling to accompany me.” This opened Stanley’s eyes. He says, “It now became clear that the Pasha had lost his authority at Wadelai, however obstinately he clung to his belief in his forces there.”

May 10th came and Stanley started with his immense expedition for the sea, his objective being Zanzibar, on the east coast of Africa. He had promised Emin to march slowly for a few days in order to give Selim, with such servants and stragglers as he might bring along, an opportunity to overtake them, but he never saw them more. To pursue a route eastward from Albert Nyanza was impracticable, for the powerful Unyoro and Uganda tribes lay in that direction. These and other tribes had been infected with the Mahdi spirit, and would therefore prove hostile. He therefore chose a route in a southerly direction, till the extreme southern waters of Victoria Nyanza had been rounded, when he would be on the natural lines running from Zanzibar into the interior. Besides, this would bring him through nearly 400 miles of practically undiscovered country.

Zanzibar, the objective point of the journey, is on an island of the same name, twenty miles from the east coast of Africa, and in latitude 6° South. It is a Mohammedan town of 30,000 people, with many good houses and mosques. Though the soil is excellent and prolific of fruits and vegetables, the town depends for its prosperity on trade and commerce. When the slave trade was driven from the Atlantic coast of Africa, it found its way to the eastern, or Pacific coast, and flourished in a manner never before known. Zanzibar, always notorious as a slave depot, became the recognized headquarters of the horrid traffic, and rapidly rose to a position of great wealth and influence. Her slave market attracted the notice and excited the disgust and indignation of strangers of every creed and country. Nothing could be more revolting than sight of the Arabic purchasers of slaves examining the build, the eyes, the teeth, and all the physical qualities of the victims offered for sale in the marts. Tens of thousands of slaves were known to pass through Zanzibar annually on their way to various parts of Egypt and Turkey. On the appearance of British cruisers on the coast, with orders to capture and condemn all slave dhows, the Sultan of Turkey prohibited the traffic at Zanzibar. But this only diverted its course. The next step was to induce the Sultan to issue a general proclamation, prohibiting the trade in all places on the coast, under his authority. This was done in 1876. The result has been a considerable diminution of the infamous traffic, which can now only be carried on by a system of smuggling, which incurs much risk. Zanzibar is the most important starting point for travelers and missionaries destined for Central Africa, and is a depot for such supplies as may be needed from time to time.

From every point of view his route was well chosen. Skirting the Unyoro country, he fell under their displeasure and became the victim of a fierce attack, which he parried successfully. This opened his way for a considerable distance along the ranges of mountains which pass under the general name of the Baleggas These mountains rise to the immense height of 18,000 to 19,000 feet, and their summits are capped with snow. The huts of the natives were visible on their sides at altitudes of 8,000 feet. During their nineteen marches along the base of these ranges, their severest obstacle was the Semliki river, a bold stream, 100 yards wide, whose crossing was rendered doubly difficult by the Warasmas natives. They formed an ambuscade, from which they delivered a single volley at the travelers, but fortunately it proved ineffective. It did not take much of a demonstration to put them to flight.

After a march of 113 days the southern waters of Victoria Nyanza were reached. From this point Stanley sent letters to the coast stating that his objective was now Mpwapwa, 230 miles inland, whither provisions should be sent. This was done, and an armed escort was furnished him by German officials thence to the coast, at Bagamoyo, opposite Zanzibar, where the expedition arrived about December 1, 1889. Thence steamer was taken to Zanzibar, where the hero of the expedition, together with Emin Pasha, and all the officials, were received with open arms, fetes and acclamations. Telegrams of congratulations poured in from crowned heads, and all parts of the world. A sample from Queen Victoria types them all. London, December 12th:

“My thoughts are after you and your brave followers, whose hardships and dangers are at an end. I again congratulate you all, including the Zanzibaris, who displayed such devotion and fortitude during your marvelous expedition. I trust Emin Pasha is making favorable progress.”

One drawback to all these exultations at Zanzibar was the fact that Emin Pasha, after escaping all the tribulations of the wilderness, had fallen from the piazza of his hotel at Bagamoyo, on December 5th, and received injuries of an alarming nature. The sad announcement of this clouded the occasion somewhat, and gave a tone of melancholy to what would have been unmixed gratulation.

In reply to a cablegram from the Emperor of Germany, Stanley said, December 7th:

“Imperator et rex. My expedition has now reached its end. I have had the honor to be hospitably entertained by Major Weismann and other of your Majesty’s officers under him. Since arriving from Mpwapwa our travels have come to a successful conclusion. We have been taken across from Bagamoyo to Zanzibar by your Majesty’s ships Sperber and Schwalbe, and all honors coupled with great affability, have been accorded us. I gratefully remember the hospitality and princely affability extended to me at Potsdam; and profoundly impressed with your Majesty’s condescension, kindness and gracious welcome. With a full and sincere heart I exclaim, long live the noble Emperor William.”

And writing for the general public, he says:

“Over and above the happy ending of our appointed duties, we have not been unfortunate in geographical discoveries. The Aruwimi is now known from its source to its bourne. The great Congo forest, covering as large an area as France and the Iberian Peninsula, we can now certify to be an absolute fact. The Mountains of the Moon this time, beyond the least doubt, have been located, and Ruwenzori, “The Cloud King” robed in eternal snow, has been seen and its flanks explored, and some of its shoulders ascended, Mounts Gordon Bennett and Mackinnon cones being but giant sentries warding off the approach to the inner area of ‘The Cloud King.’

“On the south-east of the range the connection between Albert Edward Nyanza and the Albert Nyanza has been discovered, and the extent of the former lake is now known for the first time. Range after range of mountains has been traversed, separated by such tracts of pasture land as would make your cowboys out West mad with envy.

“And right under the burning Equator we have fed on blackberries and bilberries, and quenched our thirst with crystal water fresh from snow beds. We have also been able to add nearly six thousand square miles of water to Victoria Nyanza.

“This has certainly been the most extraordinary expedition I have ever led into Africa. A veritable divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed. I say it with all reverence. It has impelled us whither it would, effected its own will, but nevertheless guided and protected us.

“I gave as much good will to my duties as the strictest honor would compel. My faith that the purity of my motive deserved success was firm, but I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.

“Not one officer who was with me will forget the miseries he has endured, yet everyone that started from his home destined to march with the advance column and share its wonderful adventures is here to-day, safe, sound and well.

“This is not due to me. Lieutenant Stairs was pierced with a poisoned arrow like others, but others died and he lives. The poisoned tip came out from under his heart eighteen months after he was pierced. Jephson was four months a prisoner, with guards with loaded rifles around him. That they did not murder him is not due to me.

“These officers have had to wade through as many as seventeen streams and broad expanses of mud and swamp in a day. They have endured a sun that scorched whatever it touched. A multitude of impediments have ruffled their tempers and harassed their hours.

“They have been maddened with the agonies of fierce fevers. They have lived for months in an atmosphere that medical authority declared to be deadly. They have faced dangers every day, and their diet has been all through what legal serfs would have declared to be infamous and abominable, and yet they live.

“This is not due to me any more than the courage with which they have borne all that was imposed upon them by their surroundings or the cheery energy which they bestowed to their work or the hopeful voices which rang in the ears of a deafening multitude of blacks and urged the poor souls on to their goal.

“The vulgar will call it luck. Unbelievers will call it chance, but deep down in each heart remains the feeling, that of verity, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in common philosophy.

“I must be brief. Numbers of scenes crowd the memory.

“Could one but sum them into a picture it would have grand interest. The uncomplaining heroism of our dark followers, the brave manhood latent in such uncouth disguise, the tenderness we have seen issuing from nameless entities, the great love animating the ignoble, the sacrifice made by the unfortunate for one more unfortunate, the reverence we have noted in barbarians, who, even as ourselves, were inspired with nobleness and incentives to duty – of all these we would speak if we could, but I must end with, thanks be to God forever and ever!”

This letter is characteristic of Stanley. The hardships of his journey will fade from memory, but its successes will become historic. He has made the “Dark Continent” dark no longer. To him and his undaunted comrades the world owes a debt of gratitude it will be difficult to repay. The vast tracts of hitherto unknown wilderness through which he traveled will stimulate the enterprise of the pioneer, and the day is not far distant – within the lifetime of our children’s children, perhaps – when the shrill echo of the engine’s whistle will be heard on the rugged sides of snow capped mountains which Stanley has explored; when those illimitable forests will resound with the woodman’s axe, and when the law of commerce will change the tawny native from a savage into a self-respecting citizen. Barbarism will retire from its last stronghold on the planet, as the darkness disappears when the sun rises over the hilltops.

The dire distresses of his long journey, begun two and a-half years ago, are beyond the reach of language. He merely hints at some of them and leaves the rest to the imagination. We ponder his pathetic references to the sturdy loyalty of companions and followers, “maddened with the agonies of fierce fevers,” falling into their graves through the subtle poison with which the natives tipped their arrows and spears, bravely fighting their way through interminable swamps only to succumb at last, and the conviction steals over us that such a story has never been told before and may never be told again. He rescued Emin and his comrades, who were “in daily expectation of their doom,” then turned his face southward, made various and important explorations on his way, and at last came within speaking distance of the millions who followed him from the hour he entered the mouth of the Congo with a solicitude which no other man of our time has commanded.

It would not do to close any account of Stanley’s brilliant career without noting the fact that Emin Pasha, in one of his last published letters, written after he was beyond all danger from Mahdi vengeance and African climate, fully acknowledges the value of the aid sent him, and makes it clear that his hesitation at availing himself of it was due to that high sense of duty which had gained him the name of Emin, or the Faithful One. The last and most trusted of Gordon’s lieutenant’s, he regarded it as his “bounden duty” to follow up the road the General showed him; and it must have been a wrench to tear himself away from the life-work to which he had in a measure consecrated himself – to see the labors of years thrown away, and all his endeavors come to naught. But it could not be helped under the circumstances, and Emin, like many before him, has had to succumb to the force of fate. And so ends for the present the attempt to civilize the equatorial Provinces of Egypt. The ruler of Egypt has formally renounced them, Gordon is dead, and his trusted lieutenant has at last thrown up the sponge. It has been a strange and eventful story, in which the heroes have been of the race which has done so much for the regeneration of the dark places of the world. For a time the dark and turbid waves of ignorance, of slavery, and of cruelty will roll back over this part of the Dark Continent and pessimists will say that nothing more can be done. But it is only for a time. The day will surely come when the dreams of Gordon and of Emin will become actual realities; and when that time comes we may be sure that the name of Henry M. Stanley will be remembered and honored.

EGYPT AND THE NILE

The historic approach to “The Dark Continent” is by way of storied Egypt and its wonderful river, the Nile. In making this approach we must not forget the modern commercial value of the route from Zanzibar, pursued by Stanley (1871-72) while hastening to the rescue of Dr. Livingstone, the great English explorer, nor of that other, by way of the Congo, which bids fair to prove more direct and profitable than any thus far opened.

It was an enterprise as bold as any of those undertaken by hardy mariners to rescue their brother sailors who had met shipwreck while striving to unfold the icy mysteries which surround the North Pole. And, unlike many of these, it was successful. The two great explorers shook hands in October 1871, at Ujiji, on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, in the very heart of the great forest and river system of Africa, and amid dark skinned, but not unkind, strangers, who constitute a native people as peculiar in all respects as their natural surroundings.

We mention this because it was a great achievement in the name of humanity. Livingstone had started on this, his last, exploring tour in 1866, and had been practically lost in African wilds for nearly four years. But it was a greater achievement in the name of science and civilization, for it not only proved that “The Dark Continent” was more easily traversable than had been supposed, but it may be set down as the beginning of a new era in African exploration.

In all ages Africa has been a wonderland to the outside world. As the land of Cush, in Bible story, it was a mystery. It had no bounds, but was the unknown country off to the south of the world where dim legend had fixed the dark races to work out a destiny under the curse laid upon the unfortunate Ham.

Even after Egypt took somewhat definite meaning and shape in Hebrew geography as “The Land of Mizriam,” or the “Land of Ham,” all else in Africa was known vaguely as Ethiopia, marvellous in extent, filled with a people whose color supported the Hamitic tradition, wonderful in animal, vegetable and mineral resources. Thence came Sheba’s queen to see the splendors of Solomon’s court, and thence emanated the long line of Candaces who rivalled Cleopatra in wealth and beauty and far surpassed her in moral and patriotic traits of character.

In olden times the gateway to Africa was Egypt and the Nile. As an empire, history furnishes nothing so curious as Egypt; as a river nothing so interesting as her Nile. We may give to the civilization of China and India whatever date we please, yet that of Egypt will prove as old. And then what a difference in tracing it. That of China and India rests, with a few exceptions, on traditions or on broken crockery tablets and confused shreds of ruins. That of Egypt has a distinct tracery in monuments which have defied the years, each one of which is a book full of grand old stories. We can read to-day, by the light of huge pillar and queer hieroglyphic, back to Menes, the first Egyptian King, and to Abydos, the oldest Egyptian city, and though the period be 4500 years before Christ, scarcely a doubt arises about a leading fact. There was wealth then, art, civilization, empire, and one is ever tempted to ascribe to Egypt the motherhood of that civilization which the Hebrew, Indian, Etruscan, Persian, Roman, Greek and Christian, carved into other shapes.

Says the learned Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, who has spent thirty years among Egyptian monuments and who has mastered their inscriptions, “Literature, the arts, and the ideas of morality and religion, so far as we know, had their birth in the Nile valley. The alphabet, if it was constructed in Phœnicia, was conceived in Egypt, or developed from Egyptian characters. Language, doubtless, is as old as man, but the visible symbols of speech were first formulated from the hieroglyphic figures. The early architecture of the Greeks, the Doric, is a development of the Egyptian. Their vases, ewers, jewelry and other ornaments, are copies from the household luxury of the Pharaohs.”

The influence of Egypt on the Hebrew race has a profound interest for the whole Christian world. Let the time of Abraham be fixed at 1900 B.C. The Great Pyramid of Egypt, built by the first Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, had then been standing for 1500 years. Egypt had a school of architecture and sculpture, a recorded literature, religious ceremonies, mathematics, astronomy, music, agriculture, scientific irrigation, the arts of war, ships, commerce, workers in gold, ivory, gems and glass, the appliances of luxury, the insignia of pride, the forms of government, the indices of law and justice, 2000 years before the “Father of the Faithful” was born, and longer still before the fierce Semitic tribes of the desert gave forth their Hebrew branch, and placed it in the track of authentic history.

In the Bible we read of the “God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.” In the prayer of King Khunaten, dating long before any biblical writing, we find a clear recognition of one God, and a reaching out of the soul after him, embraced in a language without parallel for beauty of expression and grandeur of thought. Ages before the giving of the law on Sinai and the establishment of the Hebrew ceremonial worship, the “Book of the Dead,” with its high moral precepts, was in the possession of every educated Egyptian.

The Jews went out of Egypt with a pure Semitic blood, but with a modified Semitic language. They carried with them in the person of their great leader, Moses, “all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” This is shown by their architecture, religious customs, vestments, persistent kindred traditions. Both Moses and Jesus were of the race whose early lessons were received with stripes from Egyptian masters. The hieroglyphical writings of Egypt contained the possibilities of Genesis, the Iliad, the Psalms, the Æneid, the Inferno, and Paradise Lost. In the thought that planned the Hall of Columns upon the Nile, or sculptured the rock temple of Ammon, was involved the conception of Solomon’s Temple, the Parthenon, St. Peters, Westminster Abbey and every sacred fane of Europe and America.

Therefore, travel and exploration in this wonderful land, the remote but undoubted source of letters, morals, sciences and arts, are always interesting. Thebes, Memphis, Zoan-Tanis, Pitom, Tini, Philæ, Bubastis, Abydos, are but as fragments of mighty monuments, yet each discloses a story abounding in rich realities and more striking in its historic varieties than ever mortal man composed. But for the powerful people that made the Nile valley glow with empire, but for the tasteful people that made it beautiful with cities and monuments, but for the cultured people that wrote on stone and papyrus, were given to costly ceremonies, and who dreamed of the one God, the Israelites would have recrossed the Isthmus of Suez, or the Red Sea, without those germs of civilization, without those notions of Jehovah, which made them peculiar among their desert brethren, and saved them from absorption by the hardy tribes of Arabia and Syria.

In going from Europe across the Mediterranean to Egypt, you may think you can sail directly into one of the mouths of the Nile, and ascend that stream till the first cataract calls a halt. But neither of the great mouths of the Nile give good harbors. Like those of our own Mississippi, they are narrow and exposed by reason of the deposits they continually carry to the sea. The two main mouths of the Nile – it has had several outlets in the course of time – are over a hundred miles apart. The Western, or Rosetta, mouth was once the seat of a famed city from whose ruins were exhumed (1799) the historic “Rosetta Stone,” now in the British Museum. It was found on the site of a temple dedicated by Necho II. to Tum, “The Setting Sun;” and the inscription itself, written in three kinds of writing, Greek, hieroglyphic, and enchorial, or running hand, was a decree of the Egyptian Priests assembled in synod at Memphis in favor of Ptolomy Epiphanes, who had granted them some special favor. Its great value consisted in the fact that it afforded a safe key to the reading of the hieroglyphical writings found on all Egyptian monuments.

The Eastern, or Damietta, mouth of the Nile gives a better harbor, but the boats are slow. Beyond this is Port Said, where you can enter the ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez and pass to the Red Sea. But you are not now in the Egypt you seek. There are no verdant meadows and forests of date palms and mulberry, which give to the interior of Lower Egypt – covered with numerous villages and intersected by thousands of canals – the picturesque character of a real garden of God. You only see a vast sandy plain, stretching on either side of the canal. It is a sea of sand with here and there little islands of reeds or thorny plants, white with salty deposits. In spite of the blue sky, the angel of death has spread his wings over this vast solitude where the least sign of life is an event.

Speaking of canals, reminds one that this Suez Canal, 100 miles long, and built by M. de Lesseps, 1858-1869, was not the first to connect the waters of the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. One was projected B.C. 610 by Pharaoh Necho, but not finished till the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, which ran from the Red Sea to one of the arms of the Nile. It was practically out of use in the time of Cleopatra.

The best Mediterranean port of Egypt is Alexandria, the glory of which has sadly departed. It is far to the west of the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, but is connected by rail with Cairo. Though founded 330 B.C., by Alexander the Great, conqueror of Egypt, as a commercial outlet, and raised to a population, splendor and wealth unexcelled by any ancient city, it is now a modern place in the midst of impressive ruins. Its mixed and unthrifty population is about 165,000.