1870
London
A year passed in a blur of hope and tragedy without any sign of Livingstone. He had been missing for four years and was considered, most likely, to be dead. One of his letters, dated May 1869, had arrived in Zanzibar the following November. However, his parting words gave little hope for his safety. He was heading into cannibal country, he said, and would likely be eaten. Not even the Arabs reported seeing him since.
Meanwhile, Stanley was in the process of traveling the Asian subcontinent, fulfilling Bennett's orders, girding for his secret, impossible task. And in London, Murchison was dealing with two shattering reports about Livingstone. The first came to light on February 2, when the Times published a letter from a British naval officer in West Africa swearing that Livingstone was burned by natives in the Congo. “He passed through a native town and was three days on his journey when the king of the town died. The natives declared Dr. Livingstone had bewitched him,” Captain Ernest Cochrane of HMS Peterel wrote. “Then they killed him and burnt him. This news comes by a Portuguese trader traveling that way. Livingstone was in the lakes at the head of the Congo, where he was going to come out.”
There was a very good chance the news was true. As a naval officer, Cochrane was assumed to be a man of honor. And it was also true that the alleged burning took place along the same westerly path Murchison had long predicted Livingstone would follow. Murchison, however, brushed off the report as just another act of Portuguese insolence. They were jittery about losing Africa and weren't above planting lies about their unlikely rival. “I can see no grounds for despondency,” Murchison told the RGS in his president's address.
He was, however, thoroughly disheartened by a letter Vice-Consul Kirk wrote from Zanzibar on March 5. Murchison was fond of Kirk—the younger man's hoodwinking by Musa and the Johanna men in 1867 notwithstanding. He saw Kirk, who was both a fellow Scot and RGS member, as his conduit into Africa and Livingstone. Murchison also knew that the Arab slavers were a cornucopia of information about the African interior, fully linked to the bush telegraph. Kirk's letter, however, confessed to Murchison the sorrowful news that none of the caravans returning from the interior had a scrap of intelligence respecting Livingstone.
Murchison dealt with the news by imagining that his lost friend Livingstone had concocted a brand new agenda. “The theory which I have now formed to account for this entire want of information is that he has quitted the eastern region entirely and has been following the waters flowing from the western side of the lake,” Murchison said, publicly establishing once and for all that Livingstone was not coming out via Zanzibar. “These will lead him necessarily across a large unknown region, to emerge, I trust, at some port on the west coast.”
Just to be safe, Murchison wanted to send a shipment of relief supplies to Ujiji. The tactic had been tried twice before, in 1868 and 1869. Arabs had looted the majority of the first shipment and a cholera epidemic had killed seven of the porters carrying the second. The survivors helped themselves to the supplies, leaving nothing for Livingstone. They were so sure Livingstone was dead they even threw away his letters from home.
Despite those failures, Murchison wanted to try one more time. He fearlessly approached Lord Clarendon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and a man professing ambivalence about Livingstone's achievements, to ask his intercession. Murchison wanted Clarendon to request a thousand pounds from the Government to buy relief supplies. If approved, the money would be hand-carried to Zanzibar by the British Consul, H. A. Churchill, who was in London on sick leave. Stores would be purchased and shipped by ivory caravan to Ujiji.
Clarendon agreed to present the request, even though it was politically risky. While the rest of England professed great sympathy over Livingstone's disappearance, Prime Minister William Gladstone had been notably silent. Portly and balding, the esteemed legislator was a devout Christian. A favorite pastime was walking the streets of London late at night, convincing prostitutes to seek another profession. He practiced self-flagellation as a means of fending off feelings of sexual temptation engendered by those encounters. That inner conflict was also on display in his feelings for Livingstone. Gladstone had been a vocal advocate of Livingstone and the ill-fated Universities Mission to Central Africa. He met personally with Livingstone before the beginning of the Zambezi expedition. They met informally again on his return, bumping into one another at a dinner party at Lord Palmerston's home. Livingstone called his conversation with Gladstone “very affable.”
Gladstone, however, distanced himself from Livingstone after the mission's failure, and the deaths of Bishop Mackenzie and his two colleagues. Politically, the Prime Minister shifted his focus from Africa and the foreign expansion favored by his rival, Benjamin Disraeli, to focus more on domestic issues like Irish Home Rule. By begging Gladstone for money Murchison was asking the Government to take a stand one way or another on his friend.
On May 7, 1870, during a four-hour Saturday afternoon cabinet meeting, the money was approved. Livingstone was the tenth item on a thirteen-item agenda, preceded by an election bill and followed by a million-pound loan guarantee to New Zealand. Gladstone knew public sentiment was firmly behind Livingstone, and would have risked unnecessary controversy by denying the request. Thanks to Gladstone's tightfisted and widely loathed Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, the Government didn't lose face. Instead of a humanitarian gift from a grateful nation, Robert Lowe decreed that Livingstone's thousand pounds would be an advance on his next two years of consular salary.
Nonetheless, it was money. “It will take two months or more for these supplies to reach Ujiji from Zanzibar,” a relieved Murchison explained to the RGS on June 14. “Therefore all anxiety must be set aside for months to come. In about seven or eight months good news might be expected, and soon after that I hope we might see our friend again in his native country.”
Livingstone's salary advance was duly transported to Zanzibar, relief supplies were purchased, a small caravan was hired, and the British Consulate's office concluded preparations for what represented England's final official attempt to help Livingstone. Either the supplies would find him and he would come out of Africa under his own power, or he would die and be laid in an anonymous grave. By all appearances, there seemed to be nothing more Murchison could do for Livingstone.
Ironically, in October 1870, as the seven-member relief caravan finalized preparations in Zanzibar, seventy-eight-year-old Sir Roderick Murchison was paralyzed by a stroke.
On November 1, the relief caravan sailed from Zanzibar to Bagamoyo, the traditional starting point for travel inland to Ujiji. “After a vast amount of delay,” wrote Consul Churchill, “I have succeeded in sending off to Dr. Livingstone a reinforcement of seven men, who have engaged to place themselves at the disposal of the Doctor as porters, boatmen, etc., and a quantity of beads, cloths, and provisions for his use.”
In December, Churchill was stricken with a severe malaria attack and returned to England on medical leave. Until a replacement could be appointed, his post was assumed by Livingstone's old protégé-turned-nemesis, John Kirk. Despite a recent ruling from his immediate superiors in Bombay that forbade medical officers from appointment to consular positions, and despite opposition from the old guard diplomatic corps, Kirk was determined to keep his new job in Zanzibar. It was the opportunity for status and power he'd always craved. “I had been given,” Kirk later wrote of the temporary position, “a fair chance of distinguishing myself.”
Kirk's ambitions would not be easily realized. As 1870 came to a close, Kirk was unaware that Henry Morton Stanley was, quite literally, right over the horizon. In fact, he was only days from Zanzibar. Stanley's search for a second coup, and Kirk's search for his first, could only mean a collision of egos.
Livingstone, oblivious to either man's plotting, was the prize.