The Word of a Gentleman

“And Jesus came to them and spake unto them, saying, All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations … and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

— Matthew 28:18-20, ASV

The Long Way Back

The journey back from Luanda took a year. Livingstone was ill for much of it, with fever and a bout of rheumatic fever that left him unable to travel for weeks. He went slowly, rewriting the journal that had gone down with the Forerunner and taking observations to correct his maps. The men carried the goods they had earned at Luanda, and the gifts that the Portuguese and British had sent for Sekeletu, including a colonel’s uniform and a horse. In September 1855 the party walked back into Linyanti.

The men were heroes. They had been to the sea and come back, and for days they told the people of Linyanti what they had seen: the ocean, the ships, the city with its stone houses, the warship with its guns. Livingstone recorded that they boasted that they had gone to the end of the world and had turned back only when there was no more land. Sekeletu was delighted with his gifts and with the reports. The faithfulness of the twenty-seven had made Livingstone a trusted man among the Makololo.

But Livingstone had concluded that the western route would not do. It was too long, too difficult, too unhealthy, and it passed through country where the slave trade was entrenched. He would try the other way, eastward down the Zambezi to the Indian Ocean. If the river was navigable, it might be the highway he was looking for.

Mosi-oa-Tunya

In early November 1855 he set out again, with a much larger party provided by Sekeletu, more than a hundred men this time, and with a guide and interpreter named Sekwebu, a man who had lived in the country to the east and knew its languages. Sekeletu himself came with them for the first part of the way.

For years Livingstone had heard of a great waterfall on the Zambezi, below the Makololo country, which the people called Mosi-oa-Tunya, “the smoke that thunders,” because of the columns of spray that rose from it and could be seen for miles. In the middle of November 1855, Sekeletu’s men took him by canoe down the river to an island on the very lip of the falls, and he lay down and looked over the edge into the chasm where the whole width of the Zambezi plunges into a narrow gorge.

He described it in Missionary Travels with a rare lyricism. No one could imagine the beauty of the view from anything seen in England, he wrote, and it had never been seen before by European eyes, but scenes so lovely, he thought, must have been gazed on by angels in their flight. He named the falls after Queen Victoria, the only English name, he said, that he gave to anything in the country. He planted peach and apricot stones on the island, and he cut his initials and the date on a tree there, which he said was the only time he had indulged in that kind of vanity.

The renaming of the falls is often taken as a symbol of his whole life, and rightly. The falls had a name already. The people who lived near them had known them for centuries, had worshipped at them, and had brought him there. Livingstone saw, and was moved, and gave them the name of a distant queen, as though they had not been seen until he saw them. He meant it as an honour to the falls, not an insult to the people. But it was the beginning of a habit of mind, his and his country’s, in which what Africans knew did not count until a European had recorded it. Zambia, since independence, has used the old name alongside the new, and the national park around the falls is called Mosi-oa-Tunya.

The Healthy Highlands

Below the falls, the party left the river and crossed the high plateau to the north of the Zambezi, the country of the Batoka people. It was cooler and drier than the river valleys, and Livingstone thought that it was healthy, free from the fever that killed Europeans lower down. Here, he believed, was the place for missions and for European settlement: a high, fertile, well-watered country, with a large population, reached by a great river from the sea. The vision that would drive him for the next eight years was born on this plateau.

The party descended again to the Zambezi and followed it east, through country that grew more hostile as they approached the territory of the Portuguese and their slave-trading allies. Some of the chiefs along the river had been raided by slavers, and they suspected that any large armed party was another raid.

14 January 1856

On 14 January 1856 the party reached the point where the Luangwa River joins the Zambezi, near the ruins of the old Portuguese settlement of Zumbo. The people of the chief on the other side had gathered in large numbers, armed, and Livingstone’s men believed that they would be attacked when they tried to cross. That night he wrote in his journal one of the most famous passages he ever wrote. Blaikie printed it from the manuscript.

He confessed to great turmoil of spirit at the prospect that all his plans for the welfare of that great region and its people might be brought to nothing the next day by the men across the river, whom he described with the contemptuous word his age used for peoples it thought uncivilised. Then he went on. He read, he wrote, that Jesus had come and said that all power was given to him in heaven and in earth, and had told his disciples to go and teach all nations, promising to be with them always, even to the end of the world. That, Livingstone wrote, was the word of a gentleman of the most sacred and strict honour, and it settled the matter. He would not cross secretly by night, as he had intended. Should such a man as he flee? No; he would take observations for latitude and longitude that night, though they might be his last. And he added that he felt quite calm now, and thanked God.

The word he used is not one this book would use, and it described people who, as it turned out, were not hostile at all, only cautious. The entry is recounted here because it is one of the keys to Livingstone’s faith, and because it is honest to show that his faith and his prejudice could sit in the same sentence. The people across the river had good reason to fear a large armed party coming down the Zambezi. Livingstone had good reason to fear them. Both sides were frightened, and both sides, the next day, behaved with more restraint than they feared the other would.

A Promise Taken at Its Word

What is remarkable in the entry is the way Livingstone came to rest. He was not reassured by any change in the situation. Nothing had changed. He was reassured by a promise. Jesus had said, “lo, I am with you always,” and Livingstone took the words as the word of a gentleman, a man of honour who would not break his promise. In his own phrase, borrowed from an old saying, that was the end of it: there was nothing more to be said.

It is a very Scottish way of trusting God, and a very Victorian one. It treats the promise of Christ as a kind of contract, binding on the one who made it, and it finds peace in the fact that Christ keeps his word. Some readers may find the language too stiff. But it captures something true. The promise at the end of Matthew’s Gospel is not a feeling. It is a word spoken by the one to whom “all authority” has been given, and it holds whether or not we feel it. Livingstone did not feel calm and then believe. He believed, and then he felt calm.

The next morning he crossed. The armed men watched, and did not attack. Livingstone took his men over in a single canoe, a few at a time, staying on the bank himself until the last of them had gone across, and showing the watching people his watch and his magnifying glass to keep them interested. Then he crossed himself, thanked them, and went on. He did not forget the verse. He would come back to it, in other words and other dangers, for the rest of his life.

Tete and the Sea

Below Zumbo the danger increased again. A chief named Mpende threatened to attack, and was won over only after tense negotiation, helped by Sekwebu’s skill as an interpreter and by Livingstone’s insistence that his party came in peace and were not Portuguese. On 2 March 1856, exhausted, Livingstone reached Tete, the Portuguese town on the lower Zambezi. The Portuguese commandant received him kindly.

Between Zumbo and Tete, however, he had made a decision that would have consequences he could not foresee. To save time and avoid hostile country, he had left the river for a stretch and travelled overland, south of it. In doing so he missed a long section of the Zambezi above Tete, where the river runs through a narrow gorge called Kebrabasa. He had been told that there were rapids there, but he did not see them. He assumed that they could be passed by a steamer at high water. He would discover, two years later, how wrong he was.

He left most of the Makololo men at Tete, more than a hundred of them, with land to cultivate and the promise of the Portuguese commandant to look after them. He promised them that he would come back and take them home. Then he went down the river to Quelimane, on the coast, which he reached on 20 May 1856. He had crossed Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, the first European known to have done so, though Portuguese-African traders had made the crossing before him.

Sekwebu

A British warship took him from Quelimane to Mauritius. Sekwebu, the guide and interpreter who had brought the party safely down the Zambezi, went with him, meaning to go on to England. He had never been to sea. On the voyage, and at Mauritius, the strangeness of everything overwhelmed him. Livingstone wrote that Sekwebu became insane, and in a fit of terror jumped overboard and was drowned. His body was never found.

Livingstone grieved for him. He had depended on Sekwebu as he had on Pitsane and the others, and he had brought him out of his world into one that destroyed him. Sekwebu is a small figure in the books, given a few lines. He deserves to be remembered as one of those whose skill and courage made the crossing of Africa possible, and as the first of many Africans who paid with their lives for their association with Livingstone’s journeys.

Livingstone sailed on from Mauritius, through the Red Sea and Egypt, and reached England on 9 December 1856. He had been away from Britain for sixteen years. He was forty-three years old, and he was about to become the most famous man in the country.