Recalled

“we are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, ASV

The Valley of Death

When the rains came at the end of 1862, Livingstone took the Pioneer back up the Shire, towing the Lady Nyassa, which he intended to carry in pieces past the Murchison Cataracts and reassemble on Lake Nyasa. He found the valley transformed.

Three years earlier, the Shire valley had been one of the most fertile and populous places he had seen, with large villages and fields of cotton and grain. Now it was a wilderness. A severe drought had destroyed the harvests. At the same time, slave-raiding bands working for a Portuguese-African trader named Mariano, together with Yao raiders from the east, had swept through the region, burning villages and carrying off thousands of people. Those who escaped had fled into the hills or the marshes, where many starved. The Narrative records that the bodies of the dead floated down the river past the steamer every day, and that in the mornings the paddle wheels had to be cleared of corpses. The expedition members walked through deserted villages full of skeletons.

Livingstone was shattered by what he saw. The country he had opened, and had described to the world as the most promising field for missions and trade in Central Africa, had become a graveyard. He blamed the Portuguese, whose officials, he believed, protected and profited from the slave traders, and he wrote about them in the Narrative with an anger that caused a diplomatic incident. Some historians have since asked whether the expedition itself contributed to the disaster, by opening the Shire to outsiders, arming the Makololo who stayed behind, and drawing attention to the region. The drought and the raids had causes of their own that had nothing to do with Livingstone. But it is a painful fact that the valley he had hoped to save was devastated within a few years of his arrival.

Pressed on Every Side

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s description of his own ministry, written to a church that doubted him: pressed on every side, yet not crushed; perplexed, yet not in despair; persecuted, yet not forsaken; struck down, yet not destroyed. Paul does not pretend that he is not pressed or perplexed. He insists only that the pressure has not destroyed him, because the power at work in him is God’s, not his own.

The years 1862 to 1864 were the worst of Livingstone’s life up to that point. His wife was dead. His bishop was dead. His expedition was failing, his colleagues were leaving, and the country he loved was being destroyed before his eyes. He was perplexed, and he was struck down. He was not, by any account, destroyed. He kept a journal through it all, and it records grief and anger and much self-justification, but it also records prayer, and a stubborn refusal to believe that God had abandoned Africa or him. It was in these years that he began to say, more clearly than before, that his great work was not to found missions or open trade routes but to expose the slave trade to the world, so that the world would act to stop it.

The Recall

The expedition’s members were leaving one by one. Kirk and Charles Livingstone, both seriously ill, went home in May 1863. Kirk had served loyally for five years, and Livingstone parted from him on good terms, but Kirk’s private journals from the expedition record sharp criticisms of his leader’s judgement, his temper, and his treatment of the others. They were not written for publication, and they were not unfair.

In July 1863 a letter arrived from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, recalling the expedition. The government had spent a great deal of money on it, and it had produced, as far as the government could see, a blocked river, a dead bishop, a failed mission, angry Portuguese allies and a series of resignations. The expedition was to end by the close of the year. Livingstone accepted the decision without protest, though he was bitterly hurt.

Before he left, he made one more journey on foot, in the second half of 1863, walking west and north from the Shire towards the slave routes west of Lake Nyasa. He wanted to see where the captives came from and where they went. He saw enough. When he came back, he took the two steamers down the Shire on the floods of early 1864 and handed the Pioneer over to the navy.

Across the Indian Ocean

That left the Lady Nyassa, his own ship, bought with the profits of Missionary Travels. He could have sold it to the Portuguese, but he would not, because he feared it would be used in the slave trade. He decided to sell it in India instead. In April 1864 he sailed it out of Zanzibar for Bombay, two and a half thousand miles across the Indian Ocean, in a small river steamer never meant for the open sea. His crew was a handful of Europeans and a group of young African men from the Zambezi, among them Chuma and Wikatani, the two boys freed in the Shire Highlands. Livingstone had never captained a ship. He navigated by his own observations, and the monsoon was about to break. The voyage took about six weeks. They arrived safely in June 1864, to the astonishment of everyone who saw the little ship come into Bombay harbour.

It was a reckless thing to do, and it was also one of the most remarkable feats of seamanship of the time. It is a fair picture of Livingstone at his best and worst: brave, resourceful, unwilling to let a principle go, and so careless of risk that he took a dozen other lives into his hands on a gamble. The African crew members, who had never been to sea before, showed as much courage as he did. Chuma and Wikatani were left in Bombay to be educated at a mission school, and Livingstone went on to England.

Robert

He reached London in July 1864. Waiting for him was the news of his eldest son.

Robert Livingstone was eighteen. He had been the most troubled of the children, angry, unsettled and resentful of his father’s absence. In 1863 he had been sent to Natal, in South Africa, with the intention that he would go on to join his father on the Zambezi. He did not go on. Instead he took ship for America and, in Boston, enlisted in the Union army in the American Civil War under a false name, Rupert Vincent. He wrote to his father that he had taken another name so as not to bring further dishonour on his family. He was wounded, captured, and taken to the Confederate prison at Salisbury, North Carolina, where he died in December 1864. His father did not learn the details of his death until later.

It is a heartbreaking story, and it belongs in a book about Livingstone, because Robert’s life was shaped by his father’s calling as surely as Mary’s was. Livingstone loved his children and wrote them many affectionate and earnest letters, full of advice and of prayers for their souls. But he was rarely present, and when he was, he was a stern and demanding father, as his own father had been. Paul wrote, “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, ASV). Robert was provoked, and the nurture came mostly by letter. Livingstone grieved for him, and he seems to have blamed Robert more than himself. That, too, was characteristic.

Newstead

He spent most of the following year in Britain. For several months he lived at Newstead Abbey, the old home of Lord Byron in Nottinghamshire, as the guest of William Frederick Webb, a friend from his hunting days at Kolobeng. There, with his brother Charles, he wrote the Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi, published in 1865. It defended the expedition, attacked the Portuguese, and passed lightly over its quarrels and failures. It did not sell nearly as well as Missionary Travels.

He spent time with his children, who were growing up without him. In June 1865 his mother died in Hamilton, and he went north to bury her. He spoke at the British Association, attacking the Portuguese slave trade. And he began to plan his next journey.

The idea came from Sir Roderick Murchison and the Royal Geographical Society. The great unsolved question of African geography was the source of the Nile. Several explorers had claimed to find it, at Lake Victoria or Lake Albert, and the claims were disputed. Murchison suggested that Livingstone should go to the region between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika, find the watershed, and settle the question. Livingstone agreed, on one condition: that he should go as a missionary, not only as a geographer. He wrote that he would not go simply as a geographer, but as a missionary, and do geography by the way. He also intended to see the slave routes for himself, and to expose them.

The government gave him a small grant and the title of consul, without a salary, to the rulers of the interior. His friend James Young gave him a thousand pounds. In August 1865 he left Britain for the last time. He was fifty-two. He went by way of Paris, where he left his daughter Agnes at school, and Bombay, where he sold the Lady Nyassa at a loss and recruited men. In January 1866 he arrived at Zanzibar.