“I Presume”

“As cold waters to a thirsty soul, So is good news from a far country.”

— Proverbs 25:25, ASV

The Journalist

Henry Morton Stanley was not, as he liked to suggest, an American. He had been born John Rowlands in north Wales in 1841, the illegitimate son of a young mother who did not keep him. He grew up partly in a workhouse, went to sea as a teenager, landed in New Orleans, took the name of a merchant who befriended him, fought on both sides of the American Civil War, and became a newspaper correspondent. In 1869, according to his own account, James Gordon Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald, summoned him and told him to go and find Livingstone, whatever it cost. Bennett wanted a story. Livingstone had not been heard from for years, and many believed he was dead.

Stanley took his time. He covered other assignments first, and reached Zanzibar only in January 1871. There, with Bennett’s money, he assembled a large and well-equipped caravan, with nearly two hundred porters and soldiers, and set out for the interior in March. It was a hard march. Stanley drove his men brutally, with the whip, and several died on the way. He was ill himself, and fought his way through a war between Arab-Swahili traders and the forces of a chief named Mirambo. Late in 1871 he approached Ujiji.

An Englishman

Livingstone’s journal records how the news reached him. Susi came running as fast as he could, gasped out that he had seen an Englishman, and ran off again to meet the stranger. Stanley’s caravan was marching into Ujiji with the American flag at its head and the porters firing their guns in salute. The whole town came out to see.

Stanley’s account of the meeting is one of the most famous passages in the literature of travel. He describes walking through the crowd towards a pale, grey-bearded old man in a faded blue cap and a red-sleeved waistcoat, standing in front of his house with a few of his men. He wanted to run to him, he says, and to embrace him, but he did not know how an Englishman would receive such a thing. So, in Stanley’s own account, he walked up deliberately, took off his hat, and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Livingstone said yes, by Stanley’s account, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly. They shook hands, and Stanley thanked God that he had been permitted to see him. Livingstone replied that he was thankful to be there to welcome him.

The four famous words have been quoted, parodied and repeated for a century and a half. It is worth knowing how fragile our evidence for them is. They come from Stanley alone. The pages of his diary for the days around the meeting are missing, and his first newspaper report and his book do not give exactly the same wording. Even the date is uncertain. Stanley gave 10 November 1871 in his book, but other versions of his writing give 3 November, and Livingstone’s own journal, whose dating had gone wrong during his illness, points to late October. The greeting may have been spoken as Stanley reported it. It may have been improved in the telling. What is not in doubt is that the two men met at Ujiji that autumn, and that the meeting saved Livingstone’s life.

New Life

Stanley had brought food, medicine, cloth, letters and news. Livingstone had been near starvation, and within days, with good food and company, he began to recover. Stanley reported that the old man kept telling him that he had brought him new life. Livingstone’s own journal speaks of the overwhelming kindness of Bennett in sending Stanley, and of Stanley in carrying it out, and of his gratitude.

The proverb at the head of this chapter fits the moment exactly: “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, So is good news from a far country.” Livingstone had had no reliable news for years. Stanley told him of the opening of the Suez Canal, the war between France and Prussia, the deaths of public men, and events in his own family. There were letters from his children. Livingstone devoured all of it. He had been more alone than almost any man alive, and now he was not.

Four Months

The two men spent about four months together. In November and December 1871 they explored the northern end of Lake Tanganyika by canoe, to see whether a river flowed out of it there, which might connect the lake to the Nile. They found that the river at the northern end, the Rusizi, flowed into the lake, not out of it. Tanganyika was not the source of the Nile. Livingstone took the news calmly. He still believed that the Lualaba, farther west, was the Nile.

Then they walked east together to Unyanyembe, near the modern town of Tabora, where Stanley had left stores. They arrived in February 1872. Stanley urged Livingstone to come home with him. He was old, ill and worn out; his family wanted him; the world wanted to see him. Livingstone refused. He would not go home, he said, until he had finished his work, which meant tracing the sources of the Nile, and he believed that he was close. Stanley promised to send him men and supplies from the coast.

Stanley’s Portrait

Stanley came to Ujiji as a hard-bitten journalist who had expected, by his own admission, to find a difficult and perhaps unpleasant man. He left as Livingstone’s devoted admirer. His book, How I Found Livingstone, published later in 1872, contains a long portrait of him that is one of the most valuable descriptions we have, because it comes from an outsider who lived with him day after day.

He described Livingstone’s gentleness, his humour, his patience, his love of a joke, his kindness to his men and theirs to him, and his refusal to complain. And he described his faith. Livingstone’s religion, Stanley wrote, was not of the theoretical kind, but a constant, earnest, sincere practice, neither demonstrative nor loud, but quiet and practical and always at work. Every Sunday Livingstone held a short service for his men. He read the Bible daily. He did not preach at Stanley, but Stanley was moved by what he saw.

Stanley’s portrait was not the whole truth. He did not see, or chose not to mention, Livingstone’s bitterness against Kirk, his capacity for resentment, or the darker side of the years in Manyema. His Livingstone is a saint, and Stanley needed a saint for his story. But he saw something real, and his testimony matters because he had no reason, when he set out, to admire a missionary.

It is also worth remembering what Stanley became. In later years he led expeditions that killed many Africans, and he worked for King Leopold II of Belgium in establishing the Congo Free State, a regime of forced labour and terror that killed vast numbers of Congolese people. Livingstone could not have foreseen that. But it is one of the ironies of his life that the man who found him, and whose book made him an icon, went on to serve the most brutal colonial regime in Africa, in the very basin of the river Livingstone had thought was the Nile.

The Parting

On 14 March 1872, Stanley left Unyanyembe for the coast. He carried Livingstone’s journal, sealed, to be delivered to his daughter Agnes, and a bundle of letters, among them letters for the New York Herald describing the slave trade. In his writing on the slave trade from these months at Unyanyembe, intended for the American public, Livingstone set down the sentence that would be carved on his tomb: a prayer, made in his solitude, that Heaven’s rich blessing would come down on everyone, whether American, English or Turk, who would help “to heal this open sore of the world.” It was not among his last words, as the Abbey inscription would later suggest, but was written about a year before his death, and it names Americans first, perhaps because he was writing for American readers. It is a prayer for anyone, of any nation, who would act.

The two men walked a little way together, and then parted. Stanley wrote that he turned away weeping. He never saw Livingstone again.

Five days later, on 19 March 1872, Livingstone turned fifty-nine. He wrote in his journal: “Birthday. My Jesus, my king, my life, my all; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee.” He went on to ask God to accept him, and to grant that before the year was out he might finish his task, and he asked it in the name of Jesus.

It is the most quoted prayer he ever wrote, and it deserves to be. It is not a prayer for success, or for fame, or even for health. It is a prayer of renewed self-giving, made by a man who had given himself so often that the act had become a kind of habit, and who still found it necessary to do it again. He asked to finish his task within the year. He very nearly did, though not in the way he hoped.

Waiting at Unyanyembe

For five months after Stanley left, Livingstone waited at Unyanyembe for the men Stanley had promised to send. He read, wrote letters, worked over his notes and maps, and recovered some of his strength. He wrote to his children, and in a letter to his daughter Agnes he said, in effect, that if God allowed him to help bring the inland slave trade to an end, he would not regret all his hunger and toil. The fame he cared about by now was not the fame of a discoverer. It was the influence that might move governments.

The men arrived in August 1872: some fifty-seven porters hired at the coast, and with them a group of young Africans from the mission school at Nasik in India, sent to join him. Among them was a young man of about twenty named Jacob Wainwright, a Yao by birth, who had been taken by slave traders as a boy, freed by a British warship, and educated by the Church Missionary Society in India. He could read and write English well, and he kept a diary. He would be one of those who carried Livingstone home.