Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Not at all true,” Stanley confessed in person to his friend several months later, while on a lecture tour of America. “It’s not as if I haven’t tried to forget Miss Tennant — indeed I have. But the confounded woman creeps into my thoughts in the most unexpected ways: I think it is worst at night, when I am in my bed alone. Have you any idea, Sam, of the loneliness of such nightly solitude, year after year?”

“I do, fellow traveler. I’ve had my share of such nights.”

“But at least you have the solace of a fine home.”

“It is one of my few.” Then, impatiently: “What makes you think I would have an answer to your dilemma, anyway? I wish there were a potion you could take — or maybe a hypnotist would be of help to you. Obviously that high dame means a lot to you still, and I expect that it will take you some time to get over her. But as you are about the most hard-nerved and steely man I’ve ever known in my life, I expect you to quickly put her from your mind: Think of her as just another jungle that you have hacked your way through; sure, you’re sad and disappointed, but this, too, will pass. Use your noggin on this one, Stanley. It pains me to see you this way. And, at any rate, what makes you think that this life is anything but imperfect? You of all people should know that the best.”

Then, more calmly: “In the meantime, dear Stanley, whatever you do, my friend, do not allow your memories of that woman — what was her name, anyway? — to lay you low. Now, with all due respect, buck up.”

And that was all that either man said of the Tennant affair.

BACK IN LONDON IN THE NEW YEAR, on the eve of setting out to Zanzibar by way of Alexandria and Cairo, in the service of King Léopold, Stanley dashed off several notes to friends; one of them was addressed to Samuel Clemens:

February 17, 1887

160 New Bond Street

Dear Samuel,

This brief ditty is to inform you that I am off on the Emin chase; don’t know what awaits me, and the weight of details and preparations boggles the mind, but as I have been making my final preparations and packing away an entire case of geographical and scientific books, I should let you know, for what it’s worth, that among the few books I am bringing along for my leisure (should that exist) is your own Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , which you were gracious enough to have given me.

Until we meet again,

Henry M. Stanley

ON MARCH 18, 1887, STANLEY’S hurriedly organized expedition, commencing from Zanzibar by ship, arrived, after a month’s sailing, at the port of Matadi, at the mouth of the Congo River, on the west Atlantic coast of Africa. In Stanley’s party were some six hundred native Zanzibari carriers, sixty-one Sudanese soldiers, thirteen Somalis, and his own two servants, Hoffman and Baruti. Joining the group was a Zanzibari ivory and slave trader named Tippu Tib, high lord of the Stanleyville region, whose personal retinue included thirty-six wives and concubines and some sixty-one guardsmen and porters. There was Stanley’s contingent of European officers: Captain Robert Nelson, a veteran of the Zulu Wars; Lieutenant John Rose Troup, who had seen service at one of Stanley’s stations along the Congo and was fluent in Swahili; William Bonny, a former medic in the British army; James Sligo Jameson, an amateur naturalist, who was put in charge of cooking and the distribution of rations for the expedition; and one Arthur J. M. Jephson, who had no qualifications save for the fact that he, like Jameson, donated one thousand pounds to join this glorious enterprise. (Hundreds of others had also applied.) Two more officers, on special leave from active duty in the army, were on hand: Lieutenant William Grant Stairs of the Royal Engineers and one Major Edmund Barttelot of the Seventh Fusiliers, his high-strung second in command. Finally, as chief medical officer, there was Dr. Thomas Heazle Parke, whom Stanley had signed on in Cairo.

At Matadi, the fleet of five steamboats that Léopold had earlier promised to Stanley for the expedition’s transport upriver turned out to be useless rotting hulks in total disrepair. Instead of commencing their journey by water, Stanley’s column marched uphill for twenty-eight days, along the very road Stanley had built seven years before, toward the Congo plateau.

At first, the column set off in good order: At the lead was a tall Sudanese soldier carrying a banner — not a Union Jack or the flag of Belgium, but the standard of a New York City yacht club to which Stanley’s former employer, Gordon Bennett, belonged. Behind him was Stanley himself, dressed in a Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and a peaked hat with a sun flap hanging off its back, riding a mule with silver-plated strappings along its side. Following Stanley were Baruti, dressed in white, wearing a turban, and carrying his rifle, and Hoffman, in safari garb; then a contingent of Somali soldiers followed by a hundred porters. Behind them was Tippu Tib, wearing long, flowing white Arab robes and carrying a scimitar, its handle encrusted in jewels, aloft on his shoulders, and his harem, wearing colored robes; their faces were half hidden by veils.

Despite its initial glorious appearance, the expedition was beset with problems of discipline from the beginning. Aside from certain old “faithfuls” from Stanley’s last expedition, the hurriedly recruited corps of porters and guards proved to be an unruly lot, prone to desertion, pilfering, and a reluctance to take orders. Within a few weeks of their march, the expedition began to suffer the ravages of malaria and dysentery. By the time the column had reached the first way station of Léopoldville, eleven of his porters had died, twenty-six were too ill to go farther, and twenty had deserted.

When they finally reached Yambuya, on the banks of the Aruwimi River, Stanley left Major Barttelot, his second in command, with a large body of men — his “rear column”—to wait for supplies from Léopoldville, while the remainder of his expedition went on. On June 28, 1887, with several of his officers — Jephson, Stairs, Nelson, and Parke — and his servants Hoffman and Baruti by his side, along with three hundred and eighty of his ablest men, Stanley set out, due east, into the vast Ituri Forest, a dark and dank realm the size of France, so dense with trees that light rarely penetrated to the ground. As they followed the course of the river, the sound of the cataracts was deafening; but to travel within the forest itself was daunting in a different way, often deathly silent and always gloomy, “like being inside a long-abandoned and very dark cathedral,” he later wrote. He would ultimately call it the “region of horrors.”

From Stanley’s journal:

Camp near the Lenda River, incessant roar of the cataracts maddening: from the soft and viscous topsoil, worms and slugs oozing out of the loamy mud under the worn soles of our boots, the earth smelling of elephant, simian, and antelope dung; from the trunks of rotting trees, swarms of stinging red ants in livid streams in every direction, like lines of fire… black ants, too, crawling up our boots, supping on our spoons, swimming in our thin broths, teeming over our plates and into every open box, every blanket, even crawling onto the pages of my books. Pismires — tiny insects with scissors-like mandibles — cutting into the soft flesh of one’s neck; and bees small as gnats and able to pass through the eyes of needles, stinging, biting, attacking with the ferocity of black wasps, so voracious in their appetites that they stripped the hair off my mule’s legs. Such little creatures going for the eyes, ears, and nostrils, my skin covered with swelling sores, as if I’d fallen again and again onto a nettle patch; venomous hornets tormenting us as well… and wasps, their baggy nests hanging everywhere off the trees, exploding like darts through the air and attacking man and animal alike at the slightest provocation — a footfall, a voice, the striking of a match… tiger slugs crawling up over my stockings and wriggling onto my skin, a stinging slime left in their wake; green centipedes with beady eyes falling out of the trees… and butterflies, too — appearing abruptly in swarms from the east, dropping down in sheets from the trees, and so densely gathered they are an obstruction to one’s movement; to pass them is like parting a curtain, a cloud of them, in a blizzard of fluttering wings, the creatures alighting upon our faces.