Introduction
In 1865 explorer David Livingstone went in search of the sources of the Nile. Three years passed with no word of his fate, so Welsh journalist Henry Stanley of the New York Herald was despatched to track him down. By the Autumn of 1871 the errand seemed hopeless, but then word came of a white man in Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
THE guides in the van* had reached the market-place, which was the central point of interest. For there the great Arabs, chiefs, and respectabilities of Ujiji, had gathered in a group to await events; thither also they had brought with them the venerable European traveller who was at that time resting among them.
The caravan* pressed up to them, divided itself into two lines on either side of the road, and, as it did so, disclosed to me the prominent figure of an elderly white man clad in a red flannel blouse, grey trousers, and a blue cloth, gold-banded cap.
Up to this moment my mind had verged upon non-belief in his existence, and now a nagging doubt intruded itself into my mind that this white man could not be the object of my quest, or if he were, he would somehow contrive to disappear before my eyes would be satisfied with a view of him.
That is, the vanguard, those towards the front of Stanley’s travelling party. Stanley’s caravan when he left Kwihara on September 20th, some 215 miles to the east of Lake Tanganyika, numbered nearly sixty ‘picked men’. A mutiny among them was soon ‘forcibly crushed’, but there were persistent food shortages and at several villages a high price was demanded for safe passage.
In his diary, Livingston dated these events as October 28th, whereas Stanley gives November 10th. Keeping precise track of the time was, under the circumstances, not easy. For a brief look at his life and mission, see our post David Livingstone.
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