The depths of Livingstone’s disappointment should be viewed against the height of his hopes before he received the news. He had travelled to the west coast and had found no healthy location for a mission. He had travelled to the east, and at last had found one. His encouragement was great and his feelings he recorded in his journal: “Thank God for his great mercies thus far . . . O Jesus, grant me resignation to thy will and entire reliance on thy powerful hand. On thy word alone I lean. But wilt thou permit me to plead for Africa? The cause is Thine. What an impulse will be given to the idea that Africa is not open if I perish now.”
When Livingstone emerged from the interior and made his way home to England, he found himself at the centre of the stage in a blazing glare of publicity. The Royal Geographical Society had already awarded him a gold medal, and now other societies and individuals crowded round the heroic figure and vied to do him honour. But the mind of the missionary was on other things: “Viewed in relation to my calling,” he wrote, “the end of the geographical feat is only the beginning of the enterprise.” This was why the news received at Quilimane had been so galling — the new from the directors of the L.M.S. that they regarded his journeys as “connected only remotely with the spread of the gospel”, and that even supposing difficulties could be overcome they would not be able to finance work in “untried, remote, and difficult fields of labour”. Livingstone was “cast down” by the letter from the Board, for he had received their approval for his travels before he had ever begun them. But he was not “destroyed”, as he showed when writing their representative in Cape Town: “I shall not boast of what I have done, but the wonderful mercies I have received will constrain me to follow out the work in spite of the veto of the Board. If it is according to the will of God, means will be provided from other quarters.”
During his stay at home, Livingstone’s faith was fully vindicated. His connections with the London Missionary Society were terminated, but the Government came to his aid. He was appointed Her Majesty’s Consul at Quilimane and commander of a Government expedition for exploring Eastern and Central Africa. When he left home again in the spring of 1858 he could look back with satisfaction on a visit which had effected a great change in Britain’s attitude to Africa. There had been a quickening of interest from the view-points of sociology and commerce. But, more than that, many Christians had been moved by his appeals for missionary work, like that which he had made at Cambridge: “I beg to direct your attention to Africa. I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country which is now open; do not let it be shut again.”
It is impossible here to give a detailed account of the expedition. We will therefore at the outset give a bare outline of it, and then pick out some salient points.
Expedition Outline
The remainder of 1858 was spent on the Zambesi. Livingstone first explored the mouth of it, then sailed inland until the expedition was arrested by the Kebrabasa Falls. 1859 saw the expedition travel three times to the North, up the river Shiré. It was on the third of these trips that they discovered Lake Nyasa. In the next year Livingstone travelled east again with the Makololo who had waited at Tette for him all the while he had been in Britain. 1861 was mainly taken up with exploring the Rovuma and with helping Bishop MacKenzie to establish the Universities Mission. This evangelistic effort must have afforded Livingstone great satisfaction as it virtually derived from his own appeals to the home church during his recent tour. In 1862 Livingstone suffered two great blows. First the godly Bishop MacKenzie died before his work had properly begun. Then Livingstone’s own wife was taken from him, when they had been reunited for a mere three months. 1863 found him disconsolately exploring the Shiré valley and the area of Lake Nyasa, and brought him the order from the Government, recalling the expedition. Finally, in 1864, he sailed the “Lady Nyasa” to India. He had bought this ship himself for exploring the Lake which had given the ship its name. Now that the expedition was recalled he had to sell it, but would not sell it where it would likely be turned to furthering the slave trade to which he was so opposed. Therefore he determined to sail her himself to India, though he had never been formally trained in navigation. At times during the voyage, with the period of the monsoon coming dangerously near, the amateur skipper wondered if his epitaph might be “Left Zanzibar on 30th April, 1864, and never more heard of”. But the same Lord who brought his servant over vast plains and through deep jungles in Africa preserved him also on the heaving waves of the Indian Ocean. So at last “the forest of masts loomed through the haze of Bombay harbour”. He had sailed over 2500 miles.
Notable Details
One or two details can now be given to fill out this brief account, before we come to the matter which mainly occupied Livingstone’s mind at this time.
As the government ship sailed slowly up the Zambesi, the expedition was greeted by sights familiar to its leader, but frightening to his white companions. Crocodiles, their ghastly jaws gaping as they basked in the sun, would slide stealthily into the stream at the sound of the approaching steamer. Hippopotami, disturbed from wallowing in the depths of some quiet pool, would rise to greet the intruders with a terrifying yawn, “sounding a loud alarm to the rest of the herd, with notes as of a monster bassoon”.
The navigation of the river was difficult, it being here full of islands and submerged banks. It was certainly too difficult for the black pilot the expedition employed, a man called John Scissors. When he took the wrong channel and ran the ship aground he would exclaim, as if aggrieved that the forces of nature had conspired against him: “This is not the path; it is back yonder.” Those whose work it was to prise the ship off the bank naturally asked him, “Then why didn’t you go yonder at first?”
Exploring the Shiré in 1859, Livingstone came across an old man of nearly ninety who had hardly been away from home throughout his life. This was not the only man in the Shiré valley who had attained to longevity, but, as Livingstone noted, the achievement could not have been due in any way to frequent ablutions. One old man told him he had washed once in his life, but it was so long before that he could not remember what it was like. Another man spoke of the after-life, and how the heart of the missionary must have been moved to hear these pathetic words: “We live only a few days here, but we live again after our death. We do not know where, or in what condition, or with what companions, for the dead never return to tell us. Sometimes the dead do come back, and appear to us in dreams: but they never speak, nor tell us where they have gone, nor how they fare.”
The same subject was brought up between Livingstone and the people of Seseke, during his visit to the Makololo in 1860. He was about to turn again to the East, and as they might not meet again the subject of an after-life arose in a natural way. The Makololo could not understand the doctrine of the resurrection, and asked: “Can those who have been killed in the field and devoured by vultures; or those who have been eaten by hyenas or lions; or those who have been tossed into the river and eaten by more than one crocodile — can they all be raised again to life?” Livingstone tried to help his hearers to receive the concept of a resurrection by referring to chemical changes in which the same elements combine in different ways to form different substances. He spoke of how substances can be changed into other substances, and back again. However he emphasised, after this illustration, that the real reason why he believed in the resurrection was that God spoke about it in his Book. This apparently had more effect on the minds of the people than the clever illustration he had used.
Of Livingstone’s thoughts and spiritual experiences about this time we can gather an inkling from his private journal: “Oh how far am I from that hearty devotion to God I read of in others: The Lord have mercy on me a sinner . . . When employed in active travel my mind becomes inactive and the heart cold and dead, but after remaining some time quiet the heart revives and I become more spiritually minded . . . I have been more than usually drawn out in earnest prayer of late for the expedition, for my family, the fear lest — — —’s misrepresentation may injure the cause of Christ, the hope that I may be permitted to open this dark land to the blessed gospel . . . there is a great deal of trifling frivolousness in not trusting in God. Not trusting in Him who is truth itself and faithfulness, the same yesterday, today and for ever! It is presumption not to trust in Him implicitly, and yet this heart is sometimes fearfully guilty of distrust. I am ashamed to think of it. Ay, but He must put the trusting, loving childlike spirit in by His grace.”
These details help to fill in the outline of Livingstone’s expedition near the beginning of this article. However, as already indicated, there was one thing which at this period cast a longer shadow in his mind than anything else.
The Slave Trade
It was the slave trade. Livingstone had previously encountered it, and noted its degrading effects, in the West. But never had he witnessed its ravages as he did now in the Shiré valley.
The first time they actually came face to face with a slave party was in 1861. Livingstone saw them as he glanced up the hill from the village where he had halted. Wending its weary way down the hillside was a long line of manacled men, women and children. At the head of the party, in the middle, and at the rear, marched the drivers, armed with muskets and marching jauntily, some blowing cheerful notes with long tin horns. At the sight of Livingstone the drivers bolted. Thus the whole long line of human misery was left in the hands of the missionary; the slaves involuntarily fell to the ground to express their gratitude to him. Then the liberators fell to work, cutting the women and children free with knives, and sawing through the iron pins which held the necks of the men in long forked sticks. One little child expressed the amazement of all when he asked in his simplicity: “The others tied and starved us; you cut the ropes and tell us to eat. What sort of people are you? Where did you come from?” Once liberated, the eighty-four slaves were asked if they wished to go away or to stay. They all chose to stay, and became the nucleus of Bishop MacKenzie’s mission.
Pressing up the Shiré valley and exploring briefly the situation on the Lake, Livingstone was dumbfounded at what he saw. He discovered that only one-fifth to one-tenth of the victims of the slave trade ever reached the coast. Many were slain in slave raids, in resultant inter-tribal war and famine. Of that fraction which reached the coast, he knew that 19,000 passed annually through one port alone.
Livingstone’s description of the scenes of desolation witnessed around the Shiré valley is impossible to reproduce in its full pathos. He speaks of corpses floating daily past the ship, of the necessity to clear the paddles of them every morning before starting out. He speaks of an oppressive stillness reigning where formerly the air had been filled with the cries of crowds eager to sell their goods. He speaks of the smell of decaying human flesh being everywhere and of ghastly living forms of boys and girls, with dull dead eyes, crouching beside some of the huts. Of them he says: “A few more miserable days of their terrible hunger, and they would be with the dead.” Of the corpses in the river he says that they “were only a remnant of those that had perished, whom their friends from weakness could not bury, nor over-gorged crocodiles devour”. Of the whole indescribable situation he says: “When our eyes beheld the last mere driblets of this cup of woe, we for the first time felt that the enormous wrongs inflicted on our fellow men by slaving are beyond exaggeration.” Livingstone made the same point elsewhere when he wrote: “When endeavouring to give some account of the slave trade in East Africa, it is necessary to keep far within the truth, in order not to be thought guilty of exaggeration. To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from my memory. In the case of most disagreeable recollections I can succeed, in time, in consigning them to oblivion. But the slavery scenes come back unbidden and make me start up at night, horrified by their vividness.”
So this was why God had led him, step by step, till he felt called to the work of an explorer. It was to bring him face to face with these repulsive scenes of death and desolation. Now he summoned all energies of body and mind to fight this monster to the death, as one who heeded his Master’s warning:
“If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth he not know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?” (Proverbs 24: 11, 12.)
J.T.