How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
I took out my chart--the one I had made myself--in which I had perfect
faith, and I sketched out a route which would enable us to reach
Unyanyembe without paying a single cloth as tribute, and without
encountering any worse thing than a jungle, by which we could avoid all
the Wavinza and the plundering Wahha. This peaceable, secure route
led by water, south, along the coast of Ukaranga and Ukawendi, to Cape
Tongwe. Arriving at Cape Tongwe, I should be opposite the village of
Itaga, Sultan Imrera, in the district of Rusawa of Ukawendi; after which
we should strike my old road, which I had traversed from Unyanyembe,
when bound for Ujiji. I explained it to the Doctor, and he instantly
recognised its feasibility and security; and if I struck Imrera, as I
proposed to do, it would demonstrate whether my chart was correct or
not.
We arrived at Ujiji from our tour of discovery, north of the Tanganika,
December 13th; and from this date the Doctor commenced writing his
letters to his numerous friends, and to copy into his mammoth Letts's
Diary, from his field books, the valuable information he had acquired
during his years of travel south and west of the Tanganika. I sketched
him while sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the veranda, with his Letts's
Diary on his knee; and the likeness on the frontispiece is an admirable
portrait of him, because the artist who has assisted me, has with an
intuitive eye, seen the defects in my own sketch; and by this I am
enabled to restore him to the reader's view exactly as I saw him--as he
pondered on what he had witnessed during his long marches.
Soon after my arrival at Ujiji, he had rushed to his paper, and indited
a letter to James Gordon Bennett, Esq., wherein he recorded his thanks;
and after he had finished it, I asked him to add the word "Junior" to
it, as it was young Mr. Bennett to whom he was indebted. I thought the
letter admirable, and requested the Doctor not to add another word to
it. The feelings of his heart had found expression in the grateful words
he had written; and if I judged Mr. Bennett rightly, I knew he would be
satisfied with it. For it was not the geographical news he cared so much
about, as the grand fact of Livingstone's being alive or dead.
In this latter part of December he was writing letters to his children,
to Sir Roderick Murchison, and to Lord Granville. He had intended to
have written to the Earl of Clarendon, but it was my sad task to inform
him of the death of that distinguished nobleman.
In the meantime I was preparing the Expedition for its return march to
Unyanyembe, apportioning the bales and luggage, the Doctor's large tin
boxes, and my own among my own men; for I had resolved upon permitting
the Doctor's men to march as passengers, because they had so nobly
performed their duty to their master.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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