All through his disappointments and difficulties Mackay fought on.
With him, as with Livingstone, nothing had power to break his spirit
or quench his burning determination to carry on his God-given plan to
serve Africa.
Every use of saw and hammer and chisel, every
"trick of the tool's true trade,"
all the training in the shipbuilding yards and engineering shops at
Edinburgh and in Germany helped Mackay to invent some new, daring and
ingenious way out of every fresh difficulty.
_The Wreck of the "Daisy"_
Now at last the _Daisy_ was on the water again; and Mackay and his
bearers went aboard[53] and hoisting sail from Kagei ran northward.
Before they had gone far black storm clouds swept across the sky.
Night fell. Lightning blazed unceasingly and flung up into silhouette
the wild outlines of the mountains to the east. The roar of the
thunder echoed above the wail of the wind and the threshing of the
waves.
All through the dark, Mackay and those of his men who could handle an
oar rowed unceasingly. Again and again he threw out his twenty-fathom
line, but in vain. He made out a dim line of precipitous cliffs, yet
the water seemed fathomless--the only map in existence was a rough
one that Stanley had made. At last the lead touched bottom at fourteen
fathoms. In the dim light of dawn they rowed and sailed toward a shady
beach before the cliffs, and anchored in three and a half fathoms of
water.
The storm passed; but the waves from the open sea came roaring in and
broke over the _Daisy_. The bowsprit dipped under the anchor chain,
and the whole bulwark on the weatherside was carried away. The next
sea swept into the open and now sinking boat. By frantic efforts they
heaved up the anchor and the next wave swung the _Daisy_ with a crash
onto the beach, where the waves pounded her to a complete wreck,
wrenching the planks from the keel. But Mackay and his men managed to
rescue her cargo before she went to pieces.
They were wrecked on a shore where Stanley, the great explorer, had
years before had a hairbreadth escape from massacre at the hands
of the wild savages. But Stanley, living up to the practice he had
learned from Livingstone, had turned enemies into friends, and now the
natives made no attack on the shipwrecked Mackay.
For eight weeks Mackay laboured there, hard on the edge of the lake,
living on the beach in a tent made of spars and sails. With hammer and
chisel and saw he worked unsparingly at his task. He cut the middle
eight feet from the boat, and bringing her stern and stem together
patched the broken ends with wood from the middle part. After two
months' work the now dumpier _Daisy_ took the water again, and carried
Mackay and his men safely up the long shores of Victoria Nyanza to the
goal of all his travelling, the capital of M'tesa, King of Uganda.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account