How I Found Livingstone Travels, Adventures And Discoveries In Central Africa Including Four Months Residence With Dr. Livingstone By Sir Henry M. Stanley
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Hyson Tea.
Some Sewing Thread And Needles.
1 Dozen Official Envelopes.
`Nautical Almanac' For 1872 And 1873.
1 Blank Journal.
1 Chronometer, Stopped.
1 Chain For Refractory People.
With the articles just named he would have a total of seventy
loads, but without carriers they were an incumbrance to him; for,
with only the nine men which he now had, he could go nowhere with
such a splendid assortment of goods.
I was therefore commissioned
to enlist, - as soon as I reached Zanzibar, - fifty freemen, arm them
with a gun and hatchet each man, besides accoutrements, and to
purchase two thousand bullets, one thousand flints, and ten kegs of
gunpowder. The men were to act as carriers, to follow wherever
Livingstone might desire to go. For, without men, he was simply
tantalized with the aspirations roused in him by the knowledge
that he had abundance of means, which were irrealizable without
carriers. All the wealth of London and New York piled before him
were totally unavailable to him without the means of locomotion.
No Mnyamwezi engages himself as carrier during war-time. You who
have read the diary of my 'Life in Unyanyembe' know what stubborn
Conservatives the Wanyamwezi are. A duty lay yet before me which
I owed to my illustrious companion, and that was to hurry to the
coast as if on a matter of life and death - act for him in the matter
of enlisting men as if he were there himself - to work for him with
the same zeal as I would for myself - not to halt or rest until his
desires should be gratified, And this I vowed to do; but it was
a death-blow to my project of going down the Nile, and getting
news of Sir S. Baker.
The Doctor's task of writing his letters was ended. He delivered
into my hand twenty letters for Great Britain, six for Bombay,
two for New York, and one for Zanzibar. The two letters for New
York were for James Gordon Bennett, junior, as he alone, not his
father, was responsible for the Expedition sent under my command.
I beg the reader's pardon for republishing one of these letters
here, as its spirit and style indicate the man, the mere knowledge
of whose life or death was worth a costly Expedition.
Ujiji, on Tanganika, East Africa, November, 1871.
James Gordon Bennett, Jr., Esq.
My Dear Sir, - It is in general somewhat difficult to write to one
we have never seen - it feels so much like addressing an abstract
idea - but the presence of your representative, Mr. H. M. Stanley,
in this distant region takes away the strangeness I should otherwise
have felt, and in writing to thank you for the extreme kindness
that prompted you to send him, I feel quite at home.
If I explain the forlorn condition in which he found me you will
easily perceive that I have good reason to use very strong
expressions of gratitude. I came to Ujiji off a tramp of between
four hundred and five hundred miles, beneath a blazing vertical
sun, having been baffled, worried, defeated and forced to return,
when almost in sight of the end of the geographical part of my
mission, by a number of half-caste Moslem slaves sent to me from
Zanzibar, instead of men.
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