BOOKS.
THE LAST JOURNALS OF LIVINGSTONE.* THE interest of the volumes with which the record of the life and labours of Dr. Livingstone is brought to its conclusion, consists rather in the painful and affecting narrative of his last days than in the facts chronicled by his own hand. That the
" The Last Journals of David Liringstone in Central Afi-iea. from 1865 to his Death. Continued by a Narrative of his last moments obtained from his faithful servants Chumah and Susi. By Horace Waller, F.R.G.S. London : John Murray.
great explorer died cherishing a delusion is, we presume, cer- tain; he believed to the last that the Lualaba was the Nile, and that he was nearing its sources. Now we find Lieutenant. Cameron writing to Sir Henry Rawlinson that he can say "almost positively" that the Lualaba is the Congo—a supposition to which Livingstone gave only a passing mode of consideration— and the Geographical Society disposed to consider him as much astray as Livingstone. So the great river problem remains un- solved, after all the application of men's years, which we must not call wasted, perhaps, but whose expenditure fills us with. sadness. In these volumes we have the story of seven years of continuous exertion, indomitable resolution, energy, endurance, and faith—Livingstone's faith in God and his own mission— disappointment, heart-sickness, bodily suffering, and reiterated experiences of falsehood and treachery, the latter largely counter- balanced by the splendid fidelity of the " blacks" who brought their master's remains from the hidden heart of Africa to their honoured resting-place in Westminster Abbey. For the present, the interest of Mr. Waller's portion of the work, the narrative of the concluding weeks of Livingstone's life, which has been ob- tained from his servants, assisted by the failing entries in his note- book, far transcends that of the Journals themselves ; and though the circumstances have been well known in outline for many months, the story is one to be eagerly read. In due time, the- novel facts in geography and natural history imparted by the Journals will fall into their places in their respective categories, and be duly appreciated.
As a book, we do not find these last Journals, published intact,. at all so unmanageable to read as Dr. Livingstone's revised and prepared works. The latter were the toughest tasks which even African exploration has ever cut out for the reader. No windings- of the Shire and the Zambesi were more tortuous and tantalising- than the great traveller's records of them, when put what we suppose he regarded as " ship-shape." The incongruity and un- connectedness of the last Journals, which are merely "notes," without any pretensions to arrangement or manipulation, are far less baffling and fatiguing. The character of the writer comes. out in them very strongly, and more pleasingly than in former revelations of it ; his hopefulness and doggedness, his little-under- stood sensitiveness, and the underlying enthusiasm which his inarticulateness made void and unimpressive ; the fervent, trustful appeal to God, on whose Fatherhood he dwelt with ever-increasing reliance, in the midst of scenes which would seem to tax the weary wayfarer's belief in a benign ruler to the uttermost ; the stout- heartedness, the capacity for enduring solitude, the one-ideaed- Bess ; a combination of qualities and features which raises him.- to almost the heroic standard, but yet never lends him a touch of the picturesque.
The materials which Mr. Waller has put together comprise the• Letts's Diary brought home by Mr. Stanley after his memorable expedition, and which was sealed up and consigned to the keeping of Dr. Livingstone's daughter, but opened when the news of his death was confirmed, and found to contain a considerable portion of his notes of his journeys previous to Mr. Stanley's meeting with him ; the contents of the battered tin travelling-case, which was with Livingstone to the last, and which his servants preserve& through difficulties graphically related by Mr. Waller ; in short, every line of the minute records of those seven years, together- with Livingstone's maps. The arrangement of this mass of material is most satisfactory, though we gather from Mr. Waller's. introduction that it ddes hardly more than indicate the value of the Journals, as " all the strictly scientific matter is reserved for future publication," and that among that scientific matter are meteorological observations extending over every day of the entire period from Livingstone's departure from- the coast in 1866, to within a few days of the end, on May Day,. 1873. Out of the seven years, he passed two in the Manyuemr country, hitherto absolutely unknown to us. While he keeps to Lake Nyassa and to Lake Tanganyika, and when he returns to Ujiji, we have some sort of notion of where he is,—the names are not quite strange, but for those two years he goes into an inner darkness, in comparison with which his sojourn near Lake Meroe, where the chief, Casembe, behaved very well to him, has- an almost civilised effect. Casembe was an incorrigible slave- dealer, and insisted that there were only two Sovereigns in the world,—the Sultan of Zanzibar and Queen Victoria. In 1868, Livingstone reached Lake Bangweolo, and after lengthened explorations there, he returned to Ujiji, where we can think of hint with a sort of comparative comfort, until his start due east for Manyuema, where he endured much suffering of body and agony of mind, in the helpless witnessing of horrible scenes of barbarity, and whence he returned to Ujiji in the condition which Mr. Stan- ley described when he found him there in October, 1871. Every- reader of Mr. Stanley's narrative must have felt how meagre and featureless was his description of the great traveller, how he failed in making us see the man. A similar impres- sion is produced by the entries in Livingstone's Journals, but it is not. so surprising in his case, as, except in devo- tional utterances, he is never emphatic. " 14th March, 1872," he writes,—" Mr. Stanley leaves." Mr. Waller's comment on the importance and suggestiveness of the entry is true and forcible, but there is nothing in the Journals to indicate that Livingstone felt it so: Another interval on which we dwell with comparative pleasure (though he repeatedly laments it as wearisome) is the long wait for supplies for- his final expedition after Mr. Stanley left him, in 1872. The history of the autumn, winter, and spring which ensued, during which he was exploring the Bangweolo Lake (which he had discovered in 1868, and mentions merely paren- thetically in journals of that.date), is most painful to read and to realise. The traveller's faith never failed, indeed, nor did his reso- lution falter. We wish it had faltered, and that he had yielded to the longing for "home," though that home was only a but in an African settlement, when we read those sad entries in the diary which confess to utter weariness, to growing hopelessness, and to wearing bodily disease and pain. They are peculiarly distress- ing in the beginning of 1869, two years after the loss of his medicine-chest, which was stolen by a treachermis native guide, had left him helpless against the wasting fever to which his marches in the " Sponges " or firths on the lake shores during his later expeditions exposed him, with ultimately fatal results. It is not recorded that Mr. Stanley brought him medicines, or that any Were included among the supplies which reached him at Ujiji ; though most probably such was the case ; but the under- mining of his constitution had gone too far. The last enterprise has a desperate air from the beginning. The start took place on the 25th August, 1872, and on the 18th September, when he had reached the Metambo River, " the old enemy was upon him." From that date the men speak of few periods of even comparative health, and the entries contain frequent, but always patient admissions of suffering, with many ejaculatory prayers for strength and perseverance. Perseverance he had, to an extent which we must all regret, but strength he was destined never to regain. Until quite the latter days, his quickness and minuteness of observation never failed ; we find their results in the heterogeneous contents of his Journals, which we read by a process like hopping, and which comprise a marvellous number of facts in each page. Some portions of these Journals were written under extraordinary difficulties, as, for instance, when, in Man- yuema, his metallic note-books were exhausted, and old newspapers, yellow with African damp, were sewn together, and his notes were written across the type with a substitute for ink made from the juice of a tree. Whatever the difficulty, or the danger, or the perplexity, we find the same calm, unexcited record, only the " on, on," and the utterances of yearning prayer reveal the leading moral and spiritual characteristics of the man. On 7th January, 1869, we find the most emotional passage in all these Journals, one which must be precious and painful to those who remain :— " Cannot walk. Pneumonia of right lung, and I cough all day and all night; distressing weakness. Ideas flow through the mind with great rapidity and vividness, in groups of twos and threes ; if I look at any piece of wood, the bark seems covered over with figures and faces of men, and they remain, though I look away, and turn to the same spot again. I saw myself lying dead in the way to Ujiji, and all the letters I expected there useless. When I think of my children and friends, the lines ring through my head perpetually,— 4I shall look into your faces, and listen to what you say,
And be very often near you, when you think I'm far away.' "
The next entry records that he has had to submit to being carried in a kitanda, or frame like a cot, for four hours a day. " This is the first time in my life I have been carried in illness." He describes the march over abruptly undulating country, occasioning dreadful jolting, and it was not until long afterwards that the simple expe- dient of a roof to the cot, covered in with a piece of cotton-cloth as a shelter from the sun, occurred to his servants ; though he says, " The sun is vertical, blistering any part of the skin exposed, and I try to shelter my face and head as well as I can with a bunch of leaves, but it is dreadfully fatiguing in my weakness." In the July of the following year he has to record that for the first time in his life his feet have failed him, and are fastened on by irritable, eating ulcers. It is impossible to dwell so much upon the exploits which these Journals chronicle, and the re- sults which they announce, as upon the sufferings which they disclose ; we do not see the lovely, park-like scenery to which they constantly refer, the noble animals, the
beautiful birds, the strange insects, the degraded men; we realise only the way worn sufferer, with the dogged purpose which hardens him against pain, and the fervent faith which bucklers him against solitude. We find no expression at all in these pages of that which would seem to be the most agonising and overwhelming of all the causes of suffering in those latter days,—the loneliness of the solitary white man,—loneliness which comes home to us so forcibly in the simple story of his dying- hours that it is a great relief to read of the merciful stupor, in which there may have been a vision of familiar faces, long unseen. God, to whom his faithful servant was speaking on his knees when the order of release came, only knows.
There is no abatement in his last work of Dr. Livingstone's kindly feeling towards the African races, no yielding of his belief in their capacity for civilisation, and there is even increased horror and denunciation of the slave-trade, which he called " the great, open sore of the world," combined with an eager hope that the efforts of England to put it down might be redoubled when his pioneer work should be done, and the physical difficulties of our ignorance of the country removed. But there is a sadder tone, a deeper consciousness of the might and mastery of cruelty and oppression in those dark places of the earth into which he pene- trated, hoping that the light may follow him, than marked his former works. He betrays to us that Mtesa, the King of Uganda —from whom Sir Samuel Baker hoped great things, but whom he was prevented from reaching by the villany of the young King of Unyoro—is a merciless and treacherous wretch ; and though he paints certain of the more remote tribes in favourable colours, his picture of the people of the Manyuema country is most horrible. We must accept it, too, without any of the modifica- tion to which we might subject it, if it were drawn by any other pen, for Livingstone never told "travellers' tales." The hideous cruelties practised on the slaves—among them, the leaving of numbers to die on the march, tied to trees, or fastened into the " sticks "—the dreadful murders daily perpetrated by the Manyuema, whom he describes " as the most bloody, callous savages I know ;" a massacre of women so hideous that he says " it felt to me like Gehenna ; I was laid up with the depression the bloodshed made ; it filled me with unspeakable horror. I cannot stay here in agony ;" the undeniable cannibalism of some of the tribes, and the shocking vices and loathsome diseases prevalent among them, are all told simply, but impressively. There is little of the conventional missionary tone in Living- stone's last work, but it is full of the missionary spirit, in its awed compairsion for these wretches and their victims, its pitiful but not despairing appeal, " Is there none to do them any good?" He discovered among these murderous people a singularly power- ful and repulsive animal called a soko, which, Mr. Waller says, is not a gorilla, but an entirely new species of chimpanzee ; the natives eat him, when they get the chance, though they believe that their buried dead rise as sokoa, and one was killed who had holes in his ears, as if he had been a man. "They beat hollow trees as drums with hands," writes Livingstone, "and then scream as music to it ; when men hear them, they go to the sokos, but sokos never go to men with hostility." He adds, with a touch of imagination very rare to him, " a large soko would do well to stand for a picture of the Devil."
A most interesting and touching portion of the second volume relates to Livingstone'si" waking dream " about Lake Meroe,- that the legendary tales about Moses coming up into Inner Ethiopia, with Merr, his foster-mother, and founding a city, which he called in her honour " Meroe " may have had a sub- stratum of fact. " I dream," he says, " of discovering some monumental relics of Meroe, and if anything confirmatory of sacred history does remain, I pray to be guided thereunto. If the sacred chronology would thereby be confirmed, I would not grudge the toil and hardships, hunger and pain I have endured,— the irritable ulcers would only be discipline." This dream was not realised, any more than that other, that he should find the sources of the Nile ; but they both cheered him when he badly needed cheer, and were probably more precious, as they were certainly more dwelt upon, than the great realities for whose accomplishment he will be held in undying honour by his countrymen, to whom his memory is dear, and his example ought to be profitable.
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