2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (10 page)

As they were about to cross, Spicer decided to check the special trailers Thorneycroft’s yard had made for him. They had large rubber wheels in the centre and two smaller wheels on manoeuvrable castors at the front and back, mounted on transverse wooden beams, six inches thick. However, on inspection it was found that both these beams had started to split.

‘I told the experts that the six-inch beam was not strong enough!’ shouted Spicer at the surrounding trees. ‘It should have been a twelve-inch beam!’

Mimi
showed similar damage. Spicer sent Wainwright and Eastwood back to ‘Monsieur’ at the railhead to see if the broken trailers could be repaired. They purchased two wooden ox-wagons from the railwayman and replaced the broken wheels using pieces from the wagons. This all took another week, by which time the traction engines had arrived by train: they were enormous steam tractors with extra-large steel wheels at the back and a tall funnel at the front.

The huge wheels were intended to give clearance from the uneven ground and the engines had steel boilers in which water was heated by a timber-fuelled furnace. Each locomotive came with a ten-ton trailer usually used to store wood for the boiler. They had laid stacks of wood along the entire length of the route, however, so the trailers were instead loaded with bags of meal to feed the African labourers.

The ox-teams that were supposed to supplement the pulling power of the road-locomotives had not yet arrived, but Spicer was impatient to get going. On 18 August they set off once more. The steam whistles of the locomotives blew and the African carriers chanted and beat their drums as
Mimi
was towed on to the bridge.

Within seconds of the first tractor coming on to it, however, the earthwork and timber of the bridge collapsed into the stream below. There was pandemonium as the second locomotive was disconnected from
Toutou
and put to work hauling
Mimi
and the other steam engine out of the broken ford.

It was Wainwright who came up with a solution: they had to lay the logs in the stream in the same direction as the current and pile them up until they were level with the road on either side of the gorge, making something more like a causeway than a bridge. The African labourers were set to work cutting down suitable timber and after a few days
Mimi
and
Toutou
were ready for a second attempt.

They began at six in the morning. At first all went well.
Mimi
crossed without difficulty, but then she stuck on the opposite side, unable to build up enough steam to climb a bank beyond the gorge. So another causeway was built that sloped up on to the bank.
Toutou
crossed on this with the second traction engine, which then helped pull
Mimi
and the other tractor up over the obstruction. Spicer tried walking alongside the engine as it crossed, but soon jumped off: ‘it was like trying to walk on a spring mattress.’

By then it was about 3
PM
, but there was no time for celebration. Belching smoke, the two locomotives tugged their eight-ton burdens further down the road, crashing and bumping and causing considerable consternation among the Africans who emerged from the bush to watch. Eyed at first with fear, then with wonder or simple curiosity, Spicer’s team pushed on up that seemingly interminable mountain road. The lorry went on ahead with a small team to erect tents and prepare the evening meal, lighting a fire to welcome the workers and ward off wild animals.

They had almost reached the camping point, six miles from the railhead, when disaster struck again.
Mimi
‘slocomotive slipped off the edge of the road and began to fall away, the earthwork sliding to one side, unable to carry the engine’s weight. Stuck at an angle, the tractor had to be disconnected from
Mimi
again and pulled by cable by the other engine until she was upright once more. The expedition continued a little further and then at last they could camp for the night.

It had been an exhausting day and their troubles were increased by the discovery that the adapted trailers were starting to buckle under the weight of the boats, just like their predecessors. For once Spicer kept his cool, perhaps realising that his furious outbursts were bad for morale. He tried to remain calm and collected throughout the day’s difficulties, chain-smoking his personally monogrammed cigarettes—COMMANDER G. B. SPICER-SIMSON, R. N. printed in blue letters up the stem. He kept these in his revolver holster and also affected a long cigarette holder. Smoke wreathing his Vandyke beard, he went around encouraging the men, which they considered quite out of character.

The days that followed were much the same, as they raced against the rains under the penetrating glare of the African sun. Curiously enough, says Spicer, ‘some of my men suffered from snow-blindness at this time,’ even though they were not far from the Equator. The fact was, he noted, ‘that the whole of the surface soil in the district is full of mica, and the brilliance of the reflection of the sun off that material produced the same effect as snow’. Moreover, ‘having cut down the trees we were deprived of their shade’.

Another obstacle they had to overcome was wandering swamps—‘swamps which actually move about’, as Spicer mysteriously put it. They look like water lilies on the surface of rivers (the Belgians called them ‘water-cabbage’) and sometimes grew in such bulk that ‘they form a kind of barrage’ until the force of the water rolls them up and deposits them on the shore. ‘Sometimes when we had built our road we found that it was in the path of one of these wandering swamps, and the traction engines could not get through because their fire-boxes were so low that the fire would have been put out. Then we had to build another road round the swamp.’

Tormented by insect bites, the expedition pulled and pushed their way through the bush. Up ahead the native carriers could be heard singing as they jogged along behind the lorry, carrying crates and bundles on their heads. The locomotives heaved and panted in their wake and yet more tribesmen emerged from the bush to stare at the steel monsters. Bringing fruit and vegetables and chickens and goats as gifts, they were held spellbound by the magic of cable and harness and the lurching, heaving motion of the tractors and
Mimi
and
Toutou
.

Shankland goes into some technical detail about these locomotives, which had been made by Barrels of Thetford and Fowlers of Leeds. They could do 90 miles a day on a good road, apparendy, and had been customised for working in Africa. ‘To guard against sparks setting the bush alight,’ writes Shankland, ‘they had ashpans specially constructed to hold water, and baffles and screens fitted to the smoke-boxes. They seemed to have been well cared for, and every bit of brass about them glowed like polished gold.’ Although Spicer later described them as ‘ordinary agricultural traction engines’, Wainwright—who was in special charge of the tractors—cooed over the two machines as if they were a pair of oversized kittens.

The engines were hardly kittens when it came to noise, however. Their growling, jerking passage, says Magee, disturbed ‘the slumbers of herds of elephants and other denizens of the bush…driving them from their lairs’. Bored with their tinned bully beef, some members of the expedition shot buck, wild pig and guinea fowl for the pot. At night could be heard, as if registering his own dietary interests, the roars of a particular lion—perhaps one of the black-maned ones for which the Katanga was once famous—who dogged their every step.

After building yet more causeways and levering the engines out of the holes into which they invariably became stuck every day, Spicer’s men finally reached the village of Mwenda Mkosi on 28 August. They had covered the 30 miles from Fungurume in ten days. It was pretty good going, but they still had more than a hundred miles to go, and they hadn’t even begun the climb into the mountains yet.

As they entered Mwenda Mkosi—a typical kraal of straw-roofed huts arranged in a rough circle—the trailers carrying
Mimi
and
Toutou
finally collapsed. Spicer had anticipated this. He ordered Wainwright and Cross to bring forward the locomotives’ fuel trailers and raid them for their undercarriages. It meant the expedition halting at the village for a while.

They made their camp near a river, about half a mile from Mwenda Mkosi. Every evening Dr Hanschell led a party of Africans to draw water in five-gallon oil drums, which were then boiled over the camp fires to make tea and to fill their water bottles. These were covered in felt to keep them cool and they were the men’s constant companions for the next few weeks, knocking at their thighs as they walked. Tea, which they all sat round drinking on folding tables and chairs, was the highlight of the day. ‘Tubby’ Eastwood had acquired a chimpanzee during the journey, which he christened Josephine. The Paymaster’s servant, Marapandi, would often find himself serving tea and bread and butter to Josephine as well as Eastwood.

The bread, says Shankland, was not very pleasant because the self-raising flour that was part of the expedition’s supplies was no good. ‘Eastwood made inquiries around and found that not one of the party knew how to use it. Spicer was indignant. He called them a bunch of land crabs and asserted that every seaman knew how to make bread, with self-raising flour or without. He gave the cooks precise instructions how to do it, but the result was the same—hard biscuit.’

Spicer shrugged it off as he shrugged off everything else, with a wave of his lion-handled fly-whisk. All that mattered now was getting through to Lake Tanganyika. Every night the
ngoma
or African tom-tom broadcast this single-minded goal through the primeval forest, as one man’s manifest destiny was related from tribe to tribe. The story of Spicer’s mission went through ever more fantastic permutations, mile after mile, beat after beat, until, by the time it reached the Holo-holo living on the lakeshore, Spicer had been elevated to something like a god.

W
hile they were held up at Mwenda Mkosi some expedition members pursued other tasks. Tyrer, the Piccadilly Johnny with the monocle, was sent on ahead to make further surveys of the route. Meanwhile, the lower ranks were put to work splitting up the 20 tons of meal that had hitherto been carried in the steam engines’ trailers. The carriers, who now numbered almost a thousand, would each have to bear an extra load. Meal (known
asposho
) was made from the ground root of the cassava plant and was their daily food ration.

According to Magee, many of the tribes that supplied the porterage were former cannibals, though the tone of one caption in his
National Geographic
article bears all the hallmarks of imperialist fantasy:
The ordinary diet of the native consists of a manioc or cassava flour made into a paste, and a meat stew concocted of everything, from ants and grasshoppers up to man. Indeed, ‘food that once talked’ is a special delicacy, though indulged in but secretly and rarely nowadays
.

As well as food, the porters had to carry a great many boxes and crates. These included Spicer’s folding X-pattern camp bed (complete with mosquito net) and several washstands with enamel basins and canvas covers. There was also a large tin bath with a lid and canteens for plates and cutlery. Cups and plates had covers of green baize to prevent breakages. Every night large ‘chaguls’—canvas water-bags about the size of a Labrador dog—were hung in the trees filled with leftover water from Dr Hanschell’s boiling operation. There were also the guns to carry, which were stored in padlocked steel boxes.

The doctor’s medicines added to this considerable load. A typical medicine chest of the period contained:

• Quinine bihydrochloride in 5 grain tabloids.
  
• Potassium permanganate solids.
  
• Boracic acid and zinc sulphate solids.
  
• Iodoform powder.
  
• Tincture of iodine.
  
• Aspirin tabloids.
  
• Zinc ointment.
  
• Epsom salts.
  
• Lint, cotton-wool, iodoform gauze (unbleached), bandages, scalpel, dissecting and dressing scissors, artery forceps, silk ligatures, surgical needles, a glass syringe, a one-ounce measure, a probe and a vulcanite dredger.
  

At Mwenda Mkosi Dr Hanschell was frequently consulted by the locals, who came to him in droves. ‘When they heard of the Great Medicine Chief,’ recalls Magee, ‘the natives nocked from their villages, bringing their sick and their lame with them. But the doctor could attend to only a few, as his supplies of hospital requisites was limited’. Fortunately, adds Shankland, ‘the adult natives mostly wanted purging pills [laxatives]. Those who had tried them brought their friends along for some, explaining with expressive pantomime their wonderful effect. Each received a large white pill and a small blue one with a cup of water, and the others watched solemnly while he swallowed them.’

A good deal of shooting took place. The doctor himself bagged two guinea fowl and more intrepid souls brought back bigger game, including eland and impala and the blue wildebeest or brindled gnu (
Connochaetes taurinus
), which was a feature of the region. It is probable that some zebra were shot and their flesh fed to the porters. Zebra fat was also used as a dubbin substitute to grease boots on safaris and perhaps some members of the expedition kept the animals’ skins, which were not only pleasing to the eye but had some domestic use. They would have taken some curing, however. A Tanganyika government handbook dated 15 years after the expedition notes that ‘The hide looks well on the floor, but it requires endless labour to reduce it to pliability.’ It adds that ‘The noses make pretty slippers.’

Buffalo was another favourite and Spicer hoped to bag one when he set out from camp one morning with a shotgun in one hand and a rifle in the other. He said he would be back for lunch, but as Shankland reports: ‘He wasn’t. By and by, about three in the afternoon, Dudley took out a search party and found him not far from the camp, sitting on top of a large anthill. His clothes were torn, he was badly scratched and in a vile temper.

‘‘Why has nobody heard my shots?’ bellowed Spicer from his mound of dried earth. ‘Doesn’t anybody keep watch?’’