2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (11 page)

It is astonishing that he caught nothing whatsoever, for as Magee’s article points out, in those days it was ‘a simple matter to step out into the teeming jungles or prairies of Africa and obtain an unlimited supply of game for food’.

Spicer’s inability to bag any game at all was yet another reason for his men to laugh at him behind his back. The situation was given added piquancy by the fact that he had lately been setting up targets for the men to fire at, to improve their aim when the day of battle finally came.

‘It’s easily seen,’ Spicer had remarked to Dr Hanschell while watching them, ‘that none of these men were trained in sail. When I was a midshipman in the training ship
Volage
, I would stand on the quarterdeck with a rifle and shatter a botde, six times out of six, that was swinging from the weather yard-arm.’

One day—the doctor told Shankland during the long interviews they conducted in London’s Muswell Hill in the early 1960s—a young ox was brought into camp. Spicer took it upon himself to shoot the animal, calling for Waterhouse to bring him a rifle and load it. Various members of the camp accumulated to watch the slaughter. Spicer’s first shot, taken from a standing position, disappeared into the nearby bush. He crouched closer to the oblivious beast, which was munching grass about three yards away, and fired again. The shot hit one of its horns, making it vibrate with a thrumming noise.

Turning towards Spicer, the ox ‘lowered its horns and waved its tail in the air. He got up, very red in the face, stood right in front of it and fired a bullet into its forehead at point blank range. It fell to the ground at his feet.’

‘It’s just the same with buffalo,’ said Spicer as he handed the rifle to Waterhouse. ‘You’ve got to face up to them. It’s only when they lower their heads to charge that they expose the vital spot!’

They stayed for five days at Mwenda Mkosi before the trailers were ready. During this period Dr Hanschell was called out to treat a Greek pedlar who had come down with tick fever and was laid up at a Belgian government rest house. He made the eight-mile trip on a bicycle and was chased by a pack of baboons for almost the entire journey. He was terrified as they bowled along beside him, grunting and baring their teeth. But he arrived safely and gave the Greek—‘a tall thin bearded white man with fierce glaring eyes, yellow face and long black finger-nails’—an injection, then collected the ticks stuck to the walls in a tobacco tin.

Back at camp, he told Spicer of his ordeal with the baboons. Spicer was unsympathetic and launched into a tale of how he used to shoot them from his survey boat going up the Gambia River, to prevent them raiding peanut plantations, which they dug up with their claws.

‘We saw hundreds of them,’ he said. ‘I got tired of firing at them with a rifle, only one round at a time, so I changed over to my double-barrelled shotgun. I bagged so many with buckshot that I had a letter of commendation from the Governor. I preserved the pelts of the finest in Cooper’s Sheep Dip—there’s lots of it out in the Gambia you know—and I had a fur coat with a little cap to match made of them for my wife. It was the envy of all the other women! None of them could get one like it!’

The Greek pedlar—or
smous
, as they are known in South Africa—turned up at Mwenda Mkosi village a few days later, bringing imitation wrist-watches, tinned meat and old clothes. According to Shankland, one of the expedition’s bearers bought a gold-laced tunic that had once adorned a hussar.

‘Who’s that dirty stiff walking about the camp?’ asked Spicer, on seeing the pedlar.

Dr Hanschell explained about his mercy mission into the bush.

‘You don’t deserve much credit for keeping a thing like that alive!’ said Spicer, walking away.

Falling into conversation with the Greek, the doctor asked him if he understood the mysteries of self-raising flour. He did and showed the cooks, and thenceforth the bread rose and the expedition’s diet improved.

Spirits rose, too, on 2 September when the ox-teams arrived, having been driven all the way up from South Africa:

Three columns of dust were seen coming along the road, [writes Shankland] and out of the dust three wagons appeared, each drawn by eight pairs of oxen. They were magnificent beasts with wide upturned horns which measured six feet from tip to tip. The leading teams were driven by a tall young Boer wearing a broad-brimmed hat, open shirt and long dust-coloured trousers. He walked beside the first wagon, shouting continuously and cracking a long whip: it was so long that he could reach any of the oxen without leaving his position. A Zulu ‘Voorlooper’ walked in front, guiding the team by means of a leather thong, or ‘riem’, attached to the horns of the leading oxen.

As luck would have it, the trailers were ready on the same day the oxen arrived. This time without the benefit of Monsieur’s crane, Wainwright anxiously supervised the lifting of
Mimi
and
Toutou
on to the trailers, which were now made up of parts from three separate vehicles.
Mimi
was first to be swung up in slings from tripods.

Using block and tackle and the steam engines’ cables for traction, Wainwright carefully lowered the ropes in his pulleys until
Mimi
hung above her newly fashioned carriage and then, ever so gently, settled her down.

The following morning,
Mimi
and
Toutou
went forth: although not at the front of the caravan, but at the back, for they were the slowest of the party. The lorry went first, ferrying back water from streams up ahead in case the boilers should run out. Next came the African porters with their supplemented loads, chanting as they planted one foot in front of the other, followed by the
askaris
marching at an easy pace—then the extended families of both: wives with babies wrapped in cloths on their back and young children capering and calling out. The oxen came next, then finally the traction engines pulling
Mimi
and
Toutou
, puffing away as they thundered over the uneven ground, which a dozen labourers busily strewed with branches in a vain attempt to improve the going.

One thing that gave them trouble was the ant-lion, a small ant-eating insect. It dug cone-like holes in sandy ground into which ants would tumble. Unable to climb up the rolling sides of the cone, they would then be consumed by the horned and whiskered bandit which emerged from the bottom of the hole. Spicer was fascinated by them: ‘These holes would measure as much as 3½ feet in diameter, and were usually of some depth. Occasionally they were near the surface and, if any weight was placed on them they gave way. The danger was that, if a wheel dropped into one of these holes, the propeller shaft of the boat, which projected well below the stern, might be damaged. Eventually we got the natives to tap the ground ahead; with their finer senses, they could scrape off the surface growth, thus marking the places to be avoided.’

Despite the irregular surface, the new trailers held firm. The cables took the strain and the two giant Scots, Tait and Mollison, walked alongside, making sure that the limbs of overhanging trees did not clip the boats’ rudders or tear loose the forecastles. Further up the ragged line, the Boer driver cracked his whip, yelling in Afrikaans when the oxen slipped and floundered. As the party moved forwards, the men and animals and machines made a procession several miles long, the smokestacks of the tractors and dust-clouds from the oxen marking its passage from afar. And so all day long, and for days afterwards,
Mimi
and
Toutou
went forth.

E
ach morning, as the smell of woodsmoke filled the camp, those who hadn’t done so the night before filled up their water botties from Dr Hanschell’s chaguls. They then queued up for tea and porridge, to fortify themselves for the day ahead. Some time previously, in the early hours before daylight, the porters had gathered up embers from last night’s dying fire and wrapped them in leaves, in order to preserve them for the next stopping-place. The porters had then stoked the fire for the breakfast cook-up, before heading out of camp, leaving the
muzungu
or white men to wake in their own good time. This they would generally do to a deafening dawn chorus of tropical birds.

The servants Tom, Rupia and Marapandi might bring the senior officers tea in bed. Spicer, Dr Hanschell and Eastwood would then get up and attend to their personal ablutions. Part of these included Spicer’s shaving with his cut-throat razors. Tyrer combing his yellow hair and fixing his monocle in his eye had once been a familiar morning sight—but there had been no news of Piccadilly Johnny for some time.

As usual, Tait and Mollison would roll towards the porridge pot like the biblical giants Gog and Magog. Their deliberate lumbering methods, says Shankland, ‘infuriated Dudley, who, as a cadet, had been taught to jump at a word of command, race to the mast-head and down again, and work to a stop-watch. Tait and Mollison refused to be hustled. They would gaze with patient wonder at the thin dry gesticulating Dudley, and what they thought of him nobody knew, for Tait spoke little and Mollison practically not at all.’

Each new day was another step forward on the great task. Using one of the milometers it was established that since leaving Mwenda Mkosi they averaged six miles a day. It was slow going, and hot too.
Mimi
and
Toutou
’s hulls were beginning to warp under the sun, in spite of their tarpaulins.

Something in the men prayed for the rains against which they were racing. They longed—as the trees and shrubs seemed to do—for the cataclysmic downpour of the second rainy season, which would begin in October, less than a month away.

The prevailing landscape was now the dry tree-savannah known locally as
miombo
. Seldom exceeding 50 feet, the spreading crowns of its
Pterocarpus
species covered vast areas on either side of Lake Tanganyika, playing an important part in the region’s economic life. Bushbuck, sable and roan antelope abounded here, with lions in customary attendance, ready to pounce from the yellow grasses.

Small rodents such as the hyrax also thrived in this habitat, and were sometimes hunted by setting alight long lines of brush to drive them into nets. However, most of the fires that swept through the region were the result of natural combustion—except for a few caused by human error.

After talking about bread with the
smous
, Dr Hanschell had braved the baboons once more to cycle back to the tick-infested rest house where the pedlar had stayed. Judging it unfit for human habitation, he decided to burn it to the ground.

It came first as a crackling noise on the wind, accompanied by a faint smell of burning. This grew stronger and before long the expedition could see a curtain of smoke rolling towards them over the savannah at a rapid pace. By the time it was half a mile away there were licks of orange flame at the men’s feet. This was deadly serious. Realising they could be engulfed, Spicer ordered a firebreak to be lit for about a hundred yards. It went up quickly, scorching the men’s faces and producing far more smoke than the steam engines’ exhausts. Within a quarter of an hour, the charred, smouldering line of the firebreak was engulfed by the bushfire.

Spicer flicked his fly-whisk, weighing his options. The main worry was
Mimi
and
Toutou
. They would go up like matchsticks if the fire came near. And it was near. Flames leaped wildly into the air around the locomotives and the boats, and the men choked in the thick smoke as they tried to protect them. Spicer moved the entire expedition on to the still-smoking, blackened ground of the firebreak: the massive wheels of the engines, the oxen’s hooves, the boots of the naval volunteers and the bare feet of the labourers, all crowded on to this narrow strip of hot grey ash. Anyone wearing shoes with crepe rubber soles began to feel them stick. Yet the barefoot porters seemed unconcerned, the skin on their feet hardened by years of tramping through the bush.

Round about them, spinning through the smoke, whirled clouds of white egrets and other birds snapping at the myriad insects being driven out by the flames. A zigzag of brown and grey rodents could also be seen in the unburnt grass, frantically climbing over stalks and tussocks of earth to escape the heat. Buzzards swooped down and grabbed them as they fled.

This massive fire barely merits a mention in Magee’s account. ‘Bush fires annoyed us a good deal,’ he writes, ‘and we frequently had to make a hurried shift to avoid being burnt out.’ Perhaps his brevity indicates just how harrowing it was—so much so that he doesn’t want to relive it in print. One certainly gets a more powerful sense of the danger from Dr Hanschell’s account (as related by Shankland):

Suddenly the wind changed. Instead of carrying the fiercest of fire straight towards them it blew the flames slantwise towards the road they had come up, and passed only 150 yards from them, blistering their faces. The smaller flames petered out on reaching the line where the new fire had been started. A great gust of wind followed, swirling smoke and ashes in their faces and showering them with bits of burning grass and embers: men climbed up onto the boats and beat out those that showered on the covering tarpaulins. Soon the danger was past and they all stood with eyes streaming and blackened faces with
Mimi
and
Toutou
in a burnt-out desert, with here and there a clump of trees still smouldering.

The bushfire bonded the men and in the ensuing period they all put their backs into the work. But they were soon to be challenged again. Having fought the fire, they were now short of water. Travelling across the plain beyond Mwenda Mkosi, making for the foothills of the Mitumbas, they had encountered many dry spots. It was assumed these had caused the fire, though the suspicion was raised that it might have been Africans in the pay of the Germans (certainly Zimmer’s memoirs suggest they knew the ‘top-secret’ mission was on its way, though he mentions no such counter-measures). At this stage nobody seems to have suspected it was the rest house that Dr Hanschell had burned down.