2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (14 page)

With no doubt similar delays,
Mimi
and
Toutou
made their slow progress upriver. As the sun was setting, somebody spotted a steamer. Its smoking chimney above the reeds gave away its position. After a mile or two of struggling in its wake, the expedition pulled alongside. It was a vessel of the Belgian company that ran the Congo, its deck populated by a medley of African passengers and their livestock, together with a few white traders, as well as mailbags and other freight. Most of the room was taken up with stacks of wood for the boilers. The ship’s sides were grimy with river muck, but its name,
Constantin de Burlay
, was rather romantic.

They were not well received. The captain, who came to the white-painted rail to inspect them, spoke only Flemish. Nevertheless, profanities are a universal language. A ‘burly, choleric unshaven individual’, according to Shankland, Captain Blaes was not very amenable to Spicer’s mimed suggestion that their stores be loaded aboard the steamer. In fact, he retreated to his cabin, whence ‘the volleys of
Gotfer!
and
Gotferdomme!
that issued…sounded very like English goddams’.

Eastwood took over the negotiations. His blandishments, translated into Flemish by the steamer’s purser, were relayed to the indignant Captain Blaes. Eventually the patient Methodist prevailed. It was agreed the
Constantin
would wait for Tait’s party to arrive and that the stores would be loaded on to the steamer’s lighter (a small boat she towed behind).

In the morning
Mimi
and
Toutou
continued upriver, Mauritzen joining Spicer in
Mimi
at the front of the procession. The crocodiles were larger in this section of the water and the men kept their rifles ready; but if they were ever in danger it was from a nearby hippopotamus, which opened its massive mouth to reveal bright pink gums and fearsome, tusk-like teeth. One crunch of its powerful jaws and the boats would be reduced to splinters. The men wanted to squirt some lead into its mouth. Some took a few shots, but missed and an argument broke out, Dr Hanschell objecting that it was cruel and unsporting. Spicer took his side and ordered everyone to cease fire. The creature followed them for hours all the same, its head just above the water as it pursued them without a sound.

Winding through floating clumps of light-green vegetation, the expedition progressed under the relentless sun (everyone wore a solar topi now). Sitting or lying on the boats, the men watched slender palms and massive baobabs scroll by on the bank. This was the Africa they had always imagined—but more so, so much more so. Every now and then tributaries flowed off into the forest wilderness and it was here that elephants often appeared. Wreathed in creepers and grasses, these mighty beasts would spread their ears and, lifting their trunks, trumpet at the boats as they went by.
Mimi
and
Toutou
also passed more villages, from some of which the inhabitants would emerge, standing tall and proud on the bank above, hands on hips, disdainful of strangers.

For many members of the Naval Africa Expedition, products of their own period in history, the Africans were little more than beasts. Like someone staring into a thick fog, they could not see the humanity there. The people on the shore and the animals on the shore were one and the same: simple embodiments of the wilderness—pawns in the romantic primitivist game the white man had been playing with Africa for the past 40 years. It all happened remarkably quickly. In 1875 only a tenth of Africa was under European control; by 1895 only a tenth was not.

However, some exceptional individuals can see through the fog of their time. David Livingstone could, with his never-faltering concern for African people. At this juncture, Spicer’s expedition was passing through a region that the great Scottish explorer had charted a generation earlier. It was the Congo basin, a vast trough of alluvial soil surrounded by dripping hill-slopes. But when Livingstone was travelling here, he thought the Congo-Lualaba was either a northern branch of the
Zambezi
or (which he rather hoped) part of the Nile. It was a time of great hardship for him. His followers had deserted him and stolen his medicine chest and he was suffering from ulcers on his feet, while also struggling with bouts of pneumonia, dysentery and cholera. Every joint in his body was swollen with rheumatic fever from constant exposure to the wet. Eventually, he had to attach himself to a party of Arab ivory hunters, who turned out to be slavers and thieves, kidnapping and murdering wherever they went.

‘I am heart-broken at the sight of human blood,’ he wrote in his moving
Last Journals
, his hand shaking with fever as he tried to steady the pen on the paper.

Earlier in his journey, Livingstone had spotted from some mountains a wide expanse of water and christened it Lake Liemba; it was in fact Lake Tanganyika. Like Waugh in 1930, he was coming from practically the opposite direction to Spicer’s expedition, but he was passing through the same forests as the Naval Africa Expedition and they had not changed much in the intervening half-century:

Into these primeval woods, the sun, though vertical, cannot penetrate, except as sending down their
[sic]
pencils of rays into the gloom. The rain-water stands for months in stagnant pools made by elephants’ feet, and the dead leaves decay on the damp soil. One feels himself the veriest pigmy before these gigantic trees; many of their roots, high out of the soil in the path, keep you constantly looking down, and a good gun does no harm to the parrots and guinea-fowl on their tops. The climbing plants, from the size of a whipcord to that of a man-o’-war’s hawser, make the ancient path the only passage.

Near to where he wrote this, Livingstone heard of how the great river—the Lualaba or Nile, as he was now erroneously convinced it was—spread into a large lake and joined with another river, the Lufira. It was at precisely this junction point that Spicer’s men found themselves on the morning of 11 October 1915. First they had to navigate through a swamp, and as the channels between the beds of tangled reeds grew narrower and narrower, Mauritzen argued it was dangerous to keep using
Mimi
and
Toutou
’s engines. There was too great a chance of their propellers gathering up strands of vegetation and twisting the shaft to the engine.

Their brief holiday over, the Congolese paddlemen were once again put to work. As they paddled through the reeds—sometimes getting out to tug the boats through by hand, as Bogart and Hepburn would do during the filming of
The African Queen
36 years later—enormous numbers of birds flew up from their nesting places in the marsh. Not just the kind of waterfowl familiar to Europeans—ducks, geese, herons and cormorants—but great African monsters like the Maribou stork, the pelican and the crested crane.

Eventually
Mimi
and
Toutou
emerged from the swamp and into Lake Kisale, where the current of the two rivers converged. The lake was famous for its floating islands, which were inhabited by fishermen. In his record of the explorations of Stanley and Livingstone, John Geddie describes the methods of Kisale fishermen:

The matted growths of aquatic plants fringing its shores are cut off in sections, and towed to the centre of the lake. Logs, brushwood, and earth are laid on the floating platform, until it acquires a consistency capable of supporting a native hut and a plot of bananas and other fruit trees, with a small flock of goats and poultry. The island is anchored by a stake driven into the bed of the lake; and if the fishing become scarce, or should other occasion occur for shifting his domicile, the proprietor simply draws the peg, and shifts his floating little mansion, farm, and stock, whither he chooses.↓

≡ John Geddie,
The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Record of Modern Discovery
(Edinburgh, 1883); a book to be distinguished from Richard Burton’s earlier volume of a similar name.

Another type of floating dwelling greeted Spicer and his team. Coming faintly over the lake could be heard the tinkling of a piano and looking out across an expanse of rippling blue water, over a bed of white sand, they eventually spied a barge on which had been built a small house.

‘It’s my place,’ Mauritzen explained, coolly inviting Spicer and Dr Hanschell to lunch.

The music stopped as they climbed aboard and a young blonde-haired woman in a white dress and sandals emerged on deck.

‘My wife,’ added Mauritzen. As they embraced, a native servant fetched drinks and cigarettes. Spicer and the doctor followed the Mauritzens through to the cabin of their houseboat, where there were comfortable armchairs and pictures on the walls.

Lunch was delicious—fish from the lake, naturally—and they were both slightly dazed by this sudden display of civility after months of hardship. Having eaten their fill, the two hydrographers pored over charts and maps, while the doctor discussed music and literature with Mrs Mauritzen. She was a very gracious woman, cultured as well as good-natured, and he later remembered it as the best day of the whole expedition.

Mimi
and
Toutou
’s engines were started up again in the afternoon and Mauritzen kissed his wife goodbye. On leaving the lake the expedition continued for five miles upriver to the village of Kadia. Here they were flagged down by Captain Holmquist, the Belgian river superintendent, who told them it was too dangerous to continue further. There were rocky outcrops in the river bed that might rip out the launches’ hulls. There was nothing to do but wait for the unsavoury Captain Blaes and the
Constantin de Burlay
to catch them up, hoping they might be able to load the boats on her deck.

But when he arrived Captain Blaes remained ‘extraordinarily uncouth and incommunicable’, according to Dr Hanschell. He was still unshaven and the contrast between him and Spicer, who was obsessed with the presentation of his facial hair, could not have been greater. Despite Tom’s best efforts to ruin his cut-throats and the difficulty of finding suitable campsites along the river, Spicer had continued his peculiar practice of letting his beard grow, then shaving it off. These shaves were complicated affairs employing the full regalia of wash-stand, soap-stick and circular mirror.

Quite apart from the Captain’s unwillingness to help, the
Constantin
’s cranes were too small to lift
Mimi
and
Toutou
. As usual it was Wainwright who came up with a solution. They would put the motor boats on the steamer’s lighter, using tree trunks as a kind of bridge from the banks. He immediately sent some of the ratings into the forest to cut down trees for the job.

They laid the tree trunks out into the river in a line and the cradles and other stores were meanwhile removed from the lighter.
Toutou
was put back into her cradle while still in the water and brought close to the river bank. With pulleys and a large complement of African labour, the motor boat was pulled up the ramp of logs onto the bank. The ends of the logs were then lifted and placed onto the deck of the lighter.

One of the men involved was the red-haired seaman from Donegal, who may or may not have been William Carey. Stripped down to his shorts, he waded into the water to raise each log-end one by one. His muscular physique and porcelain-pale skin, as well as his distinctive red hair, brought coos of admiration from the womenfolk of the village, who had lined up on the bank to watch.

Seeing this, Spicer was outraged and perhaps a little jealous. ‘Disgusting!’ he shouted. ‘Go and get some clothes on! Where do you think you are? Back in Donegal?!’

It was another Spicer ‘performance’ and one that the ratings would recall later in the expedition, when their leader began stripping off for male and female alike. But for the time being they had serious work to do: it wasn’t until the morning of 16 October—a week after they had arrived at Kadia and ten days after they had begun their river journey—that the motor boats had been properly secured on the lighter and the
Constantin de Burlay
was ready to leave.

By this stage, Captain Blaes was hopping mad. The business of getting
Mimi
and
Toutou
on board had put him a week behind schedule. He was a boozer, the expedition reckoned, and they didn’t think much of his passengers either. They included four convicts—shackled at the neck and under the guard of an armed
askari
—and several East European traders in dirty white linen suits. To these were added a crowd of African families with children and livestock and bags of provisions. The ship’s cargo included several elephant tusks and—tied to the side, still wriggling—a young crocodile. Spicer’s lecture about the expedition seems to suggest they actually locked Blaes in his cabin at some point during this period, though for form’s sake the Belgian is transformed into a native caretaker: ‘Dudley invited him into the captain’s cabin to discuss the situation and have a drink. He had arranged to be called away by one of his engine-room staff, and as he went out he locked the caretaker in…’

The
Constantin
left just after 7
AM
and her progress seemed to confirm the expedition’s opinion that the captain was a drunkard. His method of sailing was to ram the steamer into the bank whenever a bend was approaching. He’d then let the current carry the steamer round 360 degrees before continuing. They all burst out laughing the first time this happened (Spicer’s laugh, as ever, being the loudest), but when the procedure was repeated at every bend in the river they realised Captain Blaes was doing it on purpose. Perhaps he wasn’t so blind drunk as he seemed; perhaps it was simply the best way to get the
Constantin
downriver.

For all that, the steamer ran aground at 9.15
AM
near the village of Mulango. Whatever they did—putting the engines into reverse, throwing out anchors and hauling on them—she wouldn’t budge. Captain Blaes’s response was to retire down below, saying they would have to wait until the rains came and the river level rose, lifting the steamer from its resting place.↓