Voyages to discover the unknown

Apr 1 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

150 years ago, David Livingstone left Birkenhead for Africa. Soon, other explorers were being carried around the Empire in hammocks and bathchairs. David Charters reports

T HERE was a time in the full pink flush of British history when high-spirited young ladies wondered if the lands beyond our shores offered more fizz than a rousing psalm, a suffocating corset, a vigorous quadrille, a sly pat on the cur- ate’s bottom, vapid verses, cries of tally-ho-tantivy, or the scent of a long-hung pheasant (careful not to miss the “h” there).

So, those of a daring brand arrived at the outposts of empire, where they reclined in hammocks or sat in palanquins (carriages on poles), noting the local customs, scenery and wildlife – while natives of saintly patience carried them across malarial swamps and mountain ranges, advising them on the best ways of shooting any rapids encountered along the way.

These women and their male counterparts were the forebears of the travel writers, who now fill the weekend supplements with their observations about swimming pools, sunsets and insect-repellents.

But the journeys made by those fanned pioneers were a great deal more hazardous, as can be read in a fascinating book by Nicholas Murray, the historian and biographer, who was born and educated in Liverpool – the port from which many of these adventures began.

He remembers as a little boy gazing from his bedroom window in Seaforth at the river, which opened into the sea and faraway places.

One famous journey actually started across the Mersey in Birkenhead. Almost exactly 150 years ago, David Livingstone, who rarely needed a lozenge to soothe the ravages of laughter, set sail from there for Africa on board the steamer, HMS Pearl.

With his Bibles, medicines, moustache and faith, the missionary took his brother Charles, wife Mary, son Oswell, the family physician, a botanist and a geologist.

The party also carried Ma Robert, the world’s first steel-hulled, paddle-wheeled steamship, which had been divided into three prefabricated sections for assembly on the banks of the Zambezi. She had been designed and built at the yard of John Laird, later Cammell Laird Shipbuilders, one of the greatest names in maritime history.

Sadly, however, the Ma Robert was not one of Birkenhead’s finest offerings, blustering along the green Zambezi, consuming “a frightful” amount of wood in her furnaces. During this time, she gained the nickname Asthmatic, before running aground on a sandbank in late 1860. For a while she was replaced by the Pioneer, also shipped over from England.

Then Livingstone was sent the 24-sections of the another iron steamer, the Lady Nyassa, which could carry more missionaries. While she was being assembled in 1862, Mary Livingstone died from malaria. Natives helped him bury her under a baobab tree.

Throughout this time, Livingstone’s explorations were hampered by violent slave-traders, disease and poor organisation. He is usually portrayed as a stern, cheek-sucking Scot and a moralistic Victorian; but for all that, he was less swollen by the notion of white superiority than many others, though he failed to attract Africans to the Christian cause – the few who did reverted to their native religions.

His language would not have pleased today’s politically correct, yet its tone is sympathetic without being too pious.

“Blows even have been inflicted under the silly assumption that the negro is this, that, and the other thing, and not, like other men, a curious mixture of good and evil, wisdom and folly, cleverness and stupidity . . . Let us fancy the effect on an English village if a black man came to it and a white servant complained that he had been maltreated by him on the way. We have felt heartily ashamed sometimes on discovering how causelessly we have been angry. No doubt the natives are at times as perversely stupid as servants at home can be when they like, but our conduct must often appear to the native mind as a mixture of silliness and insanity.”

Livingstone was brought up in a one-room tenement in Shuttle Row, Blantyre, working in a mill as a boy and gaining an education, where and when he could. Maybe the indignities of crushing poverty made him aware of racial injustice, particularly slavery.

Later generations of British children were brought up with the idea that if people lived in outer space they would be green – perhaps avoiding any clash with our wide variety of earthly pigmentations.

And the colour of skin has been central to human prejudices since we shed our fur. Sadly, we do not have a record of the first meeting between a white man and a black man – to know whether the black man’s brown eyes expressed more surprise at the figure before him than the white man’s blue eyes. Perhaps they both ran as fast as they could in the opposite direction, screaming.

However, it is certain that by the time the great European powers were “opening up” Africa, a sense of white superiority prevailed and this suffuses the view of most of Murray’s travellers.

But comic relief is found in the extraordinary baggage trains which accompanied them. For example, we have the doughty Emma Roberts, a Londoner drawn from a Welsh family of “great respectability”. She would win acclaim for her book, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan.

For one trip she decided to move in the rainy season, writing this about it: “Our train consisted of a khansamah (head servant), who had the direction of the whole journey, three khidmughars (attendants), a sirdar-bearer (valet), the tailor, the washerman, the water-carrier, the cook and mussaulchees (scullions), 12 bearers for each palanquin, and claishees (tent-pitchers),

banghie-bearers (box-bearers), and other servants almost innumerable.”

Miss Roberts felt this a “civilised” mode of transport. Although she could not speak Hindi, the servants seemed to understand that they should make an advance party to pitch the tents so that the others could eat under canvas at noon.

Fanny Parkes, born in Conwy, North Wales, was the wife of a civil servant attached to the East India Company. Her travel experiences were bound under the racy title of Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque during Four and Twenty Years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana (1850).

The zenana was the house in which a harem was kept.

In one passage, Fanny witnesses the wife of a corn chandler attempting suttee (setting herself alight, so as to join her husband in death). Despite an enthusiastic crowd of 5,000, she drew back when the flames on the pile started licking around her.

Poor old John Williams, a blood and thunder preacher capable of trembling the earth, suffered a less happy fate on Eromanga, a southerly island of the New Hebrides, where his zealous reputation had preceded him. The locals attacked his group as they advanced up the shore. Fleeing back to his boat, Williams was clubbed to death.

“It has been thought that he and his companion James Harris were then eaten,” writes Nicholas, 55, an old boy of St Mary’s College, Crosby, who graduated as a BA in English from Liverpool University.

In his voice, as he retells the story on the phone, there bubbles a sound, which to the finely tuned ear suggests a giggle. Surely not!

But we shouldn’t forget that missionaries in cooking pots provided material for generations of cartoonists. A wife in a wheelbarrow presents almost as many comic possibilities, but that was the suggestion made in 1877 by Edward Hore, a scientific officer on a large expedition to Tanganyika. Concerned that bullock carts often failed because the oxen died after being bitten by tsetse flies, he told a gathering of missionaries that he would take his wife, Annie, to Ujiji in a wheelbarrow if necessary.

In the end, however, a pram was converted into a fully enclosed bathchair on bamboo poles, which was carried by 16 servants. You may have noted that central to all the stories in this superb volume is the notion that most white travellers will be carried.

A delightful chapter deals with three Indian gentlemen of high caste, who, in reversal of the trend, came to London to learn about shipbuilding. Huge crowds gathered to gawp at them and marvel at the exotic apparel. They wrote a book about the natives called a Journal of a Residence of Two years and a Half in Great Britain (1841). “Some people think that I set out to have a kind of gender balance,” says Nicholas, “but I didn’t really. The women selected themselves. There were a lot of women travellers. Often they were the wives of colonial officials and they were bored, so they went off to explore the country.

“They were very conspicuous travellers, riding with masses of luggage and hat-boxes and people running out to carry them.

“These travellers had a deep-seated belief that there was a gulf between them and the natives – hence this endless harping on about ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’, sometimes in an angry way, but sometimes in a routine way, as though it was just a descriptive term. But then at home, they would have the same attitude to the working-class.

“You have to remember how much of the map was blank then, and they went off to find great lakes and exciting places. It was a bit like space, unknown territory.”

davidcharters