Books: He Got His Man

THE RELUCTANT RESCUE (304 pp.)—Olivia Manning—Doubleday ($3.50).

Henry Morton (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) Stanley was one of the small boys’ heroes of the 19th Century. His reputation is having harder going in the 20th. It is now well established that Missionary Livingstone did not consider himself lost, and had little desire to be “found.” But though Stanley came back without his man (Livingstone preferred to continue exploring and freeing natives from Arab slave traders), Journalist Stanley’s trip built circulation for James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, and a profitable career for himself.

He was on a lecture tour 16 years later, when the chance came for another African “rescue.” Emin Pasha, the German-born Governor of the Equatorial province, had fled to the hills after the fall of Khartoum. In England there was immense popular sympathy with his plight, and money was collected to rescue him. Stanley cut short his lecture tour to lead the expedition. His two-volume description of the epic journey was In Darkest Africa. Author Manning’s less solemn account of it, based on other documents as well as Stanley’s, trims its hero to life size.

Fine Feathers. The expedition had a Gilbert & Sullivan air about it, as Author Manning tells it. Emin Pasha, the object of the hunt, was an eccentric German doctor whose real name was Eduard Schnitzer. Though he had fled to the almost inaccessible interior of Equatorial Africa, he was afraid somebody would try to “rescue” him.

The Pasha had reasons for not being rescued, or at least for not being returned to Europe, Miss Manning implies; he had deserted a common-law wife and several foster children in Germany. That did not deter Stanley’s expedition. It left Zanzibar on steamers for the mouth of the Congo in February 1887. The party consisted of eight white officers, some 600 Zanzibaris, 60 armed Soudanese, four Syrians, 13 Somalis. During part of the journey it carried a wealthy slave raider named Tippu-Tib, “gorgeously clad in silks, a jeweled turban and jeweled kris,” with his 96 relatives. Among the cargo were several cases of Stanley’s favorite Madeira and a frogged coat which he intended to wear when the white Pasha was sighted. Stanley led the expedition by sounding a piercing whistle, “a kind of marine foghorn with a huge gong.” While Stanley’s steamer chugged up the Congo, Emin made preparations to receive his visitors. By his calculations, they would arrive Dec. 15, 1888.

Disappearing Zanzibari. It was a close guess. The trek look a year and a half, much of it through an unexplored forest which rose “like a dark, dense colonnade.” Pigmies assailed them and, according to Stanley’s story, more than one Zanzibari “disappeared into the cooking pot.” He also described butterflies flying overhead in clouds, “some taking hours to pass”; beetles boring into the tent poles and showering sawdust into the soup. Natives shot poisoned arrows at the passing column, “baboons howled within the darkness . . . and . . . herds of hippopotami grunted thunderously” along the river.

Six months after the expedition entered the forest, a depleted band of tattered, hungry men reached the lake at which Emin was to meet them. Emin had received word from natives of Stanley’s coming. But Stanley arrived a day earlier than Emin had planned on; disgruntled at not finding the Pasha there, he retired to his camp “to read his Bible. He had read it through once in the forest and was back again at Deuteronomy.” Emin showed up next day, found no one, and went back to his station in the hills. After resting for a while in a village of his own building, Stanley took after his quarry again.

Three months later he finally met the Pasha, who was considerably better dressed and fed than his rescuers. The Pasha observed the historic meeting by drinking Stanley’s champagne and “discoursing charmingly on a number of subjects.” He reluctantly accompanied Stanley back to the coast. There, at a reception in his honor, he fell 25 feet from a balcony onto his head. Eventually he returned to the inky interior, and was murdered by Arabs. Said Stanley “… a nearsighted, faithless, ungrateful little man.”