FOOTNOTES:
[46] In 1875.
[47] The chiefs open-air enclosure for official meetings.
[48] These are Khama's own words taken down at the time by Hepburn.
CHAPTER XVII
THE KNIGHT OF THE SLAVE GIRLS
George Grenfell
(Dates, b. 1849, d. 1906)
The Building of the Steamship
When David Livingstone lay dying in his hastily-built hut, in the heart of Africa, with his black companions Susi and Chumah attending him, almost his last words were, "How far away is the Luapula?"
He knew that the river to which the Africans gave that name was only a short distance away and that it flowed northward. He thought that it might be the upper reaches of the Nile, which had been sought by men through thousands of years, but which none had ever explored.
Livingstone died in that hut (1873) and never knew what Stanley, following in his footsteps, discovered later (1876-7), viz., that the Luapula was really the upper stretch of the Congo, the second largest river in the world (3000 miles long), flowing into the Atlantic. The basin of the Congo would cover the whole of Europe from the Black Sea to the English Channel.
In the year when Livingstone died, and before Stanley started to explore the Congo, a young man, who had been thrilled by reading the travels of Livingstone, sailed to the West Coast of Africa to the Kameruns.
His name was George Grenfell, a Cornish boy (born at Sancreed, four miles from Penzance, in England), who was brought up in Birmingham. He was apprenticed at fifteen to a firm of hardware and machinery dealers. Here he picked up, as a lad, some knowledge of machinery that helped him later on the Congo. He had been thrilled to meet at Bristol College, where he was trained for his missionary work, a thin, worn, heroic man of tried steel, Alfred Saker, the great Kamerun missionary, and Grenfell leapt for joy to go out to the dangerous West Coast of Africa, where he worked hard, teaching the Africans to make tables and bricks and to print and read, healing them and preaching to them.
When Stanley came down the Congo to the sea and electrified the world by the story of the great river, Grenfell and the Baptist Missionary Society which he served conceived the daring and splendid plan of starting a chain of mission stations right from the mouth of the Congo eastward across Africa. In 1878 Grenfell was on his way up the river—travelling along narrow paths flanked by grass often fifteen feet high, and crossing swamps and rivers, till after thirteen attempts and in eighteen months he reached Stanley Pool, February 1881. A thousand miles of river lay between Stanley Pool and Stanley Falls, and even above Stanley Falls lay thirteen hundred miles of navigable river. Canoes were perilous. Hippopotami upset them, and men were dragged down and eaten by crocodiles. They must have a steamer right up there beyond the Falls in the very heart of Africa.
Grenfell went home to England, and the steamer Peace was built on the Thames, Grenfell watching everything being made from the crank to the funnel. She was built, launched, and tried on the Thames; then taken to pieces and packed in 800 packages, weighing 65 lbs. each, and taken to the mouth of the Congo. On the heads and shoulders of a thousand men the whole ship and the food of the party were carried past the rapids, over a thousand miles along narrow paths, in peril of snakes and leopards and enemy savages, over streams crossed by bridges of vine-creepers, through swamps, across ravines.
Grenfell's engineer, who was to have put the ship together, died. At last they reached Stanley Pool. Grenfell with eight negroes started to try to build the ship. It was a tremendous task. Grenfell said the Peace was "prayed together." It was prayer and hard work and gumption. At last the ship was launched, steam was up, the Peace began to move. "She lives, master, she lives!" shouted the excited Africans.
A thousand thrilling adventures came to him as he steamed up and down the river, teaching and preaching, often in the face of poisoned arrows and spears. We are now going to hear the story of one adventure.
The crocodiles drowsily dosing in the slime of the Congo river bank stirred uneasily as a strange sound broke the silence of the blazing African morning. They lifted their heavy jaws and swung their heads down stream. Their beady eyes caught sight of a Thing mightier than a thousand crocodiles. It was pushing its way slowly up stream.
The sound was the throb of the screw of the steamer from whose funnel a light ribbon of smoke floated across the river. An awning shaded the whole deck from bow to stern. On the top of the awning, under a little square canopy, stood a tall young negro; the muscles in his sturdy arms and his broad shoulders rippled under his dark skin as the wheel swung round in his swift, strong hands.
The steamer drove up stream while the crocodiles, startled by the wash of the boat, slid sullenly down the bank and dived.
A short, bearded man, dressed in white duck, stood on deck at the bows, where the steamer's name, Peace, was painted. He was George Grenfell. His keen eyes gleamed through the spectacles that rested on his strong, arched nose. By his side stood his wife, looking out up the river. They were searching for the landing-place and the hut-roofs of some friendly river-side town.
At last as the bows swung round the next bend in the river they saw a village. The Africans rushed to the bank and hurriedly pushed out their tree-trunk canoes. Grenfell shouted an order. A bell rang. The screw stopped and the steamer lay-to while he climbed down into the ship's canoe and was paddled ashore. The wondering people pushed and jostled around them to see this strange man with his white face.
The Slave Girls
As they walked up among the huts, speaking with the men of the town, Grenfell came to an open space. As his quick eyes looked about he saw two little girls standing bound with cords. They were tethered like goats to a stake. Their little faces and round eyes looked all forlorn. Even the wonder of the strange bearded white man hardly kept back the tears that filled their eyes.
"What are these?" he asked, turning to the chief.
The African pointed up the river. Grenfell's heart burned in him, as the chief told how he and his men had swept up the river in their canoes armed with their spears and bows and arrows and had raided another tribe.
"And these," said the chief, pointing to the girls, who began to wonder what was going to happen, "these are two girls that we captured. They are some of our booty. They are slaves. They are tied there till someone will come and buy them."
Grenfell could not resist the silent call of their woeful faces. Quickly he gave beads and cloth to the chief, and took the little girls back with him down to the river bank. As they jumped into the canoe to go aboard the S.S. Peace, the two girls wondered what this strange new master would do with them. Would he be cruel? Yet his eyes looked kind through those funny, round, shining things balanced on his nose.
The girls at once forgot all their sorrows when they jumped on board this wonderful river monster. They felt it shiver and throb and begin to move. The bank went farther and farther away. The Peace had again started up stream.
The girls stood in wonder and gazed with open eyes as the banks slid past. They saw the birds all green and red flashing along the surface of the water, and the huge hippopotami sullenly plunging into the river like the floating islands of earth that sail down the Congo. Their quick eyes noted the quaint iguana, like giant lizards, sunning themselves on the branches of the trees over the stream and then dropping like stones into the stream as the steamer passed.
The Slave Girl's Brother
Then, suddenly, as they came round a bend in the river, all was changed. There ahead Grenfell saw a river town. The canoes were being manned rapidly by warriors. The bank bristled with spears in the hands of ferocious savages, whose faces were made horrible by gashes and loathsome tattooing. In each canoe men stood with bows in their hands and arrows drawn to the head. The throb of the engines ceased. The ship slowed up. But the canoes came on.
The men of this Congo town only knew one thing. Enemies had, only a few weeks earlier, come from down-river, had raided their town, burned their huts, killed many of their braves, and carried away their children. Here were men who had also come from down the river. They must, therefore, be enemies.
Their chief shouted an order. In an instant a score of spears hurtled at the ship and rattled on the steel screens around the deck. The yell of the battle-cry of the tribe echoed and re-echoed down the river.
Grenfell was standing by the little girls. Suddenly one of them with dancing eyes shouted and waved her arms.
"What is it?" cried Grenfell to her.
"See—see!" she cried, pointing to a warrior in a canoe who was just poising a spear, "that is my brother! That is my brother! This is my town!"
"Call to him," said Grenfell.
Her thin childish voice rang out. But no one heard it among the warriors. Again she cried out to her brother. The only answer was a hail of spears and arrows.
Grenfell turned rapidly and shouted an order to the engineer. Instantly a shriek, more wild and piercing than the combined yells of the whole tribe, rent the air. Again the shriek went up. The warriors stood transfixed with spear and arrow in hand like statues in ebony. There was a moment's intense and awful silence. They had never before heard the whistle of a steamer!
"Shout again—quickly," whispered Grenfell to the little African girl.
In a second the child's shrill voice rang out in the silence across the water, crying first her brother's name, and then her own.
The astonished warrior dropped his spear, caught up his paddle and—in a few swift strokes—drove his canoe towards the steamer. His astonishment at seeing his sister aboard overcame all his dread of this shrieking, floating island that moved without sails or paddles.
Quickly she told her story of how the strange white man in the great canoe that smoked had found her in the village of their enemies, had saved her from slavery, and—now, had brought her safely home again. The story passed from lip to lip. Every spear and bow and arrow was dropped.
The girls were quickly put ashore, and as Grenfell walked up the village street every warrior who had but a few moments before been seeking his blood was now gazing at this strange friend who had brought back to the tribe the daughters whom they thought they had lost for ever.
Grenfell went on with his work in face of fever, inter-tribal fighting, slave-raiders, the horrors of wife and slave-slaughter at funerals, witch-killing—and in some ways worse still, the horrible cruelties of the Belgian rubber-traders—for over a quarter of a century.
In June 1906, accompanied by his negro companions, he lay at Yalemba, sick with fever. Two of the Africans wrote a letter for help to other missionaries:
"We are very sorrow," they wrote, "because out Master is very sick. So now we beging you one of you let him come to help Mr Grenfell please. We think now is near to die, but we don't know how to do with him. Yours,
DISASI MAKULO,
MASCOO LUVUSU."
To-day all up the fifteen hundred miles of Congo waterway the power of the work done by Grenfell and the men who came with him and after him has changed all the life. Gone are the slave-raiders, the inter-tribal wars, the cruelties of the white men, along that line. There stand instead negroes who cap make bricks, build houses, turn a lathe; engineers, printers, bookbinders, blacksmiths, carpenters, worshipping in churches built with their own hands. But beyond, and among the myriad tributaries and the vast forests millions of men have never yet even heard of the love of God in Jesus Christ, and still work their hideous cruelties.
So Grenfell, like Livingstone, opened a door. It stands open.
CHAPTER XVIII
"A MAN WHO CAN TURN HIS HAND TO ANYTHING"
Alexander Mackay
(Dates 1863-1876)
The inquisitive village folk stared over their garden gates at Mr. Mackay, the minister of the Free Kirk of Rhynie, a small Aberdeenshire village, as he stood with his thirteen-year-old boy gazing into the road at their feet. The father was apparently scratching at the stones and dust with his stick. The villagers shook their heads.
"Fat's the minister glowerin' at, wi' his loon Alic, among the stoor o' the turnpike?"[49] asked the villagers of one another.
The minister certainly was powerful in the pulpit, but his ways were more than they could understand. He was for ever hammering at the rocks on the moor and lugging ugly lumps of useless stone homeward, containing "fossils" as he called them.
Now Mr. Mackay was standing looking as though he were trying to find something that he had lost in the road. If they had been near enough to Alec and his father they would have heard words like these:
"You see, Alec, this is the Zambesi River running down from the heart of Africa into the Indian Ocean, and here running into the Zambesi from the north is a tributary, the Shiré. Livingstone going up that river found wild savages who ..."
So the father was tracing in the dust of the road with the point of his stick the course of the Zambesi which Livingstone had just explored for the first time.
On these walks with his father Alec, with his blue eyes wide open, used to listen to stories like the Yarn we have read of the marvellous adventures of Livingstone.[50] Sometimes Mr. Mackay would stop and draw triangles and circles with his stick. Then Alec would be learning a problem in Euclid on this strange "blackboard" of the road. He learned the Euclid—but he preferred the Zambesi and Livingstone!
One day Alec was off by himself trudging down the road with a fixed purpose in his mind, a purpose that seemed to have nothing in the world to do with either Africa or Euclid. He marched away from his little village of Rhynie, where the burn runs around the foot of the great granite mountain across the strath. He trudged on for four miles. Then he heard a shrill whistle. Would he be late after all? He ran swiftly toward the little railway station. A ribbon of smoke showed over the cutting, away to the right. Alec entered the station and ran to one end of the platform as the train slowed down and the engine stopped just opposite where he stood.
He gazed at the driver and his mate on the footplate. He followed every movement as the driver came round the engine with his long-nosed oil-can, and opened and shut small brass lids and felt the bearings with his hand to see whether they were hot. The guard waved his green flag. The whistle of the engine shrieked, and the train steamed out of the station along the burnside toward Huntly. Alec gazed down the line till the train was out of sight and then, turning, left the station and trudged homeward. When he reached Rhynie he had walked eight miles to look at a railway engine for two and a half minutes—and he was happy!
As he went along the village street he heard a familiar sound.
"Clang—a—clang clang!—ssssssss!" It was irresistible. He stopped, and stepped into the magic cavern of darkness, gleaming with the forge-fire, where George Lobban, the smith, having hammered a glowing horseshoe into shape, gripped it with his pincers and flung it hissing into the water.
Having cracked a joke with the laughing smith, Alec dragged himself away from the smithy, past the green, and looked in at the stable to curry-comb the pony and enjoy feeling the little beast's muzzle nosing in his hand for oats.
He let himself into the manse and ran up to his work-room, where he began to print off some pages that he had set up on his little printing press.
At supper his mother looked sadly at her boy with his dancing eyes as he told her about the wonders of the railway engine. In her heart she wanted him to be a minister. And she did not see any sign that this boy would ever become one: this lad of hers who was always running off from his books to peer into the furnaces of the gas works, or to tease the village carpenter into letting him plane a board, or to sit, with chin in hands and elbows on knees, watching the saddler cutting and padding and stitching his leather, or to creep into the carding-mill—like the Budge and Toddy whose lives he had read—"to see weels go wound."
It was a bitter cold night in the Christmas vacation fourteen years later.[51] Alec Mackay, now a young engineering student, was lost to all sense of time as he read of the hairbreadth escapes and adventures told by the African explorer, Stanley, in his book, How I found Livingstone.
He read these words of Stanley's:
"For four months and four days I lived with Livingstone in the same house, or in the same boat, or in the same tent, and I never found a fault in him.... Each day's life with him added to my admiration for him. His gentleness never forsakes him: his hopefulness never deserts him. His is the Spartan heroism, the inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution of the Anglo-Saxon. The man has conquered me."
Alexander Mackay put down Stanley's book and gazed into the fire. Since the days when he had trudged as a boy down to the station to see the railway engine he had been a schoolboy in the Grammar School at Aberdeen, and a student in Edinburgh, and while there had worked in the great shipbuilding yards at Leith amid the clang and roar of the rivetters and the engine shop. He was now studying in Berlin, drawing the designs of great engines far more wonderful than the railway engine he had almost worshipped as a boy.
On the desk at Mackay's side lay his diary in which he wrote his thoughts. In that diary were the words that he himself had written:
"This day last year[52] Livingstone died—a Scotsman and a Christian—loving God and his neighbour, in the heart of Africa. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"
Mackay wondered. Could it ever be that he would go into the heart of Africa like Livingstone? it seemed impossible. What was the good of an engineer among the lakes and forests of Central Africa?
On the table by the side of Stanley's How I found Livingstone lay a newspaper, the Edinburgh Daily Review. Mackay glanced at it; then he snatched it up and read eagerly a letter which appeared there. It was a new call to Central Africa—the call, through Stanley, from King M'tesa of Uganda, that home of massacre and torture. These are some of the words that Stanley wrote:
"King M'tesa of Uganda has been asking me about the white man's God.... Oh that some practical missionary would come here. M'tesa would give him anything that he desired—houses, land, cattle, ivory. It is the practical Christian who can ... cure their diseases, build dwellings, teach farming and turn his hand to anything like a sailor—this is the man who is wanted. Such a one, if he can be found, would become the saviour of Africa."
Stanley called for "a practical man who could turn his hand to anything—if he can be found."
The words burned their way into Mackay's very soul.
"If he can be found." Why here, here in this very room he sits—the boy who has worked in the village at the carpenter's bench and the saddler's table, in the smithy and the mill, when his mother wished him to be at his books; the lad who has watched the ships building in the docks of Aberdeen, and has himself with hammer and file and lathe built and made machines in the engineering works—he is here—the "man who can turn his hand to anything." And he had, we remember, already written in his diary:
"Livingstone died—a Scotsman and a Christian—loving God and his neighbour, in the heart of Africa. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"
Mackay did not hesitate. Then and there he took pen and ink and paper and wrote to London to the Church Missionary Society which was offering, in the daily paper that lay before him, to send men out to King M'tesa. The words that Mackay wrote were these:
"My heart burns for the deliverance of Africa, and if you can send me to any one of those regions which Livingstone and Stanley have found to be groaning under the curse of the slave-hunter I shall be very glad."
Within four months Mackay, with some other young missionaries who had volunteered for the same great work, was standing on the deck of the S.S. Peshawur as she steamed out from Southampton for Zanzibar.
He was in the footsteps of Livingstone—"a Scotsman and a Christian"—making for the heart of Africa and "ready to turn his hand to anything" for the sake of Him who as
"... the Carpenter of Nazareth
Made common things for God."