This herculean task he expects will occupy the next two years.
RAPIDS OF THE LIVINGSTONE RIVER.
There have been but few “sensations” more profound than the sensation created by this despatch. As has been said, it threw the great Peace Jubilee into the shade. Sporting men who had just won on the race-horse “Longfellow” or lost on “Harry Bassett,” paused for a while to think of the strange intelligence. The report of the trial of him who had been charged with the murder of the noted James Fisk, Jr. attracted but comparatively little attention. All through the section of the great city known as “Five Points” the news was discussed by the tatterdemalions of the metropolis; all up and down Fifth Avenue, thousands of the best representatives of wealth and of culture canvassed the double-leaded telegram; and Wall street gave it as much attention as it gave to stocks and government securities. The substance of the telegram was sent to the evening papers all over the country and to Europe, and before sunset of July 2d a vast majority of intelligent people of Christendom knew that Livingstone had been found, and through the means of American private enterprise. It was a triumph in which the “Herald” might have been excused, had it indulged in no little self-glorification. Its article upon the subject, however, was greatly national in spirit, and awarded the credit of the success to American journalism, rather than claimed it for itself.[2]
[2] The leading article of the “Herald” upon this subject is worthy of quotation here as a part of the journalistic history of this remarkable expedition:
The triumph of the Herald exploring expedition to search in the heart of Equatorial Africa for the long-lost Doctor David Livingstone is one which belongs to the entire press of America as well as to the journal whose fortune it was to originate and carry it out. It marks the era in which the press, already beyond the control of even the most exalted among men, who may hold states and empires in their grasp, strikes out boldly into new fields and treads daringly on terra incognita, whether of mind or matter. This is distinctively the work of the American press, whose aspirations and ambitions have grown with the majesty of the land, and whose enterprise has been moulded on the national character. In even recent times the work of progress lay in government hands, or else was wholly neglected. Sir John Franklin started out amid Polar snows to work out the Northern passage only to leave his bones among the eternal ice. Hand or foot was not stirred to learn his fate until Lady Franklin, with woman’s devotion, fitted out the expeditions to search for him or his remains. When the gentleman entrusted with the command of the “Herald” expedition had arrived at Unyanyembe, half way on his journey to Ujiji, he wrote:—“Until I hear more of him, or see the long-absent old man face to face, I bid you farewell; but wherever he is, be sure I shall not give up the chase. If alive, you shall hear what he has to say; if dead, I will find and bring his bones to you.” To those who neither understood the man nor the esprit de corps which gives the representative of an American journal his stamp of vitality the words may have sounded like bombast. For answer it is sufficient to point to the columns of the Herald of to-day. It may have seemed to those who reasoned from a foreign standpoint that no man could so wrap himself up in his work as to give utterance to such words with an earnestness of purpose, backed by a life at hazard from day to day. They simply mistake the spirit of the American journal. If it were in any other quarter of the globe, by land or sea, the same enthusiasm, the same dash, enterprise and pluck would be exhibited, because of the race which he runs for his journal against equally keen-witted rivals, and not alone for the work itself. Enterprise, then, is the characteristic of the American press. It is confined to no one paper, to no one locality. Whatever the Herald may have done in advancing the national reputation in this respect it is proud to claim, as the victor in the Olympic games of old was proud of his laurel crown above all gifts of gold or gems. But there is not a paper published between the Narrows and the Golden Gate which has not its own laurels in the line of enterprise to glory in, and there is not one leaf of the wreath that has not been snatched at and wrestled for by a hundred sinewy journalistic minds. Thus no one journal on the Continent looks up to a permanent head of the profession. To-day one paper may be “ahead on the news;” to-morrow another will snatch the chaplet from its brows. The enterprise of a contemporary in the late Franco-Prussian war was celebrated all over the land, as we have no doubt the success of the Herald will be when the Herald’s special columns are perused to-day.
In England the London Times is looked up to all over as a Triton among the minnows. It is the great paper. The Daily Telegraph is the cheapest, spiciest paper published there; the Standard is a careful, able Tory organ; the Post is a quiet, aristocratic sheet, but the Thunderer overshadows them all. Instinct with the democratic spirit of our institutions, the press of America looks up to no lord among them. As each man born on the soil may be President of the United States, so each paper—no matter what its origin or where its birthplace—feels within itself the possibility of precedence in point of worth, brains and news over all others. We, therefore, reassert that the triumph of the Herald Livingstone expedition is the triumph of American journalism in its broadest sense.
To point this something more, we may say that an American war correspondent has achieved what one of the most powerful governments in the world failed to accomplish. How it was done is easily told. It is probable that an English journal might have succeeded, if it had undertaken the task; but, like Columbus with the egg, the enterprise which knocked in the end of the oval difficulty and made the expedition stand for itself is not a British article.
The story of the meeting of the greatest explorer of any time with the Herald correspondent, by the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with one thousand miles of desert, jungle, jagged mountain path and sodden valley trail, peopled with brutal, ignorant savages, behind him, is one which will long be remembered. The Herald correspondent has kept his word. Happily for civilization there was no necessity to carry back to distant civilization the relics of her hero. He is alive and well and hopes to carry himself home when he has attained the object of his stay. In March 1866, he started up the Rovuma, but was deserted, and the false Moosa spread the lying story of his death to cover his own poltroonery, as was hoped against hope when the baleful tidings first came to hand. The undaunted Livingstone then set forward and reached the Chambezi River, which he discovered has no connection with the Portuguese Zambesi River, which disembogues into the Mozambique Channel opposite Madagascar. But the gem of his discovery lies in the fact that the Chambezi is the true source of the Nile. He followed its course for seven hundred miles towards its source, but was obliged to turn back in want, with one hundred and eighty miles unexplored. The Chambezi towards its source is called the Lualaba, and is not supplied from Lake Tanganyika, and the latter lake has no effluence to the Nile. To solve the problem of the Lualaba and pass round the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika, Livingstone purposes spending two years more in Central Africa. Truly this is great news, and we congratulate the world that neither the life nor the toil of so great a man is lost to the world, as the fates seemed so grimly to threaten. The story of his solitary land-finding will now be read by joyful millions, who, if they cannot all appreciate fully his labors, will not grudge him the tribute of lasting admiration.