2000 " Jocelyn and Starrs ammunition.
1500 " Henry rifle ammunition.
Cooking utensils, medicine chest, books, sextant, canvas bags, &c., &c., &c.
The above made a total of about forty loads. Many things in the list would have brought fancy prices in Unyanyembe, especially the carbines and ammunition, the saw, carpenter's tools the beads, and wire. Out of the thirty-three loads which were stored for him in my tembe—the stock sent to Livingstone, Nov. 1,1870—but few of them would be available for his return trip to Rua and Manyuema. The 696 doti of cloth which were left to him formed the only marketable articles of value he possessed; and in Manyuema, where the natives manufactured their own cloth, such an article would be considered a drug; while my beads and wire, with economy, would suffice to keep him and his men over two years in those regions. His own cloth, and what I gave him, made in the aggregate 1,393 doti, which, at 2 doti per day for food, were sufficient to keep him and sixty men 696 days. He had thus four years' supplies. The only articles he lacked to make a new and completely fitted-up expedition were the following, a list of which he and I drew up;—
A few tins of American wheat-flour. " " soda crackers.
" " preserved fruits
A few tins of salmon, 10 lbs. Hyson tea. Some sewing thread and needles.
1 dozen official envelopes. 'Nautical Almanac' for 1872 and 1873. 1
blank journal. 1 chronometer, stopped. 1 chain for refractory people.
With the articles just named he would have a total of seventy loads, but without carriers they were an incumbrance to him; for, with only the nine men which he now had, he could go nowhere with such a splendid assortment of goods. I was therefore commissioned to enlist,—as soon as I reached Zanzibar,—fifty freemen, arm them with a gun and hatchet each man, besides accoutrements, and to purchase two thousand bullets, one thousand flints, and ten kegs of gunpowder. The men were to act as carriers, to follow wherever Livingstone might desire to go. For, without men, he was simply tantalized with the aspirations roused in him by the knowledge that he had abundance of means, which were irrealizable without carriers. All the wealth of London and New York piled before him were totally unavailable to him without the means of locomotion. No Mnyamwezi engages himself as carrier during war-time. You who have read the diary of my 'Life in Unyanyembe' know what stubborn Conservatives the Wanyamwezi are. A duty lay yet before me which I owed to my illustrious companion, and that was to hurry to the coast as if on a matter of life and death—act for him in the matter of enlisting men as if he were there himself—to work for him with the same zeal as I would for myself—not to halt or rest until his desires should be gratified, And this I vowed to do; but it was a death-blow to my project of going down the Nile, and getting news of Sir S. Baker.
The Doctor's task of writing his letters was ended. He delivered into my hand twenty letters for Great Britain, six for Bombay, two for New York, and one for Zanzibar. The two letters for New York were for James Gordon Bennett, junior, as he alone, not his father, was responsible for the Expedition sent under my command. I beg the reader's pardon for republishing one of these letters here, as its spirit and style indicate the man, the mere knowledge of whose life or death was worth a costly Expedition.
Ujiji, on Tanganika, East Africa, November, 1871.
James Gordon Bennett, Jr., Esq.
My Dear Sir,—It is in general somewhat difficult to write to one we have never seen—it feels so much like addressing an abstract idea—but the presence of your representative, Mr. H. M. Stanley, in this distant region takes away the strangeness I should otherwise have felt, and in writing to thank you for the extreme kindness that prompted you to send him, I feel quite at home.