Here the doctor resolved to remain, while Stanley went down to the coast to enlist men and collect such further stores as were required, and to send them back. On their arrival, Livingstone purposed returning with them to Ujiji, and from thence crossing over into Manyema, to make further researches in that province and Ruo; among other things, to examine the underground habitations which he had heard of on a previous journey.
On the 14th of March, Stanley and Livingstone breakfasted together, and then the order was given to raise the flag and march. Livingstone accompanied him some way, but they had to part at last.
The return journey was not performed without many adventures and a considerable amount of suffering by the enterprising traveller.
Passing the stronghold of Kisalungo, a large portion had disappeared. The river had swept away the entire front wall and about fifty houses, several villages having suffered disastrously, while at least a hundred people had perished. The whole valley, once a paradise in appearance, had been converted into a howling waste.
Further on, a still more terrible destruction of human life and property had occurred. It was reported that a hundred villages had been swept away by a volume of water which had rushed over the banks of the Ungerengeri.
Passing a dense jungle, and wading for several miles through a swamp, on the 6th of May the caravan was again en route, at a pace its leader had never seen equalled. At sunset the town of Bagomoyo was entered.
His first greeting was with Lieutenant Henn, who had come out as second in command of the proposed Livingstone search and relief expedition. He next met Mr Oswald Livingstone, the doctor’s second son. The two proposed shortly starting on their journey, having come over with no less than a hundred and ninety loads of stores, which they would have had no small difficulty in conveying. Two other members of the expedition, Lieutenant Dawson, RN, and the Reverend C New, had resigned, for reasons which Mr Stanley fully explains. He himself was not over well pleased with some of the remarks made in the papers about himself, some having regarded his expedition into Africa as a myth.
“Alas!” he observes, justly, “it has been a terrible, earnest fact with me: nothing but haul, conscientious work, privations, sickness, and almost death.”
However, welcomed cordially by numerous friends at Zanzibar, which he reached the following day, he soon recovered his spirits, and, having disbanded his own expedition, he set to work to arrange the one he had promised to form for the assistance of Dr Livingstone, Mr Henn having in the mean time resigned, and Mr Oswald Livingstone being compelled from ill health to abandon the attempt to join his father.
Fifty guns, with ammunition, stores, and cloth, were furnished by Mr Oswald Livingstone out of the English expedition. Fifty-seven men, including twenty of those who had followed Stanley, were also engaged, the services of Johari, chief dragoman to the American consulate, being also obtained to conduct them across the inundated plains of the Kinganni.