At this great crisis in his life, Livingstone turned to Stewart for companionship and help. In the evenings they had long conversations about the deathless life beyond the grave. ‘We talked,’ Stewart writes, ‘over the idea of the state of seclusion—the Hades or Intermediate State—and agreed to hold the common belief. He then expressed his willingness to die.’

From this time their companionship seems to have been complete. ‘Dr. Livingstone,’ he writes, ‘is peculiarly communicative and agreeable.’

‘I have now come to be able to travel with the minimum of baggage—a piece of soap, a towel and a comb.’

Livingstone wished to explore the Rovuma (a river to the north of the Zambesi) in the hope of finding an entrance into Central Africa, free from Portuguese control. Stewart found that he would have to wait a whole year if he accompanied Livingstone’s expedition. Hungering for a beginning and for real work, he resolved to push into the interior. The only white man with him was a member of the Universities’ Mission. They had a native canoe dug out of a great tree. It was so nicely balanced as to be easily capsized, and the river was swarming with crocodiles and hippopotami. Stewart had a crew of eight natives, whose steady paddling against the stream drew forth his admiration. He passed through the pestiferous ‘Elephant Marsh,’ a paradise for sportsmen, in which herds of three hundred elephants were sometimes found. His canoe startled great numbers of crocodiles which looked ‘like so many trunks of trees left by the receding river.’ On one island they counted seventy-two alligators basking in the sun. He visited Bishop Mackenzie’s grave, and the ill-fated Universities’ Mission. On foot, and usually in company with a member of that mission, he explored the Highland Lake Region on both sides of the Shire.

Concerning his numberless discomforts, hardships, and African fevers, he writes: ‘But with a definite purpose and the knowledge that you are certainly clearing the way for a better state of things, and helping to bring in the dawn of a better day of gospel light, there is a measure of enjoyment even with all the discomfort in canoe voyaging in African rivers.’ As he entered the villages ‘in his shirtsleeves, and with an old green silk umbrella over his head, the women startled and the children screamed.’ Every night he spoke to them of Jesus Christ, ‘a phrase never heard by them before, but it was left among them. I gathered all my men round the fire after supper, and spoke to them the things of God. The outline of my talk was God, Sin, Jesus Christ.’ He records that the native women everywhere showed him the greatest politeness and courtesy.

He pushed on beyond the Murchison Cataracts, and explored parts of the hill-country to the east of the Shire, in the district where the Blantyre Mission now stands. He recognised the comparative healthiness and rich resources of what is now a prosperous Scottish settlement of coffee-planters, traders, and missionaries. It was a sore disappointment to him that lack of money would not allow him to visit Lake Nyasa, though he was within fifty miles from it. Of this journey he writes:

‘Except these two missionary travellers (himself and a member of the Universities’ Mission) there was not probably at that time a single white man living east of the Shire River till the coast is reached; certainly none were settled in the country, and northwards, even as far as Victoria Nyanza, six hundred miles, no trace of a Christian mission, or even of a white man, was to be found. It was a lonely land of barbarism, of game and wild beasts, of timid and harried but not unkindly men, harassed by never-ending slave-raids and intertribal wars. We saw heaps of ashes, broken pottery, a good

many bones but no bodies—the hyenas had attended to that.’

On the Shire, as afterwards on the upper reaches of the Zambesi, he supported himself and his men chiefly by his rifle. His menu included, besides the ordinary food of the natives, pigeons, ducks, flamingoes, and hippopotamus steaks. It was his opinion that ‘a man with a good sound appetite would enjoy a roast sirloin of hippopotamus.’ Many of the districts he visited were sorely stricken with famine, and he was often hunger-bitten. Men travel in that region now with almost all the comforts of home.

Before leaving for Africa he had given an address in the Town Hall of Manchester, in which he gave his reasons for hoping that a supply of cotton might be obtained from Zambesiland. This speech had evidently created a real interest. His Journal contains a long paper with the title ‘Report for Cotton Supply Association, Manchester, in Reply to Queries sent on June 24, 1861.' He found small patches of cotton in the Shire valley, and also native weavers, but so lazy were the natives that only about one in twenty was wearing cotton, while all the rest were clothed only with bark, probably the most uncomfortable garment a human being can wear. The substance of his report was, that the Shire valley was admirably fitted for the growing of cotton, but that it could not be cultivated till there was a settled government, and the natives had been taught to work. [It is now believed that Central Africa has soil capable of producing cotton enough to keep all the spinning-mills in the world at work.] ‘The examination of the country, especially of the Shire highlands, left the impression of its great beauty, the comparative healthiness of the higher districts, and the undoubted fertility of its rich valleys, but it was at that time a land laid waste by slaving wars, as has happened times without number to many of the fairest portions of the African continent.’

On this expedition be was often grazed by death. Sleeping on the banks of the Shire one night, he awoke to find a large python lying coiled up upon him. He seized his gun, the reptile moved off, and a hole in the ground was the only result of the shot.

Once his canoe was upset, and he got entangled with some ropes, and nearly lost his life. When almost drowned, the thought flashed through his mind, ‘Well, well, is this to be the end of it all? No, it cannot be.’ He made another struggle; help arrived, and he was saved.

On September 25th, 1862, after an absence of three months, he returned to Shupanga, and a fortnight afterwards he started to explore the Zambesi. He visited Senna and Tete, and reached the Kebrabasa Rapids. Only with great difficulty could he guide the canoe through the labyrinths of small sandy islands, and often his men lost control of the boat, and, like all Africans in trouble, they ‘stood calling on their mothers when they should be exerting themselves.’

‘We spent Christmas Day of 1862 digging with a party of natives into the coal seams, three of which lie on the east bank of the Zambesi, a few miles from Tete. Some specimens of the coal thus dug may possibly still be found in the Museum of the University of Glasgow, as some were sent there on my return. . . . The partition of Africa—the most stupendous division of the earth’s surface which has ever taken place—was then not even thought of.’

On foot he examined the country on both sides of the river, some parts of which reminded him of the Danube. ‘He did all this,’ Livingstone says, ‘with most praiseworthy energy, and in spite of occasional attacks of fever.’

He was then convinced that any future mission should be northwards on the line of the Shire, and not westwards on the line of the Zambesi. This conviction practically settled the site of the two great missions of Livingstonia and Blantyre.

Travel in Central Africa then was travail indeed. Stewart had endured great hardships and suffered severely from numberless attacks of that malarial fever which plays with its victim as a cat plays with a mouse, and which the Africans call ‘the father of knees.’ Tropical medicine had not then limited its ravages. It had desolated the Universities’ Mission, brought down to the grave some who were by his side, and thinned Livingstone’s small force. At first he could ‘drive off’ its attacks, but by-and-by it mastered him, and only did not kill him. But his spirit triumphed over his body, and, like Living-stone in his last years, he would not yield. He believed that activity was the best prophylactic. Once when he rose in the morning he fell on the floor, yet he marched on. Some of the attacks lasted for weeks, and made him unconscious. ‘My knees,’ he writes, ‘are relaxed; what is the Homeric expression? Fever and mental depression go as certainly together as fever and sweat.’ Still he writes: ‘The hardship, fatigue, fever, and hunger I have suffered are nothing in comparison with the end to be gained.’ He owns that he had ‘the malady of thought - looking forward too far’ when in fever, and resolves to fight against ‘this subjectivity.’ He arrived at Shupanga on New Year’s Day, 1863, and in a month he turned homewards.

‘Considering the way we lived,’ he writes, ‘the wonder is we were ever free from fever. We carried no tents, but slept in the open when dry, in the canoe when it rained, and its position being down in the river, sometimes alongside a bank of reeds, the sleeper was in the best situation to become well soaked with malaria. Except tea and coffee, we carried no civilised provisions, but depended mainly on what could be got in the country. A little wheaten bread was therefore often the greatest luxury.’

It is not easy for us to realise the courage of his enterprise. For weeks he had been battling with the most powerful of terrorising influences—uncertainty, the fear of destitution, unknown dangers, home-sickness, solitude, and that terrible fever which magnifies every peril, and weakens all the powers of resistance. But he seems never to have given in. His was the temper of those whom Lowell describes:

In defiance of all his hardships his report regarding the proposed mission was, ‘It can be accomplished.’

In the beginning of February, 1863, after many vexing delays, he reached Quilimane. By piecing together his Journal and his letters, we gain a vivid portrait of the wanderer. He is in a canoe with six native rowers; clad with’ honourable rags,’ like Grant and Speke when they emerged from Central Africa, and like Mackay of Uganda when Stanley visited him; soaked by four days of ceaseless tropical rains, which had put out the fire in the canoe and damped all the firewood; all his blankets dripping; with no cloth and few goods of any value; less than £5 in his pocket; half-dead with fever; his head like a lump of lead, and his eyesight impaired; solitary, but with his duty; and that was enough for him. When he landed at night, he could hardly walk, and was not sure of any shelter, for not one of his fellow-countrymen was then in the town: there was no hotel, and he knew the name of only one inhabitant. During six weary weeks, remote and friendless, he walked daily down to the beach, and looked for a ship coming up the river. At last he got off in a miserable little Indian vessel, and reached Mozambique, where he had to wait other six weeks.

One blessed afternoon, the Gorgon sailed into Mozambique, and Stewart was soon on board. He tells how it then fared with him: ‘In a very short time I was on the deck of the Gorgon and met Captain Wilson. He stared at me without sign of recognition. Whether I was so much altered that he gazed upon me as if fifteen years had passed instead of fifteen months since we last met, I do not know. But I had to tell him who I was and what I wanted—the favour of being taken on board his ship and landed at any port, south or north, where he might be going, by preference at some British port, whence I might be able to reach home. Nothing could exceed his kindly welcome when he did recognise me.’

Captain Wilson described him as being then more ‘like a bag of bones than a man.’ Scarcely anything but the bony framework was left on him.

This bag of bones the Captain conveyed to East London.

At the request of Dr. Duff he visited several missions in Kaifraria. His splendid constitution soon rallied amid the inspiring sea-breezes during the voyage, and the generous and invigorating ozone of that radiant land, ‘the white man’s sanatorium.’

He reached Scotland after an absence of nearly two and a half years of hazardous work. For that work he had not received nor expected any salary. Moreover, out of his patrimony, he had borne more than one-fourth of the whole expenses of the expedition.

At the beginning of this chapter it was stated that Stewart’s life now broadened into history. That was no exaggeration, for his explorations in Central Africa contributed in several ways to the overthrow of the slave-trade, the expansion of our Empire, and the Pax Britannica. An article in the Scotsman, on May 18, 1899, describes the Protectorate of British Central Africa, [Lord Salisbury resolved to form this Protectorate in consequence of information supplied to him at his request by representatives of the Scottish missions in Central Africa.] and adds: ‘To two men is that due, in the first instance to David Livingstone, and to Dr. James Stewart.’ Stewart thus helped to make the Zambesi what Lord Clarendon desired it to be, ‘God’s highway for all nations.’ And these two years of pioneering fitted him to be the Founder of Livingstonia.

With words strangely prophetic, he Closes his article in the Sunday Magazine (written in 1874 and 1875, when he was advocating the Livingstonia Mission): ‘To these sketches the practical epilogue is Livingstonia.’ After describing the features of the combined mission, he adds: ‘It would be a centre of civilisation and good government, and even now it would become one of the most effective checks on the slave-trade, by cutting off the supply in its own home. It would certainly prove more effective than the maintenance of one, or of several ships of war on the coast. . . . In a few weeks it is hoped that a compact party under an experienced leader will be on their way to establish Livjngstonia. The enterprise is one both difficult and perilous. But nothing great in Africa or elsewhere was ever done but in contempt of danger. . . . If God grant His blessing, there is no calculating whereunto the enterprise might reach. It ought to grow and expand, diffusing itself like leaven, reproducing itself like seed, and leading to great and momentous issues.’