XXVIIA. D. 1898JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN
Fromthe Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart S. Grogan in the year1900:—
“I must say I envy you, for you have done that which has been for centuries the ambition of every explorer, namely, to walk through Africa from South to North. The amusement of the whole thing is that a youth from Cambridge during his vacation should have succeeded in doing that which the ponderous explorers of the world have failed to accomplish. There is a distinct humor in the whole thing. It makes me the more certain that we shall complete the telegraph and railway, for surely I am not going to be beaten by the legs of a Cambridge undergraduate.â€
It took death himself to beat Rhodes. Two years after that letter was written news went out through the army in South Africa that he was dead. We were stunned; we felt too sick to fight. For a moment the guns were hushed, and silence fell on the veldt after years of war. That silence was the herald of lasting peace for British Africa, united by stronger bonds than rail or telegraph.
* * * * *
Grogan was an undergraduate not only of Cambridge,but also of the bigger schools called War and Adventure, for he had traveled in the South Seas, climbed in the Alps, and fought in the Matabele campaigns, before he made his holiday walking tour from the Cape to Cairo. He was not the usual penniless adventurer, but, reckoned by frontier standards, a man of means, with the good manners that ease the way for any traveler. From the Cape to the Zambesi he had no need to tread old trails again, and far into the heart of Africa there were already colonies with steamers to speed the journey up to Lake Tanganyika, where his troubles really began. Through two-thirds of the journey Grogan had a partner, Mr. A. H. Sharp, but they were seldom in company, for one would explore ahead while the other handled their caravan of one hundred fifty negro carriers, or one or both went hunting, or lay at the verge of death with a dose of fever.
Their route lay along the floor of a gash in the continent, a deep abyss called the Great Rift, in which lies a chain of lakes: Nyassa, Tanganyika, Kevu, Albert Edward, and Albert, whence the Nile flows down into distant Egypt. This rift is walled and sometimes blocked by live volcanoes, fouled with swamps, gigantic forests and new lava floods, reeking with fever, and at the time of the journey was beset by tribes of hostile cannibals. This pleasant path led to Khartoum, held in those days by the Khalifa with his dervish army. The odds were about a thousand to one that these two British adventurers were marching straight to death or slavery. Their attempt was madness—that divine madness that inspires all pioneers.
Now for a glimpse into this great adventure:
“I had shot a zebra ... and turning out at five-thirty A. M. crept up within sixty yards.... I saw in the middle of a circle of some two hundred vultures a grand old lion, leisurely gnawing the ribs, and behind, four little jackals sitting in a row.... Behind stretched the limitless plain, streaked with mists shimmering in the growing light of the rising sun, clumps of graceful palms fenced in a sandy arena where the zebra had fallen and round his attenuated remains, and just out of reach of the swish of the monarch’s tail, the solid circle of waiting vultures, craning their bald necks, chattering and hustling one another, and the more daring quartette within the magic circle like four little images of patience, while the lion in all his might and matchless grandeur of form, leisurely chewed and scrunched the titbits, magnificently regardless of the watchful eyes of the encircling canaille.... I watched the scene for fully ten minutes, then as he showed signs of moving I took the chance afforded of a broadside shot and bowled him over with the .500 magnum. In inserting another cartridge the gun jammed, and he rose, but after looking round for the cause of the interruption, without success, started off at a gallop. With a desperate effort I closed the gun and knocked him over again. He was a fine black-maned lion and as he lay in a straight line from tip to top ten feet, four inches, a very unusual length.â€
Among the volcanoes near Lake Kivo, Grogan discovered a big one that had been thrown up within the last two years, and there were vast new floods of lava, hard to cross. One day, while searching out a route for the expedition, he had just camped at aheight of nine thousand feet in the forest when he found the fresh tracks of a bull elephant, and the spoor was much larger than he had ever seen. When he overtook this giant the jungle was so dense that only the ridge of his back was visible, and for some time he watched the animal picking the leaves off a tree. When fodder ran short he tore down a tree whose trunk was two feet thick, and fearing he might move on, Grogan fired. The elephant fell, but recovered and clashed away, so that there were some hours of tracking before the hunter could catch up again. And now on a flaw of wind the giant scented him.
“The noise was terrific, and it suddenly dawned upon me that so far from moving off he was coming on. I was powerless to move—a fall would have been fatal—so I waited; but the forest was so dense that I never saw him till his head was literally above me, when I fired both barrels of the .500 magnum in his face. The whole forest seemed to crumple up, and a second later I found myself ten feet above the ground, well home in a thorn bush, while my gun was lying ten yards away in the opposite direction; and I heard a roar as of thunder disappearing into the distance. A few seconds later the most daring of my boys, Zowanji, came hurrying along with that sickly green hue that a nigger’s face assumes in moments of fear, and with his assistance I descended from my spiky perch. I was drenched with blood, which fortunately proved to be not mine, but that of the elephant; my gun, which I recovered, was also covered with blood, even to the inside of the barrels. The only damage I sustained was a slightly twisted knee. I can not say whether the elephantactually struck me, or whether I was carried there by the rush of the country.â€
Following up, Grogan found enormous pools of blood, and half a mile farther on heard grunts that showed that the elephant had scented him. The animal rushed about with terrifying shrieks, devastated half an acre of forest, and then moved on again. Several times the hunter caught up, but the elephant moved on at an increasing pace, until sunset put an end to Grogan’s hopes.
This part of the Rift has belts of forest, and close beside them are patches of rich populous country where black nations live in fat contentment. But for five years there had been trouble to the westward where the Congo army had chased out the Belgian officials and run the country to suit themselves. Still worse, there were certain cannibal tribes moving like a swarm of locusts through Central Africa, eating the settled nations. Lately the swarm had broken into the Rift, and as Grogan explored northward he found the forest full of corpses. Here and there lurked starving fugitives, but despite their frantic warnings he moved on until he came to a wide province of desolated farms and ruined villages. Seeing that he had but a dozen followers a mob of cannibals attacked at night; but as they rushed, six fell to the white man’s rifle, and when the rest fled he picked them off at the range of a mile, as long as he could find victims. Then he entered a house where they had been feasting. “A cloud of vultures hovering over, the spot gave me an inkling of what I was about to see; but the realization defies description; it haunts me in my dreams, at dinner it sits on my leg-of-mutton, it bubblesin my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the same country.â€
Grogan fled, and starved, for the mountain streams were choked with corpses, the woods were a nightmare horror, to eat and sleep were alike impossible. He warned his partner and the expedition marched by another route.
Two very queer kinds of folk he met in the forests: the pygmies and the ape-men. The pygmies are little hunters and not more than three feet tall, but sturdy and compact, immensely strong, able to travel through the pig-runs of the jungle, and brave enough to kill elephants with their tiny poisoned arrows. He found them kindly, clever little folk, though all the other explorers have disliked them.
The ape-men were tall, with hanging paunch and short legs, a small skull and huge jaws, face, body and legs covered with wiry hair. The hang of the long powerful arms, the slight stoop of the trunk, and the hunted vacant expression of the face were marked. The twenty or thirty of them Grogan met were frightened at first but afterward became very friendly, proud to show him their skill in making fire with their fire sticks.
Once in the forest he found the skeleton of an ape of gigantic size. The natives explained that such apes were plentiful, although no white man has ever seen one. They have a bad habit of stealing negro women.
At the northern end of the Rift, where the country flattens out toward the Nile, Grogan and Sharp met with the officials of British Uganda, which was then in a shocking muddle of mutinous black troops, raidsfrom the Congo, drought and famine. There Mr. Sharp left the expedition, making his way to Mombasa; the carriers were sent back home as a good riddance, and Mr. Grogan, with only five faithful attendants, pushed on down the Nile Valley. The river was blocked with a weed called the sudd, which a British expedition was trying to clear away, and Grogan was forced to the eastward through horrible marshlands. He had in all only fourteen men when he came to the Dinka country, and met that queer race of swamp folk. They are very tall, some even gigantic, beautifully built, but broad-footed, walking with feet picked up high and thrust far forward—the gait of a pelican. At rest they stand on one leg like a wading bird, the loose leg akimbo with its foot on the straight leg’s knee. They are fierce, too, and one tribe made an attack on Grogan’s party. His men threw down their loads, screaming that they were lost, and the best Congo soldier fell stabbed to the heart, while two others went down with cracked skulls.
“I took the chief,†says Grogan, “and his right-hand man with the double barrel, then, turning round, found that my boy had bolted with my revolver. At the same moment a Dinka hurled his spear at me; I dodged it, but he rushed in and dealt me a swinging blow with his club, which I fortunately warded with my arm, receiving no more damage than a wholesome bruise. I poked my empty gun at his stomach, and he turned, receiving a second afterwards a dum-dum in the small of his back. Then they broke and ran, my army with eight guns having succeeded in firing two shots. I climbed up an ant hill that was close by, and could see them watching atabout three hundred yards for our next move, which was an unexpected one, for I planted a dum-dum apparently in the stomach of one of the most obtrusive ruffians, whom I recognized by his great height. They then hurried off and bunched at about seven hundred yards, and another shot, whether fatal or not I could not see, sent them off in all directions.â€
The battle was finished, and Grogan toiled on with his wounded men, famished, desperate, almost hopeless. One day in desert country he came to the camp of Captain Dunn, a British officer.
“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’
“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any sport?’
“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing here. Have a drink?’
“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war, (South Africa), and eventually Dunn asked where the devil I had come from.â€
The battle of Omdurman had destroyed the dervish power, and opened the Nile so that Grogan went on in ease and comfort by steamer to Khartoum, to Cairo, and home. Still he heard in his sleep the night melody of the lions—“The usual cry is a sort of vast sigh, taken up by the chorus with a deep sob, sob, sob, or a curious rumbling noise. But the pukka roar is indescribable ... it seems to permeate the whole universe, thundering, rumbling, majestic: there is no music in the world so sweet.â€
It is hard to part with this Irish gentleman, whose fourteen months’ traverse of the Dark Continent is the finest deed in the history of African exploration.