The Pearl sailed on from Cape Town to Quilimane. As soon as the men arrived there, David was glad that his wife was safely in Kuruman. Everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong. Although the sections of the Ma-Robert were unloaded and quickly bolted together by George Rae, the boat’s new design turned out to be defective. The vessel leaked constantly and needed enormous quantities of wood to stoke its boiler. Sometimes it took a day and a half to cut enough wood to keep the Ma-Robert running for a single day. It also took four hours for the boiler to build up enough steam to get the boat moving. And when the boat was finally running at full throttle, a child could paddle a canoe faster than the Ma-Robert moved. The draft of the boat, too, was deeper than expected, and the men often had to climb into the water, wade to the riverbank, and, using a rope, pull the boat off a sandbank it had run aground on.
All this would have been trying in the best of circumstances, but the state of the men’s health turned the whole adventure into a nightmare. The men had all read David’s book before leaving England, but they had failed to grasp just how uncomplaining David was about sickness and his own health. Malaria, which David had described in his book as “little worse than a common cold,” gripped the men, along with its debilitating effects of giddiness, delirium, and constant vomiting. The men also suffered from mosquito bites, tropical ulcers, and ticks. They were not at all happy, and before long, arguments erupted among them. George Rae taunted Captain Bedingfeld by saying he knew how to run the boat better than the captain. Captain Bedingfeld, for his part, complained about everything. Charles Livingstone and Tom Baines were so ill with malaria they didn’t leave their cabins for days at a time. And when they did, the others accused Charles of not doing any “real” work. David often found himself having to act like a parent trying to control squabbling children, and privately, even he thought they had a point about Charles!
It took the group three months to reach Tete, where David was glad to be reunited with the Makalolo helpers he had left there on his trip to the coast over two years before. Of the original one hundred men, seventy were still there. The other thirty men had either died of smallpox or been murdered. Still, those who remained had been treated well and were in no great hurry to return home to Linyanti. A few, though, did sign on as crew aboard the Ma-Robert. They had trusted David with their lives before, and he had not failed them.
As the Ma-Robert steamed slowly up the Zambezi River, it wheezed and labored so much that the crew nicknamed it the Asthmatic. After two days of travel upriver from Tete, the water became more turbulent, and huge round boulders began protruding from the river. David knew they were entering the Kebrabasa Gorge. On his trip to the coast two years earlier, however, the Portuguese army major in Tete had told him that the river was navigable all the way to the Victoria Falls and that there were just a few minor rapids along the way. David supposed that this was one of those minor rapids, and he expected to find a way through them. But as the water boiled and foamed over and around the boulders and the Ma-Robert fought to make headway against the surging current, David had to face reality. The boat could go no farther. But David had come too far to give up. There had to be a way through the rapids. David decided he needed to do some exploring on foot to see how long the rapids were and find the best way through them.
“Come on,” yelled David above the roar of the water. “I’m going ahead on foot.”
Four Makalolo men stepped forward. “We are going with you,” they announced.
“Me too,” chimed in Dr. Kirk.
“All right,” agreed David. “But you’ll have to keep up with me or you’ll be left behind.”
The six men scrambled ashore and began climbing over the gigantic boulders. But the boulders were very smooth, and it was hard to get a good grip on them and not slip and slide. And the boulders were hot, blistering hot. None of this seemed to bother David, but the feet of the Makalolo men soon blistered, and the leather on the bottom of Dr. Kirk’s boots was worn through, making it difficult going for him. Eventually, three of the Makalolos turned back, but David kept going. He was determined to find something that would give him hope. Eventually, he came to a three-hundred-foot high wall of rock covered with lichen. David, Dr. Kirk, and the remaining Makalolo man scaled the rock face together. When they reached the top, they got a panoramic and depressing view of what lay ahead. The rapids stretched on into the distance.
“There must be thirty miles of them!” exclaimed David, staring glumly down at the boulders and turbulent water of the river. “These are no minor rapids. There’s no way we can ever get a boat through them.”
No one spoke on the way back to the boat. David couldn’t escape the reality of the situation. The Zambezi River was not navigable all the way to the Victoria Falls. There was going to be no easy river access to the plateau area where he’d imagined a great mission station being established. David was going to have to look elsewhere for a site for such a station. Reluctantly, he ordered the crew to turn the Ma-Robert around and head back to Tete.
Everyone on board the boat was tired of it by the time the boat got back to Tete. David immediately wrote to Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society asking if there was some way he could have a more powerful boat made and sent to Africa.
Next David decided to investigate the Shire River to the north and see if it led inland to some other promising areas. This time he left behind all the original crew except Dr. Kirk. The others were either too ill or too full of complaints to be worth the trouble of taking along.
The Shire River was filled with duckweed, which caught in the paddles of the Ma-Robert and became entwined in the engine, making constant stops necessary. As a result, progress up the river was laborious, but eventually the men came to a village called Magomero, which belonged to the Manganjis tribe. The climate in the area was reasonable, and the village was situated amid hills and away from the malaria swamps. David thought it would be a wonderful location for future missionary work. He called the area the Shire Highlands. As he traveled north from the village, David again encountered insurmountable rapids. This time there was also a waterfall, which he named after Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society, no doubt hoping it would help his request to the society for a bigger and better boat.
The men were forced to turn back, but two subsequent exploration trips up various arms of the Shire River proved more fruitful. In September 1859, David and Dr. Kirk found two lakes nestled between high mountains. The first, Lake Shirwa, was about fifty miles long, while the second, Lake Nyassa, was too large to map.
When the men got back to Tete after discovering the two lakes, several letters were waiting for David. One was from Mary. David was sure she had written to him before this, but somehow none of her other letters had made it through. His hands trembled as he opened the letter. As he read, two words jumped out at him: Anna Mary. Mary had had another baby on November 16, 1858, a whole year before! Mary wanted to know how soon she could come and join her husband and whether he had finished establishing a mission station on the upper Zambezi River. It was not easy for David to write back to her with the news that they had encountered mile upon mile of impassable rapids on the Zambezi River and that he had no idea when it would be safe for her to come and join him.
David also received a letter from the London Missionary Society informing him they were about to send out missionaries to work among the Makalolos. David groaned as he read. The Makalolos weren’t ready for permanent missionaries. David hadn’t yet had a chance to go back to Makalolo territory and see how things were and to talk with Chief Sekeletu about having permanent missionaries come and live among his people. But there was nothing David could do about it. By now the missionaries would be on their way to brave central Africa. Although David tried to have faith, he hated to think of what could happen to them.
In March 1860, a number of the Makalolo helpers who had traveled with David from Linyanti asked him to lead them home. They went by canoe as far as the Kebrabasa Gorge and then continued overland on foot. All along the way, they came across signs of slave trading. They walked through burned villages and came across huge piles of human bones and starving people. It saddened David, but it also strengthened his resolve to open the area up to trading and other civilizing influences. The way things stood at present, the tribe with the most guns and other weapons could terrorize anyone they pleased, and there were no laws or government to stop them.
As David, accompanied by Dr. Kirk, marched into the village of Sesheke in Makalolo territory, he looked forward to seeing Chief Sekeletu. He was shocked, however, when he finally laid eyes on him. The chief’s body was covered with weeping sores, which the chief scratched constantly. Both David and Dr. Kirk made the same diagnosis: a severe form of eczema, that had turned the chief into a cringing wreck. They treated him as best they could with zinc sulfate ointment, and the sores began to heal. David knew, though, that once the ointment ran out, the eczema would return.
Whether it was from being sick for so long, David could not tell, but Chief Sekeletu had changed a great deal since the two men had last been together. The chief had blamed many of his people for putting a sickness spell on him, and the witch doctor had performed many ritual killings. David could see that the Makalolo people did not have the love and respect for their chief that they formerly had.
Dr. Kirk went to investigate a rumor he had heard about some white people in nearby Linyanti. He returned with grim news. Two families, consisting of four adults and five children, had indeed been sent out by the London Missionary Society. Regrettably, Dr. Kirk had not been able to see the people in person because all that was left to see was some graves. Three adults and three children had all died within weeks of arriving in Linyanti. The last surviving adult and two children had fled overland in the direction of Kuruman. David felt ill. These people’s deaths had been so pointless, and he chided himself that he may have unwittingly contributed to them by giving such stirring talks about the need for missionaries when he was back in England.
David did not want to stay long in Sesheke. On September 17, 1860, he and Dr. Kirk began the trip back to the coast. Along the way, David became convinced they could shoot the Kebrabasa Rapids in their canoes. He was partly right. His canoe managed to navigate around the thousands of boulders, but Dr. Kirk was not able to do the same. The canoe capsized, sending all of Dr. Kirk’s books, journals, and medical instruments into the turbulent water. And while Dr. Kirk himself was rescued, everything he owned was lost.
By the time the men reached Tete, David was feeling gloomy. And on top of everything else, the Ma-Robert became stranded on a sandbar. By this time, David had had enough of the troublesome vessel, and he abandoned it and left it to rot where it had run aground!
In January 1862, David received a letter he both dreaded and wanted. Mary had given up waiting for the “right” time to join her husband. She was catching a ship from Cape Town to Quilimane and would be arriving at the end of the month. For the time being, she would leave Zouga and Anna with her parents in Kuruman. When she and David had established a permanent home, she would go back and collect them.
Traveling on the same ship with Mary were the wives of four missionaries David had already escorted to Magomero in the Shire Highlands where they were establishing a mission station. These missionaries were from the Universities Mission of Central Africa, which was established after David had spoken at both Oxford and Cambridge universities while in England. The students had been so inspired by what David said that they banded together to send missionaries to Africa.
