An African Adventure

The year was eighteen-fifty-two, and at twenty-six years of age, my long-planned odyssey to the Dark Continent was about to begin. I, James Havelock, was about to follow in my dear Papa’s footsteps and spend twelve weeks hunting for unknown plant species on the African continent. I am an only child of doting parents. Our family name is renowned in Kent, England and beyond. My patriarchal grandfather Benjamin Havelock had amassed our family fortune from woollen mills where he employed hundreds of workers on slave wages ten hours a day, six and a half days a week, so that he would reap the financial rewards of the worker’s menial toil. My father, Todd Havelock, had shrewdly invested the small fortune. Benjamin, his father, had bequeathed to him in stocks and shares to make us Havelock’s one of the period’s richest families in Great Britain.

I had grown up privileged and well-educated, listening avidly to my father’s tales of his travels and travails in the lush, deep forests of The Congo and other Distant African countries. These tales awakened my burning desire to travel to the same continent. I studied botany at Cambridge University, reasoning this field of study would be my best chance of securing a sponsor for my African adventures. British explorers were bringing home many exotic new plant species worldwide. There seemed to be a never-ending appetite for these unknown wonders of the natural world.

To this end, I had approached the British Museum of Natural History a year previously, enquiring if they would be interested in financially supporting my proposed adventure to the African continent. To my surprise and delight, I received a positive reply about six months later. In return for keeping a daily record of my time on the African continent, the sole rights to publish those diaries, plus first display rights on any new plant specimens I brought back, the museum was willing to cover fifty per cent of all my costs for the expedition. I had been hoping for more, but one can’t be too greedy. This left Mama, Papa, and my good friend Julian Timmermann, from my days at Cambridge, who was to accompany me on my African sojourn, and myself to fund the other fifty per cent of the costs. With the tiresome aspect of financing the trip taken care of, I could, with Julian’s help, get down to the fun part of it all and start planning the trip. I won’t bore you with all those fiddly details, but instead, fast-forward you to the fine morning when Julian and I found ourselves at Liverpool docks, ready to begin our great adventure to Africa. Once again, dear reader, I will spare you the boring details of the long, boring hours at sea and instead start the substantive story on the late afternoon of December 10, eighteen fifty-two, when we two fine-bred young British gentlemen first set foot on African soil.

The British Consulate in Khartoum had everything set up for us in advance, including letters of the right of safe passage through all territories and fiefdoms we would pass through, all our medications, our clothing and most importantly, all our supplies, guides, porters and interpreters. It was with light hearts and a strong sense of adventure to come that we set off on the morning of December 18, having spent the previous eight days champing at the bit to get going but having to take care of tiresome details and acclimatising to African climate and pace of life.

Day I. Setting out. We left the relative comfort of Khartoum at daybreak. Once out of the city’s confines, we continued slowly and quietly along a deeply rutted, dusty track that finally petered out until, by mid-morning, we now found ourselves engulfed by virgin forest. At 10 am, we stopped to make camp, eat some pre-cooked cold rice and raisins, rest and escape the worst of the day’s heat. Julian and I camped, ate, and slept slightly apart from the guides, porters, and interpreters on my Dad’s advice. He had told us this helped to maintain order and discipline. They were not our friends; they were employees, and they also expected this social order to be maintained. Julian and I thought that the first day of the trek was a brutal introduction to life in the African jungle. Nothing can prepare you for the oppressive heat, high humidity, and biting and stinging insects. Then, there was the African night’s early onset and its attendant temperature drop. We went from searing heat and humidity to freezing night-time temperatures in a few hours. Our first night in our tents in the jungle was, to put it mildly, an unnerving experience. Firstly, it was pitch black underneath the tree canopy, and then there were all the strange animal and insect noises and continual movement to contend with. Neither of us inexperienced English explorers got much sleep that first night or for the first week.

Day 2. At sunrise the next morning, our porters broke camp; they already had a fire going and served us steaming tin mugs of strong black tea to get us up to speed. After a light breakfast of breadfruit harvested from a nearby tree, we got underway again, hacking our slow way through the thick forest undergrowth while doing our best to avoid swarms of mosquitoes, rampaging armies of ants, poisonous snakes, and all manner of flying, borrowing and creeping and stinging insects. What about collecting plant specimens? I imagine you, the readers, asking, but this first week was about staying alive and not much else. By the end of that first week, our daily routine was set. Rise and break camp at sunrise, trek until 11 am, and rest until 4 pm, followed by another one-and-a-half-hour trek before making camp for the night.

Day 3. Just when you thought your situation was dire. Day 3 was when dysentery set in for Julian, myself and a couple of our bearers. The four of us afflicted woke to varying degrees of pain, nausea, diarrhoea, and debilitating bouts of cramps, vomiting and fevers. Being a highly infectious condition, our first concern was to ensure the contagion did not spread to the rest of our fellow travellers. It took a week for the worst of the symptoms to pass and another week for the four of us to fully recover our strength. Thankfully, we did survive and did not infect anyone else in our company.

Day 4. We were starting to get used to the daily routine and the ways of staying healthy in the jungle. Keeping your feet clean and dry was paramount. This helped to keep fungal infections in between the toes at bay. These infections could turn nasty very quickly if left unattended. This meant that last thing every night, everyone carefully checked, washed, and thoroughly dried their feet and ankles before settling down for the night. Clean, dry socks every morning were also vital in keeping infections at bay. As was cleanliness in general.

Day 5. This was the day we experienced our first tropical storm, and we could do nothing except stay in our tents and keep dry while waiting for the storm to pass. The fury of that storm and the noise it created in the tree canopy was both frightening and exhilarating at the same time. I was unsure whether to be sad or glad when it began to wane before nightfall. We never broke camp that day and had to make do with cold raisins for sustenance.

Day 6. Well-rested from our enforced day of inactivity, we were eager to get started the next morning. After the storm, we awoke to sparkling blue skies and an eerie calm with barely a breath of wind. This most welcome weather turnaround was somewhat tempered by the discovery almost half of our stores of rice had been fouled by giant millipedes. The millipedes, while harmless, had rendered our rice unusable by their fouling. This made it all the more important for our jungle guides to identify and harvest as much of the jungle’s edible foods as possible to supplement our diminishing food supplies.

Day 7. Another glorious African day. Having chanced upon an enormous jungle clearing, I had, at last, an opportunity to start sampling plant material. The diversity was staggering, and I was put on the pin of my collar to name ten per cent of the samples we collected. I was in a botanical heaven and could have contentedly stayed in that forest clearing for weeks. However, after a full day of sampling and collecting, the rest of the team forced me to move on. I barely slept that night; I was intent on preserving my plant samples. Julian was no less taken with this task, and after finishing the task of protecting the samples, neither of us could sleep and lay in our cots, talking about our finds until it was almost dawn.

Day 8. Two physically shattered Englishmen rose and broke from camp the next morning. Reflecting on it now, Julian’s lack of proper rest played a major role in the misfortune that befell him that afternoon. We had spent the morning happily collecting more plant samples on a high desert-like shale escarpment when Julian’s cry of terror caused me to look up and turn around just in time to witness my friend fall from the cliff’s edge and plummet to the jungle floor forty feet below. An hour later, we found him lying in agony at the foot of the escarpment with multiple fractures in his left leg and various contusions. Our porters had basic first-aid training but not enough to deal with this eventuality. They splinted Julian’s leg as best they could and cut bamboo poles and stout interwoven rattan to fashion a makeshift carrier with four of our guides, one at each corner, doing the heavy lifting work.

Day 9. At daybreak, the whole team, excluding Julian, met to consider our best course of action, considering the seriousness of Julian’s injuries. It was decided that all of us, bar two of our fastest and best guides, would make a permanent camp where we were. The two selected guides were to track back to a village we had passed a day previously to obtain whatever medical assistance the village offered. They set off immediately, and the rest of us cleared the campsite and made Julian as comfortable as possible in the prevailing circumstances. After giving him strong doses of our pain relief powders, we carefully hoisted his injured leg into a makeshift tourniquet to take the pressure off it and keep his blood flow going. I stayed by his cot, continuously talking with him to him to keep his mind off the pain. That day was the worst day of my life.

Day 10. I had not managed to get much sleep that night while looking after Julian’s needs, but by midday, Julian had slipped into a feverish state of unconsciousness, and I could doze on and off. At 4 pm, one of the porters entered Julian’s tent to help me change the bandages on his broken leg. From how he wrinkled up his nose as he neared Julian’s cot, I knew something new was afoot. I guess I had become accustomed to the smell in the tent and hadn’t noticed the slow chance. But as soon as we started to unwind his old dressings, the putrid odour of necrotising flesh almost made us faint. Large parts of the broken leg were swollen and mottled, and even with untrained eyes, it was easy to deduce a major and seriously threatening infection had set in. All we could do was change the old dressings, administer more pain relief powders, and hope that the two guides we had sent back to the village would soon return. Mercifully, Julian remained semi-comatose throughout that night and through the next morning.

Day 11. On or near midday, our two guides returned from the village with help. I immediately brought the medical intern and the medications they returned with to Julian’s tent. The intern quickly and expertly changed his dressings and administered medications to deaden his discomfort and lower his fever. The intern, Ehogou, motioned me to follow him outside and away from Julian’s tent. Once alone, he told me the bad news about Julian’s condition. Gangrene had set in on the leg and was spreading rapidly. He continued explaining to me that if he didn’t amputate the infected leg immediately, the gangrene would spread everywhere and kill Julian anyway. The really bad news was the shock of the amputation under these conditions could just as likely kill Julian as well. This left us in a classic Catch-22 situation, damned if we did and just as likely damned if we didn’t. Ehogou performed the amputation, assisted by me two hours later, and we cauterised the stump with glowing embers from our campfire.

Day 12. As Julian was too weak to be moved, we sat around in camp all day, pondering our situation. We were a deeply sad and downbeat group to be around. The only thing that roused us was to respond to Julian’s plaintive cries for more pain medication every few hours. These cries were silenced in the late evening when he succumbed to his injuries and died.

Homeward Bound. That journey was beyond sad and not relatable. I returned to England a much-changed, more miserable and deeply troubled man.