Richard Harding Davis

Harper’s Monthly/March, 1893

ABOUT four months ago young William Astor Chanler went into Africa, to be gone two years. When he returns, his story will be well worth the telling; but even should he never return, his story, unfinished as it is today, has certain values. It has that value which attaches to the work of those who explore the few territories still unknown to us; it has another value in the intense personality of the young man himself, and still another in that he is the first man born in this country to carry the American flag into Africa at the head of so important an expedition. There is so much desire for acclaim today, and so much of it is given unsought, that it is hard to believe Chanler was well on his way into Africa before any, save a very few, knew that he had gone. This in itself, in a day when paragraphs and special articles herald the arrival and the departure of the man who crosses the ocean in an open dory, gives an interest to his expedition. Young men who do important things for the sake of the things themselves, and not for the afterclap of applause, are so few that it seems almost a pity to spoil Mr. Chanler’s modest departure by even this reference to it. But there are other reasons why his story should be written, the chief one being, to my mind, the chance that what Clianler has done and what he hopes to do may suggest to other young men who do not have to work that there are more dangerous as well as more profitable sports than following hounds across country, and that they may get much amusement, and may benefit the world, and gain experience and strength for themselves, not by following his footsteps, but by making their own footsteps mark the way into new countries and among strange peoples.

It is always satisfactory to have anyone who does fine things live up to the part. It is depressing to have the man who has run blockades and led armies stand dumb and confounded when the general conversation leaves war and fighting and shifts to a question of ethics or the play.

There is a story that Voltaire called upon Congreve, and that the latter begged him to take him as a gentleman, and not as a writer of plays, and that Voltaire replied to this that had Congreve been merely a gentleman he would not have climbed three flights of stairs to call upon him. I have always sympathized with Congreve in this story, although it is supposed to make him out something of a snob. Perhaps he personally was a snob, but the spirit in which he spoke was certainly the right one and the more self-respecting. It must be very trying to go through life only as the man who painted this, or who discovered that, or who won the other thing, and to feel that if that one great card were taken away you would not be considered at all, especially so if you happen to be a very decent sort of fellow without it, as no doubt Congreve was, and a most charming companion as well. The highest compliment I ever heard paid William Black was by an ingenuous youth who had whipped salmon streams and drunk brandies and sodas with him for a year, and who one day said, innocently, “They tell me Black, you write things.” We have all met explorers and other great men; I have seen one who kept his seat while twelve women stood, and a painter who is the greatest of his school, and who did not know whether Lord Rosebery was the name of a novel or of a peer of the realm. When one of these men left the narrow path he had opened up, or the other his studio, he was lost and helpless. Now this is obviously wrong. It is not enough today to have made several millions if you lack the education to spend it, or to have written a successful novel if you cannot talk intelligently on another man’s novel. At least, it is more satisfactory to others if you are rounded out, and have more than one string to play upon. You cannot lean back at table and say, “I do not have to join in this talk—which, by-the-way, I do not understand—because I am the president of the XYZ Railroad, and I am a king in Wall Street.” To be a king in Wall Street or anywhere else must be a very fine thing, but you do not want to spend your life in Wall Street. You certainly pay the man who has been playing Hamlet for three years a much higher compliment if you ask his opinion on the political situation, or the best way in which to invest a fortune, than to tell him that you have seen him act and think he is great.

If you should meet Chanler as I met him last he would appeal to you as a most live, interesting, and entertaining youth, and not at all the sort of young man you would expect to meet at the head of three hundred negroes in the heart of Africa.

When I saw him last summer in London he was deep in the work of preparation, but he did not allow this to interfere with whatever the present serious business of the moment might be, whether it was a discussion of the coming Presidential election in our own country or the selection of a button-hole at Simpson’s. Part of his day was spent closeted with the officers of the East Africa Company, another part in Whitechapel buying Tommies’ discarded red coats as presents for African kings; and later he was testing smokeless powder and repeating-rifles, or choosing canned meats and bottled medicines, and still later walking past Stanhope Gate and critically inspecting the gowns on the lawn, or ordering a dinner at the Savoy with enviable taste. His world was not limited to the continent of Africa, nor did his conversation teem with treks and Soudanese porters, and anecdotes of the slave trade and the quick effectiveness of jungle fever. Indeed, so little was he given to any one topic that it was rather amusing, after he had interested those about him with reminiscences of Harvard or the boulevards, to ask him for a story of the land of the Masai, and to watch the faces of his hearers as the worldly, idle, and conscientiously dressed youth of the minute before told how men look who are dying of thirst, or how an elephant is liable to act when you fire at it.

Chanler came of age and into his money when he had just completed his sophomore year at Harvard. He is now twenty-five years old, and one of the four years which have passed since he left Harvard was spent in Africa. He went there with only one white companion, his servant, George Galvin, and led an expedition of 180 men around the mountain of Kilimanjaro and through the land of the Masai, where Henry M. Stanley has said it is not safe to go with even a thousand rifles. He did this, as he told a celebrated African explorer whom he met in this wilderness of central Africa, “for fun.” This to a man who was trying to do the same thing under the patronage of an emperor, three geographical societies, and backed by a trading company, must have been a trifle aggravating. The explorer mentions the fact in his book, and marvels not so much at the boy and his white servant (who was then but eighteen years old) having done what they did, as at the nonchalant manner in which they regarded what was to him a life’s work. The experience young Chanler gained during the progress of this expedition only whetted his appetite for more, and at the same time fitted him for organizing and leading an expedition of much greater importance. For the last year and a half he has been making preparations for this expedition, which, he has assured his friends, if it be successful, will be his last.

On September 16,1892, his caravan left Lamu for Somali Land, a country in East Africa extending along the coast from Abyssinia to Cape Guardafui. In about two months after the date of his departure he expects to reach Mount Kenia, where he will halt for some weeks to ascend the mountain, which is estimated to be over 18,000 feet high. From Mount Kenia he purposes to push north through the desert to the southern extremity of Lake Rudolph, and after this lake region is explored, will enter with his caravan from Lake Stephanie into 600 miles of utterly unknown territory, which lies between the lakes and the Juba River. If he reach this river, Chanler will follow it to the ocean, and then journey along the sea-shore to Lamu.

This route, which is roughly outlined in a paragraph, necessitates a march of 3000 miles, and it will be two years before it is accomplished and before we shall hear from Mr. Chanler again. The dangers in this march are actual and many, and the benefits to science, if it be accomplished, will be of incalculable value. In that portion of it which stretches from Mount Kenia to Lake Rudolph, Count Teleki lost one-third of his caravan from thirst and disease; and if he pass through the lands of the Gallas and the Somals, Chanler will have succeeded where Prince Ruspoli Revoli, Ferrandi, and James failed, and in attempting which Baron von der Decken lost his life. But Chanler enters it with a larger and more complete expedition than was possessed by any of these explorers, and with the backing of experience and all the advantages of perfect health and youth.

The preparation of an expedition of this sort, and the variety of work it entails, is not merely a question of marching through an unknown country, of putting one foot after the other, and shooting at those animals or men who get in the way, but it involves a knowledge of men, and a knowledge of the endurance of a man as compared with the endurance of a camel, for instance, of medicine and of agriculture, of engineering and of war, of geography and of diplomacy. To get into the country at all, Chanler had first to propitiate the powerful East Africa Company, to assure the representatives of several governments that he did not mean to interfere with the peoples over whom they exercised a protectorate, and to obtain permission from Lord Salisbury to carry two hundred and fifty rifles, and to borrow from the Emperor Francis Joseph the services of Lieutenant von Hohnell, of the Austrian navy. He had to know enough of agriculture, for one thing, to properly plant certain cereals, so that on his return journey he might be able to enjoy their fruit; of surgery, to care for the sick or wounded in his outfit; of photography, to reproduce the scenes and people which he will be the first white man to see; and of military tactics, to organize and discipline a force of three hundred men. He had to know just how few men could carry how much baggage, and to leave behind what was bulky, and yet save that which was essential. Several of his own ideas were most original. One was to have his servant George take lessons from a wizard of High-Holborn in sleight of hand, so that he might impress the native magicians; and another, the preparation of a search-light, which is to be used to show the position of a certain tribe which always attacks at night. And to this latter he added a stock of war rockets which go through the air in various colors and in irregular lines, and with which he intends to pursue retreating foes. One of the most amusing of his preparations was the purchase of a dozen pair of flesh-colored gloves, which he intends to pull carelessly off his hands while conversing with African kings, and so impress them with the idea that he is skinning himself alive, and that he rather likes the sensation. These are the idle little things which are only interesting here as going to show how many details go to make up the whole of an African caravan. In graver matters Chanler showed a consideration which was much more mature than one would have expected to find in a youth of his years. His selection of Hohnell as his solitary lieutenant exhibits his earnestness to obtain the best results from his journey. For Hobnell’s maps are the best, or among the best, that have been made of Africa, and he was taken on this expedition because they were the best. Men who would have gone for the love of the adventure or for fame could have been had for the asking, but Chanler’s aim is an earnest one. All his equipments are of the best—his scientific instruments; his telescopic cameras, which enable him to photograph au object half a mile distant, and yot make it look when developed as though it had been taken at a few yards’ range; and the typographical paraphernalia are of the most accurate and latest makes. He is not going “for fun” this time. When he returns, it is interesting to know that it is not his desire to rest on his lionskins or pose upon lecture platforms, but that his hope and ambition is to be able to serve his country by representing it and the city of New York in Congress. This is not unnatural in the great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, who opened up the great Northwest, or in the son of John Winthrop Chanler, for three consecutive terms a Democratic Congressman of New York city.

To most young men it would be quite enough to have opened up a new country; their ambition, or restlessness, or desire for power and responsibility, or whatever it is which makes young men exert themselves, would be amply satisfied by this; but Chanler treats himself to this expedition into Africa, and thinks his serious work in life lies after his holiday in that strange country is over. But then when you have said that, you have told the whole story. Chanler is not content to be like most young men.