Following in Elephants’ Footsteps: Packing for a Congo Expedition in the 1800s, and Now

Over the last few years, I’ve been coming and going from England, where I live, to East and Central Africa to research a book. A Training School for Elephants tells the story of a forgotten 1879 expedition commissioned by King Leopold II of Belgium.

He wanted to test a new transport system to extract Congo’s resources. So he imported four tamed Asian elephants from India, and with a caravan numbering upwards of a hundred people, ordered they be marched from the east coast of Africa (present-day Tanzania) to Lake Tanganyika in the continent’s interior.

On a practical level, my to-and-fro following in the elephants’ footsteps taught me how to pack fast and light. Essentials included a two-pound pop-up tent made from a fine mesh (useful in roadside motels where torn mosquito nets couldn’t keep out a bird); a “Yellow Fever” vaccination certificate (without it, most African countries won’t let you in); and a GPS locator linked to a security company in the U.K. (important for those moments I ventured into the Democratic Republic of Congo).

I soon learnt what I could buy on the ground, including malaria test kits and a killer hot sauce. I mention this only because of the history I was researching. The packing lists used by Europeans in their nineteenth-century grab for Africa emerged as one of the more curious revelations.

In 1879, new arrivals loaded up in Zanzibar where resident Indian and Omani traders would supply beads (in pinks, blues and browns), cowrie shells and cloth needed to pay local transit taxes on the mainland. “Fashion was as dominant among Central African tribes as among the belles of Paris or London,” remarked the London Royal Geographical Society’s man, Joseph Thomson, who recommended a solid stock be purchased.

But these days, all I have to do is load up my mobile phone with an M-PESA account—a branchless banking service used all over Tanzania, which allows travelers to pay for almost everything via cellphone.

Epicurean delicacies had to be sourced in Europe. “Wine is generally helpful,” advised one of the Belgian expedition doctors. Most medical supplies also had to come from home, including quinine and arsenic which European explorers reached for “much like pepper and salt” at an evening meal, observed a Belgian traveler.

Zanzibar had a well-loved Goanese shopkeeper called Andrew who kept arriving Europeans supplied with opium, but otherwise medicine chests were full of experimental attempts to fight off still unnamed tropical diseases. In 1879, Leopold’s expedition doctor arrived particularly well endowed, carrying various potions another visitor remarked he dared not even touch.

For the “right” wardrobe, explorers relied on men’s outfitters at home, usually those stationed in London’s smartest areas such as Jermyn Street. ‘A free-and-easy suit of Tweeds and pith hat’ was recommended by Thomson.

Another traveler emphasized the importance of sunglasses—French were the best, as well as a floppy, broad brimmed ‘wide-awake’ hat (the Catholic missionaries tied theirs down with silk cord chin-straps, which were paired solemnly with long black cassocks and white gowns).

The Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley suggested a flannel suit accessorised with a white peaked tropical hat of his own design, with vents in the high brim and a gauze veil to keep off the mosquitoes. Adolphe Burdo, one of Lepoold’s men, brought opera glasses to aid his big-game hunting.

Then there were the tents, which became a distinguishing mark of national pride: the Belgians used tall, double-roofed contraptions; the British squat tents too small to stand up in (a hangover from Livingstone perhaps, who’d favoured ‘a small gipsy tent, just sufficient to sleep in’ with a horse rug for a bed). Stanley packed a custom-made double-clothed American drill tent, outfitted as if it were an English drawing room, with a bearskin and portable writing table.

Weapons were of course deemed essential, but guns were just one of the tools the colonizers used to subdue local resistance. Missionaries brought musical boxes, magic lanterns, barrel organs and portable printing presses to help nudge people towards adopting European ‘civilization’.

The French explorer, Abbé Debaize, carried a 12,000-franc hurdy-gurdy that played feeble operatic selections. He would strap the instrument to one of his men’s backs. Turning the handle, he’d march towards his antagonist, and if the ‘softening influence of music’ failed to secure a suitable welcome, he’d let off a few fireworks.

Debaize had set out in 1878 at the head of a French Scientific Expedition—a three-year mission across Africa from east to west, with a caravan of nine hundred porters. But when he went mad with fever on the shores of Tanganyika, there was no saving him. The labels on the bottles in his medicine chest had all been soaked off.

Many of these packing choices were inspired by the most popular explorer’s how-to guide of the time: Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel, which was already on its fifth edition by 1879. An English eugenicist and Nile explorer, Galton listed expedition furnishings “with the most show for their weight,” such as rugs and dinner services.

He recommended heavy bullets (needed to bring down an elephant), advised how best to lift a sarcophagus from an Egyptian tomb, and counseled that the best way to smuggle jewels was by stitching them under your skin.

Despite Stanley’s misgivings (“I am told he has twice written about the Art of Travel,” remarked Stanley in his journal; “I think it strange that such an accomplished Master of the Art, did not succeed in reaching the Lake”), Galton’s tome was considered essential packing material for any would-be Victorian explorer.

Reading material should include “a simple, commonsense cookery book”—also recommended by the British missionary Arthur Dodgshghun, who wrote forty pages of handwritten instructions for future travelers—along with one or two of the current best-selling travelogues.

How did the Europeans carry all that stuff? They didn’t. They engaged porters, on lousy pay, occasionally even using enslaved Africans.

These porters toiled under dreadful conditions (Stanley, for instance, recommended that porters should be paid nothing but food until they made it to Tabora, an Arab-Swahili trading station around two months’ march into the interior from Dar es Salaam). Those men (and women, who are written out of European records) didn’t just have to carry all the trading goods, but sometimes even the Europeans  themselves.

Among the most startling accounts was Annie Hore, who in 1882 traveled from England to join her missionary husband on Lake Tanganyika. A team of sixteen men took turns wheeling her in a padded wicker bathchair, which was fitted with two long poles for lifting the chair wherever the terrain got challenging.

While the coir fastenings and bamboo ensured “a pleasant springiness,” she complained about the waterproof awning: “I could see nothing of the country, or people, only the dark forms of our own men, and, dimly, the clumps of bushes and trees gliding by.”

“Though always carried, I endured my own particular kind of weariness, and often longed for the relief of a walk,” she said, insisting she was by no means a profligate traveler: “indeed we had no gilt tent-knobs, or fancy portmanteaus or canteens.”

In Annie Hore’s estimation, she considered her journey to Lake Tanganyika a grand success, “[which] was, I think, notwithstanding its difficulties, the quickest on record by any European.” It’s some boast—illustrative of a larger tale found in the seams of nineteenth-century expedition packing lists: the folly of the European grab for Africa, which in the case of Leopold’s four elephants, is a story drenched in colonial arrogance and hubris.

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A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts is available via the Atlantic Monthly Press.