The Book of Missionary Heroes Part 20

He read these words of Stanley's:

"For four months and four days I lived with Livingstone in the same house, or in the same boat, or in the same tent, and I never found a fault in him.... Each day's life with him added to my admiration for him. His gentleness never forsakes him: his hopefulness never deserts him. His is the Spartan heroism, the inflexibility of the Roman, the enduring resolution of the Anglo-Saxon. The man has conquered me."

Alexander Mackay put down Stanley's book and gazed into the fire.

Since the days when he had trudged as a boy down to the station to see the railway engine he had been a schoolboy in the Grammar School at Aberdeen, and a student in Edinburgh, and while there had worked in the great shipbuilding yards at Leith amid the clang and roar of the rivetters and the engine shop. He was now studying in Berlin, drawing the designs of great engines far more wonderful than the railway engine he had almost worshipped as a boy.

On the desk at Mackay's side lay his diary in which he wrote his thoughts. In that diary were the words that he himself had written:

"This day last year[52] Livingstone died--a Scotsman and a Christian--loving G.o.d and his neighbour, in the heart of Africa.

'Go thou and do likewise.'"

Mackay wondered. Could it ever be that he would go into the heart of Africa like Livingstone? it seemed impossible. What was the good of an engineer among the lakes and forests of Central Africa?

On the table by the side of Stanley's _How I found Livingstone_ lay a newspaper, the Edinburgh _Daily Review_. Mackay glanced at it; then he s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and read eagerly a letter which appeared there. It was a new call to Central Africa--the call, through Stanley, from King M'tesa of Uganda, that home of ma.s.sacre and torture. These are some of the words that Stanley wrote:

"King M'tesa of Uganda has been asking me about the white man's G.o.d.... Oh that some practical missionary would come here. M'tesa would give him anything that he desired--houses, land, cattle, ivory. It is the practical Christian who can ... cure their diseases, build dwellings, teach farming and turn his hand to anything like a sailor--this is the man who is wanted. Such a one, if he can be found, would become the saviour of Africa."

Stanley called for "a practical man who could turn his hand to anything--_if he can be found_."

The words burned their way into Mackay's very soul.

"If he can be found." Why here, here in this very room he sits--the boy who has worked in the village at the carpenter's bench and the saddler's table, in the smithy and the mill, when his mother wished him to be at his books; the lad who has watched the ships building in the docks of Aberdeen, and has himself with hammer and file and lathe built and made machines in the engineering works--he is here--the "man who can turn his hand to anything." And he had, we remember, already written in his diary:

"Livingstone died--a Scotsman and a Christian--loving G.o.d and his neighbour, in the heart of Africa. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"

Mackay did not hesitate. Then and there he took pen and ink and paper and wrote to London to the Church Missionary Society which was offering, in the daily paper that lay before him, to send men out to King M'tesa. The words that Mackay wrote were these:

"My heart burns for the deliverance of Africa, and if you can send me to any one of those regions which Livingstone and Stanley have found to be groaning under the curse of the slave-hunter I shall be very glad."

Within four months Mackay, with some other young missionaries who had volunteered for the same great work, was standing on the deck of the S.S. _Peshawur_ as she steamed out from Southampton for Zanzibar.

He was in the footsteps of Livingstone--"a Scotsman and a Christian"--making for the heart of Africa and "ready to turn his hand to anything" for the sake of Him who as

"... the Carpenter of Nazareth Made common things for G.o.d."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 49: "What is the minister gazing at, with his son Alec, in the dust of the road?"]

[Footnote 50: See Chapter XV.]

[Footnote 51: December 12, 1875.]

[Footnote 52: May 1, 1873.]

CHAPTER XIX

THE ROADMAKER

_Alexander Mackay_

(Date, 1878)

After many months of delay at Zanzibar, Mackay with his companions and bearers started on his tramp of hundreds of miles along narrow footpaths, often through swamps, delayed by fierce greedy chiefs who demanded many cloths before they would let the travellers pa.s.s. One of the little band of missionaries had already died of fever. When hundreds of miles from the coast, Mackay was stricken with fever and nearly died. His companions sent him back to the coast again to recover, and they themselves went on and put together the _Daisy_, the boat which the bearers had carried in sections on their heads, on the sh.o.r.e of Victoria Nyanza. So Mackay, racked with fever, was carried back by his Africans over the weary miles through swamp and forest to the coast. At last he was well again, and with infinite labour he cut a great wagon road for 230 miles to Mpapwa. With pick and shovel, axe and saw, they cleared the road of trees for a hundred days.

Mackay wrote home as he sat at night tired by the side of his half-made road, "This will certainly yet be a highway for the King Himself; and all that pa.s.s this way will come to know His Name."

At length, after triumphing by sheer skill and will over a thousand difficulties, Mackay reached the southern sh.o.r.e of Victoria Nyanza at Kagei, to find that his surviving companions had gone on to Uganda in an Arab sailing-dhow, leaving on the sh.o.r.e the _Daisy_, which had been too small to carry them.

On the beach by the side of that great inland sea, Victoria Nyanza, in the heart of Africa, Mackay found the now broken and leaking _Daisy_.

Her cedar planks were twisted and had warped in the blazing sun till every seam gaped. A hippopotamus had crunched her bow between his terrible jaws. Many of her timbers had crumbled before the still greater foe of the African boat-builder--the white ant.

Now, under her shadow lay the man "who could turn his hand to anything," on his back with hammer and chisel in hand. He was rivetting a plate of copper on the hull of the _Daisy_. Already he had nailed sheets of zinc and lead on stern and bow, and had driven cotton wool picked from the bushes by the lake into the seams to caulk some of the leaks. Around the boat stood crowds of Africans, their dark faces full of astonishment at the white man mending his big canoe.

"Why should a man toil so terribly hard?" they wondered.

The tribesmen of the lake had only canoes hollowed out from a tree-trunk, or made of some planks sewn together with fibres from the banana tree.

At last Mackay had his boat ready to sail up the Victoria Nyanza.

The whole of the length of that great sea, itself larger than his own native Scotland, still separated Mackay from the land of Uganda for which he had left Britain over fifteen months earlier.

All through his disappointments and difficulties Mackay fought on.

With him, as with Livingstone, nothing had power to break his spirit or quench his burning determination to carry on his G.o.d-given plan to serve Africa.

Every use of saw and hammer and chisel, every

"trick of the tool's true trade,"

all the training in the shipbuilding yards and engineering shops at Edinburgh and in Germany helped Mackay to invent some new, daring and ingenious way out of every fresh difficulty.

_The Wreck of the "Daisy"_

Now at last the _Daisy_ was on the water again; and Mackay and his bearers went aboard[53] and hoisting sail from Kagei ran northward.

Before they had gone far black storm clouds swept across the sky.

Night fell. Lightning blazed unceasingly and flung up into silhouette the wild outlines of the mountains to the east. The roar of the thunder echoed above the wail of the wind and the threshing of the waves.

All through the dark, Mackay and those of his men who could handle an oar rowed unceasingly. Again and again he threw out his twenty-fathom line, but in vain. He made out a dim line of precipitous cliffs, yet the water seemed fathomless--the only map in existence was a rough one that Stanley had made. At last the lead touched bottom at fourteen fathoms. In the dim light of dawn they rowed and sailed toward a shady beach before the cliffs, and anch.o.r.ed in three and a half fathoms of water.

The storm pa.s.sed; but the waves from the open sea came roaring in and broke over the _Daisy_. The bowsprit dipped under the anchor chain, and the whole bulwark on the weatherside was carried away. The next sea swept into the open and now sinking boat. By frantic efforts they heaved up the anchor and the next wave swung the _Daisy_ with a crash onto the beach, where the waves pounded her to a complete wreck, wrenching the planks from the keel. But Mackay and his men managed to rescue her cargo before she went to pieces.

They were wrecked on a sh.o.r.e where Stanley, the great explorer, had years before had a hairbreadth escape from ma.s.sacre at the hands of the wild savages. But Stanley, living up to the practice he had learned from Livingstone, had turned enemies into friends, and now the natives made no attack on the shipwrecked Mackay.

For eight weeks Mackay laboured there, hard on the edge of the lake, living on the beach in a tent made of spars and sails. With hammer and chisel and saw he worked unsparingly at his task. He cut the middle eight feet from the boat, and bringing her stern and stem together patched the broken ends with wood from the middle part. After two months' work the now dumpier _Daisy_ took the water again, and carried Mackay and his men safely up the long sh.o.r.es of Victoria Nyanza to the goal of all his travelling, the capital of M'tesa, King of Uganda.