BEFORE THE INFORMATION Superhighway there was the British Empire. I say this because the Empire too was interactive. People around the world had its pleasures and presumptions, brought to their door, but they also ventured out to play a role in its follies and conceits. The whole point of imperial culture was that it was, well, imperial -- a game of controlled laissez-faire, you might say. Certainly it wasn't just something to be found in the mother country alone. This is brought home to me every now and then, most recently by a new book from Nimbus Publishing, Victorian Explorer: The African Diaries of Captain William G. Stairs 1887-1892, edited by Janina M. Konczacki, a specialist in African history at Mount Allison University in Halifax.
The book carries with it a suggestion of rediscovery, though Konczacki's subject was a famous person at his death in 1892 when he was not yet 30 -- at least famous enough to be in Sir Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography. His renown now should probably rest on his being the perfect example of an extinct type: the-Canadian- as-imperial-hero.
It's easy to dismiss Stairs as a racist and as a tool of the stock jobbers, for indeed he was both. But he's not without value (much of it cautionary) as a representative person of his time, class -- and place. Canada contributed its share of Stairs figures to the story of the British Empire, thereby providing some of the first and strongest evidence of how Canadians were growing up as a society.
A Pottersfield Press book of a few years ago -- The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax by Judith Fingard -refreshed our understanding of how much Haligonians were on the receiving end of British military tradition. But the diaries of Stairs, whose family had been in Hatifax since the 1760s, show that the road had two lanes. Young Stairs was an 1882 graduate of the Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario, who later joined the e1ite Royal Engineers. He was a man of parts. When Henry M. Stanley, the "rescuer" of Dr. David Livingstone, was named to head an African expedition in 1887, he chose Stairs to accompany him, on the strength of Stairs's prose style in his letter of application. (In fairness, though, this is mostly a statement on Stanley's -- and the time's -- rather Kiplingesque taste in such matters.)
Three years earlier, General Charles (Chinese) Gordon had been killed defending Khartoum against the Muslim sect called the Mahdists. The expedition sent to relieve him, led by Gordon's friend Garnet Wolseley, the future commander-in-chief of the British army, didn't get up the Nile in time, despite the boat-handling skill of 400 Canadian voyageurs: a story told in Roy MacLaren's book Canadians on the Nile 1882-1898 (UBC Press, 1978). Wolseley had brought them along because he had seen what they were capable of when he'd served in Canada in the 1860s and 1870s, where his duties had included helping to put down the Red River uprising. Now the Mahdists were still at it, and a new and this time only quasi-official British expedition had to be dispatched to rescue Gordon's old protege, the explorer and civil servant Emin Pasha (actually a German named Eduard Schnitzer). In cold statistical terms, the so-called Emin Pasha Relief Expedition was hardly a success, as Emin Pasha didn't really need evacuating and the huge stores of ammunition delivered to him were never used. Of 695 members who set out from Zanzibar (I I of them Europeans), only 253 returned, with many dying of disease and starvation rather than of wounds. Of the more than 600 refugees from "Equatoria" who came out with them, less than half survived the march to the Atlantic coast. Yet this crusade was a great popular cause, and Stairs emerged from it a famous explorer. So much so that when Leopold 11 of Belgium wanted someone to lead a scientific (and business) expedition to what is now Zaire, he chose Stairs, who set off in 1891 and succeeded in his mission of locking up this mineralrich territory for the Katanga Company, a Belgian concern with a lot of British backers. But as the assignment was drawing to a close the following year, he died of malaria, and his fame has proved somewhat transient.
Stairs's diary of the first expedition, written in a difficult hand and laced with drawings of African crafts and customs, etc., was passed down among his descendants until one of them donated it in 1950 to the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, where it's lain unpublished until now. His second diary, an even more harrowing story and edited with the same skill by Konczacki, is known only from a published version in an obscure Belgium periodical, which had to be translated back into English for inclusion in the new book.
Together they make an interesting set piece from what has come to be seen in so many ways as a rather unpleasant time, but one from which all the secrets (and lessons) have not yet been wrung.
