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Authors: Prefers to remain anonymous, Giles Foden
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fleet, but, pulled by tugs from Britain to Malta, they had been too slow to get there in time. Then it was decided they should be sent to East Africa to resolve the Königsberg problem, so they were tugged a further 5,000 miles to Mafia Island and the Tanganyikan coast. As it turned out, their fate was intimately connected with that of Mimi and Toutou , which had a no less curious journey ahead of them.
Once off the Llanstephen Castle , the two motor boats were put on to goods trucks in a railway siding, ready for travel. The special cradles that had held them on the deck of the boat were simply lifted on to the flat beds of the railway wagons and bolted down again.
After a comfortable night at the Mount Nelson, Spicer spent the following morning making a series of official visits to navy and government officials in the town. He took with him as his aide-de-camp Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, complete with monocle and cutlass and canary-yellow hair. Meanwhile, Dr Hanschell and ‘Tubby’ Eastwood went to Lennard’s the pharmacist to supplement the expedition’s inadequate medical supplies.
Mr Lennard supplied zinc-lined boxes to keep the medicines safe from rain and insects. He also advised not putting all of the painkillers in one box, all the quinine in another, and so on. It was always better to split up the supplies, he said, in case a box went astray. The old chemist, who had fitted out many safaris in his time, also counselled taking plenty of laxative pills. These, he informed them, would be in constant demand from the African tribes they would encounter on the way.
While further preparations were made for their journey up to the Congo, Spicer had time to ponder a report he had received that John Lee, whose idea the whole thing had been, was a drunkard and had been ‘blabbing’ about their top-secret mission. In fact, many people knew about the expedition and the big-game hunter was probably innocent. However, the German commander Zimmer’s memoirs make clear that his intelligence about the arrival of the expedition came around the same time that Lee appeared in the Congo in late May.
Lee had worked hard blazing the trail up in the Congo, if his companion Magee is to be believed. Four years after the War he described Lee’s work in the National Geographic :
While preparations were being pushed in England, Lee and I left for Africa on 22 May 1915, going ahead of the main body to select a route across the African bush from the point where the boats would be taken off the train. It was important that a route be free as possible from hills, gorges, etc, yet close to water, should be chosen, as our boats were to be taken over this trail intact, each drawn by a traction engine.
Great difficulty was experienced in finding a suitable route over which to make our road, owing to the hilly nature of the country, as well as to the long stretches of marshland, the breeding ground of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But at last a route was selected and thousands of natives were recruited from the adjacent villages and set to work under white supervision literally to carve a passage through the bush.
Spicer refused to accept any of this as true, even though Lee had been sending back reports of his own. He had to investigate, so on Tuesday 6 July Spicer left Cape Town by train for Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe) to meet the British authorities there.
That same day the saga of the Königsberg came to a head in the east, on Tanganyika’s Indian Ocean coast. Since October 1914 the German ship had been skulking in one of the Rufiji’s channels and guns and troops had been put ashore for further protection. The British knew where she was: an officer had noticed that some coconut palms were moving above the tree level near the river mouth. They were tied to the Königsberg ’s masthead as a primitive camouflage. But it was only with the arrival of shallow-bottomed boats like HMS Severn and HMS Mersey
Once off the Llanstephen Castle , the two motor boats were put on to goods trucks in a railway siding, ready for travel. The special cradles that had held them on the deck of the boat were simply lifted on to the flat beds of the railway wagons and bolted down again.
After a comfortable night at the Mount Nelson, Spicer spent the following morning making a series of official visits to navy and government officials in the town. He took with him as his aide-de-camp Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, complete with monocle and cutlass and canary-yellow hair. Meanwhile, Dr Hanschell and ‘Tubby’ Eastwood went to Lennard’s the pharmacist to supplement the expedition’s inadequate medical supplies.
Mr Lennard supplied zinc-lined boxes to keep the medicines safe from rain and insects. He also advised not putting all of the painkillers in one box, all the quinine in another, and so on. It was always better to split up the supplies, he said, in case a box went astray. The old chemist, who had fitted out many safaris in his time, also counselled taking plenty of laxative pills. These, he informed them, would be in constant demand from the African tribes they would encounter on the way.
While further preparations were made for their journey up to the Congo, Spicer had time to ponder a report he had received that John Lee, whose idea the whole thing had been, was a drunkard and had been ‘blabbing’ about their top-secret mission. In fact, many people knew about the expedition and the big-game hunter was probably innocent. However, the German commander Zimmer’s memoirs make clear that his intelligence about the arrival of the expedition came around the same time that Lee appeared in the Congo in late May.
Lee had worked hard blazing the trail up in the Congo, if his companion Magee is to be believed. Four years after the War he described Lee’s work in the National Geographic :
While preparations were being pushed in England, Lee and I left for Africa on 22 May 1915, going ahead of the main body to select a route across the African bush from the point where the boats would be taken off the train. It was important that a route be free as possible from hills, gorges, etc, yet close to water, should be chosen, as our boats were to be taken over this trail intact, each drawn by a traction engine.
Great difficulty was experienced in finding a suitable route over which to make our road, owing to the hilly nature of the country, as well as to the long stretches of marshland, the breeding ground of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But at last a route was selected and thousands of natives were recruited from the adjacent villages and set to work under white supervision literally to carve a passage through the bush.
Spicer refused to accept any of this as true, even though Lee had been sending back reports of his own. He had to investigate, so on Tuesday 6 July Spicer left Cape Town by train for Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe) to meet the British authorities there.
That same day the saga of the Königsberg came to a head in the east, on Tanganyika’s Indian Ocean coast. Since October 1914 the German ship had been skulking in one of the Rufiji’s channels and guns and troops had been put ashore for further protection. The British knew where she was: an officer had noticed that some coconut palms were moving above the tree level near the river mouth. They were tied to the Königsberg ’s masthead as a primitive camouflage. But it was only with the arrival of shallow-bottomed boats like HMS Severn and HMS Mersey
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