Page 274 - The Secret Museum

THIS HAS GOT TO BE one of the most famous lines in history. It was uttered by a

journalist called Henry Morton Stanley, who was on a job for the New York Herald.
He was looking for David Livingstone, a missionary and explorer who was in Africa
trying to find the source of the Nile.

When they met, each man was wearing a hat. The two hats are now side by side in
the archive of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London.

In How I Found Livingstone (1872), Stanley’s account of their meeting in Ujiji,
deep in the heart of what is now Tanzania, he describes how they doffed these hats to
one another:

As I advanced slowly toward him I noticed he was pale, looked wearied, had a
gray beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it. …

I walked deliberately to him, took off my hat, and said, ‘Dr Livingstone, I
presume?’
‘Yes’, said he, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.
I replace my hat on my head and he puts on his cap, and we both grasp
hands, and I then say aloud, ‘I thank God, Doctor, I have been permitted to
see you.’ He answered, ‘I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.’

The hats – a sailor’s cap that belonged to Livingstone and a pith helmet that
belonged to Stanley – are in front of me now, on a table at the RGS. A tailor named

Hawkes made Stanley’s pith helmet and another named Gieves made Livingstone’s
cap. This was before the two tailors joined forces to become the famous tailoring
firm of Gieves & Hawkes. Their current shop at 1 Savile Row was once the
headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, before it moved out to South
Kensington. The tailors had kitted out so many explorers over the years that the

building felt like home, so when the Society moved they bought it for themselves.
Livingstone was very fond of his hat and is usually depicted wearing it: at the
RGS there is a painting of him with it on, and the statue of him outside the building

also shows him wearing it as he gazes out towards Hyde Park, above an old
milestone measuring the distance to London (1 mile to Hyde Park Corner) and
Hounslow. Have a look if you are walking past.

The hat reminds me of another piece of Livingstone memorabilia, held by the
Hope Entomological Collection in Oxford, the second largest collection of insects in
the UK. It is the ‘type’ or standard example of a tsetse fly. This small fly, little
realizing how famous it would be in the future, landed on Livingstone’s arm. He
swatted it, then scraped its squished body and two others like it on to a piece of card,

labelled the card ‘Setse: Destroys horses in Central Africa’, and sent it home to his
entomologist friend, Frederick Hope (1797–1862), in Oxford, who was probably
delighted to open it over breakfast one morning. The first curator of Hope’s insect
collection, John Westwood (1805–93) described the tsetse fly from this specimen
and added it to Hope’s collection of almost 5 million insects (it’s unlikely anyone