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 pass. 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
shore 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 pass 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 shore of Victoria Nyanza at
Kagei, to find that his surviving companions had gone on to Uganda in
an Arab sailing-dhow, leaving on the shore 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 God-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 anchored in three and a half fathoms of
water.
The storm passed; 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 shore where Stanley, the great explorer, had
years before had a hairbreadth escape from massacre 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 shores of Victoria Nyanza to the
goal of all his travelling, the capital of M'tesa, King of Uganda.
The rolling tattoo of goat-skin drums filled the royal reception-hall
of King M'tesa, as the great tyrant entered with his chiefs. M'tesa,
his dark, cruel heavy face in vivid contrast with his spotless white
robe, sat heavily down on his stool of State, while brazen trumpets
sent to him from England blared as Mackay entered. The chiefs squatted
on low stools and on the rush-strewn mud-floor before the King. At his
side stood his Prime Minister, the Katikiro, a smaller man than the
King, but swifter and more far-sighted. The Katikiro was dressed in a
snowy-white Arab gown covered by a black mantle trimmed with gold. In
his hard, guilty face treacherous cunning and masterful cruelty were
blended.
M'tesa was gracious to Mackay, and gave him land on which to build
his home. More important to Mackay than even his hut was his workshop,
where he quickly fixed his forge and anvil, vise and lathe, and
grindstone, for he was now in the place where he could practise his
skill. It was for this that he had left home and friends, and pressed
on in spite of fever and shipwreck to serve Africa and lead her to the
worship of Jesus Christ by working and teaching as our Lord did when
on earth.
One day the wide thatched roof of that workshop shaded from the
flaming rays of the sun a crowded circle of the chiefs of Uganda with
their slaves, who loved to come to "hear the bellows roar." They were
gazing at Mackay, whose strong, bare right arm was swinging his hammer
"Clang-a-clang-clang."
Then a ruddy glow lit up the dark faces of the watchers and the
bronzed face of the white man who in the centre of his workshop was
blowing up his forge fire. Gripping in his pincers the iron hoe that
was now red-hot, Mackay hammered it into shape and then plunged it all
hissing into the bath of water that stood by him.
Hardly had the cloud of steam risen from the bath, when Mackay once
more gripped the hoe, and moving to his grindstone placed his foot on
the pedal and set the edge of the hoe against the whirling stone.
The sparks flew high. A murmur came from the Uganda chiefs who stood
around.
"It is witchcraft," they said to one another. "It is witchcraft by
which Mazunga-wa-Kazi makes the hard iron tenfold harder in the water.
It is witchcraft by which he sends the wheels round and makes our hoes
sharp. Surely he is the great wizard."
Mackay caught the sound of the new name that they had given
him--Mazunga-wa-Kazi--the White-Man-at-Work. They called him by this
name because to them it was very strange that any man should work with
his own hands.
"Women are for work," said the chiefs. "Men go to talk with the King,
and to fight and eat."
Mackay paused in his work and turned on them.
"No," he said, "you are wrong. God made man with one stomach and with
two hands in order that he may work twice as much as he eats." And
Mackay held out before them his own hands blackened with the work of
the smithy, rough with the handling of hammer and saw, the file and
lathe. "But you," and he turned on them with a laugh and pointed to
their sleek bodies as they shone in the glow of the forge fire, "you
are all stomach and no hands."
They grinned sheepishly at one another under this attack, and, as
Mackay let down the fire and put away his tools, they strolled off to
the hill on which the King's beehive-shaped thatched palace was built.
Mackay climbed up the hill on the side of which his workshop stood.
From the ridge he gazed over the low-lying marsh from which the women
were bearing on their heads the water-pots. He knew that the men
and women of the land were suffering from fearful illnesses. He now
realised that the fevers came from the poisonous waters of the marsh.
He made up his mind how he could help them with his skill. They must
have pure water; yet they knew nothing of wells.
Mackay at once searched the hill-side with his spade and found a bed
of clay emerging from the side of the hill. He climbed sixteen feet
higher up the hill and, bringing the men who could help him together,
began digging. He knew that he would reach spring water at the level
of the clay, for the rains that had filtered through the earth would
stop there.
The Baganda[54] thought that he was mad. "Whoever," they asked one
another, "heard of digging in the top of a hill for water?"
"When the hole is so deep," said Mackay, measuring out sixteen feet,
"water will come, pure and clean, and you will not need to carry it up
the hill from the marsh."
They dug and dug till the hole was too deep to hurl the earth up over
the edge. Then Mackay made a pulley, which seemed a magic thing to
them, for they could not yet understand the working of wheels; and
with rope and bucket the earth was pulled up. Exactly at the depth of
sixteen feet the water welled in. The Baganda clapped their hands and
danced with delight.
"Mackay is the great wizard. He is the mighty spirit," they cried.
"The King must come to see this."
King M'tesa himself wondered at the story of the making of the well
and the finding of the water. He gave orders that he was to be carried
to view this great wonder. His eyes rolled with astonishment as he saw
it and heard of the wonders that were wrought by the work of men.
Yet M'tesa and his men still wondered why any man should work
hard. Mackay tried to explain this to the King when he sat in his
reception-hall. Work, Mackay told M'tesa, is the noblest thing a
man can do, and he told him how Jesus Christ, the Son of the Great
Father-Spirit who made all things, did not Himself feel that work
was a thing too mean for Him. For our Lord, when He lived on earth at
Nazareth, worked with His own hands at the carpenter's bench, and made
all labour forever noble.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 53: August 23, 1878.]
[Footnote 54: The people of Uganda.]