Sam and Remi walked into the workspace to find Selma leaning over the tank, writing something on a clipboard. She turned, saw them, held up a finger, then finished writing and set aside the clipboard. “My Centropyge loricula is looking sickly,” she said, then translated: “flame angelfish.”“That’s one of my favorites,” Remi said.
Selma nodded solemnly. “So, welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Fargo.”
Sam and Remi had long ago given up trying to convince Selma to call them by their first names.
“Good to be home,” Sam replied.
Selma walked to the long, maple-topped workbench that ran down the center of the room and sat down. Sam and Remi took the stools opposite her. Blaylock’s massive walking staff was lying lengthwise on the table.“You look well,” Selma said.
“Pete and Wendy disagreed.”
“I was comparing your current condition to how I imagined you over the past few days. Everything is relative.”
“True enough,” Remi said. “Selma, are you stalling?”
Selma pursed her lips. “I’m not fond of handing you incomplete information.”
Sam replied, “What you call incomplete we call mysterious, and we love a good mystery.”
“Then you’re going to love what I have for you. First a little background. With Pete and Wendy’s help, I dissected, indexed, and foot-noted Morton’s biography of Blaylock. It’s on our server in PDF format, if you want to read it later, but here’s the condensed version. Selma opened a manila folder and began reading.
“Blaylock arrived in Bagamoyo in March 1872 with nothing but the clothes on his back, a few pieces of silver, a .44 caliber Henry rifle, a bowie knife big enough to ‘chop down a baobab tree’ stuck in his boot, and a short sword strapped to his hip.”“Clearly, Morton had a creative streak,” Remi said. She looked to Sam. “Do you remember the story we read about the murdered British tourist?”
“Sylvie Radford,” Sam finished.
“Remember what she found while diving?”
Sam smiled. “A sword. It’s a long long shot, but maybe what she found had once belonged to Blaylock. Selma. Can you . . .”
Their chief researcher was already jotting a note. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“A short sword and a bowie knife could easily be confused. Maybe Morton got it wrong. Sorry, Selma, keep going.”
“Evidently, Blaylock terrified the locals. Not only was he a foot taller and wider than almost everyone, he wasn’t prone to smiling. On his first night in Bagamoyo, half a dozen thugs got together and decided to separate Blaylock and his money. Two of them died, and the rest required medical attention.”“He shot them,” Sam said.
“No. He never picked up his Henry, the bowie, or the sword. He fought with his bare hands. After that, no one bothered him.”
“Which was probably the point,” Sam replied. “Doing that to six men while unarmed tends to create an impression.”
“Indeed. Within a week, he was serving as a bodyguard for a rich Irishman on safari; within a month, he’d started his own guide business. As good as he was with his hands, he was even better with the Henry. Where other European guides and hunters were using big-bore hunting rifles, Blaylock could take down a charging Cape buffalo-a mbogo-with one shot from his Henry.
“About two months after Blaylock arrived, he contracted malaria and spent six weeks on his back near death while his two mistresses-Maasai women who worked in Bagamoyo-nursed him back to health. While Morton never came out and said as much, Blaylock’s brush with death seemed to have left him slightly . . . touched in the head.
“After the malaria Blaylock would disappear for months on end on what he called ‘vision quest expeditions.’ He lived with the Maasai, took concubines, studied with witch doctors, lived alone in the bush, hunted for King Solomon’s mines and Timbuktu, dug fossils in Olduvai Gorge, followed the trail of Mansa Musa, hoping to find his staff of gold . . . There’s even an anecdote that claims Blaylock was the one who found David Livingstone first. According to Morton’s account, Blaylock sent a runner to Bagamoyo to alert Henry Morton Stanley; shortly after that the pair had their famous ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ moment near Lake Tanganyika.”“So if we’re to believe Morton,” Remi said, “Winston Lloyd Blaylock was the Indiana Jones of the nineteenth century.”
Sam smiled. “Hunter, explorer, hero, mystic, Casanova, and indestructible savior all rolled into one. But this is all from Morton’s biography, right?”
“Right.” “By the way, we’re assuming Morton was named after the Morton-as in Henry Morton Stanley?”
“Right again. In fact, according to the family tree in the back of the book, all of Blaylock’s direct descendants were named after Africa in some fashion-the places, the history, the larger-than-life characters . . .”“If you got all this from the biography, what about the journal you mentioned?” asked Sam.
“I used the word ‘journal’ for lack of a better term. In fact, it’s a potpourri: diary, field sketchbook . . .”
“Can we see it?”
“If you’d like. It’s in the vault.” Off the workspace, Selma had a temperature- and humidity-controlled archive area. “It’s in bad shape-insect-eaten, soiled, water-damaged pages stuck together. Pete and Wendy are working on the restoration. We’re photographing and digitizing what pages we can before we start work on the damaged portions. There’s one more thing: It appears the journal also served as Blaylock’s captain’s log.”“Pardon me?” Remi said.
“While he never mentions the Shenandoah or the El Majidi, many of his entries clearly indicate he was at sea, on and off, for long periods. Blaylock does, however, mention Ophelia quite often.”“In what context?”
“She was his wife.”
“THAT WOULD EXPLAIN his obsession, I suppose,” Sam said. “Not only did he mentally rename the Shenandoah, he also carved Ophelia’s name into the bell.”“Ophelia is a distinctly un-African name,” Remi said. “It had to be the name of his wife back in the U.S.”
Selma nodded. “There’s no mention of her in the biography. And he never speaks in detail about her in the journal-just little snippets everywhere. Whether he was simply yearning for her or it’s something more, I don’t know, but she was never far from his mind.”“Are there dates in the journal?” asked Sam. “Anything we can cross-reference with Morton’s biography?”
“In both books, only months and years are used; in the journal, those are far and few between. We’re trying to do some matching, but it’s turning up discrepancies. For example, we found a time where in the biography he’s trekking in the Congo, while according to the journal he’s at sea. It’s slow going so far.”“Something doesn’t add up,” said Sam.
“Just one thing?” Remi replied. “My list is longer than that.”
“Mine too. But on the captain’s log angle: If we’re thinking Blaylock might have been at sea aboard the Shenandoah-El Majidi, I mean-then we’ve got a contradiction. By all accounts, after the Sultan of Zanzibar bought the Shenandoah in 1866 he all but abandoned her at anchor until she was destroyed either in 1872 or 1879. I think someone would have noticed her missing.”
“Good point,” Selma said, jotting down a note. “Another point of curiosity: Sultan Majid died in October 1870 and was succeeded by his brother and bitter rival, Sayyid Barghash bin Said. By default, he became the owner of El Majidi. Some historians find it curious that Sayyid didn’t change the ship’s name, let alone keep it around.”Sam added, “Can we put together a time line of the Shenandoah/ El Majidi ? Be easier to visualize the events.”
Selma picked up the phone and dialed the archive room. “Wendy, can you throw together a rough time line of the Shenandoah /El Majidi? Thanks.”“We also need to find out more about Blaylock’s life before Africa,” Remi said.
“I’m working on that as well,” said Selma. “I reached out to an old friend who might be able to help.”