Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (12 page)

The expedition started with Burton committing a major error of judgement. With sole responsibility for buying the expedition’s supplies from Zanzibar’s Indian merchants, and only half the funding he had hoped for, he had to buy wisely. He purchased from Ladha Damha (or Damji), a leading merchant, excellent presents for chiefs: sprigged muslin for turbans, embroidered hats and coats, and white and pink Venetian beads. But regarding the all-important basic trade goods, he later confessed he had ‘made the mistake of ignorance of not laying in an ample store of American domestics [versatile sheeting fabric known locally as Merikani
cloth], and a greater supply of beads’.
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Basic trade goods were essential for buying food and paying for the right of passage through the territory of African chiefs. So to have skimped on these essential commodities was folly. His initial failure to recruit enough porters led him to leave behind the expedition’s portable boat. This was another bad mistake. ‘She would indeed have been a Godsend,’ he admitted later, ‘sparing us long delay, great expense and a host of difficulties and hardships.’
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But, leaving Zanzibar, Burton felt euphoric.

Naval vessels at Zanzibar (from Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone).

Of the gladdest moments in human life is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of carking care, and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of youth, excitement gives a new vigour to the muscles.
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Just before leaving, he and Speke visited the young Sultan Majid, who over sweetmeats and glasses of sherbet, alarmed them by suggesting that they take a field gun.
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The route they meant to follow to the lake had been pioneered by Arab-Swahili slave traders twenty years earlier, and although Hamerton
warned them that ‘contact with slave-dealers had increased African cupidity and diminished hospitality’, the two explorers believed that because Africans were now accustomed to seeing travellers, they would be unlikely to harm them if they stuck to the known path.
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Burton’s RGS instructions required him ‘to penetrate inland’ to the ‘unknown lake’ – which was of course only ‘unknown’ to Europeans. Many Arabs had stood on its shores since Sayf bin Said el-Muameri had reached it in 1825. Burton was tasked by the RGS ‘to proceed northward towards the range of mountains [Mountains of the Moon] marked upon our maps as containing the probable source of the “Bahr el Abiad” [White Nile], which it will be your next great objective to discover’.
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Burton believed that any man succeeding in linking mountains and river should ‘justly be considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science’. But because the celebrated German explorer of the Sahara, Heinrich Barth, had told him ‘that no prudent man would pledge himself to discover the Nile sources’, he timidly redefined his mission as being ‘to ascertain the limits of the Sea of Ujiji [Tanganyika], to learn the ethnography of its tribes, and determine the export of the produce of the interior’.
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It would be nine months before he discussed the source of the Nile again with Speke, although both men knew very well that they would be judged by how much they contributed to the solution of the world’s greatest geographical mystery.

The success or failure of expeditions depended not just on the tenacity of individual explorers, but as much on the experience and motivation of their African guides, porters and servants. By great good luck, Burton and Speke had managed to employ Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who would become the expedition’s principal
factotum.
When only twelve, Bombay had been captured between Kilwa and Lake Nyasa by Arab-Swahili slave traders, and then sold to an Indian merchant, who had taken him to work for him in Sindh, where he had learned Hindustani. After the merchant’s death, Bombay was freed and sailed to Zanzibar, where the two explorers met him. Since Burton and Speke both
knew Hindustani, communication with Bombay was easy. Even before the journey started Speke wrote that he had ‘become much attached to Bombay’ and asserted that he had never met any black man as honest, generous and conscientious as he was.
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They had engaged at the same time another man also destined to become one of East Africa’s great caravan leaders, Mabruki (later known as Mabruki Speke), a member of the Yao tribe like Bombay.

Sidi Mubarak Bombay.

On condition that Burton paid each man five Maria Theresa dollars a month,
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the Sultan of Zanzibar agreed to lend him a dozen Baluchi soldiers – originally from Baluchistan to the north-west of Sindh – and a one-eyed
jemadar
(native officer) to command them. An Indian merchant called Rush Ramji rented to the expedition nine slaves, whose ‘only object’ according to Burton was to capture further slaves. Rather surprisingly, he condoned this ambition, insisting that he ‘had no power to prevent [his] followers purchasing slaves’. But Burton would at least refuse to accept slaves as presents. He had already chosen
as personal servants and ‘cook boys’, Valentine and Gaetano, half-Portuguese and half-Indian teenagers, who could sew, cook and speak Kiswahili.

The entire caravan was under the orders of its
cafilah-bashi
or headman, Said bin Salim, whose father was an Omani Arab and his mother an African. He carried ‘a two-handed blade fit for Richard of England’, could recite poetry in Arabic and would soon fall out with Burton, though not with Speke. Said bin Salim brought along four slaves as his personal servants: three females, including ‘Halimah, his acting wife, and one boy’.
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The total recruited on Zanzibar was thirty-one, not counting Speke and Burton. Said bin Salim was sent ahead to the mainland to try to recruit 140 porters. He would only manage to engage thirty-six at the coast, but within a month the expedition’s numbers would rise to 132, thanks, in part, to some men who had failed to present themselves at the coast unexpectedly turning up a month later, inland. Thirty baggage asses were also acquired by Said bin Salim.
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The expedition’s principals sailed from Zanzibar to the mainland in mid-June 1857 on the Sultan’s 18-gun corvette, which Colonel Hamerton had borrowed to ensure that the two young officers would arrive rested on Africa’s shores. Since he was dying, the consul’s concern for their well-being was greatly to his credit.
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Hamerton knew that many British explorers had died in Africa earlier in the century: among them Mungo Park and Richard Lander, both murdered on the Niger; Gordon Laing killed near Timbuktu, and Hugh Clapperton dying from dysentery at Sokoto. James Tuckey and fourteen of the thirty men who had volunteered to go with him beyond the first cataracts on the Congo had succumbed to fever before travelling a hundred miles. According to Mr Frost, Hamerton’s physician, the consul mistrusted Burton and feared he would be a poor leader. Frost claimed that Hamerton murmured to Speke, at the moment of parting: ‘Good luck, Speke; you know I would not travel with that man under any condition.’
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Speke and Burton and their people were landed at Kaole Point, eighty miles south of Bagamoyo, on 16 June 1857. Ten days
later, after watching his protégés’ heavily laden caravan lumber out of the cantonments into the bush, Colonel Hamerton sailed for Zanzibar. He died on board nine days later.

Preceded by the Sultan’s blood-red flag, which was carried at the head of all Zanzibar caravans, the column marched along the coast for several miles before heading inland, led by the Baluchis, armed with archaic muzzle-loaders and German cavalry sabres. Immediately behind them, the main body of porters straggled for several hundred yards, their seventy-pound loads chafing backs and shoulders not yet hardened to them. They were carrying not only cloth and beads, but tinned food, tea, coffee, sugar, a box of cigars, a tent, camp beds, chairs, carpenters’ tools, books, a table and a chest of scientific instruments. Within a fortnight, all of the expedition’s three chronometers were out of commission due to nothing worse than a few sharp jolts. Evidently these precious clocks had not been swaddled in cotton wool and carried by the most reliable porters. This was a serious oversight since without the help of at least one chronometer synchronised to Greenwich Mean Time, longitudes were going to be very hard to calculate, which in turn would make it impossible to furnish the RGS with accurate maps, unless either of the white officers could show rare ingenuity.

Speke marched ahead of the column, while Burton brought up the rear, riding on one of the expedition’s thirty donkeys, most of which were girthed with coir rope, tied too loosely to prevent their 200-pound loads from slipping. So ‘they rushed against one another, bolted, shied, and threw their impediments’.
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If the beasts were anarchic, so too were the men. Being used to obedient soldiers, both Speke and Burton found their Nyamwezi porters and their concubines and hangers-on hard to manage. The problem of how best to prevent thefts and desertions became a conundrum they never could solve.

An open plain dotted with termite mounds and baobab trees stretched westwards for a hundred miles and would have to be crossed before they reached the cooler terrain of the Usagara Mountains. For several days they marched beside the Kingani river&
(the Ruvu) on whose banks villagers grew sweet potato, tobacco and rice. Soon jungle and swamp replaced these cultivated fields. Hours of fiery sunshine alternated with brief but violent tropical showers which soaked them to the skin. At night, the air was muggy and clouds of mosquitoes tormented them. Away from the villages, zebra and kudu could be seen grazing. Eleven days after leaving the coast, Burton rose one morning feeling ‘weak and depressed, with aching head, burning eyes and throbbing extremities’. He was oppressed by a conviction that he would fail in everything. Speke had already shaken off the same symptoms, and was providing meat for the entire expedition with his gun.
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During their earlier foray along the coast, Speke had felt that Burton was unreasonable not to hold up their caravan for longer periods so that he could shoot hippopotami. But though Burton had little interest in hunting and shooting, he did acknowledge that it was part of an explorer’s duty to shoot and stuff birds and beasts as specimens, and this function, it had been agreed – along with surveying and mapping – would be performed by Speke.
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Thanks to Isabel Burton’s later efforts to present her husband as an early opponent of blood sports and shooting, most of his biographers have applauded their subject’s disapproval of killing except for the pot. In fact Burton had brought two huge double-barrelled elephant rifles to Africa. One was lost in a river, but he would have used the other, he said, ‘to attack the herds of elephant’ in the forests of Ugogo, if he had had ‘strength enough [and] time’. In his personal armoury he also had an 8-bore by W. Richards, a .22-inch ‘pea’ rifle, an air gun, two revolvers and a crossbow.
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‘Sensible men, who went out to India, took one of two lines,’ Burton wrote in his memoir, ‘they either shot, or they studied languages.’ So he could hardly have disapproved of Speke – as has been suggested – for having adopted one of the ‘two lines’ open to a ‘sensible man’. After they had quarrelled, Burton would claim that Speke had enjoyed eating the embryos of the pregnant animals he had shot, implying that his love of shooting was perverted. In fact Burton never saw his companion eat an
embryo, but founded his allegation on a single passage written by Speke in
Blackwood’s Magazine,
in which African superstitions in regard to pregnancy were mentioned, but nothing was included to suggest that Speke had any interest in eating embryos.
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