Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (13 page)

In reality, Burton must have found Speke’s prowess with his rifle reassuring as they entered country where hyena and leopard posed a danger to the expedition’s donkeys. The terrain became increasingly menacing:

The black greasy ground, veiled with thick shrubbery, supports in the more open spaces screens of tiger and spear-grass, twelve and thirteen feet high, with every blade a finger’s breadth . . . The footpaths are crossed by lianas thick as coir cables . . . The earth, ever rain-drenched, emits the odour of sulphuretted
[sic]
hydrogen, and in some parts the traveller might fancy a corpse to be hidden behind every bush.

While crossing an endless plain, ‘burnt tawny by the sun’ and spotted with ‘calabashes, palmyras, and tamarinds’, distant blue hills could be seen. Burton reflected sadly that in Africa ‘grace and beauty are seldom seen for long without a sudden change to a hideous grotesqueness’.
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As his disapproval of Africa increased, so too did his dislike of its inhabitants:

Their character may be briefly summed up: a futile race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive; boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy and thriftless. Their redeeming points are a tender love of family, which displays itself by the most violent ‘kingrief’, and a strong attachment to an uninviting home.

Ignorant of the existence of the ruins of African-built Great Zimbabwe and the artefacts of West Africa, Burton declared that the sub-Saharan continent ‘lacked antiquarian and historic interest’. Along the way, he sneered at ‘filthy heaps of the rudest hovels, built in holes in the jungle’, and pronounced East Africa ‘revolting’. Although Burton measured Africans’ penises, as part of his research, and asked intimate questions about the duration of the ‘deed of kind’, he had no interest in the way
they
viewed
him,
and he resented their stares. Burton categorised these
as ‘the stare furtive … the stare curious or intelligent, which generally was accompanied by irreverent laughter regarding our appearance … the stare greedy … the stare drunken, the stare pugnacious and finally the stare cannibal’.
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Burton’s drawings of the heads of Africans, from
The Lake Regions.

In comparison Speke was a model of sympathy: ‘Poor creatures! They had come a long way to see us, and now must have a good long stare; for where was there ever a Mzungu [white person] here before?’ He was even prepared to let people touch his hands and hair. When Henry Morton Stanley later visited places where Speke had spent time, chiefs reminisced about Speke and ‘descanted his virtues’.
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This is not to suggest that Burton was always aloof. One particular group of African women (and there would be others) won over the sardonic traveller.

Though destitute of petticoat or crinoline they were wholly unconscious of indecorum. It is a question that by no means can be answered in the
affirmative that real modesty is less in proportion to the absence of toilette. These ‘beautiful domestic animals’ graciously smiled when in my best Kinyamwezi I did my devoir to the sex; and the present of a little tobacco always secured for me a seat in the undress circle.
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The Ladies’ Smoking Party, from Burton’s
The Lake Regions.

After twenty-two days travelling through dense jungle, interspersed with ‘barrens of low mimosa and dreary savannahs’, the two Britons suffered their first severe attacks of malaria. Apart from the usual headaches, nausea, lassitude, weakness, inability to stand up, and alternating burning heat and freezing cold,
Burton endured visions of ‘animals of grisliest form, hag-like women and men with heads protruding from their breasts’, and during this ‘fever-fit [had] a queer conviction of divided identity, never ceasing to be two persons that generally thwarted and opposed each other’. When he fell ill, he usually claimed in his journal that Speke was also prostrated and ‘suffering even more severely’. In reality, Burton was the one who was sick for the greater part of the time they were together, while Speke always recovered rapidly and completely. In almost all Burton’s references to ‘my companion’ in his
Lake Regions of Central Africa,
Speke is represented either as being gravely ill, or convalescing. On this early occasion, in mid-July 1857, Burton claimed that Speke was prostrated by ‘a fainting-fit which strongly resembled a sunstroke, and which seemed permanently to affect his brain’.
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This was patently untrue.

Just after Speke was supposed to have suffered brain damage, the chronometers were found to be useless. In this alarming situation, it was Speke who came up with a way to calculate longitude without the aid of a chronometer set to Greenwich Mean Time. Longitude could only be worked out if the difference between local time and GMT was established, and was then converted into space on the map – a one hour difference in time corresponding to a 15 degree difference in longitude. Speke succeeded in calculating GMT by using ‘lunar distances’, which involved measuring with a sextant the angle between the moon and a selected star. That angle is the same at any place on the surface of the earth facing the moon at a unique instant of time. Armed with his angle, Speke could thumb through a Nautical Almanac, containing listings of such angles and their associated GMT. He also used ‘a rude pendulum’ – which consisted of a 4-ounce rifle-ball at the end of a 39-inch string ‘attached to a three-edged file as a pivot’ – to confirm his observations. Each swing of the pendulum recorded a second, so he could tell how much time had elapsed between his separate observations.
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Rarely generous to Speke, Burton admitted that ‘my companion’ used his ‘sextant and other instruments with a resolution and
a pertinacity that formed his characteristic merits. Night after night, at the end of the burning march, he sat for hours in the chilling dews, practising lunars.’
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Nevertheless, Speke let slip to Norton Shaw that Burton had refused to assist him, making his task far harder. ‘Although I can take a lunar observation in 5 minutes with anyone simply noting the time and observations; yet without that assistance & having only two sextants & no stand, I find I can do nothing.’
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Burton seems to have been scared to place himself in any situation in which Speke might show superior aptitude. On their return, he would deride him as ‘unfit for any other but a subordinate capacity’. But to preserve this view of Speke, he had to pretend that ‘celestial observation’ was less important on an exploring expedition than his own chronicling of ‘the ethnography of the tribes’.
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On 7 August 1857 Speke and Burton left the low-lying and unhealthy town of Zungomero glad to have increased their number of porters by forty-one, and thankful to be only a day’s march from the foothills of the Usagara Mountains. They were both so ill they could only just sit on their donkeys. But both hoped that the higher ground would mean an escape from ‘the fiery and oppressive heat of the river valley into the pure sweet mountain air’. Yet, on the way, food was in very short supply, and they were ‘saddened by the sight of clean-picked skeletons, and here and there the swollen corpses of porters who had perished in this place by starvation’. Next they came upon victims of smallpox, ‘and the sight made a terrible impression’, wrote Burton. ‘Men staggering on, blinded by disease, mothers carrying on their backs infants as loathsome as themselves. The poor wretches would not leave the path, as every step in their state of failing health was precious.’
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The cooler weather on the hills was a blessing but the nights were damp and dew-drenched and the ascent ‘was painful, the path winding along the shoulders of stony and bushy hills’. Between the three ranges of the Usagara, the path descended into deep valleys, like that of ‘the Mukondokwa [river] which spread out in swamps nearly two miles broad’. On paths slippery with
mud, they came across columns of ‘black pismire ants’, which in no time ‘fastened themselves to the foot or ankle’, inflicting bites that burned ‘like a pinch of a red hot needle’. Then their old relapsing fever returned, severely enough to force Burton to ‘beg Jack to send me back a hammock from the halting-place’. Within days, the normally sprightly Speke was delirious, and, according to Burton, ‘became so violent that I had to remove his weapons’. Dire though this sounded, two nights later Speke ‘came to himself and proposed to advance’. A short illness indeed.
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Ahead, 5,700 feet above sea level, towered the third and most westerly range of the Usagara Mountains. ‘Trembling with ague, with swimming heads, ears deafened by weakness, [Burton and Speke] contemplated with dogged despair the perpendicular scramble.’
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Six days later, on 10 September, ‘by resting after every few yards, and by clinging to our supporters, we reached the summit of the Pass Terrible’, and five days later saw far below, the plateau of Ugogo stretching away to the west. Descending, they were threatened by a small group of spear-wielding Africans. The Baluchis fell on them bravely. ‘Spears and daggers flashed in the sun, and cudgels played with a threshing movement that promised many a broken head.’ Though the attack was beaten off, Burton believed that had his men been facing more serious odds they would have run away and saved themselves. ‘There was not a soul to stand by Jack and me except ourselves,’ he reflected sombrely.
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At this time, when Burton was still too weak to walk unassisted, the Baluchis decided to stage a strike in order to force their leaders to kill the expedition’s goats, despite the fact that every day Speke was in the bush shooting partridge and guinea fowl for them to eat. Speke countered the strike by ordering a march.

This brought them to reason, for hitherto they thought we should be afraid to go without them … Finding themselves left behind, they forgot their wrath and followed us. On the way they found Captain Burton lying by the roadside prostrate with fever, and taking compassion on him, brought him into camp.

An incident now took place which deepened Speke’s mistrust of Burton. Because a third of the expedition’s thirty donkeys had by this juncture been killed by the tsetse fly, there was an urgent need to recruit more porters. The only men not already carrying burdens were members of a group of slaves called by Burton ‘the sons of Ramji’ because they had been leased to the expedition by Rush Ramji, Ladha Damha’s clerk. These men justifiably considered themselves superior to ordinary slaves, since they were all either interpreters, guides or
askari
(soldiers). They were adamant that they had not been engaged to carry loads, which led Burton to consider them spoilt and above themselves. But needing their help, if he were to avoid jettisoning his precious books, he promised to pay them if they would act as carriers. When Speke pointed out to Burton that he would find it hard to honour his promise, given the expedition’s stretched finances, his leader simply whispered to him that ‘Arabs made promises in this way, but never kept them; and, moreover, slaves of this sort never expected to be paid.’ Speke countered angrily that Tibet had been ruined by officers not keeping faith with porters. A few days later, they happened upon, and hired, a group of fifteen carriers, who had been abandoned by their caravan after a quarrel. If this extraordinary piece of luck had not come their way, the sons of Ramji would have carried Burton’s baggage for a hundred miles before being cynically cheated. A serious row between the two officers would then have wrecked the expedition before anything substantial could be achieved.
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