Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (15 page)

For many months Speke would be almost entirely deaf in this ear. Strangely, he found that his misfortune drew the inflammation away from his eyes and actually improved his sight.

Two days later the wind abated and Speke crossed to the island of Kasenge, where lived Hamid bin Sulayyan, the dhow-owning slave trader. Speke landed in hope but was soon disappointed. Not even his offer of £100 could persuade the slaver to hire out his large dhow. Africans, he maintained, could only manage paddles, and since his dhow had oars it would not be possible to lease it to Speke. He could not lend his crew to him, since he needed them for his own purposes. Nevertheless, Hamid greatly excited Speke with the news that a large river flowed out of the northern end of the lake. Sadly, Hamid had not himself been able to reach it because the behaviour of ‘a barbarous boisterous tribe called Warundi’ had so alarmed him. Hamid had addressed these words not to Speke but to Bombay in Kiswahili, and Bombay had then translated them into Hindustani for his employer – a process which left room for misunderstanding.

On the island, Speke was horrified when several mothers tried to sell their own children to his Baluchi soldiers for a loin-cloth or two. The destruction of normal maternal feelings brought home to him ‘how foolish were all those other nations who allowed the slave trade to go on’.
⁶⁰
With no reason to remain longer on this blighted island, he and his men re-crossed the lake without mishap, and were back in Ujiji after an absence of twenty-seven days.

While Speke had been away, Burton, whose health was little better, had passed the time ‘chiefly in eating and drinking, smoking and dozing’. Yet he saw nothing inappropriate about making fun of an exhausted Speke on his return. ‘I never saw a
man so thoroughly moist and mildewed … his guns were grained with rust, and his fire-proof powder magazine had admitted the monsoon rain.’ Speke’s braving of the lake when ill and half-blind deserved better than to be dismissed by Burton in one scathing sentence, which he later published: ‘I was sorely disappointed: he had done literally nothing.’ In fact, though Speke had returned without the expected dhow, he gave Burton an account of the lake’s shape – mainly from Hamid’s information, though partly from personal observation.
⁶¹
But when Speke announced that a river flowed out of the northern end of the lake, Burton was ecstatic. Now it really seemed that Lake Tanganyika was a source of the Nile, if not
the
source. Burton’s earlier decision to reject Speke’s request to prioritise the larger lake now seemed vindicated.

In his journal Burton represented himself as getting healthier and Speke as being the one causing the delays, thanks to ‘punching-in with a penknife a beetle which had visited his tympanum’. But ill though Burton still was, the near exhaustion of their trade cloth ruled out delaying their departure for the north end of the lake. Travelling in dugouts was no picnic for a man in good health, but would be hellish for ‘a sick man, even in the best weather’. And now the rains had started again. ‘I was sorry for it,’ wrote Speke, ‘but anybody seeing him [Burton] attempt to go would have despaired of his ever returning. Yet he could not endure being left behind.’ Indeed, for Burton, reaching the northward-flowing river posed the greatest challenge of his life. ‘Everything – wealth, health, and even life – was to be risked for this prize,’ he declared.
⁶²

So when Kannena – the local chief whose canoes and assistance were essential for their success – refused to help, Burton overwhelmed him with an immense heap of trade goods, including some of his most expensive beads and a six-foot length of scarlet broadcloth ‘that caused Kannena to tremble with joy’ and to agree to travel with the explorers in the larger of two canoes. This craft would also accommodate Burton and thirty-three paddlers provided by Kannena. Speke was to be consigned to the smaller vessel with a mere twenty-two crewmen.

This crucial trip began in the early hours of the morning of 9 April, with Burton having to be half-dragged, half-carried for three miles over rough ground to the point of departure selected by Kannena for magical reasons. The sailors were serenaded to the shore by ‘their loud-voiced wives and daughters performing upon the wildest musical instruments’. Out on the lake, Burton was soon ordering his crew not to ‘splash water in shovelfuls over the canoe’, and to stop trying to bump the other dugout. While resting, the sailors smoked cannabis. They had no regular halting places or routines, and often slept during cool mornings, before paddling through the heat of the day. Burton thought the local people on the banks were ‘quarrelsome and violent … and addicted, like all their Lakist [
sic
] brethren, to drunkenness’. Whether sheltering from torrential rain under a sail, or being drenched as his men baled water from the bottom of the dugout, Burton was in constant pain. ‘The crisis of my African sufferings took place during my voyage upon the Tanganyika Lake.’
⁶³

After nineteen days afloat, Burton wrote that he was ‘suffering so severely from ulceration of the tongue, that articulation was nearly impossible, and this was a complete stopper to progress’. This affliction could not have come at a worse time, since, on 28 April, Burton met the three handsome sons of a local chief and heard from their lips the shocking news that the Rusizi river – despite what Speke had been told earlier – flowed
into
Lake Tanganyika rather than
out
of it. Bombay then put the matter beyond doubt by admitting that he had long suspected that he and Speke had misunderstood Hamid bin Sulayyan, who had actually meant the reverse of what they had at first believed him to have said. ‘All my hopes,’ confessed Burton, ‘were rudely dashed to the ground.’
⁶⁴

Even though it now seemed all but certain that Lake Tanganyika could have no relationship to the Nile, it remained ‘a matter of vast importance’, as Burton conceded, to reach the Rusizi river in person to see with his own eyes the direction in which it flowed. So it is baffling that after saying that life itself was to be risked in order to reach the river, Burton put so little pressure on
Kannena to persuade him and his men to paddle on for six more hours, which was all it would have taken to reach the Rusizi.
⁶⁵
The question of why his resolution crumbled at this vital moment is one that has not been answered. Henry M. Stanley would write in an essay on ‘Our Great African Travellers’, that Burton’s ‘struggle for the mastery over African geography ceased from this time, and Speke was permitted to come to the front [and] emerge out of the contest with honour and credit’. In Stanley’s opinion this voyage on the lake revealed that Burton was no explorer but ‘a traveller and “litterateur”‘.
⁶⁶

When the two of them had returned to Ujiji, Speke announced that he ‘wanted to finish off the navigation of the lake’. Burton brushed this aside at once and said ‘he had had enough of canoe-travelling’. He assured Speke that ‘our being short of cloth … would be sufficient excuse’. For two reasons this was a very peculiar response: the first being that very recently Said bin Salim, their
major domo,
had ‘generously proposed … to return to the Arab depot at Kazeh, and fetch some more African money [cloth and beads] to meet the necessary expenses [for a full survey]’. The second reason, as Speke later recalled, was that while preparing to leave Ujiji ‘by great good fortune some supplies were brought to us by an Arab called Mohinna [Muhinna bin Sulayman of Kazeh] … Help had reached us when we most required it.’
⁶⁷

Of course what Burton had meant was not that they had no cloth, but that they could plead lack of it to explain and excuse their failure. Indeed, back in Britain, Burton would tell the members of the RGS: ‘I was compelled by want of supplies to desist from exploration.’
⁶⁸

The decision whether or not to return to the Rusizi was a defining one. A Livingstone or a Stanley would never have allowed a chief like Kannena to thwart him when so close to attaining a major objective. Both would either have attempted the short journey in a smaller canoe, which could have been propelled by a few men, or would have risked marching overland with a few porters. Kannena had refused to go the last few miles to the Rusizi, because the Warundi hated his people (or that was what
he claimed) and might have killed them all if they had travelled to the lake’s tip. When Livingstone and Stanley visited this same region a dozen years later, they experienced nothing worse than some shouting and stone-throwing by the Warundi.

According to Speke, Burton had refused Said bin Salim’s offer to fetch more cloth from Kazeh because his real problem – which he had not wished to admit to – had been a total collapse of his health.
⁶⁹
Burton wrote that by the end of his Tanganyika voyage his mouth ulcers had no longer obliged him to take sustenance through a straw, and that his hands had lost the numbness that for weeks had restricted his ability to write. But he had still lacked the strength to ride a donkey, and left Ujiji (as he had arrived) on a
machilla
carried by slaves. ‘Only fancy what a time he has had of it,’ wrote Speke to Norton Shaw – not without sympathy – ‘eleven months in a bed-ridden state & being obliged to travel the whole time, more or less.’ So, poor health
had
indeed lain behind Burton’s decision. But this does not mean it would have been physically impossible for him to have made a final attempt to navigate the lake to its northern extremity. When the moment of choice had come he had lacked the self-destructive courage and obsessive determination of a true explorer. In the same circumstances, Livingstone, Stanley and Speke, who had volunteered, would all have been prepared to endure the pain and privation of one last desperate effort to reach the river. But the sybaritic Burton ‘had had enough of canoe travelling’, and that had been the end of it.
⁷⁰

While recuperating in Ujiji in early May, Burton and Speke discussed the desirability of visiting the northern lake, which the Arabs called Ukerewe. Burton, whose health was much the same, said he needed to spend a month with Snay and the other Arabs at Kazeh in order to finish his book. So Speke diplomatically suggested: ‘If you are not well enough when we reach Kazeh, I will go myself, and you can employ the time taking notes from the travelled Arabs.’ Burton agreed to this. But in years to come, in his desperation to make it seem that
he
had been responsible for initiating Speke’s historic journey, he would write for public
consumption that he had ‘despatched him [Speke] from Kazeh’. He knew this was untrue. In a letter to Norton Shaw of the RGS, he stated unambiguously that: ‘Captain Speke has volunteered to visit the Ukerewe Lake.’
⁷¹

The journey to Kazeh from Ujiji took from 26 May to 20 June 1858, and during this time Burton ‘again suffered severely from swelling and numbness of the extremities’.
En route,
a letter was handed to him by a trader, containing the news that his father had died nine months earlier. Though they had not been close, his loss distressed him greatly. Back at Kazeh, with its comfortable
tembes
standing among shady palms and fruit trees, Burton had to decide, once and for all, whether to go north with Speke and endure more danger and discomfort or whether to stay with his Arab friends and work on his book. He chose to do the latter. ‘I was delighted with the prospect of a month’s leisure for inquiry amongst the intelligent Arabs.’
⁷²

Speke often found Burton hard to fathom. ‘[Burton] did not come here to open up the country,’ he told a friend disapprovingly two years later, ‘but to make a book and astonish the world with his prowess. He never learnt observing … never protracted a bit of a map on the whole journey.’
⁷³
By ‘observing’, Speke had not simply meant making scientific observations with instruments, but had been referring to the practical field skills familiar to anyone used to tracking game. As for Burton’s desire to ‘astonish’ with his book, Speke thoroughly disapproved. A year later, he would write to his publisher: ‘If there is anything you don’t think exactly modest in my writings, cut it out without mercy.’
⁷⁴

For Speke, exploration was all about seeing
with his own eyes
features and places new to European geography, rather than writing down what this or that Arab had claimed he had seen on his travels. Though well-disposed towards Africans, Speke cared little for the minutiae of their customs, which Burton spent so many months describing, despite finding them repellent. Speke remarked that Burton ‘had not shown himself capable of doing anything but making ethnological remarks at the dictation of the Arabs’.
⁷⁵
Whenever Speke urged Burton to devote more time to
exploration, he had been rebuffed. His own solo trip on the lake had been a failure – as had his journey in Somaliland. So perhaps Burton expected him to fail to reach the Ukerewe lake. After all, Snay had warned of the terrible dangers to be encountered in that direction. But this time, Speke was determined to succeed at whatever cost.

SIX

Promises and Lies

Burton seems to have grasped only at the eleventh hour that Jack Speke’s mission, if successful, might one day affect him adversely. By then his ‘subordinate’ – as he would always describe Speke in his published accounts of their time together – was buying gifts to present to chiefs and making other preparations. Speke had not fallen out with Sheikh Said bin Salim, their Arab caravan leader, as Burton had done, and therefore wished to have this seasoned traveller by his side. The sheikh was experienced in negotiating with chiefs who demanded unreasonable quantities of trade goods for the right to pass through their territory, and Speke feared he might never reach the lake without being able to call upon such skills. But, unaccountably, Said bin Salim declined to accompany him. Back in England, Burton would claim that the sheikh had been terrified ‘at the prospect of meeting death’, but soon after refusing to come with him the Arab told Speke, ‘in the most solemn manner, that Captain Burton positively forbade his going’.
¹
In the margin beside this allegation, in his personal copy of Speke’s
What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile,
Burton scrawled in his spidery hand: ‘The Sheikh lied. What did I gain by spoiling my own exped?’
²
His ‘gain’ would, of course, have been to prevent Speke ‘spoiling his expedition’ by outshining him. Presumably it was also to discourage him from going that Burton denied Speke’s urgent request to take Ramji’s men with him. They too were excellent linguists and negotiators. Burton had very recently dismissed them for insubordination, and he said they would be too expensive to re-engage for the journey to the lake. But after Speke had departed, he promptly re-employed these very same men for his own uses.