Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (16 page)

As he headed into the bush, Speke brooded on the fact that Burton ‘had absolutely done his best to dissuade me from going’.
³
But eventually Speke managed to assemble a caravan of thirty-four men, with Bombay and Mabruki as his captains, a local man as his
kirangozi
or guide, Gaetano as cook, ten Baluchis as guards, and twenty local men as porters to carry gifts and trade goods. They left Kazeh in the evening of 9 July 1858.

The following night saw him and his men beyond the borders of Unyanyembe, sleeping in an African village, with Speke curled up in a smoky hut, and his men lying beside the cattle, or under the eaves of other huts.
⁴
Each day they would start before dawn when the air was so cold that Speke’s fingers ‘tingled with it’. Occasionally, he spoiled himself with ‘a hearty breakfast of cold meat, potted Tanganyika shrimps, rozelle
[sic]
jelly, and coffee’, which must have made a good start to a day spent travelling through ‘a waterless wilderness of thorn and forest’. For a typical lunch, he ate local tomatoes and chili with a village fowl.
⁵
After many hours walking through such terrain, Speke always enjoyed coming to villages and seeing the women grinding grain on large slabs of granite, singing as they pounded with small stones held in both hands. The cows, he noticed, were much smaller than at Lake Tanganyika. Every evening, his porters danced and sang a song composed for the occasion. ‘It embraced everybody’s name connected with the caravan, but more especially Mzungu [the white man].’ In the hope of getting some milk to drink and some eggs, Speke visited a female chief, whose arms were decorated with huge brass rings. After receiving this food, he was happy to let ‘the sultana’ – a woman of about sixty – ‘manipulate’ his shoes, ‘the first point of notice in these barefooted climes’, and then touch his trousers, waistcoat and buttons. Even his hair, ‘which was likened to a lion’s mane’, he permitted to be touched by various courtiers. Because he agreed with Burton that few Africans believed any traveller ‘so stupid as to go through danger and discomfort for exploring and science, which they simply do not understand’, Speke let it be thought that he was going to the lake ‘to barter cloth for large hippopotami teeth’.
⁶

African village scenes.

By 29 July, nearly three weeks into his march, he was crossing hilly country with well-cultivated valleys dotted with palms. The tropical feel of the landscape told him he was nearing the lake. In fact on the very next day, 30 July, Speke saw a sheet of water several miles away that turned out to be a creek of the great Nyanza (like Nyasa, the word Nyanza denoted a large body of water). Before reaching it, they had to cross a deep, muddy watercourse frequented by hippopotami, but on 1 August he was descending from the hills and following the creek, which was wide enough to accommodate small islands. His eyes were still too sensitive for him to travel without wearing his ‘French grey spectacles which so excited the crowds of sable gentry who followed the caravan [that they were soon] peering underneath [his] wide-awake to get a sight of [his] double eyes’. Soon, to get some peace, he had to take them off and close his eyes while Bombay led his donkey. Two days later, with spectacles on his nose again, Speke climbed a low hill and from its summit was overjoyed to see ‘the pale blue waters of the Nyanza’.
⁷

Frustratingly, he could get no accurate idea of the lake’s size because Ukerewe and Mzita islands obstructed his view of the water lying beyond them to the north. But even the limited archipelago he
could
see entranced him with its sandy beaches and wooded slopes.

The islands, each swelling in a gentle slope to a rounded summit … [were] mirrored in the calm surface of the lake; on which I here and there detected a small black speck, the tiny canoe of some Muanza [sic] fisherman. On the gently shelving plain below me, blue smoke curled above the trees which here and there concealed villages and hamlets, their brown thatched roofs contrasting with the emerald green of the beautiful milk-bush.

After three weeks in the bush, the lovely margins of the immense and still unseen lake made him dizzy with excitement. To stand here, as the white discoverer of the mysterious Nyanza, which was justly called a ‘sea’ by the Arabs, and was entirely unknown in Europe and America, made this the most joyful moment of his life to date.

I no longer felt any doubt [he wrote later] that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers. The Arabs’ tale was proved to the letter. This is a far more extensive lake than the Tanganyika, so broad that you could not see across it, and so long that no one knew its length.
⁸

At this ecstatic moment, Speke longed to venture out onto the water and would have been able to do so if Burton had not left their portable boat behind. Instead Speke had to try to acquire a vessel at this place where the Arab slave trade was rife, and where people were naturally fearful of strangers. He wanted to travel either to Ukerewe or to Mzita island and from a high point gain an uninterrupted view of the lake to the north. Unfortunately, Mahaya, the chief at Mwanza – where he had reached the Nyanza – was at daggers-drawn with Machunda, the king of Ukerewe and Mzita. This enmity would inevitably delay his collection of the necessary men and boats. Furthermore, Speke heard from Mahaya, and from an Arab trader, Mansur, that the local canoes were too frail for journeying far on the unpredictable lake. People never attempted to cross from east to west in open water, but invariably hugged the southern shore. So how big was the Nyanza? Chief Mahaya’s wife swore that there was no end to it. One of her headmen tried to convey the same message by repeatedly nodding his head to the north, ‘and at the same time throwing forwards his right hand and making repeated snaps of his fingers, endeavouring to indicate something immeasurable’.
⁹

By calculating the temperature at which water boiled, Speke estimated the lake to be almost 4,000 feet above sea level. Since he knew that the elevation of the bed of the Nile at 5° North Latitude was less than 2,000 feet, he concluded joyfully that ‘it would indeed be a marvel if this lake was not the fountain of the Nile’. The Nyanza’s height certainly allowed for its waters to descend the many cataracts, which were said to exist in the river’s course above the most southerly point reached by traders like De Bono.
¹⁰
And Speke had other reasons for believing that ‘his’ lake gave birth to ‘that interesting river’. He had heard from
Arabs at Kazeh that the Mountains of the Moon were situated to the west of the Nyanza, and that several large rivers flowed into its western side from these peaks. This tallied with Ptolemy’s famous map of the Nile. As for the lake’s size, he had been cheered by a native of Unyanyembe who had told him that he had visited ‘Kitara or Uddu-Uganda’ – which Speke guessed to be at 1° North Latitude – where ‘the sea was of such great extent, and where winds blew so boisterous that the canoes did not trust themselves upon it’.
¹¹
So to sail around the lake, or to cross it from south to north, was clearly going to be a major enterprise, requiring far more time than he could spare at present. So, on 7 August, Speke started the journey back to Kazeh.

My reluctance to return may be easier imagined than described. I felt as much tantalized as the unhappy Tantalus … and as much grieved as any mother would be at losing her first-born, and planned forthwith to do everything that lay in my power to visit the lake again.
¹²

Speke could hardly have conveyed his possessive feelings for the lake more strikingly than by comparing them to a mother’s protective fears for her threatened first-born! And if the Nyanza was now
his
child, he knew very well that Lake Tanganyika was Burton’s offspring, on whose behalf he would doubtless exercise all his talent for special pleading. Already Speke suspected that his leader had discouraged him from visiting the Nyanza in order to preserve the lustre of
his
Lake Tanganyika.

Passing through the agricultural districts south of the Nyanza, Speke was greeted in a friendly spirit by people who seemed to view his ‘advent as a matter of good omen’. On first seeing the lake, ‘the pleasure of the mere view vanished in the presence of those more intense and exciting emotions which are called up by the consideration of the commercial and geographical importance of the prospect before me’. Indeed, as he marched towards Kazeh, commercial questions preoccupied him. Pondering why these people were not more prosperous, though living in a marvellously fertile and well-watered country, Speke placed most of the blame on local wars. Indeed, on the way to the lake, his guide had insisted on a lengthy diversion to avoid
such fighting. Only a ‘protecting government’, Speke decided, would be able to prevent the strong – whether Africans or Arabs – from always getting what they wanted from the weak. But it would be wrong, he thought, for ‘any foreign European power to upset these Wahuma [local African] governments; but on the contrary I would like to see them maintained as long as possible’.

From thoughts of a benign imperial future, Speke was brought down to earth by a group of drunken spear-wielding villagers bursting into the hut where he was resting. Despite being asked to leave, they continued to try to touch him, and the Baluchis made things worse by threatening to start shooting. At this dangerous moment, Speke bravely left his hut, and, with the help of a translator, told the growing crowd outside that ‘they might now stand and gaze as long as they liked’. Luckily for him, this turned out to be all they wanted to do.
¹³

In the early hours of the morning of 25 August, ‘under the delightful influence of a cool night and a bright moon’, Speke and his men marched the last eighteen miles of their return journey to Kazeh, having completed 452 miles there and back, in forty-seven days. Kazeh’s villagers hurried after the caravan, shrieking and ‘lullabooing’. It was breakfast-time when Speke at last arrived at Burton’s
tembe
and was invited in.

Burton was genuinely relieved to see Speke because he had heard reports of fighting near the lake. At first Speke only told his leader about the immense size of the Nyanza, and Burton responded enthusiastically to this news. But towards the end of breakfast, Speke announced that he had found the source of the White Nile. Of course he could not prove his case because he had not circumnavigated the lake, and therefore could not be sure that there were not several bodies of water to the north of Ukerewe Island. That a link existed with the Nile would inevitably remain conjectural until he could establish that the Kivira river, which was reputed to flow northwards from the lake to Gondokoro, really did so.

Yet, however sensible it might be to take one cautious step at a time, Speke’s astonishing experience had catapulted him
beyond the realms of strict logic. He had stood on the banks of an immense inland ocean of uncharted water and had seen great flocks of birds swoop over its waves. He had heard the wind sighing in the reeds and had felt its breath on his face, cooled (as he thought) by its passage over hundreds of miles of water. He had seen its still and glassy surface at dawn and had sensed its mysterious presence in the darkness. Most suggestive of all to him was the fact that all this water was located due south of the most southerly points yet charted on the course of the White Nile. But Burton promptly dismissed all this as foolish speculation, only condescending, after they had ceased talking, to make a brief and grudging note of Speke’s route.
¹⁴

As if struck by lightning Burton was unable to marshal arguments with which to crush Speke’s effrontery. His disbelief was emotional as well as logical. How
could
his ill-educated subordinate, who had failed to reach the Wadi Nogal and had not even had the wit to hire a dhow on Lake Tanganyika, have suddenly seized the greatest geographical prize of all time? It seemed perverse, impossible and downright wrong. How could Burton even be sure that Speke had properly understood his Arab and African informants through the medium of Bombay’s Hindustani? Yet, even as he fought against the possibility of Speke being right, he began to fear in his guts that he might be.

Speke for his part had offered up his discovery to his superior officer for his applause, only to receive scornful disbelief. Yet despite being stung to the quick, Speke understood his commander’s terror of being upstaged. Indeed, unknown to Speke, Burton was already secretly wondering how he could contrive ‘to share in the glory won by his lieutenant’.
¹⁵
But ‘Ruffian Dick’ seemed oblivious to the sorry fact that in order to share the discovery, he would have to applaud Speke’s achievement and return with him to the lake for a longer reconnaissance. Burton not only turned down Speke’s proposal to re-visit the Nyanza but refused even to consider the possibility of sailing north across the lake to Uganda to find out whether the Kivira river flowed out of the north side of the Nyanza. This
was what Kazeh’s principal Indian merchant, Musa Mzuri, had assured Speke that it did.