Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (2 page)

Battle of Omdurman. ‘The opening charge of the Dervishes against the British Division’, in
Omdurman
by Philip Ziegler

A romantic French view of Marchand and his mission, cover design of a French pamphlet
Le Commandant Marchand á Travers l’Afrique
by Michel Morphy

Captain Henry Kelly, Royal Engineers, a photograph in
Imperial Boundary Making: The Diary of Captain Kelly . . .
,ed. G. H. Blake

Omar al-Bashir

Milton Obote (©
Getty Images)

Mutesa II,
kabaka
of Buganda 413

List of Plates

A medieval reconstruction of Ptolemy’s map of the world, in
The Discovery of the Nile
by Gianni Guadalupi, from a map in the Vatican Library, Rome

Richard Burton depicted as an Afghan peddler in Isabel

Burton’s
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton
(1893).

John Speke and James Grant at Mutesa’s court. From Speke’s
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.

A naked Mutesa drawn by Speke in one of his sketchbooks, now at the Royal Geographical Society.
RGS

Speke portrayed standing at the Ripon Falls source, by the artist James Watney Wilson.
RGS

African birds drawn by Speke.
RGS

Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass in a storm on Lake Albert, an engraving from Samuel Baker’s
The Albert Nyanza
(1874).

Obbo warriors perform a war dance, a water colour by Samuel

Baker, in the Baker family collection.

Baker’s sketch of himself in danger of being trampled by an elephant, in the Baker family collection.

James Gordon Bennett Jr., editor of the
New York Herald,
by ‘Nemo’ (Constantine von Grimm), chromolithograph,
Vanity Fair,
15 November 1884.

Stanley and his men crossing the Makata swamp, a magic lantern slide in a private collection.

Hats worn by Livingstone and Stanley at the time of their meeting, now in the RGS.

Stanley watches a phalanx dance by Chief Mazamboni’s warriors, during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, an illustration in Stanley’s
In Darkest Africa
(1890).

Livingstone’s remains being carried to the coast by his men, a magic lantern slide from
The Life and Work of David Livingstone,
published by the London Missionary Society (1900).

David Livingstone in 1866.
London Missionary Society
Richard Burton posing in Arab clothes, by Ernest Edwards, April 1865, in
David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa. National Portrait Gallery

Richard Burton in his tent in Somaliland, a photograph in Isabel

Burton’s
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton
(1893).

John Hanning Speke as a young officer in India, an oil painting reproduced in Harry Johnston’s
The Nile Quest
(1903).

Speke before his great journey, a photograph in Mary Lovell’s
A Rage to Live
(1998).

Speke’s memorial in Kensington Gardens.

Samuel Baker in his African hunting attire, Baker family collection.

Florence von Sass before her marriage to Samuel Baker, from Richard Hall’s
Lovers on the Nile.

The Royal Geographical Society outing during the meeting of the British Association in Bath, 1864, a photograph in the David Livingstone Centre.

Henry Stanley aged twenty-eight, two years before he ‘found’ Dr Livingstone, a photograph in the estate of the late Quentin Keynes.

Chuma and Susi, Dr Livingstone’s servants.
London Missionary Society

Some of Stanley’s principal Wangwana carriers on his great trans-Africa journey, a photograph in the Royal Museum of Central Africa.

Karl Peters, the German explorer and imperialist. ©
Getty Images

Princess Salme, sister of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
Author’s Collection

Captain T. M. S. Pasley
RN.
Author’s Collection

James S. Jameson, a photograph in
The Story of the Rear-Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition,
ed. Mrs J. S. Jameson (1890).

Major Edmund Barttelot, a photograph in W. G. Barttelot’s
The Life of Edmund Musgrave Barttelot
(1890).

Stanley (aged forty-six) and Anthony Swinburne, a photograph in the Royal Museum of Central Africa.

Captain Frederick Lugard soon after claiming Uganda for Britain, a photograph in Margery Perham’s
Lugard: The Years of Adventure 1858-1898
(1956).

Kabarega of Bunyoro in old age, a photograph in Alan Moorehead’s
The White Nile
(1960).

Henry Stanley in 1892 with his close friend Sir William Mackinnon of the Imperial British East Africa Company, a photograph in the Royal Museum of Central Africa.

Major-General Sir Horatio Kitchener at the time of the battle of Omdurman, a photograph in Philip Magnus’s
Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist
(1958).

Marchand’s emissaries approach Kitchener’s ship, a photograph in J. O. Udal’s
The Nile in Darkness: A Flawed Unity 18631899
(2005).

Commandant Jean-Baptiste Marchand, from an oil painting in the Musée de l’Armée, Paris.

Sir Harold MacMichael, Britain’s top civil servant in Sudan 1926-33.

List of Maps

1. Livingstone’s Last Journeys, first stage, 1866-1871

2. Burton’s Somali Expedition, 1854-1855

3. The Journeys of Burton and Speke, 1856-1859, and of Speke and Grant, 1860-1863

4. The Journey of Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass, 1862-1865

5. The Journeys of Livingstone and Stanley, together and alone, 1866-1873

6. Stanley’s trans-African Journey, 1874-1877

Introduction

In the middle of the nineteenth century the whereabouts of the Nile’s source was still the planet’s most elusive secret, as it had been since the days of the Pharaohs. When Alexander the Great was shown the temple of Ammon in Luxor, the first question he asked is said to have been: ‘What causes the Nile to rise?’ Indeed, a longing to find answers to the twin mysteries of the location of the river’s source, and why it always flooded in summer rather than in winter, had drawn Alexander to Egypt as powerfully as any military, commercial or political reason.
¹
From 30
BC
Egypt was ruled by Rome. A Roman proverb –
Facilius sit Nili caput invenire
(‘It would be easier to find the source of the Nile’) was still current in nineteenth-century Europe as a handy epithet to hurl at impractical dreamers of all sorts. In
AD
66, the Emperor Nero – surprisingly, a keen geographer – had sent an expedition upriver, led by two centurions, with instructions to find the legendary headwaters. Two thousand miles from the Mediterranean (halfway between the river’s mouth and its unknown source), the centurions were defeated by an immense swamp extending for hundreds of miles. This was the mosquito-infested Sudd, where under the blazing sun a maze of shifting channels was blocked by floating islands of papyrus and interlaced aquatic plants.

Over the millennia the Nile mystery remained unsolved. How, people asked, could the river flow unfailingly every day of the year, for 1,200 miles through the largest and driest desert in the known world without being replenished by a single tributary? Small wonder that its annual inundation of the Nile Delta in the hottest month of the year caused awe and no little anxiety in case the mysterious sources might one day fail and Egypt perish. Yet, despite the passionate curiosity of successive generations, 2,000
years would pass without any significant new discovery being made on the White Nile. To the south of Latitude 9.5° North (the position of the Bahr el-Ghazal and the Sudd), mid-nineteenth-century maps would still show the main channel dwindling away into a tracery of ever more hesitant dots.

The world’s longest river has two main branches: the White Nile, which flows 4,230 miles from its remotest central African sources to the Mediterranean, and the Blue Nile, which rises high up on the Ethiopian plateau and flows for 1,450 miles before it joins the White Nile at Khartoum. By then the White Nile has already flowed for nearly 2,500 miles.
²

During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, two Spanish Jesuit priests, Pedro Paez and Jeronimo Lobo, reached the headwaters of the Blue Nile. The Scot James Bruce ignored their achievement and published a popular account of his own identical ‘discovery’ made 150 years later. From that time it would be suspected that the annual flood on the lower Nile between July and October was due to monsoon rains falling on the Ethiopian highlands and cascading with spectacular force down a succession of rapids towards the parent stream via the Blue Nile and other rivers.

But on the White Nile itself, there would be no comparable discoveries, although this far longer river provided water all the year round, even during the months of winter and spring when the Blue Nile and the Atbara were dried-up riverbeds. Despite Egypt’s absolute dependence on the continuous flow of the White Nile, by the early 1850s not a single one of the succession of Greek, Italian, Maltese and French traders and adventurers who had attempted to locate the source for two decades had managed to journey further south than the position of the present town of Juba 750 miles south of Khartoum.

At first sight it seems incredible that in the era of the steam engine, the galvanic battery, telegraphic communication and accurate chronometers, the Nile continued to keep its secrets. But there were many excellent reasons for the lack of progress in the great quest: ‘fever’ and other unexplained tropical illnesses decimated expeditions, cataracts blocked the upper river, tsetse
fly killed beasts of burden and made wheeled transport impossible, porters deserted, the rainy season turned whole regions into quagmires, and local conflicts stirred up by the slave trade caused many chiefs to shower strangers with spears and poisoned arrows rather than with gifts.

But between 1856 and 1876, the White Nile would at last yield up its secrets to an idiosyncratic group of exceptionally brave British explorers, who would solve the mystery of the source bit by bit – despite many illnesses, including loss of sight and hearing, and in one instance, for a time, the use of both legs. They also suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, malaria, colonic haemorrhage and deep spear wounds. Ironically, after their journeys were over, almost all would disagree profoundly about which one of them had won the crown.

Fifty years ago, Alan Moorehead’s international bestseller about the search for the source of the Nile was published. Although, in the decades since
The White Nile
first appeared, a mass of previously unknown facts relating to the search have come to light, both in manuscript and in published form, no full-scale attempt has been made until now to write a further book on the subject, in which the new material is used to deepen and redraw the characters and relationships of the original Nile explorers, to re-examine their journeys, and to reassess up to the present day the enduring and tragic consequences of nineteenth-century exploration of the Nile basin. New information exists that sheds light on all the above subjects, but also on more personal matters, ranging from Speke’s alleged betrayal of Burton, to how Baker acquired the mistress he took to Africa, to whether Speke had an affair with a Ugandan courtier, and to whether the real Livingstone and the real Stanley resembled their portrayals in
The White Nile.
I give a full account of related books and my own researches at the end of this volume on pages 438-42.