Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (20 page)

[My] modest, good-natured, dare-devil friend … is a character with a strong dash of Robinson Crusoe about him: I never met with such a mixture of simplicity and almost childish ignorance, combined with the most indefatigable energy and the most wonderful shrewdness in his own particular way.
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But Blackwood never patronised Speke in person and consequently the explorer would feel wholeheartedly grateful. ‘Many thanks for what you have done,’ he wrote, after the successful publication of his journals in
Blackwood’s Magazine.
‘You have made me quite a literary character. I feel as proud as Punch … It’s wonderful to contemplate on!’
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After staying with the Blackwood family at St Andrews, Speke visited his publisher’s offices in Edinburgh and was shown there a copy of a map of the Bahr el-Ghazal – the complex river system to the west of Gondokoro feeding the Nile’s main channel. This map was the work of a Welsh mining engineer, John Petherick, who had first gone to the Sudan to prospect for coal a decade earlier, and doubled as British honorary vice-consul at Khartoum and as an ivory trader in the regions far to the west of Gondokoro.
Speke had first met Petherick at Sir Roderick Murchison’s house and now told Blackwood that he meant to get in touch with him again, since he was ‘without doubt the greatest traveller in that part of Africa’.
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Speke hoped that Petherick might be prepared – if funds could be found – to push southwards up the Nile and meet him with men and boats, somewhere between the northern shores of the Nyanza and Gondokoro, giving him essential help to pass through the hostile tribes said to inhabit this unexplored country. By then Speke hoped to have completed his northward march up the western side of the Nyanza to Uganda, and to have located the precise spot on the lake’s northern shore where the Kivira – or the Nile, as he hoped it was – flowed out. He wrote with
gung-ho
enthusiasm to Norton Shaw: ‘I have asked Petherick to come here for a few days, before he goes out again, that we may make arrangements for
ripping
open Africa together, he from the north & I from the south.’
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Petherick did indeed come to stay with Speke at his parents’ imposing house in Somerset, and although a member of the English landed gentry like Speke might have been expected in this snobbish era to look down on an ivory trader from a poor background, even at their first meeting they got on well with Speke affectionately comparing the energetic manner of the big, curly-haired Welshman to that of ‘a rampant hippopotamus’. He soon commended Petherick to Blackwood as a future contributor to his magazine, and made a generous subscription to the publication costs of Petherick’s book
Egypt, the Soudan and Central Africa.
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Unfortunately, the British government – having at last voted Speke his £2,500 – was not prepared to contribute anything towards the cost of Petherick’s expedition, and so the RGS was obliged to launch a public appeal, which would close in January 1861 having failed to raise more than half the £2,000 required. Great misunderstandings would arise from this shortfall. So although the RGS told Petherick in his instructions that he should ‘proceed in the direction of Lake Nyanza, with a view to succouring Captain Speke, and bringing him and his
party in safety to the depot at Gondokoro’, Petherick secretly doubted whether he would be able to spend anything like the two years he was being asked by the RGS to devote to waiting for Speke, way to the south of Gondokoro.
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As Speke began to list all the sextants, artificial horizons, pocket chronometers and other equipment he would be taking, he knew nothing of Petherick’s doubts. In fact it comforted him to know that burly Consul Petherick would be out there on the upper Nile with fresh supplies and equipment, waiting to help him negotiate the dangerous final quarter of his epic journey. The possibility that Petherick might fail to show up never occurred to him.

Because of his disastrous relationship with Burton, even before Speke had left Africa in 1859 he had started agonising over whom to take with him as his companion on his next expedition. Petherick would only be with him for the final phase, so Speke was going to need another colleague for the bulk of his journey. When he had been homeward-bound with Burton, an Arab caravan had disgorged a letter from Christopher Rigby, the newly appointed consul at Zanzibar. It contained the awful news that Speke’s army officer brother, Edward, had been shot and killed in Delhi, soon after the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny. Only weeks earlier Speke had written to Edward in high spirits, announcing: ‘I have made up my mind to return to the Nyanza, and to trace the Nile down to Egypt,’ and then suggesting that his brother come ‘home’ as soon as possible so that, together, they could solve the Nile mystery.
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Denied the loyalty of an actual brother, Speke settled for a brother officer, Edmund Smythe. ‘He is the hardest and toughest man in all Bengal,’ he told Norton Shaw proudly, ‘a wonderful pedestrian, and an astonishing cragsman, and a man of precisely my habits.’ But not a man of Speke’s constitution because a month later he heard that Smythe was ‘feverishly inclined’ like the ‘feverishly inclined’ Burton.
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This was a fatal weakness; so Speke decided to take instead Captain James Grant, whom he had known and liked since 1847, when they had both been twenty-year-old Indian Army cadets. The pair had fought
together in the Punjab War, and while Speke had been in Africa, Grant had been swept up in the Mutiny. Besieged in Lucknow for two months, he had been wounded, losing the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He was an even-tempered, quietly spoken Scot, who had taken a degree in natural philosophy and maths at Marischal College, Aberdeen, but nevertheless shared Speke’s love of life in the wild. Speke told the RGS that he valued Grant particularly ‘for his conciliatory manner with coloured men [and] for general good temper and patience’. This would make a change from Burton, who had constantly derided Africans and had been sharp and impatient with Speke. Grant had another virtue in Speke’s eyes: Georgina Speke, his mother, ‘thought a lot of him’.
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As the time for Speke’s departure approached, John Blackwood became increasingly worried about his youthful author. ‘I am quite startled to think that you will soon be away from all your friends bound on your daring expedition … Often shall we think of you & hope that all is well with our adventurous friend.’
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At their previous meeting, Blackwood had warned Speke that he had already ‘risked his life to an extent far beyond the average dangers which the human being is likely to escape’. Shouldn’t he perhaps be more sensitive to ‘the feelings of those to whom he was dear?’ Speke responded with a rhetorical question: ‘How would I feel if any foreigner should take from Britain the honour of discovery? – rather die a hundred times!’
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This idea that great geographical achievements could confer
kudos
not only on the individual explorer but also on his nation had fired Sir Roderick Murchison’s imagination ever since he had promoted and publicised Dr Livingstone’s famous trans-Africa journey of 1853-56. Public fascination with the doctor had enabled Sir Roderick to enlist government aid for him to return to Africa, and even for Burton and Speke to go out there a year later. In August 1859, Speke had decided to ask the Queen whether he ought to call his Nyanza, the Victoria Nyanza. She had agreed, and Murchison had applauded Speke’s patriotism.
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And as if to confirm that Speke’s new enterprise had national
significance, he and Grant were invited to sail for the Cape,
en route
for Zanzibar, in the warship HMS
Forte,
which left Portsmouth on 27 April 1860.

Captain James Grant.

Like Murchison and Livingstone, Speke believed that Africans would be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’ by the Arab-Swahili slave trade, unless Britain established in east and central
Africa a government resembling the British Raj in India.
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But Her Majesty’s Government did not share this view. Only in the 1880s would the word ‘imperialism’ gain its usage as a laudatory euphemism for the indiscriminate theft of territory. So although Speke and Grant were expected to bring Britain glory by solving the Nile mystery, they were not being sent out as an imperial advance party. In Palmerston’s eyes the two explorers were brave, foolhardy young men, who might if they were lucky survive and increase the world’s geographical knowledge.
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Though Murchison railed at the premier’s lack of imagination, he could do nothing about it as yet.

The dangers ahead were underlined for Speke and Grant on their arrival at Zanzibar when they heard that another European explorer had recently been murdered in the interior. He was a young German, Albrecht Roscher, who in October 1859 had reached Lake Nyasa from the east a few months after Livingstone had arrived on the lake’s western shore. Two of Roscher’s murderers were executed at Zanzibar shortly after Speke’s and Grant’s arrival. On the appointed day, the Sultan’s death warrant did not arrive on time, so the executioner appealed to Grant, as the Sultan’s senior guest, to sanction the double beheading. He did so with stolid self-assurance: ‘Yes, certainly; proceed.’
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Though Speke had been away shooting hippos and so was spared the sight of the sword’s flashing descent and the gush of blood, he anticipated seeing worse things on their journey. Rigby warned him about ongoing fighting in the interior between the young Nyamwezi chief, Manwa Sera, and the Arab slave traders of Unyanyembe. The war had spread to Ugogo, where one of the principal chiefs had recently been shot dead.
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But there could be no turning back now and the process of hiring porters began in earnest.

Sheikh Said bin Salim was at once engaged as the caravan’s leader, followed by former employees Bombay and Mabruki. Consul Rigby allowed his friend to recruit Baraka, Frij and Rahan, trusted crewmen of his official launch. The highly capable Baraka would command sixty-five Wangwana – the black Swahili-speaking free people of Zanzibar. One of these
men was Uledi, who later became James Grant’s valet, and would one day serve H. M. Stanley with great distinction on all his major journeys. Speke had never detested the Baluchi soldiers as Burton had done, and now recruited twenty-five of them too. A hundred Nyamwezi porters, and ten Hottentots, engaged at the Cape, completed the personnel, taking the caravan’s numbers to 200. Grant and Speke gave slightly different total figures, which included four women in both estimates.
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They started from Bagamoyo on 2 October and were soon experiencing the usual frustrations and hardships of African travel: excessive demands for
hongo
(payment for passage), deserting porters, disappearing goats and donkeys and then their first bouts of fever. Grain was scarce and at times the men refused to march. There were also numerous thefts of cloth, with which porters furtively bought extra food for themselves. So Speke and Grant were soon flogging carriers guilty of stealing the means of common survival.
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Passing through Uzaramo, Speke met Chief Hembè, who confessed to being the murderer of Lieutenant Maizan. The chief excused himself from full responsibility for amputating the young Frenchman’s limbs and slicing off his genitals while he was still alive, on the grounds that he had been acting under the orders of Arabs who had been prepared to do anything to discourage Europeans from muscling in on their ivory trade. Being inclined to think well of Africans, Speke chose to believe that the chief would have been killed if he had disobeyed. He therefore decided not to involve the Zanzibar authorities.
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Speke’s great patience with Africans served him well when the tormenting mutual jealousy between Bombay and his deputy, Baraka, erupted into occasional violence. Since Said bin Salim was seriously ill, this rift between the caravan’s two most important African captains even threatened the expedition’s future. But Speke managed to reconcile them, while simultaneously bolstering Bombay’s ego against future assaults from the verbally brilliant Baraka.
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Arriving in Ugogo, the explorers encountered famine conditions. The Unyanyembe Arabs had recently been foraging in the
region, so when Speke and Grant appeared, ‘the poor villagers, accustomed only to rough handling, immediately dispersed in the jungles’. Speke sent out parties with cloth to buy food, but the hiding people fired arrows at them. Meanwhile, Speke was abused by his own people for his ‘squeamishness’ about using his guns to persuade these villagers to give up their grain.
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The rains swept in across Ugogo, ‘worse than an Indian Monsoon’, and soon desertions increased dangerously. Speke blamed them partly on the harsh conditions, partly on the threats of local people, but he also saw them as ‘a judgment on us whites for the blackguard conduct of Burton in cheating the first men of the moon [Nyamwezi] who had dealings with our race’. The expedition’s numbers had almost halved by early December, though the Wangwana, under Baraka’s command, remained loyal. The desertion of eight of the Baluchis hurt Speke most of all since he had paid to liberate them from slavery ‘and had given them muskets as an act of good faith’.
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Speke responded to the emergency by ordering a series of forced marches, intended to reduce the time during which they were exposed to disease and war. The caravan survived because both Grant and Speke were excellent shots and able to provide flesh from small birds and animals as large as giraffe and buffalo.
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