Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (30 page)

Grant and Speke acclaimed at the RGS.

The two explorers expected applause from the public and got it. Indeed it was hard to get inside Burlington House so dense was the crowd on the day of their official welcome home. Several
windows were broken by people pressing against them in their efforts to see inside. But explorers’ reputations were frailer affairs than this hullabaloo might suggest. Men like Murchison needed to be assiduously fed with supportive nuggets of information if their patronage was to prove long-lasting.

Unfortunately, Jack Speke never understood that it was not enough to outshine other travellers in Africa. At home too, the ambitious explorer had to work out how best to convince jealous geographers and travellers that he had achieved his aims. He should at all costs avoid confrontations with people who might wish to cast doubt on his discoveries. With his fierce pride and strong sense of what was fair, Speke had already shown -especially in his quarrel with Burton – that he was not good at keeping quiet when it was strategically imperative that he do so.

Ever since Sir Roderick Murchison had written his impulsive letter to
The Times,
he had been receiving complaints from armchair geographers such as Dr Charles Beke and W. D. Cooley who had the unenviable distinction of being the men who had sneered at the first reports of snow-capped mountains existing in Africa. These theorists reminded Sir Roderick that as students of sixteenth-century Portuguese maps, they had been arguing for decades that the source would turn out to be in the region of lakes accessible from the East African coast. Although neither Beke nor Cooley had been within a thousand miles of Lake Tanganyika or the Victoria Nyanza, in deference to them Sir Roderick – after welcoming the explorers to Burlington House – conceded in parenthesis that a month ago he had been ‘too unqualified in his praise’ for Speke and Grant.

I know for example that I did not on that occasion do sufficient justice – and I am sorry for it – to able critical geographers, who had framed hypotheses or had collated data …

Small wonder that Speke was soon writing angrily about ‘geographers who sip port, sit in carpet slippers and criticise those who labour in the field’.
⁵

Sir Roderick Murchison was not the only one who let himself down at this meeting. Speke also made a serious error when he
made public his suspicion that the lake might have as many as three outlets. In reality the one he had discovered was unique, and by speaking of others he devalued his ‘source’. Later, it would be pointed out that he had neither sailed around the lake nor even visited the western shores when staying with Rumanika. The fact that he had stood on the southern shore of a lake at Mwanza, and then on the northern shore of a lake 200 miles to the north of that first position, did not necessarily mean, his critics would say, that he had been viewing the same stretch of water on both occasions. Even though African and Arab testimony supported the idea of a single lake, Speke had still not made it impossible for his critics to argue with some degree of plausibility that there might be two or more lakes in the intervening space. Nor had he established a foolproof link between the Nyanza and the Nile at Gondokoro.

Facing such scepticism, Speke’s best policy would have been to have written a detailed report for the RGS without delay. A clear and full presentation of his arguments, accompanied by a map founded on his lunar observations would have armed Sir Roderick and his committee with just the right ammunition to confound envious critics. Unfortunately, Speke remembered offering his Somaliland diaries to the RGS in 1859, and being unofficially advised by the Society’s secretary, Norton Shaw, ‘not to be so liberal, but to profit by publishing a book [of his own] the same as everyone else does’.
⁶
Speke knew from personal experience that general publishers like Blackwood could bring an explorer’s discoveries to the attention of a far wider readership than the RGS could reach through its in-house publications.
⁷
And since all publishers preferred to print original material that had not previously been cherry-picked by the editor of some learned journal and then leaked to the press, his course had seemed clear.

Yet with a formidable enemy like Burton due to return to England in a matter of months, Speke
should
have published
something
in an RGS journal as soon as he had conveniently been able to do so, in order to retain Sir Roderick’s vital support. But, as if unaware of the importance of keeping the
RGS’s white-haired president happy, he signed a book contract with John Blackwood, which committed him to a task that made it exceptionally unlikely that he would manage to publish anything else before the end of the year. Since his aim after that was to make good the omissions of his previous journey – while crossing Africa from the east coast to the west – he needed to keep Murchison and the RGS on board, since only with their endorsement would the British government be likely to fund this expensive venture.
⁸

So Speke would have been well-advised to avoid unnecessary controversy. But instead, a few months later, he hinted in a speech made in Taunton, near his father’s country estates, that Petherick had let him down and had been involved in the slave trade. On hearing about Speke’s attack, Petherick wrote at once to
The Times
angrily protesting his innocence.
⁹
John and Katherine Petherick’s first letters of self-exculpation reached Murchison in August 1863. Katherine gave a heartbreaking account of their tribulations, without either mentioning Petherick’s theft of cattle or his attempt to force women and children to become carriers. She explained how Speke had given to Baker the task of reaching the unknown lake, ensuring that therefore ‘there was to be no opening for Mr Petherick’. Such letters persuaded Murchison that the Pethericks had done everything they could to aid Speke and were being unfairly maligned by him.
¹⁰

Only that long-awaited report from Speke might have persuaded Murchison otherwise and restored the explorer to favour. But struggling with the endless task of writing his book for Blackwood, the floundering Speke kept the committee waiting seven more months for what would turn out to be an insultingly brief account of his discoveries. Deeply aggrieved, Murchison lost much of his former enthusiasm for his protègè’s project for an east-west African journey and dismissed his criticism of the Pethericks as ‘Speke’s visions’. ‘It is very annoying to have the dispute between Speke & Petherick going on,’ he complained to Grant. ‘There has been much misapprehension as to what Petherick engaged to do. He, P, never engaged to go himself
to relieve you – but to send boats and grain for a given time to Gondokoro.’
¹¹
Actually, Petherick’s RGS instructions
had
required him to ‘proceed [in person from Gondokoro] in the direction of Lake Nyanza with a view of succouring Captain Speke’.
¹²
Two years later, an RGS committee of inquiry found that Petherick had not fulfilled his promise to search in person for Grant and Speke. But by then it was far too late to restore Speke in Murchison’s eyes.
¹³

In August 1864 – just over a year after Speke and Grant returned to Britain – a still resentful Richard Burton came home on leave from the British Consulate on the fever-ridden island of Fernando Po, West Africa. Because Burton had quarrelled with the East India Company and the Foreign Office, this obscure diplomatic posting had been the best he could obtain. The contrast between his declining fortunes, and the apparently glittering prospects of his famous former ‘sub’, made him seethe with jealousy. No sooner aware of the quarrel between Speke and Petherick, Burton decided to support the latter, on the age-old principle that his enemy’s enemy was his friend. He formed an alliance with the armchair geographer James McQueen, who was a close friend of Petherick’s brother-in-law, Peter McQuie, and began work with McQueen on their book
The Nile Basin,
which turned out to be a vitriolic and libellous attack on Speke’s geographical claims
and
on his character. By the late summer of 1864, Burton had effectively become leader of all those geographers and explorers who saw Speke’s account of the Nile as a threat to their own theories.
¹⁴

In the months before Burton’s arrival in England, Speke had been working on a book to follow his
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile,
which had appeared the previous December. This new book was going to cover his travels with Burton and was intended to contradict what had been said about him in Burton’s
Lake Regions of Central Africa.
During many months of work, Speke inevitably relived their bitter disputes, and felt belittled by him all over again. His publisher was
concerned that this new book would simply offer Burton new targets to shoot at. Speke’s reply (written shortly before Burton’s return to England) was not reassuring.

Don’t be afraid of what I have written, for it only rests between B the B and myself whether we fight it out with the quill or the fist. I won’t let him come to England quietly … He was cut by his Regt for not accepting a challenge, and now my Regt expects me to tackle him some way or another, to say nothing of my feelings of honour. I think I have been very mild, considering the amount of injustice he has done me. I have been cautious because I can prove what I have said, whilst he, being the aggressor has brought it all on himself.
¹⁵

It was unfortunate for Speke that just when he should have been giving his undivided attention to securing patronage for his next African expedition, he was writing about his travels with Burton and worrying about the need to counter whatever the man might say about him next.

Speke was also preoccupied with nothing less momentous than how best to help Africa and its inhabitants to prosper and progress. In January 1864, he wrote to his friend, Sir George Grey, the former Governor of Cape Colony, asking him to put his ‘powerful influence [behind a] project for the regeneration of Africa’.
¹⁶
A month later, Grant was told by Speke that he ‘had in view a scheme for civilizing Africa and putting a stop to the slave trade’.
¹⁷
In an astonishing departure for an army officer turned explorer, Speke published two broadsheets: ‘Scheme for Opening Africa’ and ‘Considerations for opening Africa’, and in March, he launched his new project at a meeting in the Belgravia town house of a wealthy social reformer. Although clearly influenced by Livingstone’s ‘civilising’ formula of ‘commerce and Christianity’, Speke had ideas of his own and appealed to the British government to put pressure on the
khedive
of Egypt to use force to end the Egyptian and Arab slave raids on the upper Nile. He not only wanted to end the persecution of the Bari, but to use the Nile ‘to open a direct trade’ between Britain and the kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro and Karagwe. Missionaries as well as traders, he said, should be sent to the three kingdoms.
¹⁸

Sir Roderick Murchison was no admirer of missionaries (with the single exception of Livingstone), so he found Speke’s new interests puzzling and even distasteful. But the worldly RGS president had not yet given up all hope of sending Speke back to Africa, and it occurred to him that if the explorer was genuinely eager to persuade the Egyptians to crush the slave trade on the river, he might be happy to sail up the Nile with an escort of Egyptian soldiers, on his way to mapping the river’s upper reaches. Murchison reckoned the British government would be delighted if the Egyptians could be shamed into paying a significant percentage of the costs of the expedition by providing its manpower.

On 12 May, Speke wrecked this plan by storming into the office of the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, and telling him that the RGS had asked him ‘to explore the head basin [by] forcing his way up the Nile with Egyptian troops’. He confided to Russell that he had never shot Africans or Arabs and did not intend to do so now. Instead, he wanted to enter Africa through Masai country ‘as a British envoy to open a legitimate trade with the king of Bunyoro’, and only after that would he fill in the gaps he had left in his earlier exploration of the Nile basin, and continue across Africa to the Atlantic.
¹⁹

A month after Speke’s visit to the Foreign Office, Lord John Russell had still not taken the hint and appointed him to a roving consulship. Nor had the RGS made him any offer of support.
²⁰
This indifference persuaded a humiliated Speke to revert to a foolish plan he had briefly considered in February and March -which was to involve the Emperor Napoleon III of France in an Anglo-French expedition. Although France was still considered the old enemy, Speke meant to invite French explorers to set out east from Gabon on the Atlantic coast and then meet him in the region of Buganda and Bunyoro after he had reached these places either by travelling up the Nile or approaching from the East African coast. He held back at first, knowing that the plan was controversial; but in the late summer, when his relations with Murchison had become seriously strained, Speke contacted
his friend Laurence Oliphant, now living in Paris, and asked him to contact the British Ambassador, Lord Cowley, about a possible meeting with the Emperor. Not perhaps understanding the full implications, Cowley obliged and Speke was granted an audience with Napoleon III on 25 August 1864. The explorer came away believing that the Emperor was ready to finance a joint expedition.
²¹
At this date, one French expedition was already pushing into the West African interior up the Ogowé river, and others were under way on the Niger and in Senegal. So Speke had been preaching to the converted. The Emperor was already keen to extend French influence to the east – perhaps even as far as the Sudan. That this would very likely conflict with British interests at some future date was something which Speke chose to ignore. An explorer could only explore if someone provided him with the funds to do so. If Britain denied him what he needed, he would go elsewhere.