Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (36 page)

Baker did not attempt a full circumnavigation, partly because of Florence’s ill-health, but also because he feared that if he failed to reach Gondokoro before the end of April, the boats left there by Petherick would have departed for Khartoum on the last southerly winds of the season. After a week of recurrent fever, enough of his men had recovered to embark the entire party in two canoes, and paddle north, close to the eastern shore. They were heading for Magungo, where a large river flowed into the lake. Baker believed this must be the river he had crossed at Karuma Falls, and which Speke had told him flowed out of the Victoria Nyanza as the Nile. Baker erected a crude awning to shelter Florence from the hot sun, and somehow resisted the temptation to shoot any of the lake’s hippopotami. Had he shot one, his men would have stripped off the meat and then cooked and eaten it – the whole process delaying them all for several days.

Magungo was reached after a thirteen-day voyage, and here the lake was already narrower, its northward flow discernible. But before continuing on their course, they paddled due east into the broad reed-fringed channel of the incoming river. Just before they entered it, Baker saw in the distance, less than ten miles away, at the lake’s most northerly tip, another river flowing out northward. Everyone Bacheeta spoke to at Magungo said that this second river flowed on to Appuddo on the Nile, through Madi country. Speke and Grant had travelled on from Appuddo to Gondokoro, so Baker knew that his lake was an important basin of the Nile, which either entered it from the southern shores which he had not seen, or through the river which he was now entering. Though Baker had hoped to return to Gondokoro by following the river at the Luta N’zige’s northern tip, his Nyoro porters and boatmen refused to consider this because of the hostility of the people living along the banks. It was a key moment when the truly great explorer compels his men to obey
him. But Baker and Florence were still very weak and lacked the strength and will to insist that they paddle all the way downstream to Gondokoro. Instead, he and Florence allowed their men to paddle them eastwards, confining their investigations to the river before them.
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Murchison Falls.

During their eighteen-mile voyage upstream, Baker thought he might die. He lost consciousness, and, as darkness fell, was
carried on a litter, with his ‘poor sick wife, herself half dead’, walking by his side to the nearest village. Next morning, both were too weak to walk and were carried to their dug-out, where they ‘lay like logs while the canoes continued their voyage’. Most of Baker’s men were also ill, and seeing them ‘crouched together’, he thought they looked like ‘departing spirits being ferried across the melancholy Styx’. On the third morning, on waking, they saw a thick fog covering the surface of the water. As it cleared, they observed that the river had become narrower with the current flowing fast against them. Bacheeta announced that they were now approaching a great waterfall. Already they could hear a sound like distant thunder. As the men paddled against the flow, the water became spume-flecked and the noise of the waterfall grew louder. On the river’s banks lay numerous crocodiles, many of them very large. On both sides, tall cliffs, which were clad with mature trees, rose almost vertically. At the next bend in the river, an unforgettable sight greeted them. The whole river was funnelled into a rocky cleft only twenty-four feet wide, and burst from it as if from a ruptured water-main, to cascade and tumble down the rock face for 120 feet in a foaming mass of snow-white roaring water.

As his men were paddling away from this natural marvel, Baker – ever aware of his own self-interest – decided to name it the Murchison Falls, after the man who could do more than any other for his exploring career. This might have ended prematurely, when a bull hippopotamus unexpectedly lifted their canoe half out of the water. Had it capsized, the lovers and their boatmen would have had a hard time escaping the many crocodiles watching on the banks. Yet, even when they were safely ashore, with a land journey ahead of them, their prospects were not bright. Their oxen had been bitten by tsetse fly, and the animals’ staring coats and running noses showed that they were dying. While Baker managed to toil up the cliff path that brought them to the track above the falls, Florence had to be carried. They now faced seven-foot-high grass and waterlogged country choked with vegetation. It was raining and they were
wet and cold. Without riding-oxen and quinine, their chances of survival looked slim, and would soon seem slimmer.

Sleeping on straw in a succession of waterlogged huts, they grew weaker and could no longer move from the positions in which they had been deposited. Ahead of them, due east, the country and the islands on the river belonged to Rionga, who had recently been attacked by Ibrahim. Rather than encounter these inevitably hostile people, Baker intended to abandon the direct route along the river to Karuma Falls, and loop south to bypass the rebels. But on the morning on which he hoped to start, he and Florence were deserted by all their porters and left helpless with less than a dozen followers – too few to carry their sick leader and his mistress. There would be hardly anyone left over to shoulder the trade goods essential for purchasing food. Since not an animal, or even a bird, was to be seen, they survived by digging up hidden grain in burned-out villages. Occasionally, the boy Saat and Bacheeta managed to buy a fowl from the rebels on their islands. Confined to a dark hut for two months, Baker wrote instructions for his headman in case he died. In that event the man was to deliver up his maps, observations and papers to the British Consul in Khartoum. If he failed to do this, all the evidence for Baker’s and Florence’s discoveries would be lost. By now, Baker had given up hope of reaching Gondokoro before the boats sailed for Khartoum.

‘We were very nearly dead,’ he recalled later, ‘and our amusement was a childish conversation about the good things in England [such as] an English beefsteak and a bottle of pale ale.’ Their mutual dread was that Baker would die and Florence would then fall into Kamrasi’s hands to be one of his many wives, never to return to Europe again. At times they both looked upon death as ‘a pleasure, affording rest, [and] … no more suffering’. Every week, during this two-month period ‘of fever and constant starvation’, one of Kamrasi’s chiefs would turn up to report back on their condition to his king. It became obvious to Baker that Kamrasi had ordered the porters to desert and had deliberately kept them here as virtual prisoners. When
Kamrasi sent a courtier with the proposition that Baker and his men, with all their guns, should join him in attacking Chief Fowooka (Rionga’s ally), the Englishman was almost angry enough to ally himself with Fowooka. It was plain to him that Kamrasi was using his and Florence’s suffering to force them to become his allies. Baker now tried to strike the best bargain he could, though it maddened him to be in this subservient position. Through Bacheeta, he told the king’s emissary that if Kamrasi wanted an alliance, he would have to deal face to face with him and send fifty men at once to transport him and his wife to the royal camp.

The men duly arrived next day with an ox for slaughter. After three days’ travel, the whole party arrived at Kisoona (Kisuna), where Kamrasi had his camp. But Baker was once again met by Mgambi, who at last admitted he was the king’s younger brother, and explained that because De Bono’s people had fought with Rionga against Kamrasi, the king had naturally needed to be careful about which foreigners he agreed to see. Baker was disgusted to have been fobbed off with the king’s brother, but concentrated on how best to make an impression on Kamrasi. To do this, he exchanged the rags he was wearing for a full-dress Highland suit with all the accessories: kilt, sporran and Glengarry bonnet. In this astonishing outfit, he was carried by ten of his men through curious crowds to Kamrasi’s hut. When the real Kamrasi asked Baker why he had not come to see him sooner, he replied: ‘Because I have been starved in your country, and I was too weak to walk.’

Baker thought Kamrasi handsome and beautifully dressed in a fine mantle of black and white goatskins. Yet he also found the ruler ‘peculiarly sinister’, perhaps because his subjects approached him on their hands and knees, touching the ground with their foreheads. From the time of their meeting, Kamrasi gave Baker an ox every week, plenty of flour, and a cow that produced copious milk. So though the lovers could not leave for Shooa, and suffered attacks of fever almost daily, they began to grow stronger on their new diet. During the next three weeks,
Kamrasi visited Baker at intervals to demand that he come at once to attack Rionga and Fowooka, and pick them off from afar with his Fletcher 24 rifle, which the king coveted. Baker claimed to be too weak to fight, until one night he was woken by a frenzied cacophony of drums and horns, and found people screaming that they were about to be attacked by De Bono and by Rionga. Mgambi dolefully informed Baker that the king would have to flee. Kamrasi himself declared that it would be futile to fight against 150 guns, even with the advantage of Baker’s firepower. ‘Pack up your things and run,’ he advised. But, according to his own account, Baker had other ideas.

After donning his Highland costume, he hoisted the Union Jack on a tall staff, and sent men to tell Wad-el-Mek that Kamrasi was under British protection. He then wrote to Wad-el-Mek in Arabic stating that if he attacked the king, he would be arrested on his return to Khartoum. This caused Wad-el-Mek to desert his allies, enabling Kamrasi to launch a successful counter-attack on Fowooka.

By the time Baker was eventually allowed to leave Bunyoro in November 1864 – ten months after his arrival at Shaguzi – he knew that Kamrasi hoped one day to conquer Buganda with the help of Ibrahim and Khursid. The arrival of ‘the Turks’ in Bunyoro – largely thanks to Baker – had been a harmful development. But without Ibrahim’s help, Baker knew he would not have been able to make his great discovery. And in November 1864, Ibrahim was again about to be indispensable. For he and his thousand-strong caravan would escort Baker and Florence safely through Madi country, enabling them to get home and enjoy the fame their bravery and astonishing resilience had earned them.

For Kamrasi, the consequences of Baker’s visit would be less pleasing. The explorer would represent the ruler of Bunyoro as cruel, cowardly and devious; and this caricature would stick to him, and to his successor, Kabarega, with the disastrous consequence that they would be mistrusted and disliked by the British Colonial Office. In reality, as Speke had justly recorded, Kamrasi was a better ruler than Mutesa and a lot less brutal. The
cultural gulf between Baker and Kamrasi had been impossible to bridge. Through cunning, and the efforts of his spies, the king had cleverly preserved his kingdom, which the more powerful ruler of Buganda had repeatedly attempted to wrest from him. Inevitably, Kamrasi had suspected that Baker, like Mutesa, had also come to steal his land, and that his tale about coming to visit a lake had been an invention. Since Chief Commoro had entertained exactly this suspicion, Baker should have expected to be mistrusted by Kamrasi. Inevitably, the king had supposed that his frightening visitor had brought along a ‘wife’ in order to breed sons, who could then inherit Bunyoro after their father’s death.
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Though Baker showed no understanding of Kamrasi, he did his best to prevent injustice when it occurred in front of him. During the return journey to Gondokoro, he tried to mitigate the cruel treatment of the slaves in Ibrahim’s caravan. When a young female slave and her mother were condemned to be hanged for trying to escape, Baker announced that he would use ‘any force’ to prevent such an act, and would report the names of the offenders to the Egyptian authorities. Meanwhile, Florence protected and fed Abbai, the two-year-old son of a Nyoro mother, who had been sold separately after attempting to run away. She also looked after four other young dependents, feeding them milk, and greasing their skin, as their mothers would have done. But in the end, when the caravan arrived at Appuddo, these children were all handed back to Ibrahim and his men, including little Abbai, who tearfully begged in broken Arabic to go home with Florence. ‘Had I purchased the child to rescue him from his hard lot,’ claimed Baker, ‘I might have been charged with slave dealing.’ Other travellers – Henry Stanley for one – would purchase the freedom of slaves, without fearing the consequences.
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The problem posed by these unfortunate children had been nothing to the great dilemma obsessing Baker for much of the journey down the Nile:
should he, or should he not bring Florence back to Britain with him?
In none of his letters home to family and friends, written from Khartoum, did he mention her. Only
in a letter to Robert Colquhoun, the British consul-general in Cairo, who had actually met Florence, did he write that ‘we are all right’ – a guarded indication that she had survived. Although 500 men in Khartoum’s garrison of 4,000 had recently died of plague, Baker spent two months in this place he detested, simply because he could not make up his mind what to do about Florence. Otherwise, he would have had every incentive to hurry back to England to see his family and receive the longed-for plaudits of the public. But how could he introduce Florence to his teenage daughters and to Min, his unmarried sister who had brought them up? Marrying a woman with Florence’s background would certainly be scandalously unconventional. But by the time he reached Alexandria, Baker had finally decided that he would not be able to endure life without her. So he sent a telegram to one of his brothers, Captain James Baker
RN
, asking him to arrange a quiet marriage in London.
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