Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (8 page)

Burton suggested to Shaw that these recent discoveries could turn Krapf into his [Burton’s] ‘John the Baptist’. This blasphemous comparison of himself with Christ would have entertained Burton, as would its arrogant subtext that he would now complete what the missionary had merely started.
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Krapf did not stay long in Cairo, and it is doubtful whether Burton actually met him. So he would not learn for several years that in Masailand, with his colleague Rebmann, Krapf had narrowly escaped being killed by a group of Masai warriors who had butchered their African porters almost to a man.
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But, at this date, Burton did at least know that, in 1844, a young French naval officer, Lieutenant M. Maizan, journeying inland from the coast, had been caught, tied to a tree, mutilated and then beheaded by tribesmen – another clear indication that trying to reach the Nile’s source from Mombasa or Zanzibar, rather than directly upstream from Egypt, was unlikely to be problem-free.
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So why not try the direct route up the Nile? Throughout recorded history it had been blocked by the swamps of the Sudd. But in 1841, the Egyptian viceroy, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a modernising Francophile, had sent an expedition of several boats commanded by Selim Bimbashi, a corpulent Turkish captain, who, accompanied by his favourite concubine and a
eunuch, had forced a way through the floating islands of aquatic vegetation, and had then sailed on to Gondokoro, 700 miles south of Khartoum as the crow flies.
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The Upper Nile had thus become viable for traders, missionaries, big-game hunters and adventurers. So, for two decades, a motley group of people launched a series of uncoordinated attempts to reach the source. Because they lacked proper funding, exploration had to be fitted in with trading or with sporting pursuits. Andrew Melly, a Liverpool businessman, had plenty of money, but he made his Nile attempt purely for pleasure in the company of his son, his daughter and his wife. Their tinned salmon, champagne and other provisions had been purchased at Fortnum & Mason, and they had no intention of risking their lives. Even so, Melly died of fever at Shendi near Khartoum in 1850.
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Most of the Europeans who travelled south at this time were Frenchmen and Italians hoping to get rich in the ivory trade. Instead, the majority died of malaria. More successful was a determined Maltese trader, technically a British subject. By 1851 the moustachioed, cane-carrying Andrea De Bono employed 400 men as porters and boatmen in his ivory company. Occasionally he would capture a lion and sell it to a zoo or menagerie. De Bono’s enemies swore that he and his nephew bought and sold human beings as well as exotic animals. At this time, De Bono moved his headquarters south from the slaving town of Khartoum to distant Gondokoro, described by one traveller as ‘that Babylon of prostitution’.
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From this stinking, rat-infested string of slave and ivory camps beside the Nile, De Bono, and his friends and business partners, launched themselves up the river. But a combination of cerebral malaria, cataracts and hostile Africans defeated them. In 1853, while Richard Burton was writing his book in Cairo, entirely unknown to him De Bono travelled up the Nile once again and passed through the land of the Bari and the Obbo to within eighty miles of Lake Albert. A few years later, Jules Verne would pay tribute to the Maltese trader’s achievement in his adventure novel,
Five Weeks in a Balloon,
by having one of his characters
look down through binoculars and spot De Bono’s initials, which he had carved on a rock on an island, near Fola Rapids. ‘It is the signature of the traveller who has gone farthest up the course of the Nile!’
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Although other attempts were soon made – several ending tragically – De Bono’s most southerly point would not be bettered until 1860 when the extraordinary Italian polymath, Giovanni Miani – who had written operas and been a professional wood carver before starting to trade in ivory – struggled as far south as modern Nimule, near the present Ugandan border, before being forced back by illness and an attack by Madi tribesmen.
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Miani would die in 1872, aged sixty-one, still trading on the upper Nile and its tributaries. His last written words were: ‘Adieu so many great hopes: the dreams of my life.’
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Since De Bono and Miani did not know precisely how close they had been to making significant discoveries, the world would remain ignorant of their achievements.

Blissfully unaware of what had been happening on the upper Nile, Burton stayed on in Cairo for three leisurely months, only leaving in mid-January 1854. On reaching India in mid-February, he delayed till April before submitting to the Bombay government his application for leave of absence and permission to explore Somaliland, and then head south and travel into the interior from Zanzibar. Since it was not unusual for favoured officers to be given paid leave in which to make journeys likely to increase the company’s knowledge of the lands bordering its territories, he was not surprised when the required permission was formally confirmed by the East India Company in London, and a grant of £1,000 was promised.
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But he was appalled to be given only a year’s leave of absence since this would make it all but impossible to attempt his all-important second objective: a journey into the heart of the continent from Zanzibar to find the Nile’s source. How disappointed he was can easily be imagined after reading this declaration in his application to the Bombay government. Despite the maddeningly pedantic style of the communication, his passionate desire to solve the age-old mystery shines through:

It may be permitted me to observe that I cannot contemplate without enthusiasm, the possibility of bringing my compass to bear upon the Jebel Hamar, those ‘Mountains of the Moon’ … a range white with eternal snows even in the blaze of the African summer, supposed to be the father of the mysterious Nile … a tract invested with all the romance of wild fable and hoar antiquity, to this day the [most] worthwhile subject to which human energy could be devoted. For unnumbered centuries, explorers have attempted the unknown source of the ‘White River’ by voyaging and travelling and literally against the stream. I shall be the first to try by a more feasible line to begin with the head.
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The thought of finding the Nile’s source now became for Burton ‘the
mot de l’énigme,
the way to make the egg stand upright, the rending of the veil of Isis’. and, of course, the way to become a great deal more famous than his journey to Mecca was ever likely to make him.
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But that would have to wait till he could persuade his employer to grant him more time. But a year might nevertheless be long enough to bring back a wealth of new information about Somaliland and its people – enough, perhaps, to persuade the grandees of the East India Company to send him to find the Nile’s source.

To prepare for his expedition, Burton arrived at the coaling station of Aden, on the southern Arabian coast, in advance of the men he had chosen as expedition members. Later, he would claim that it was entirely due to advice tendered by the over-cautious British Political Resident, Brigadier James Outram, that he decided to journey without his fellow officers into south-eastern Ethiopia to visit Harar, which was then considered to be Islam’s fourth most holy city, after Mecca, Medina and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
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In truth, he had never intended to take any colleague with him, and had always planned to claim sole credit for becoming the first European to enter this fiercely religious place, which was said to be closed to foreign visitors and therefore dangerous to enter. That Burton was eager to upstage his companions in a reprise of his Mecca adventure would not have mattered if one of them had not been destined to become his partner on his
next and far more important East Africa journey, targeting the Nile’s source.

Burton had wanted to take to Somaliland his friend Dr John E. Stocks, a military surgeon, who is thought to have circumcised him before his trip to Mecca. But Stocks, who lived hard – ‘an excellent chap, but a mad bitch’ according to his friend – died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage, and so Burton was left looking for a last-minute replacement.
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He had already chosen Lieutenant William Stroyan of the Indian Navy, and Lieutenant G. E. Herne, who had both worked on the Sindh survey with him. Then pure chance delivered to him the man who would be his nemesis, and whose well-merited place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest explorers Burton would later work so hard to obliterate. Right on cue, Lieutenant John Hanning Speke – ‘Jack’ to his friends – stepped ashore on a hot day in mid-September 1854 at Steamer Point, Aden, from a P&O steamship from Calcutta. One of the greatest misalliances in history was about to begin, without either party having the least presentiment of trouble ahead.

THREE

A Rush of Men Like a Stormy Wind

Most of Richard Burton’s many biographers have seen John Hanning Speke as a being inferior to their own complex and multi-talented subject in virtually every respect.
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But Burton himself did not make the same mistake. Almost twenty years after the two men had first met – by which time Burton would have long since come to detest the man and his memory – he could still vividly recall the favourable impression which Speke had made upon him.

A man of lithe, spare form, about six feet tall, blue-eyes, tawny-maned; the old Scandinavian type, full of energy and life, with a highly nervous temperament, a token of endurance, and long wiry, but not muscular limbs that could cover the ground at a swinging pace.
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Jack Speke’s willowy figure, his fair-skinned, fresh-faced good looks, and his assured but reserved manner, contrasted strikingly with Burton’s swarthy, almost oriental appearance, and his dark-eyed, melodramatic presence. As tall as Speke, and broader shouldered, Burton, with his high cheekbones, black hair and luxuriant moustache, looked exotic and foreign – rather gypsylike – although he sprang from the English upper-middle-class, as did the new arrival. Burton’s face often bore an expression of ferocious cynicism, which one of his recent biographers has attributed to resentment of his superiors in India for failing to appreciate his merits.
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His heavy brows and darkly brooding expressions sometimes led acquaintances, and even friends, to call his appearance Satanic.
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But it was the sociable Richard Burton, and not his fiercely combative
doppelgänger,
who greeted Speke under the dark cliffs of Aden’s extinct volcano.

Jack Speke had just been to see Brigadier Outram, who, as Political Resident of this recently snatched British outpost, ruled
it with paternal zeal, and had conscientiously refused the young officer permission to cross the Gulf of Aden to hunt game in Somaliland and Ethiopia because ‘the Somalis were the most savage of all African savages’ and would very likely kill him.
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But if Lieutenant Speke could persuade Lieutenant Burton to take him with him on his expedition, then Outram would be delighted to change his mind and even ask the East India Company to allow him to serve on full pay.

Later, Burton would claim that in 1854 Speke had been an inexperienced greenhorn, who had arrived unprepared, with no knowledge of Somaliland or its language. He would also mock the younger man (at twenty-seven, Speke was six years his junior) for having brought with him ‘all manner of cheap and useless chow-chow, guns and revolvers, swords and cutlery, which “the simple-minded negro of Africa” would have rejected with disdain’. Burton next derided Speke’s attempt to engage as guides ‘the first mop-headed … donkey boys’ he encountered.
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Yet, in reality, far from accepting Speke out of pity as he later made out he had, Burton was eager to have him on the expedition, and appealed to Outram to ‘allow [him] to enrol Lieut. Speke’.

The more he learned about Speke, the more Burton realised that his innocent, enthusiastic manner masked a loner’s steely self-reliance. Something else struck him about the outwardly easy-going officer. Although he joked about being a
Masti Bengali
(‘a bumptious Bengal-man’), for all his humorous self-deprecation, ‘he had a way as well as a will of his own’, after being ‘for years his own master’.
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While on leave from the 46th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, Speke had not gone home to England but had travelled in the unexplored mountains of Tibet with a couple of servants, mapping the country and collecting specimens of wildlife for the museum he had created in his father’s house. He was an exceptional shot, and a capable soldier, having served in General Sir Colin Campbell’s brigade during the Sikh Wars.
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Unlike Burton, he drank little alcohol, and on his Tibetan journeys had risen ‘with the freezing dawn, walked in the burning sun all day, breaking his fast upon native
bread and wild onions, and passed the night in the smallest of “rowtie” tents’.
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As Burton conceded, Jack Speke had rare gifts such as ‘an uncommonly acute eye for country – by no means a usual accomplishment even with the professional surveyor’.
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While they were still in Aden, Burton and his new expedition member had a conversation that would have momentous consequences. The subject was ‘Krapf’s snow mountains’. Burton confided to Speke that within a year or two, he meant to travel westward from Zanzibar into the African interior to find the Nile’s source. Although Speke was surprised to learn that his leader was planning anything so ambitious, he declared an existing interest of his own. Ever since seeing the Mountains of the Moon depicted in a reproduction of Ptolemy’s famous map, he said he had deduced that these snow peaks must feed the Nile, just as the Himalayas’ glaciers fed the Ganges. But though Burton must have been struck by what the new arrival said, his discovery that their minds were running on similar lines did not cause him to invite Speke to go with him to the mysterious city of Harar. From now on, however, Speke knew that in order to be chosen for a future expedition to the Nile’s source, he was going to have to seem to be on friendly terms with Burton, whatever he might secretly feel about him.
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