Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (35 page)

She was 20 when she died so squalidly in Bengal—from earing too much fruit, we are told—and the poet survived her for sixty-four years.

Let us end with the humblest of literary forms, the graffito. Every empire left its scratches. The Spanish conquistadores carved their names in exquisite calligraphy on desert rocks in New Mexico. The Romans cut theirs sacrilegiously upon the Colossi of Memnos. The British left the same such homely souvenirs across the world, wherever a ship put in, a company halted on the march, or an idle sentry doodled with his bayonet point in the night. At Muscat in the Persian Gulf, where the British claimed misty powers of suzerainty, a tall bluff above the harbour was daubed all over with the names of British warships, piquantly flaunted up there beside the fortress that represented the lost empire of the Portuguese. On the walls of the water catchment tank at English Harbour, in Antigua, Nelson himself had scratched the name of his ship, HMS
Borealis
, and the remains of his own name could still be seen, it was said, among the myriad Robinsons, Thomases and Williamses carved there in the limestone. On the ruins of Persepolis in Persia, that grand fragment of an older empire, generations of British imperialists had shamelessly carved their signatures: wandering diplomats and intelligence agents, soldiers scouting the approaches to India, unexplained adventurers, scholars taking the long road home. And in the Red Fort at Delhi, where the British Army now maintained a garrison of its own, many a redcoat had by now scratched his initials, his regiment and the homesick date upon Bahadur’s soft sandstone. Slightly sweaty we may imagine such a young man there, in his thick serge and white-crusted webbing, his rifle propped against the wall, his helmet pushed to the back of his head, his tongue protruding slightly in concentration beneath his moustache: the bul-buls sing in the garden trees, a distant clamour sounds from the bazaar, a desultory murmur of Indian voices rises from some shadowy arch beneath his watchtower—until he hears the orderly sergeant approaching, with a stertorous clatter up the winding stone staircase,
and hastily returning his bayonet to his scabbard, tilting his topee correctly above his eyes, he stands ready with his back to the parapet, in case those new-scratched letters in the old stone, with half a heart and a sweetheart’s crooked initials, should show up in the moonlight and betray him.
1

O
N September 16, 1864, the spa of Bath in Somerset awoke in a state of half-illicit anticipation. Long past its prime as a fashionable resort, its prevailing tone was set now by retired military men and colonial administrators, and the walls of its ancient abbey were crowded with memorials to the imperial departed—as was said of them, 

Bath’s glorious Georgian squares and crescents, which made it one of the handsomest cities in Europe, were mostly peeled and shabby: the old place had subsided into provincial respectability, and had acquired a name for seedy dullness that was to persist for another century.

But September 1864 was a gala month there. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded thirty years before to foster public interest in the sciences, was holding its annual conference in the city. Savants and enthusiasts had arrived from all over the kingdom, and at a moment when applied science had reached an apogee of esteem, all educated eyes were turned to the proceedings in Somerset. The London newspapers carried long daily accounts; the
Bath
Chronicle
had imported forty typesetters from the capital to produce a daily newspaper reporting nothing else. The œlebrated squares, parades and terraces of the city were alive with the comings and goings of the great, and the
Chronicle’s
social reporters
1
could scarcely keep up with the soirées, the conceits, the balls and the private dinner parties—over whose tables, between whose quadrilles,
eminent men of science argued the possibilities of a fifth dimension, or discussed the anthropological characteristics of the Lapps. Public interest had never been so great, and the attendance was a record: 1,630 members and associates had applied for tickets, and that did not count, of course, foreigners or ladies.

For the general public the greatest scientific excitement of the day was exploration. The urge to open up the world was inextricably linked with the gathering emotions of Empire, and anything to do with foreign discovery aroused an avid interest. The Royal Geographical Society, a force in the land, held its own annual conference as Section E (Geography and Ethnology) of the British Association, and down at Bath the real lions of the month were the celebrities returned from exotic parts. Henry Bates the Amazon naturalist was there, and Bishop Colenso of Zululand, and J. M. Stuart, the first man to cross Australia from south to north, who was visibly and satisfyingly shattered by his terrible journey two years before. Dr Livingstone of Africa was staying in appropriate splendour at No. 13, The Circus, one of the finest houses in Bath, attended wherever he went by adulatory crowds; and present too, though less easily recognized, were influential figures on the fringe of the exploratory saga, like Sir William Armstrong of Newcastle, whose patented rifled guns kept the world, in a manner of speaking, safe for British adventure. Bath that September, in fact, was like an analogue of the imperial momentum itself—the zest, the hero-worship, the covert rivalries, the fascination of distant places and sensational goings-on, not least the sanctimony—for as Dr Livingstone told the Mayor’s welcoming banquet at the Guildhall, British discoveries were never selfishly hoarded, but were ‘communicated to the world, and being known to the whole world were prevented from being lost’.

Even by these stimulating standards the 16th was a special day. Among the celebrities in the city were the two most controversial figures of African exploration, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. They were enemies. Together they had, in 1856, gone to Africa to search for the source of the White Nile, the supreme prize of exploration. Speke claimed to have found the source, during a solitary sortie. Burton doubted it, and the resultant quarrel had become public property. The antagonists were theatrically contrasted.
Speke, the scion of a well-known Somerset family, was an upstanding young Victorian gentleman of the middle rank, a sportsman to his finger-tips, boyish and well-spoken, his eyes frank, his ears slightly cauliflowered. Unmarried at 37, he was a local hero: his family home, Jordans, was only forty miles away, and he had relatives on the outskirts of Bath itself. Burton, on the other hand, could hardly have been more alien to the spa. He was the very antithesis of Victorian decorum. His eyes flamed, his black moustaches drooped, he had a profound knowledge of oriental pornography and was reputed to have done dreadful things in many remote corners of the world. He had made a famous journey in disguise to the forbidden places of Mecca, and had been the first European to penetrate the scarcely less alarming city of Harar in Ethiopia. A true scholar and a marvellous linguist—he had translated the Portuguese poet Camoens—Burton had recently married a harebrained, fanatic but doting Catholic, Isabel Arundell, and he lived in a more or less constant condition of fury.

These two men had not met since their return from Africa in 1859, but the newspapers and learned journals had reverberated with their differences. The insults and innuendoes had grown more vicious each year, and as a climax to it all the Royal Geographical Society had arranged a formal confrontation between them, to be held in public at 3 pm on the 16th as part of Section E’s proceedings. It was the prospect of this meeting that so excited Bath that morning. Anything, it was thought, might happen—
The
Times
called it a gladiatorial exhibition. While Speke might be expected to behave with a certain Somerset restraint, the daemonic Burton was capable of any enormity, and with Livingstone himself tipped as a probable referee, the meeting promised the combined allures of a sporting contest, a scientific debate and an evangelical demonstration.

The compelling fascination of the Nile had exerted itself upon empires long before the British. Through the centuries historians, geographers and romantics had propounded theories about its source, which had acquired in turn a fabulous, an intellectual and a
strategic meaning. The river was said to spring from ‘fountains’ deep in the African interior, from a range of snow-capped peaks, from a system of great lakes, or from Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon in Ethiopia. The source of the Blue Nile had been identified by James Bruce the Scot in 1770, but the greater stream, the White Nile, remained as total a mystery as ever. Nobody knew where it came from. It was a superb enigma, and as the British responded to their imperial destiny, as the public began to acquire its proprietorial interest in the other side of the horizon, as the London strategists evolved the theory that control of Egypt was essential to the security of British India, so the conundrum of the Nile became almost a national obsession. The British regarded it as a challenge specific to themselves, its solution as the greatest prize awaiting any British adventurer of the nineteenth century: and the tremendous journeys of the explorers in inner Africa, lasting years at a time, chronicled with mysterious rumour and consummated with best-sellers, provided for twenty years a running excitement for the people.

Burton and Speke had been the first to make the attempt. By 1858 most of Africa was imperfectly understood. Kilimanjaro and Kenya had been seen. Much of the Niger had been navigated. The Kalahari was penetrated. The mythical Timbuctoo had been reached at last, and had proved a dreary fraud. The time was right, the pundits of the R.G.S. had decided, for a determined attempt to reach the fountains of the Nile: so they commissioned Burton and Speke, both officers of the Indian Army, to make the attempt from the east coast—the most direct route, it was assumed, and one whose lower course had been well established by generations of Arab slavers bringing their captives for shipment at Zanzibar. The two soldiers had already been in Africa together, on a disastrous expedition in Somaliland four years before. Burton, at 37, was famous for his journey to Mecca: Speke was 31, unknown but ambitious.

One would have thought them incompatible from the start—Burton the rootless Anglo-Irish intellectual, bored by blood sports and picking up languages like stones from the ground, Speke the quintessential English sportsman, ‘a right good, jolly, resolute fellow’ who seldom read a book—the one believing that the extension of Christianity was a prime purpose of exploration, the other almost
alone among public figures of his time in thinking that Islam could do better.

In February 1858 they together became, nevertheless, the first Europeans to set eyes on Lake Tanganyika, which Burton thought might be the Nile’s source: but it appeared to lie too low, and had no apparent outlet. Exhausted and side—Speke was almost blind with trachoma, Burton half-paralysed by malaria—they returned to recuperate at the slave-trading settlement of Kazeh, which stood at a cross-roads of the slave routes.
1
There the acquaintance was further strained, Burton delighting in the company of the unprincipled Arab grandees of the place, Speke, one feels, suspecting them of vices even worse than slaving. So Burton was only too pleased when Speke, his eyesight recovered, proposed to make a solitary reconnaissance to the north, leaving Burton to work up his notes and get his strength back. They had heard of another, larger body of water, Ukerewe or the Northern Lake, three weeks’ journey away. Might this not be the source of the Nile? Burton was not very interested, but early in June Speke set off on mule-back, with twenty porters and thirty armed guards, determined to find out.

So the controversy began. Twenty-five days later, on August 3, 1858, Speke became the first European to reach what is now Lake Victoria Nyanza. It is easy to imagine why the experience had for him a revelatory quality. Set among rolling scrubby downland, interspersed with forests of dark green—speckled with little islands, haunted by ibis in the daytime and fireflies at night—splashed with gay tropic colours of mango, orchid and wavering bird, and rippled always by a warm African breeze, the lake was a marvellous surprise. Some 250 miles long, only a little smaller than Scotland, it was really an inland sea, and in that country seemed spectacularly anomalous, like an error of creation, or at least an afterthought.

Speke was later to become a favourite victim of Freudian amateurs, and certainly his reactions to this grand vision invite analysis. The names he chose for his discoveries were revealing in themselves. The hillock he stood upon he called Somerset, the creek at his feet he called Jordans, the lake he called Victoria for the queen—
herself, we are imaginatively told, a dream-synonym for his mother. And he went on to reach a dramatic intuitive conclusion. He flatly decided, without further evidence, that this was the source of the Nile. He explored no further. He spent only three days on the lake. He saw no river outlet. Yet he
knew
, for certain, that this was the beginning of the White Nile, and he hurried excitedly back to Kazeh to tell Burton.

His reception there was caustic. ‘It was,’ Burton recorded drily, ‘an inspiration perhaps … the fortunate discoverer’s conviction was strong; his reasons were weak.’ A local worthy had told Speke that Lake Victoria probably extended to the end of the world. ‘Strongly impressed by this statistical information,’ Burton commented in his best pedagogic style, ‘my companion therefore planned the northern limit about four to five degrees north lat.’ It was not that Burton dismissed Victoria as the main source of the Nile. It was Speke’s irrational certainty that infuriated him, coupled no doubt with a nagging feeling that he had missed his own chance of glory by staying behind.

Like husband and wife at the end of a long day, they found they could not mention the subject without bicker, and so they returned laboriously and unhappily to the coast, sick, exhausted and tired of each other—they had been in each other’s company for nearly three years. When they reached Aden it was agreed that Speke should go on to England at once, and that Burton should follow a little later, when he was stronger. According to Burton, the parting was selfconsciously cordial. ‘I shall hurry up, Jack,’ Burton said, ‘as soon as I can,’ and Speke is alleged to have replied: ‘Goodbye, old fellow; you may be quite sure I shall not go up to the Royal Geographical Society until you come to the fore and we appear together. Make your mind quite easy about that.’

But when Burton reached England, only two weeks later, Speke’s ‘discovery of the Nile’s source’ was already one of the excitements of London. Speke had reported to the R.G.S. the very first day after his arrival, and was presently commissioned to take his own expedition back to Africa to confirm his conclusions. Burton arrived home almost disregarded—‘a mere skeleton’, Isabel recorded, ‘with brown-yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding, and his lips drawn
away from his teeth’. He must have been worth seeing, but nobody took much notice of him—the ground was, he said, ‘completely cut from under my feet’. The two men never spoke to each other again, and Burton never returned to the Nile.