Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (36 page)

But Speke went back with a very different companion, James Augustus Grant of the Indian Army, who worshipped Speke with a spaniel devotion, and who would never dream of contradicting him: a gentleman through and through, as was said of him, the son of a Scottish minister, an ardent big game hunter, a gallant campaigner in the Indian Mutiny, huge of build, unquenchably modest of demeanour—‘that old creature Grant’, General Gordon was to write of him years later, ‘who for 17 or 18 years has traded on his wonderful walk’.

Their journey this time led them through the three queer kingdoms of Uganda—Bunyoro, Buganda, Karagwe—which lay along the western shore of Lake Victoria, and had never been visited by white men before: the many queens of Karagwe were fed entirely on milk, and were so fat that they could only grovel seductively on the floor, the King of Buganda walked in a stiff tiptoe way meant to simulate a lion’s prowl, and had burnt alive some sixty of his own brothers, and when Speke once went for a drink with the Queen-Mother, he found her on all fours drinking beer out of a trough. Escaping with difficulty from these peculiar hosts, Speke and Grant set off once more to the north, and once again, by instinct, accident or design, Speke was alone when he reached Jinja, on the northern shore of the great lake, and saw at last, with his own eyes, the Nile falling over its rim in cataract and rainbow.

The river banks there were covered with thick jungle, and coming upstream Speke could not see the lake until he was quite close to it. Then, as he crossed a fold in the ground, suddenly the fells were there: beyond them lay the vast green-blue expanse of the lake, and the water tumbled over its edge like a bath overflowing, splashing and rushing to the rapids below, where fish leapt in thousands through the spray, where crocodiles and hippopotami lay in the
shallows, where every rode was crowned by its slim black fishermen, and the whole air glistened with the shine of the spray.
1
This time Speke had no qualms when he returned to camp. He felt himself absolutely vindicated, and Grant agreed. ‘Inform Sir Roderick Murchison,’ they cabled home as soon as they could, ‘that all is well … and that the Nile is settled.’

But it was not. When Speke and Grant stumbled into the southern Egyptian outpost of Gondoroko, after two and a half years in the field, they found an unexpected Englishman hurrying to greet them: a big, jolly, bewhiskered personage, his eyes full of fun and confidence, who advanced upon the exhausted explorers like a vision of Christmas to come. This was Samuel Baker, son of a prosperous shipowner, who had knocked about the world from Ceylon to the Danube, and had now come to Africa with his beautiful young Hungarian wife to rescue Speke and Grant, if they need rescuing, and to do some exploring on his own. Baker decided that, since it was now clear that the Nile
did
emerge from Lake Victoria Nyanza, he would try to discover if there were any other source. Speke and Grant had not followed the whole course of the Nile, on their way northwards from Victoria: they had taken a big short cut, and there was evidence that in the loop of the river they did not see some additional supply of water entered the stream. There must exist, the Bakers thought, another lake: and so, armed with Speke’s own map, they marched boldly off to find it.

They had a frightful journey. All their baggage horses died, they were laid low with fever, their porters mutinied, savages attacked them with poisoned arrows. The King of Bunyoro demanded Mrs Baker as a hostage, offering one of his own virgins in exchange, until Baker drew his pistol and threatened to shoot him there and then, and Mrs Baker, rising terribly from her seat, hurled at the monarch a tirade in Arabic, of which he understood not one word. It was a proper Victorian adventure. The hero was stalwart, and British. The heroine, though foreign-born, was beautiful and brave—‘not a
screamer’, as her husband put it. The savages were savage. The elephants screamed ‘like railway engines’. When the explorers could not jolly man or nature into compliance, they used a touch of healthy British persuasion, like a cocked gun or an upper-cut to the jaw, and they entered every hazard, recorded every spectacle, with an enthusiastic diligence worthy of Prince Albert himself (who had died, as it happened, soon after their departure from London).

On March 14,1864, Baker spurred his ox up a hill on a fine spring morning, and looking down a steep granite cliff at his feet, saw the lake they were looking for. It was like a sea of quicksilver, he thought, bounded far in the distance by blue mountains, and glittering in the sun. ‘England had won the source of the Nile! Long before I reached this spot, I had arranged to give three cheers with all our men in English style in honour of this discovery, but now … I felt too serious to vent my feelings in vain cheers for victory, and I sincerely thanked God for having guided and supported us through all dangers to the good end. As an imperishable memorial of one loved and mourned by our gracious Queen and deplored by every Englishman’ (Baker ambiguously adds) ‘I called this great lake “The Albert Nyanza”’—and so the White Nile acquired, in both its branches, an imperial pedigree.
1

The twin reservoirs of the river were thus identified, but even so the Nile was not settled. During Baker’s absence the controversy between Burton and Speke had reached its climax, with public opinion veering now towards Burton’s view that the true source of the Nile was much farther south, in the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika. Neither Victoria nor Albert had yet been circumnavigated: it was possible that Tanganyika and Albert were in feet linked by a river, or that another big river flowed into Victoria. For by now the search for the true source was becoming a little farcical, and the hunt was being pursued or argued from lake to feeder, feeder to tributary, tributary to spring, to locate the very farthest point from which the principal flow of the river could be said to issue—a river which, though in its
last thousand miles it receives no tributary at all, in the first thousand miles is fed by dozens of streams, lakes and ancillary watersheds. The mid-Victorians believed in ultimate truths. Bruce had discovered the actual group of springs from which the Blue Nile issued. His successors were determined to pinpoint the exact damp origin of the White.

In 1865, the R.G.S. accordingly turned to an elder statesman among explorers, David Livingstone, and commissioned him to settle the issue. At 52 this marvellous and maddening Scot stood in a different class from all his colleagues. He was the Christian hero, in an age when the cult of the hero, particularly one both holy and remote, was in the ascendant. The son of a modest tea-merchant, with a medical degree from Glasgow, he had gone to Africa as a medical missionary, but was famous for his great exploratory journeys—across the Kalahari, down the Zambesi, through the basin of the Nyasa. He had done more than anyone to expose the continuing evils of the African slave trade, and he had established relations with the African peoples different in kind from those of other explorers and missionaries. Idiosyncratic though he was, quarrelsome, stubborn, conceited, he had a magic gift. People of unexpected kinds responded to him, and those who did not detest him loved him devotedly.
1

Livingstone’s prestige was enormous—Florence Nightingale called him the greatest man of his generation. Though in fact his life had been largely a life of failure, personal and professional, still he was one of the most famous men on earth, idolized by the public and respected by the scientific community. He would be the perfect arbiter of the Nile dispute, in the field as in the debating chamber: so at the beginning of 1865 Murchison invited him, on behalf of the R.G.S., to return to Africa to solve ‘a question of intense geographical interest … namely the watershed or watersheds of South Africa’. Did Lake Tanganyika empty itself to the north? And if so, could the river that flowed out of it possibly be the Nile?

It was Livingstone’s last and greatest adventure, and it was purely secular, unless one argued that British supremacy in geographic science would be best for the natives in the long run. On the whole Livingstone supported Burton’s theories. He thought the true beginning of the Nile would prove to be a river that arose south-west of Tanganyika, called by the Africans Lualaba. This might itself be the Nile, he thought, or alternatively, Albert and Tanganyika might form part of a central chain of lakes, through all of which the Nile flowed. In April 1866, he set off from Zanzibar to find out, accompanied by no Europeans, but by four old African friends, Chuma, Susi, Amoda and Wikatani. Before he reached Lake Tanganyika a terrible calamity occurred. He lost his medicine chest. ‘I felt,’ he wrote, ‘as if I had now received the sentence of death.’ Certainly from that moment nothing went right. Delayed by tribal wars, constantly sick, losing his teeth one by one, no more, he said, than ‘a ruckle of bones’, he pushed slowly on to the eastern shore of Tanganyika, reaching the Arab slavers’ village of Ujiji very near death.

He had hoped to find supplies there, but they had all been looted, and there was no mail for him either. He was almost beaten by these disappointments, and spent six whole months at Ujiji trying to regain his strength. Then he moved painfully westward once more. Months and years passed in his wanderings, 1869 into 1870, and then into 1871, and still he looked for the Lualaba. By now hardly anyone would help him. He had never disguised his enmity to the Arab slave-traders of the interior, while the local Africans were too terrified of the slavers to come near him. Even his own porters deserted. He could get no reply to the messages he sent to Zanzibar. His shoulder, torn by a lion years before, was giving him great pain, he was half-starved and had practically lost hope. When at last, after five years in the field, he reached the banks of the Lualaba, nobody would row him down the river to see which way it turned in its flow, or whether it really could be the Nile.

So he limped back to Ujiji and threw himself upon the mercy of the Arabs, hoping somehow or other, one day, to continue his quest. There he lay sick, penniless and exhausted, lost to the world, utterly out of touch with Europe, his mission a failure, his whereabouts one of the mysteries of the age: and there on November 10, 1871, Henry
Stanley of the
New
York
Herald
, advancing into his camp beneath the Stars and Stripes, with his caravan of porters loaded with bales of food, tents, expensive equipment and ingenious accessories to African travel, walked through the wondering crowd of Arabs, took off his hat, and uttered one of the epic texts of the Victorian age, as sacred to the faithful as it was comic to the irreverent: ‘
Dr
Living
stone,
I
presume?
’

‘“Yes”, he said with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.’

Stanley was a Welshman. Born John Rowlands at Denbigh in 1841, he had run away from the workhouse at St Asaph, and shipped as a cabin-boy for the United States. There he was adopted by a kindly cotton-broker, Mr Stanley of New Orleans. After fighting on both sides in the civil war (he was never a man of strong convictions) Stanley had taken to journalism, becoming the best-known special correspondent of the
New
York
Herald.
Having distinguished himself in reporting a small war in Abyssinia, Stanley had been given an agreeable roaming commission. ‘Go to Jerusalem, Constantinople, the Crimea, the Caspian Sea, through Persia as far as India. After that you can start looking round for Livingstone. If he is dead bring back every possible proof of his death.’

Stanley had done as he was told. He had travelled through the Holy Land, had scratched his graffito upon the walls of Persepolis, had reported on imperial India, and in January 1871 had arrived at Zanzibar, tough, 30 years old and very bumptious, on the last stage of his mission. He knew nothing about Africa, or about exploration, but he was a hard-bitten, ambitious, able and healthy young newspaperman, ready to do anything for a good story. Finding Dr Livingstone would be an incomparable scoop, to use the word just coming into vogue in American newspaper offices. He had plenty of money, so he bought all the best gear and hired all the most reliable porters: but he took no chances, in the way of his trade, and told nobody in Zanzibar the purpose of his journey. If anyone asked him where he was going, he simply said ‘To Africa’.

He followed the now familiar route west, along the tracks of
Burton, Speke, Grant, the slave caravans, and on the way he repeatedly heard rumours of a European living on the shore of Lake Tanganyika—an old wan man with grey moustaches—a man walking, wearing American suiting and a cap—a white man at a place called Urua—finally, as he approached the lake, an old sick man with hair upon his face, who had come from a very far country, and was living at Ujiji. Stanley’s excitement was transferred professionally to the pages of his book
How
I
Found
Livingstone
. ‘Hurrah! This is Livingstone! He must be Livingstone! He
can
be no other!’ As they approached Ujiji he ordered Old Glory unfurled (though he thought of himself still as British, he was an American citizen), and soon he was surrounded by hundreds of negroes and Arabs from the village, shouting
‘ϒambo,
bwana,
ϒambo
!’—‘Welcome!’

Down they all went into Ujiji, and there in the distance on the verandah of his hut they saw Livingstone. ‘I see the doctor, sir’, said one of Stanley’s Africans. ‘Oh, what an old man! He has got a white beard!’ As for Stanley himself, ‘what would I not have given for a bit of friendly wilderness, where, unseen, I might vent my joy in some mad feat, such as idiotically biting my hand, turning a somersault, or slashing at trees, in order to allay those exciting feelings, that were well-nigh uncontrollable’. He did control them, however, not wishing to ‘detract from the dignity of a white man appearing in such extraordinary circumstances’, and so gave his folk-phrase to the language—‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’.

Livingstone, it seemed, did not in the least wish to be rescued. Now that fresh supplies were at hand, he wanted only to complete his task. Stanley had other duties to perform, and taking Livingstone’s precious journals with him, and bidding an affectionate and respectful goodbye to the old man, in March 1872 he left for the coast to sublimate his scoop—which very rightly made him celebrated throughout the world. From Zanzibar he sent back to Livingstone a team of porters, and in August the doctor set out once more on his travels. He had been reprieved, he thought, in order to crown his life with the supreme African discovery. ‘No one will cut me out after this exploration has been accomplished, and may the good Lord of all help me to show myself His stout-hearted servant, an honour to my children, and perhaps, to my country and race….’