Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (49 page)

Of course all the above is not much use if you cannot manage the men under your command. For this he instructs would-be explorers in the ‘Management of Savages’. First, Galton counsels that:

He advises that on arrival at a native encampment the occupants often run away in fright. He suggests you ‘go boldly into their huts, take just what you want, and leave fully adequate payment. It is absurd to be over-scrupulous in these cases.’

Galton recognises the importance of keeping morale high with feast days and holidays. ‘Recollect that a savage cannot endure the steady labour that we Anglo-Saxons have been bred to support. His nature is adapted to alternations of laziness and severe exertion. Promote merriment, singing, fiddling and so forth, with all your power.’

On flogging he is circumspect. Most of the African explorers resorted to flogging porters who stole or tried to desert. Stanley recommended a light switch, others favoured the hippo-hide whip which would raise a cut on the first lash. Galton writes, ‘Different tribes have very different customs in the matter of corporal punishment: there are some who fancy it a disgrace and serious insult. A young traveller must therefore be discriminating and cautious in the licence he allows to his stick, or he may fall into sad trouble.’

On counting: ‘When you wish a savage to keep count, give him a string of beads.’ As each item to be counted is passed, the man counting jerks a bead from the forepart of the cord hanging in front to the rear part over his shoulder.

Of course, when managing savages goes wrong it is time to resort to coping with hostilities. Galton makes a long list of weapons suitable for resisting a native attack: for close-quarter attacks ‘Buck-shot and slugs are better than bullets’, but for a really good frightening effect he recommends rockets:

For keeping watch he recommends opera glasses, and ‘I should be glad to hear that a fair trial had been also given by a traveller to an ear-trumpet.’

As a clever trick when being robbed he suggests the following: when approached by an armed robber and told to lie on the floor while the robber divests you of your goods, take out your revolver and, cursing, say, ‘If this were loaded you should not treat me thus!’ Then throw yourself on the ground as the robber in his triumph approaches. When he is in range shoot him with the ‘unloaded’ gun, which of course was loaded all the time. Another ruse is to keep a small pistol cocked and loaded in your wallet pocket. When asked for money reach into the pocket and fire through the fabric at your assailant.

If one is forced to take a prisoner, perhaps to act as a guide as Nile
explorers sometimes did, secure him with the least amount of string by tying his thumbs together behind his back.

25
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Buying a white slave

The man who kills a lion does not pick his nose like a child
.
Nubian proverb

In the nineteenth century, as we have seen, there were two approaches to discovering the Nile’s source – travelling inland through Africa or attempting to ascend the river from Cairo. No one had ever managed the full ascent, not Alexander the Great’s envoy, nor Nero’s legionaries, nor Napoleon, nor Capitan Selim, nor the admirable Petherick. Not until the Victorian explorer Samuel Baker
and his wife
– who travelled everywhere with him – did the ascent of the Nile occur. And Baker’s wife, to whom he was devoted, was certainly unusual – he bought her at a Circassian slave auction.

The going rate for a white slave in the Balkans in 1859 was about £10 for a virgin aged between twelve and eighteen, though in a glut the price could go as low as £5, perhaps the equivalent of £300 now. There were many sources: Georgia, Circassia, the edges of Greece and the wilder parts of Albania and Serbia. Turkey’s vassal states in Europe were particularly vulnerable. In some Bulgarian districts each family had to give up one child as a kind of blood tax.

It was into this world that Samuel Baker, easily the most likeable of the great African explorers, burst on to the scene with a desire to be amused by the slave market in Widdin in what is now north-west Bulgaria. Baker was thirty-eight years old, already a widower and the father of four daughters in the care of his sister (two sons and another daughter having already died).

In one version of the story, the Pasha of Widdin outbid Baker for the eighteen-year-old Hungarian Florenz Sass, originally from a German-speaking part of Transylvania. Baker was so entranced by the girl that he refused to let her become the slave of the elderly Turkish governor. The same night he managed to arrange her escape and together they fled down the Danube to freedom – an implausible story at best, as Baker was on a hunting holiday at the time with an Indian maharaja
called Dulep Singh. It is almost certainly the case that Florenz caught his romantic eye at the slave auction and he simply bought her.

From these extraordinary beginnings began the greatest husband-and-wife exploring team the world has ever seen, or is likely to see. It would be two years before he could set in motion his plan to reach the source of the Nile by ascending the river, attempting what every expedition since ancient times had failed to achieve. Speke may have claimed to have found the Nile’s source, but somehow cutting in from Zanzibar wasn’t quite as impressive as travelling the full length of the river, especially if you do so with your woman (he had yet to marry Florenz). Baker spurned the usual source of patronage, the Royal Geographical Society. Instead he sought support from a former rear admiral, Henry Murray, a bachelor who lived in Albany off Piccadilly and kept the company of explorers and big-game hunters. No women, not even slaves, were allowed in his apartments; in his bedroom were a set of parallel bars that male guests could work out on when the conversation flagged. From Murray, Baker received all important contacts, especially in Egypt. Murray, known as ‘the skipper’, was an enthusiastic supporter of flogging as a way of maintaining discipline, though according to Baker he exuded ‘an almost womanly gentleness and courtesy’. Another contact was a former aide to Livingstone, the admired big-game hunter William Oswell. Oswell lent Baker his most prized weapon: a massive 10-gauge double-barrelled rifle and shotgun combination. The skipper, meanwhile, presented him with a naval telescope. Baker was set.

In 1861 he sent home from Alexandria for rifles, 250 pounds of gunpowder, a large box of tools and a medical chest well stocked with quinine. Unlike most of the nineteenth-century explorers Baker was independently wealthy. He asked the family company that looked after his inheritance to make unlimited funds available for his assault on the Nile. He set out on 15 April 1861: ‘Left Cairo at 6am with a spanking breeze.’ His notebook was not a new one, but already contained notes made during his eight years as a planter in Ceylon and during the Danube journey during which he had bought Florence (as she was now known). His handwriting had changed since then: it was smaller, less jerky, more controlled.

At Aswan, a party of Nubians came aboard to beg for baksheesh. They were all entirely naked. Baker remarked in his diary, ‘I could not help thinking how much ladies must learn by a journey up the
Nile which affords such opportunities for the study of human nature.’ They then travelled overland past the cataracts on sixteen camels until rejoining the Nile at Berber. Florence (the second Florence of the Nile, we might note) did not like the climate at all. ‘F. very ill with fatigue and heat,’ wrote Baker. But they battled on, reaching the borders of Abyssinia, where they then spent months becoming acclimatised to travel in remote places.

Eventually they returned to the Nile and journeyed on to Khartoum. Here they met Arab slavers and made plans to penetrate further up the Nile. Reaching Gondokoro, they believed Speke, on his expedition, to be dead. But after a short stay he arrived with his fellow explorer James Grant. Baker had been hoping that it would be he, Sam, who would rescue Speke from trouble near the source of the Nile. But Speke, though tired and anxious, told him, ‘The Nile is settled.’ Baker asked him if there was anything left to do on the river. The reply was ‘Find Lake Nzige.’ Speke in his desire to escape the rapacious King of the Bunyoro, who had taken virtually all his belongings, had left the Nile shortly after seeing it exit Lake Victoria and journeyed overland to Gondokoro. He had thus missed out a huge loop of the White Nile that native information suggested passed through an enormous lake, the Luta Nzige. Baker decided to find this lake.

It shows Baker’s courage that, knowing he would have to deal with the Bunyoro King, Kamrasi, he still went ahead with his plan. Speke warned him repeatedly about the devious and repugnant nature of Kamrasi, but Baker, trusting in his immense physical strength which he was convinced was the key to impressing Africans, was sure he would gain the permission he needed to get to the lake. Kamrasi had odd protuberant eyes and a fickle nature. He said that Baker could of course go to the lake. He’d even send an armed party of warriors to protect him. But he wanted Florence in exchange.

This demand was the last of many they had had to endure during the weeks they had been in Kamrasi’s company. So far they had given the chief a Persian carpet fifteen feet square, a Kashmiri shawl, a double-barrelled rifle, several pairs of wool socks, handfuls of bracelets and necklaces, even the yellow kerchief Florence wore on her head. But no, he wanted more. Kamrasi hadn’t even allowed them to stay in his capital. Instead they lodged outside the town in huts on a muddy meadow abutting a mosquito-infested swamp.

But Kamrasi had not reckoned on the hero that was Sam Baker. After
the demand had been translated – with the addition of several African wives for Sam thrown in as a sweetener – the enraged Baker leapt forward drawing his navy revolver from his waistband. He held it as steady as his fever-ridden state would allow, a few feet from the King’s chest, and in a wild rage told him that if the demand was ever repeated he would kill him then and there. Florence joined in in Arabic (a language Kamrasi was ignorant of) and then the female interpreter joined in.

Kamrasi knew he had gone too far. His gross face remained impassive as he opted for less offensive gifts. That kilt Baker had been wearing when he arrived (Baker wore full Highland dress when he wanted to impress native chiefs) – could he have that? Or the compass he’d been shown? After all, good Speke had given him a chronometer. The wheedling continued, but Baker was firm. No more gifts until they had permission to leave. Kamrasi shrugged. They could go. It would take twenty days, he said. But ominously he added, ‘Don’t blame me if you can’t get back.’

Baker and Florence were already weakened with malaria and gastric fever. The medicine chest left by Speke which they had hoped would replenish their stocks of quinine had been emptied by Kamrasi long ago. But discovering a new lake would make their name. They left with guides and a hundred-strong warrior escort. ‘I trust I have seen the last of Kamrasi – a greater brute cannot exist,’ wrote Baker. But this was not to be.

This is the very nature of exploration, what makes it so different from later travellers following a well-worn path. You are under the complete control of local chiefs. You have to pass through lands relying on guides you pick up along the way. You cannot afford not to trust, yet trusting too much may also bring disaster. The explorer must be a curious mix of the obsessive, the optimistic, the psychologically resilient. For all Baker’s claims about the importance of physical strength it is the mental strength, epitomised by Florence’s iron will to continue, that marks out the successful explorer.

Baker rode on an ox to conserve his strength. Florence, weakened by months of fever, was conveyed in an
angarep
– a sedan chair carried by twelve men. Her condition worsened. One evening Baker ordered a new handle to be fitted to his pickaxe in preparation for digging her grave. But Florence did not die, and on they went. A range of mountains grew closer and closer. The thought of crossing them seemed too
dreadful to contemplate. The guides revealed nothing to them except the route for the following day. They finally reached a village Baker understood was called Parkani – in fact it meant ‘very close’: the lake was in front of the mountains, a mere half-day’s walk away.

They could hardly contain their excitement. But when they saw the great lake, the seventh largest in all Africa, over a hundred miles long and eight times bigger than Lake Constance, worthy indeed to be named after Victoria’s consort Prince Albert, Baker was too stunned or exhausted to lead his men in a round of three cheers ‘in the tradition of Old England’ as he had long planned. Fever ridden, in no state either to continue or to turn back, he had achieved the dream that started when he had first heard about Livingstone and had been rejected for a place on the Scottish explorer’s expedition. Now, at the age of forty-two, Baker was no longer a rich big-game hunter and adventurer – he had become, like Livingstone, one of the world’s great explorers.

He knew he couldn’t turn back, though, until he had verified that the Nile flowed in and out of Lake Albert. This long thin lake is the receptacle for all the rivers of the region – filling a rift valley between 1 and 2 degrees North – with mountains running along both its sides. It forms such a formidable barrier the fauna changes from one side to the other. Locusts cease to be found on the other side of the lake – hence its original name Luta Nziga, which means ‘the brightness which kills locusts’.