Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (50 page)

Speke’s intelligence was correct – the Nile flowed in and out of the northern end of Lake Albert, the river much swollen by the other sources flowing into the long lake. It can be said that the three main sources of the Nile are, along with the Blue Nile, Lake Victoria and Lake Albert.

More waiting followed for Sam and Florence. More fever as the natives of the lake, who lived by extracting salt from the lakeside (Albert is a very salty lake, unlike the sweet water of Victoria), kept them waiting and extracted as many beads and baubles as they could. It was not the men who worked the salt ‘mines’ but the women who, completely naked, waded through the bubbling sulphurous gullies that fed into the top part of the lake. The women dam the hot salty ooze in little channels and the mixture of mud and salt is packed into banana leaves and laid in long pieces of bamboo which can be carried easily along narrow jungle paths.

If Baker had known it, he might have crossed the lake to continue
to the Mountains of the Moon, which were only fifty miles away but shrouded in almost perpetual mist. The world would have to wait twenty years before Stanley would discover the Ruwenzoris. Here too lived the Twa tribe of pygmy people. It was Aristotle, acting on the information of Greek and Egyptian travellers, who stated that tiny people lived in caves in the Mountains of the Moon. But Baker had other things on his mind. When two dugout canoes thirty-two feet long were finally procured (the other craft mere flimsy rafts of papyrus so unstable he feared for their lives), it turned out that his men could not paddle them in a straight line. It is somewhat comic to think of Baker, having come all this way, spending the day going round in circles on the water, but that is what happened. That night Sam used his knife and axe to fashion rudders for the canoes from two paddles. He also used one of the plaid blankets that had survived Kamrasi’s acquis itiveness to make into a sail. The local people were amazed: it was the first sailing boat to be seen on Lake Albert. (Years later the European tradition of cruising the lake would result in the SS
Robert Coryndon
, ‘the best floating library in the world’ according to Hemingway. This ship plied Lake Albert for years until it sank in 1964. For forty years its rusted wreck was still visible at the north end of the lake looking like a small
Titanic
run aground, but it had been removed by 2012.)

Sam and Florence sailed up the lake. They saw that a reedy estuary marked the outflow. The ingress was near by and they started up it to verify that it was indeed the Victoria Nile. One thing that puzzled Baker was the relative heights of Lake Victoria and Lake Albert. Though only 168 miles apart, his altitude tests – done by measuring carefully the boiling point of water – suggested that Albert was much lower than Victoria. His thermometer read 207.8 degrees, which meant the height they were at was 2,388 feet compared to the 3,700 feet of Victoria. Unless there was a large waterfall, this was not the same Nile. Florence was utterly weak but told him to continue with their search upriver. ‘Seeing is believing,’ she said.

Banks of weed gave way to rising cliffs. The river narrowed after ten miles to a few hundred yards. They heard a roaring noise, and turning the corner of the bending and ever narrowing river came upon the largest waterfall on the Nile cascading through a slot a bare twenty-three feet wide. Smoky mist rose high above the waterfall and the slot itself was a pounding comb of white water. At 141 feet high the falls, which
Baker named after Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society – a canny move for an explorer to make – were high enough to explain the anomaly in the heights of the two lakes. They had truly secured the Nile for European posterity.

All that remained was the trip home – through Kamrasi’s land. The King had earlier sent an urgent message to Baker asking him to return and help him in a war he was fighting with a neighbouring tribe. Unknown to Baker, this was the start of the disintegration of the upper Nile kingdoms, as slave-trader armies, run by such men as the Maltese adventurer De Bono, were following the explorers deeper and deeper into Equatorial Africa. The slavers set one tribe against another in order to extract ivory out of the locality. It was against such a slaver-backed tribe that Kamrasi begged for help. Baker refused. Kamrasi, true to form, decided to starve him out, cutting off supplies and sending word that they were to be denied food along the lake. In the end they were reduced to eating a kind of wild spinach and drinking tea made from thyme growing on the river banks. Finally after some two months Baker sent word that if Kamrasi despatched fifty men and food he would at least enter into negotiations about helping the King with his own men and guns. The food and men arrived, and Baker and Florence began to recover on a new diet of meat and milk. They made their way back to the capital Kisoona and began negotiations. Baker agreed to help in defence but not in any attack. The old bully Kamrasi wanted to flee into the bush in the face of De Bono’s private army of slavers. Baker ordered that his Highland costume be unpacked, and kilt-clad he persuaded Kamrasi that they would stay and fight. He raised a Union Jack above the town which greeted De Bono’s craven emissaries spying out the capital for an attack. These men were told by Baker that if they did not withdraw from Bunyoro he would inform Khartoum that De Bono had invaded a country under British protection. If he did that their leader would certainly be hanged. The bluff succeeded and Baker earned considerable new respect from Kamrasi. The slavers retreated but left behind some mail for the Bakers that had come from England via Khartoum (no doubt the slavers had posed as friends of the Bakers while in Khartoum). These letters had taken two years to find them – the very first postal service running the length of the Nile river. Florence received some copies of the
London Illustrated News
that contained illustrations of the latest female fashions. As Kamrasi had been unable to get his own white bride, Florence
thoughtfully cut out pictures of the women and sent them to the King.

Finally the season for Nile travel arrived and they set off for Gondokoro and Khartoum. The journey was far from quick. To hasten things they travelled across the desert to the Red Sea and then to Suez by steamer. Baker had still not married Florence, his faithful companion of six exciting years. As they neared England he became fearful of the reception his ‘lady companion’ would receive. He telegraphed James, a younger brother, to meet him in Paris. Here they hatched a plan to win the family – and, by extension, England – over to Florence. When they finally arrived it was to no fanfare or ticker-tape parade. Baker told no one and lived quietly for three weeks in London to satisfy the banns requirements for a marriage by special licence. Only two people attended the wedding – in St James’s Piccadilly – a church large enough to hold a congregation of 2,000. The two were James Baker and his wife Louise, and both were to become staunch friends of the twenty-four-year-old Florence. At long last, one of the most eventful courtships in history had ended, as it should, at the altar.

26
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Buried alive

The person who is comfortable thinks everyone is comfortable
.
Ethiopian proverb

Baker was the greatest of the Red Nile explorers. He travelled extensively on the Nile – not just a quick trip (all right, a two-year quick trip) to the source. Like all good Red Nilists he had a nose for the extraordinary and the macabre.

The death of a great king among the people dwelling in the upper Nile region of Bunyoro, now in western Uganda, was an extraordinary event. The Bunyoro controlled almost the whole area between Lake Albert and Lake Victoria and their kings – Kamrasi and later Kabarega – were a thorn in the side of Baker’s sweeping ambitions. When Baker returned in 1871 he was not unhappy to hear of Kamrasi’s death. He gave an account of the great funeral:

Among the Dinka, the rainmaker was considered the highest-status personage in the tribe. His privilege, when he became infirm with old age, was also to be buried alive.

Burial alive of the king’s wives and vassals occurs all over the world throughout history. In Ethiopia it was said that the sons of Prester John were buried alive alongside their father. On his return to Cairo, Baker’s attention was drawn to Ibn Battuta, who relates the death of the great Khan of Peking, who is buried with four female slaves and six male slaves and the slain bodies of his family and close friends. In this version the slaves are given a poison to drink while they are being incarcerated alive. But Ibn Battuta then relates a story he has heard from the
south of Sudan ‘from persons upon whose word full reliance may be placed, that among certain infidels of these countries, on the death of the king, a vault is constructed in which the corpse is laid and along with it a certain number of his courtiers and servants . . . the forearms of these persons are first broken, as also their legs, below the knees . . .’

Ibn Battuta was writing in 1346. Five hundred years later the same funeral rites were still being practised in the same region. But within fifty years all that would end.

27
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The madness of King Theodore and the elephants of war.

Big talk: its head is fire, its behind water
. Ethiopian proverb

Things were changing too at the other end of the Nile, the Blue end in Ethiopia. An extraordinary new Christian king named Theodore had begun conquering and subduing all the warring factions around Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. In 1855 he proclaimed himself Emperor of Ethiopia, father of the Blue Nile, and attempted to abolish slavery. That he ended up as an enslaver of others suggests that his efforts at abolition were at best a partial success.

Born in 1818, Theodore claimed descent from Solomon and Alexander the Great; in reality he was the son of a small local chieftain with no royal claim at all. A self-made monarch, he would make those who would mock his rightful claims tremble indeed. Having conquered all the warring Muslim tribes and unified his Christian subjects, he proclaimed himself Emperor Theodore III. The world took notice. England even sent a consul, Walter Plowden, to make a treaty with him. By then, in the late 1840s, England had realised that the Red Sea coast was worth controlling. It made sense to be friends with Theodore.

And Theodore came to love Walter Plowden like a brother. When Walter was killed by tribesmen near Gondar in 1860, Theodore avenged him by killing and mutilating
2,000
members of the offending tribe. That was a lot, even by Ethiopian standards.

The English sent another consul, Charles Cameron (of the same clan but not a direct relative of the future Prime Minister of Britain). While not a fool exactly, Cameron lacked Plowden’s charm, Plowden’s pull.
He lacked something, that was certain. Foresight? Nous? Whatever he lacked, his inadvertent attempt to curry favour with Ethiopia plunged that country, and Britain, into a costly war at the source of the Blue Nile, a war that produced the first and last amphibious elephant attack in history. It is quite the most extraordinary story in a river of extraordinary stories.

Cameron presented Theodore with a brace of pistols – a welcome, though possibly risky choice of gift for a man with a volatile temper and a line in mutilation. He then committed his major blunder by suggesting that Theodore write to the British authorities in order to conclude treaties beneficial to both (that is, beneficial to the Brits). Theodore took to this task with great seriousness. He knew that the British had an empress called Victoria – would she not be thrilled to hear from a fellow emperor?

The letter was about a page and a half long, full of talk of exterminating the Turks, who had pressed up from Sudan and Egypt. Also it contained a fair bit of general politesse and an attempt at brotherhood against the assumed joint enemy of Islam. The letter was sent and an answer eagerly awaited.

None came. The British had other concerns. It was the time of the American Civil War and cotton prices had quadrupled. Instead of receiving an answer by return of diplomatic bag (a process that could admittedly take months), Cameron was asked to head into Sudan to find out if it were suitable for cotton farming.

Sudan was the sworn enemy of Ethiopia. Over a year had passed and still no reply came. Not only had no reply come, but now HM Consul was slipping off to the enemy. Theodore fell into one of his increasingly common rages (his first wife, a steadying influence, had died – now he drank heavily and was more prone to anger). He turned his attention to the fifty or so Europeans, mainly missionaries and their children, who were living at that time in Ethiopia – all in Gondar. He clapped the lot in prison, and when Cameron returned all unsuspecting from his cotton excursion, he too was chained up and tortured with the skill and malice only someone as well practised in that dark art as Mad King Theodore could properly muster.