Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (53 page)

One gets a rare glimpse of the contribution Florence made to Baker’s success. She provided, one suspects, the judgement that he lacked. If Baker had gone he might well have ended the way Gordon did. And Gordon, incidentally, was not at all pleased that anyone, and a man’s wife no less, should block him. Baker led him from the drawing room with a doleful air. ‘My dear Gordon,’ he said, ‘you see how I am placed – how can I leave all this?’ Florence later remarked that Gordon had hypnotically powerful blue eyes that were very hard to resist – she did not condemn her husband for falling prey to them, though she never forgave Gordon for trying to pass on a deadly mission to a man past retirement age.

Gordon was duly sent to the Sudan with the object of staging a withdrawal there in the face of the Mahdi’s forces. And he was really the wrong man, given all the years he had spent building up the British presence there and subduing the Arab slave trade. He had too much invested and this led to the dithering that brought about his downfall. But it seems that, had a certain telegraph not been sent, the whole Gordon fiasco might have been avoided. Lord Cromer related in his memoirs that when he discovered Gordon was proceeding to Khartoum via the Red Sea port of Suakin he immediately telegraphed that this was inadvisable, the reason being the open rebellion of the tribes that lay between Suakin and Khartoum. If Gordon had continued via Suakin he would have been held up and eventually turned back – by which time the need for him in Khartoum would have evaporated. But Gordon changed his route and went to his eventual doom via Cairo instead. Cromer wrote, ‘If I had not interfered as regards General Gordon’s route, a point which seemed at the time to be one of detail, the course of history in the Soudan would have been changed and many valuable lives, including probably that of General Gordon himself, would have been saved.’ And there might, ten years later, have been no battle of Omdurman in which so many died and a certain English subaltern called Winston Churchill rose to prominence.

In 1893 the Bakers, Florence and Sam, planned to spend the following year in Somaliland, hunting lions. Sam was now immensely fat
and suffering from intermittent gout. He died of a heart attack before he could leave. Somewhat ahead of his time, he had asked to be cremated in the newly built crematorium in Woking, the first to be built in Britain.

Florence lived on in Devon for another twenty-three years. Whenever guests arrived she wore her finery, everything she had been denied during her travels in Africa. And all visitors were forced to eat the immense cream teas her husband had so loved.

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A strange occurrence

The Nile is great, greater still is a man who sincerely notes his own faults
. Egyptian proverb

The story, however, does not stop there. Often, when writing a book such as this, which requires the sourcing of hundreds of volumes of old and often hard-to-find books, one is struck, forcibly, how much coincidence, or serendipity, plays a part in the finished work. I started writing this book in Egypt, within sight of the Nile. The Arab Spring revolution of 2011 made me reconsider what was the best place to carry on the uninterrupted work necessary for such a large project. I ended up living in Dorset, not so far from a friend who lived in Dowlish Wake in Somerset, which turned out to be the ancestral home of the Speke family. I then travelled up north and gave a talk at a school in Dumfriesshire. It was here, in Thornhill, that I discovered that Joseph Thomson had been born (well, two miles from Thornhill), the African explorer who first named the Thomson’s gazelle (and about whom I had been reading in my research on Nile exploration). I started to obtain books – some second-hand, some new, many through the marvellous interlibrary loan service. In a bookshop about a mile and a half from my house I found a reprinted edition of
Ismailia
, Samuel Baker’s account of his attempt to subdue the slave trade in southern Sudan. The book was missing a map and was only £10 – a bargain. When I got it home I found inside it a letter typed on thin blue paper dated 20 July 1963 – in good condition and almost the same age as myself. The letter was from the great-grandson of Sam Baker, Valentine E. Baker, presumably named after Sam’s brother, though an internet search found nothing
beyond references to Chet Baker singing ‘My Funny Valentine’. The letter itself concerned a visit the great-grandson Valentine had made to Gulu in Uganda, home to the Samuel Baker School. He had visited in the 1960s to donate some books by Baker as well as a handwritten letter from Baker to Abou Saoud, (or Aboo Sood as he sometimes spelled it), the double-dealing Arab slaver whom he defeated in his attempt to stamp out slavery.

But this upper Nile story twists and turns like the Nile itself because the Samuel Baker School is only about an hour from where Joseph Kony, founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army, was born. Kony staged raids on its dormitories and kidnapped children for his army. One of the ex-Sam Baker schoolboys, Moses, who would rise to become a trusted lieutenant before defecting back to normal life to resume his studies, was interviewed by Matthew Green, author of a book about Kony called
The Wizard of the Nile
. I got in touch with Matthew. In a further twist I found we had been to the same college and had even shared the same teachers.

The letter to the slaver appears on page 138 of
Ismailia
. So the great-grandson of the writer had copied the original letter and then sent it to someone (‘Mr Hudson’ is all it is addressed to) who had put it in a book containing the same letter, which some fifty years later I bought in a second-hand bookshop in Dorset which I visited only because it was within walking distance of my house. Here’s the letter:

The original letter, still at the Samuel Baker School, was handwritten. I fold up my version, from Baker’s great-grandson, and return it to the safety of his great-grandfather’s book. I am sure Kony’s lieutenant Moses must have seen the letter, the original, while he was at school. I’ll surely tell Matthew Green, maybe at my next college reunion. I am beginning to realise why the Nile has such a hold on people. It connects up all stories.

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Mountains of the Moon no. 2

The word of God is like a grinding stone
. Sudanese proverb

The Red Nile connects up all stories – maybe – but it certainly keeps returning us to the old stories. Millennia after Aristotle wrote of the strange Mountains of the Moon, they appeared again in all their ghostly significance in the accounts of the new European explorers.

Burton and Speke naturally had different theories about where exactly the mountains were. It took the superhuman efforts of Stanley, however, finally to identify their true position.

Burton rightly pointed out the many holes in Speke’s argument for Lake Victoria being the source of the Nile, or even being one lake and not many, but he did not, after the RGS had backed Speke’s expedition, seek to prove his own theories on the ground. This was left to Stanley, who in his incredible 1874–6 expedition circumnavigated Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, thus proving that Speke’s inspired guess about the source was correct. The geography hinted at by Ptolemy’s map of the Nile’s source was proved to be substantially right. Only one thing remained – where and what were the Mountains of the Moon? In 1876 Stanley’s able assistant Frank Pocock claimed that he saw white-topped mountains through the mist as they camped near Lake Edward, which connected with Lake Albert to form a major reservoir of mountain
water that entered the White Nile. But it would take until the end of the disastrous 1887–9 Emin Pasha expedition for the Mountains of the Moon to be properly discovered.

Emin Pasha was a German who pretended to be a Turk. Stanley was a Welshman who pretended to be an American. Emin Pasha was appointed to run the Equatorial area of Sudan, a replacement for General Gordon. Though he had left behind a wife and children in Germany, Emin Pasha had reinvented himself as a man of science and learning. When Gordon – who was now in charge of the whole of Sudan – refused to evacuate Khartoum he was overrun by the dervish army of the Mahdi. A dervish is, ordinarily, a Muslim seeker after truth, a kind of would-be mystic. Dervishes who have found what they seek become Sufis, and the whole of North Africa and Arabia is host to many different groupings of Sufis and dervishes. In the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Sufi orders provided moderate Islamic resistance to the extreme Saudi-influenced and -funded Islamists known as Selafis. So in general they are a force for good. However, in nineteenth-century Sudan the word ‘dervish’ became misapplied to Islamic fanatics – who we might call jihadists today. They allowed themselves to be whipped into a frenzy of anti-European sentiment by their leader, the ‘mad Mahdi’. These ‘dervishes’ became the core of the army which then persuaded local tribes to instigate a national rebellion.

Emin Pasha was sufficiently far south to be out of reach of the Mahdi’s supporters. Moving his Egyptian and European staff and army further south, Emin Pasha took to patrolling Lake Tanganyika in a steam boat. He also sent mixed messages of despair to the British government. In fact Emin Pasha was a great fool, something Stanley discovered only when he had spent a year trying to rescue him.

The British, anxious that they should not have another Gordon-type disaster on their hands, were only too pleased when Stanley was recommended to stage a relief expedition. Perhaps it was the semi-official nature of the expedition, or the fact that it would be transporting a large quantity of arms and ammunition to the embattled Emin Pasha – whatever the reason, Stanley departed from his usual practice of employing men of a lower social status than himself, people he could dominate totally. Instead he engaged several British army officers and sons of the moneyed classes. The decision was to prove a terrible mistake. When the expedition was forced to divide in two, the so-called
rear column commanded by a Major Edmund Barttelot spiralled into a jungle-induced anomie and despair. The young aristocrats and soldiers beat their native servants mercilessly. All of them had native mistresses, a practice Stanley disagreed with.

Then things took an even more macabre turn when James S. Jameson, an heir to the Jameson whiskey family in Ireland, paid for a young female slave who was then given to cannibals to be cooked and eaten as he sketched the whole proceedings. Stanley could not believe this had taken place, but when he finally relieved the rear column he was able to open the now dead Jameson’s personal box, to find the drawings he had made. This, and the charges of murder and brutality brought against the other officers under his command, were to ruin Stanley’s reputation for ever. He was known as Mata Bulair, ‘the breaker of rocks’, because of his selfless work alongside native road-builders during his work establishing trading posts in the Congo, and this epithet took on a more sinister meaning when the ghastly events of the Emin Pasha expedition were revealed. Stanley, for all his obvious gifts, was fatally poor at judging the characters of those above him on the social scale. He was repeatedly duped by the psychopathic King Leopold of Belgium, he was tricked by the cunning adventurer Pierre de Brazza, and when presented with feeble specimens of the ruling classes assumed they would live up to their public school rhetoric of honour and duty.

Once Emin Pasha was contacted, it transpired that he wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to be rescued or not. Certainly, the amount of supplies and ammo brought by Stanley was pitifully low after all the depredations the expedition had suffered. Indeed it was Emin Pasha who had to feed Stanley’s men after they had been living for months by foraging in the Ituri Forest. But Emin Pasha’s hold on his men was more fragile than his sensitive ego cared to admit. When stragglers failed to keep up with the expedition he would not order them to do so. When his men openly revolted he did nothing to quell the rebellion. In the end, though, he did leave, along with the remaining members of his embryonic ‘government’ of Equatorial Sudan.

From Sam Baker to Gordon to Emin Pasha – an explorer, a soldier and a scientist, all defeated in the end by the country and its conditions. By the time they reached the Mountains of the Moon, Stanley could barely walk a hundred yards. The thousand-person-strong expedition crossed the Semliki river in three canoes – it took a day and a half,
which was fast going, despite an attack by fifty members of the Warasura who killed two of Stanley’s men. The constant attritional warfare Stanley had suffered since leaving the lower reaches of the Congo now ceased. The people around Lake Edward were routinely oppressed by the Warasura and they welcomed Stanley’s column with ample gifts of food: ‘Not a bead or yard of cloth was demanded from us.’ The explorer established the Semliki’s source in Lake Edward, and since the Semliki fed Lake Albert it meant that the Ruwenzoris were one of the ultimate sources of the Nile – just as Ptolemy’s map had predicted. If Burton had not been so keen to shoehorn Lake Tanganyika into the role that Lake Albert played, he might not have exposed himself to being so wrong about the Nile’s source. In any case, Stanley had sewn it all up: the Nile really was solved – as far as the geographers were concerned.