Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  Inscribed on brown wooden boards just inside the front doors of the imposing redbrick headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore, London, are the names of the winners of the Society’s Gold Medal. The roll-call includes missionaries like David Livingstone, Arctic adventurers like James Clark Ross, big-game hunters like Frederick Courtney Selous, mystics like Francis Younghusband and archaeologists like Gertrude Bell, as well as Edward Eyre, who walked across much of Australia, Joseph Thomson, who once convinced menacing Masai warriors that he was superhuman by removing his false teeth and brewing up a fizzing froth of Eno’s fruit salts, and Lady Franklin, who repeatedly sponsored expeditions to discover the remains of her husband who had perished trying to find the North-West Passage. The modern RGS likes to proclaim its credentials as a research institute. But it is an unmistakably imperial creation, its headquarters acquired by Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, in the days when its membership included dukes, earls, baronets and knights, together with hundreds of naval and military officers. The men and women who won the endorsement of this bemedalled body sallied forth full of ambition and returned as newspaper heroes, best-selling authors, highly paid lecturers, hymned in the music halls and courted by portrait-painters. The commercially minded could make a fortune from advertising endorsements. (Henry Morton Stanley, for example, appeared in advertisements for Bovril, Keble’s pies, Edgington tents and ‘Victor Vaissier’s CONGO SOAP’.)

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most ambitious geographical challenge of the age was that which had animated James Bruce – the search for the source of the Nile. Early Victorian maps show a roughly accurate understanding of the coastline of Africa, with a little detail of the interior of the continent coloured in the north and south but most of the rest left as a vast expanse of white nothingness – there were rumours that much of what lay beyond the coast was only desert. Like the United States’ ambition to land a man on the moon in the latter half of the twentieth century, the attraction of discovering the source of the most famous river in the world was irresistible to an empire in its pomp. There was the incidental benefit that planting the Union flag at the head of the Nile would prevent some other European power from doing so.

  The two men chosen for the task were Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, a partnership which ended in sensational bitterness. It goes without saying that both were immensely brave. Each was also a tremendous egotist. There – save for the fact that they had both been officers in the Indian army – the similarities end. ‘As the prime minister of an Eastern despot, he would have been splendid,’ was Lord Salisbury’s verdict on Burton, and there was certainly no one like him in British public life. He belonged to that breed of Englishmen who believe that ‘Little islands are all large prisons’ and in the course of his lifetime became intimately familiar with places from Peru to Syria, from west Africa to the Rocky Mountains. His father had plans for him to become a clergyman, which would have been a very bad idea indeed, and Burton dropped out of Oxford to join the Indian army, determined to ‘be shot at for sixpence a day’. As well as his considerable mental talents – he developed a system which enabled him to learn a new language within a month, and mastered forty languages and dialects during his lifetime – Burton was hard as nails. Convinced that you could learn nothing of a culture without immersing yourself in it, he became a master of disguise, travelling through the bazaars of India, sitting in mosques, playing chess and lying around in opium dens, pretending to be a half-Persian, half-Arab merchant, having stained his face, arms, hands and feet and grown a beard and shoulder-length hair. So confident was Burton of his disguise that he claimed to have investigated male brothels in Karachi at the request of a senior officer.* In 1852 Burton proposed to the Royal Geographical Society that he make the hajj, or pilgrimage, to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from which infidels were banned. Discovery would have meant certain death, but Burton so successfully refined his disguise that he was able to pass himself off as an itinerant sufi. His account of the penetration of the forbidden Muslim holy cities made him something of a national hero: his descriptions of his adventures count among the best non-fiction of the nineteenth century. He would not, however, be mistaken for an intellectual on first sight – big-browed and strong-jawed, with a prodigious moustache and beard tumbling over each side of his upper lip and hanging from his chin like rusty chain-mail. He looked, thought one man who met him, ‘like a prize-fighter’, an impression not diminished by the scars on his face left by a lance which had pierced both cheeks. But it was the eyes which everyone remarked upon. In a typically extravagant phrase, the poet Swinburne described a ‘look of unspeakable horror in those eyes which gave him at times an almost unearthly appearance … the brow of a god and the jaw of a devil’.

  In 1856 this remarkable man applied for leave from the army to enable him to make an attempt on the true source of the Nile. He was granted two years’ paid absence, with the endorsement of the Foreign Office and the RGS. His partner on the expedition was six years younger, tall, slim, fair-haired and blue-eyed, clean-living, fit and determined. John Hanning Speke came from a West Country family which could trace its roots back to the Saxons. He had the English country gentleman’s interest in field sports and had decided to travel the Nile well before he met Burton, his main motive being to kill and preserve birds and animals for a museum he was developing at his father’s house: there were, he said, very few species left in India, Tibet or the Himalayas which he had not shot already. He was also intensely ambitious and quite fastidious: he hardly drank, so Burton’s pleasure in drink, drugs and pornography and his preoccupation with African genitalia left Speke a little cold. It was not the most auspicious of teamings, but Burton claimed that he owed Speke the opportunity to join him (despite the fact that ‘he was not a linguist … nor a man of science, nor an accurate astronomical observer’), because they had travelled together in Somalia in 1855. That journey had ended with Speke captured and at the point of death, with his gaoler stabbing a spear into his shoulder and then through each thigh. Astonishingly, Speke still retained the strength to make a run for it, to be reunited with his surviving companions. Burton later made the odd claim that ‘before we set out, [Speke] openly declared that, being tired of life, he had come to be killed in Africa’.

  For the expedition to find the source of the Nile the two men decided that, instead of following the river upstream from Egypt, they would land on the east coast of Africa and strike inland. They arrived on the island of Zanzibar in December 1856. It was a foul, stinking place, racked by malaria, dysentery, venereal diseases, yellow fever and elephantiasis, some instances of which, Burton noted, caused the scrotum to swell so much that it hung down around men’s knees. Zanzibar still had a flourishing slave trade, which the British Empire was committed to terminating. But that was not their concern: despite the support of the Royal Geographical Society and the sponsorship of the British Foreign Office, they would make their journey under the red flag of the sultan of Zanzibar. The two men did not travel especially light and the final column of porters and guards numbered 132, with a drummer and standard bearer at the front and the two white men bringing up the rear. The porters in the middle carried sacks of brightly coloured beads, bolts of cloth and rolls of brass wire, to pay the expedition’s way among local tribes. The rest of the baggage included tents and bedding, rifles and pistols, sextants, compasses, sundial, rain-gauge, barometer, pedometers, thermometers, telescope, hammers, chisels and saws, stationery (down to sealing wax), two dozen penknives, four umbrellas, 2,000 fishing hooks, a case of brandy (to be supplemented by several more later), cigars and several canisters of snuff.

  The porters travelled in a cacophony of shouting, whistling, singing and imitations of the shrieks and cries of birds – the noise was intended not merely to amuse them but to deter any potential attackers. The party fought its way through swamps and scrub, up mountains and across rivers: 10 miles a day was good going.
Tribal chiefs demanded tribute to allow the expedition to pass, thorn-bushes tore at their clothes, insects bit them mercilessly. If a hare or antelope crossed their path, the porters dropped their loads to chase it, and if successful, tore it limb from limb and ate it raw. On other occasions they squabbled, became lethargic when smoking drugs, mutinous when not. The two explorers fell sick with fever, hallucinated, starved, became so weak they could not walk, while at other times an ulcerated tongue prevented Burton from giving any orders at all. His account of the journey, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, describes how tribal chiefs amuse themselves by chopping limbs off people who displease them, how an ancient witch-doctor tried – and failed – to cure his sickness and notes the different practices of tribes like the Wanyamwezi and the Wagogo, from clothing and sex to favoured methods of intoxication. Speke does not figure prominently in the narrative and when he does appear it is generally to be described as under the weather, weak, obtuse, or having done ‘nothing at all’. Burton does, however, include Speke’s own account of the incident in which a small black beetle crawled into his ear while he was asleep. When the beetle reached his eardrum Speke said it had the same sort of effect as a swarm of bees attacking a train of donkeys. Unable to remove the beetle by pouring melted butter into his ear canal, Speke decided to try to dig it out with the blade of his penknife. In silencing the beetle he also made himself deaf and the entire side of his head and neck swelled up in buboes – it was, he said, the most painful experience of his life. (When he blew his nose his ear made an audible whistle, and six months after the event bits of beetle were still dropping out of his ear.)

  The two men landed on the east coast of mainland Africa from Zanzibar in June 1857. A year later, they had reached the Arab slave station at Tabora, in what is now western Tanzania, having already made the momentous discovery of the existence of Lake Tanganyika. Burton had hoped that the lake might turn out to be the source of the Nile, but it was not high enough above sea level for that, and anyway the river on which they had pinned their hopes turned out to flow in the wrong direction. ‘I felt sick at heart,’ Burton wrote. The camp at Tabora was comfortable, and especially congenial to Burton who enjoyed the company of Arabs – that they were in Africa as slavers did not trouble him unduly. Speke, however, was restless and anxious to see what truth there was in the tales the traders told of a much bigger lake three weeks’ journey to the north. While Burton stayed in camp to recuperate and write up his notes, Speke set off again.

  On 3 August 1858 John Hanning Speke stood on the shores of a massive body of water. He was instantly, instinctively – and unscientifically – convinced he had found what they were looking for. He stayed at the lake only three days and then rushed back to rejoin Burton, unable to contain his excitement. ‘We had scarcely breakfasted,’ recalled Burton, ‘before he announced to me the startling fact that he had discovered the sources of the White Nile.’ In the absence of any proof or even eyewitness testimony, Burton was unconvinced. But Speke would hear no doubts. And now came the oddest part of their epic journey. The two men simply decided not to discuss the matter further. ‘After a few days it became evident to me that not a word could be uttered on the subject of the Lake, the Nile, and his trouvaille generally without offence,’ said Burton. ‘By tacit agreement it was, therefore, avoided.’ In a letter to the Royal Geographical Society later, Speke gave his side of the breakdown. Burton, he said, ‘used to snub me so unpleasantly when talking about anything that I often kept my own counsel. B is one of those men who never can be wrong, and will never acknowledge an error so that when only two are together talking becomes more of a bore than a pleasure.’ Richard Burton’s line was not that he was especially miffed at being absent when the object of their shattering journey had been achieved, but that Speke was essentially guessing when he claimed that the lake (now, inevitably, christened Lake Victoria) was the source of the Nile. They should stick to what they had properly investigated.

  At the end of September 1858, the expedition set off on the journey back to the coast. By now, both men were sick and exhausted and had to be carried for much of the way. At Zanzibar, in March the following year, they took ship for Aden, where they would join another vessel for the onward journey home to England. But it was there that the two men who had shared such hardships parted. By Burton’s account, they had agreed that they would go public with their discoveries only once both were back home. Instead, Speke set off for England on board HMS Furious, and when Burton reached England, twelve days behind him, he discovered that the younger man had already contacted the president of the Royal Geographical Society to pass on his theory about the source of the Nile. London was transfixed by the news that an Englishman had almost certainly settled the greatest challenge in exploration, and £2,500 was immediately raised to send him back to Africa to confirm his discovery. When the gaunt figure of Burton reached home, he discovered there was a great deal less popular interest in his more meticulous account of Lake Tanganyika, for the obvious reason that it was not the fabled source of the Nile.

  Speke found his companion for his next expedition to be altogether more congenial. Captain James Augustus Grant was another officer in the Indian army, and had even taken part in the relief of the siege of Lucknow. But yet again, at the culmination of their journey, Speke contrived to keep the climax to himself. Grant had been immobilized for three months by an infected sore in his leg, during which time Speke had been a virtual prisoner of King Mutesa in Buganda. When Grant finally rejoined him, Speke argued that they should split the caravan, with Grant preparing the ground for their return, while he pressed on to investigate stories of massive waterfalls where Lake Victoria spilled its banks. Conscious that his injured leg would not allow him to match the furious pace which Speke now proposed – 20 miles each day – Grant claimed to be entirely happy with the arrangement. On 21 July 1862, Speke reached the Nile, where he told his men ‘they ought to shave their heads and bathe in the holy river, the cradle of Moses’. They turned to march towards the source of the river.

  And so, one week later, on 28 July, Speke cast his eyes upon the great enigma of geography, the falls where Lake Victoria pours into the River Nile. ‘It was a sight that attracted one for hours,’ Speke wrote, ‘the roar of the waters, the thousands of passenger-fish leaping at the falls with all their might; the Wasoga and Waganda fishermen coming out in boats and taking post on all the rocks with rod and hook, hippopotami and crocodiles lying sleepily on the water.’ He named the place Ripon Falls, after the first Marquess of Ripon, president of the Royal Geographical Society when the expedition was organized. Then, reunited with Grant, Speke set off downstream on the Nile. At Gondoroko in southern Sudan, on 13 February 1863 – nearly two years and five months after starting their journey – they met Samuel Baker and his future wife, Florence (he had bought her in a slave auction), who had come upriver to search for them. Samuel and Florence offered the two men a cup of tea, Baker noting that:

  Speke appeared the more worn of the two: he was excessively lean, but in reality he was in good tough condition; he had walked the whole way from Zanzibar, never having once ridden during that wearisome march. Grant was in honourable rags; his bare knees projecting through the remnants of trousers that were an exhibition of rough industry in tailor’s work. He was looking tired and feverish, but both men had a fire in the eye, that showed the spirit that had led them through.

  As soon as he was able to do so, Speke cabled London: ‘The Nile is settled.’

  But the Nile was not entirely ‘settled’. Speke had neither circumnavigated the lake nor given the river a comprehensive survey. Burton, for one, still nursed a grievance and clung to the possibility that Lake Tanganyika might be the source. The missionary and explorer David Livingstone was also sceptical. To settle the matter once and for all, a meeting was arranged for September 1864 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It was to be held in Bath, where Burton and Speke would present their arguments to an audience o
f geographers and scientists. But there was to be one final chapter in this extraordinary story. As the audience gathered on the morning of what had come to be known as ‘The Nile Duel’, a note was passed around. When the contents of the note were read to Burton, he staggered and sank into a chair, with the words, ‘By God, he’s killed himself!’

  Whether Speke took his own life or was the victim of an extraordinarily timed accident will never be known. The day before the debate the two men had been in the same room, but cut each other dead, with Speke said to have left the room exclaiming, ‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ He had then gone off to his uncle’s nearby estate to shoot partridges. At about 4 p.m., his companions saw the explorer standing on top of a low wall. They heard a shot and saw him fall. When they reached him they found an awful wound to his chest. It looked as though he had clambered over the wall and then tried to pull his loaded gun – which had no safety catch – up after him. By the time they managed to get a doctor to him, Speke was dead. An inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.

  These epics of nineteenth-century exploration gave the expansion of empire a clear focus. They were fantastical tales of wild landscapes, weird animals, extreme hardship and utterly different cultures, and their heroes men whose steely fortitude seemed to express a national purpose. Many of the protagonists of these epics also had a talent for self-promotion. Newspaper editors recognized that there were few things their growing readership would enjoy more with their breakfast marmalade than news of battles against the odds and they soon began the modern habit of sponsoring expeditions and paying small fortunes for first-hand accounts written by the explorers themselves. (The practice extended to wars as well, with correspondents like G. W. Steevens regaling readers of the Daily Mail with accounts of the glorious thrill of imperial battles – ‘the only complete holiday ever invented’* – in places like Sudan and South Africa.)