by Tim Jeal
The world’s longest river has two main branches: the White Nile, which flows 4,230 miles from its remotest central African sources to the Mediterranean, and the Blue Nile, which rises high up on the Ethiopian plateau and flows for 1,450 miles before it joins the White Nile at Khartoum. By then the White Nile has already flowed for nearly 2,500 miles.2
During the first two decades of the seventeenth century, two Spanish Jesuit priests, Pedro Paez and Jeronimo Lobo, reached the headwaters of the Blue Nile. The Scot James Bruce ignored their achievement and published a popular account of his own identical ‘discovery’ made 150 years later. From that time it would be suspected that the annual flood on the lower Nile between July and October was due to monsoon rains falling on the Ethiopian highlands and cascading with spectacular force down a succession of rapids towards the parent stream via the Blue Nile and other rivers.
But on the White Nile itself, there would be no comparable discoveries, although this far longer river provided water all the year round, even during the months of winter and spring when the Blue Nile and the Atbara were dried-up riverbeds. Despite Egypt’s absolute dependence on the continuous flow of the White Nile, by the early 1850s not a single one of the succession of Greek, Italian, Maltese and French traders and adventurers who had attempted to locate the source for two decades had managed to journey further south than the position of the present town of Juba 750 miles south of Khartoum.
At first sight it seems incredible that in the era of the steam engine, the galvanic battery, telegraphic communication and accurate chronometers, the Nile continued to keep its secrets. But there were many excellent reasons for the lack of progress in the great quest: ‘fever’ and other unexplained tropical illnesses decimated expeditions, cataracts blocked the upper river, tsetse fly killed beasts of burden and made wheeled transport impossible, porters deserted, the rainy season turned whole regions into quagmires, and local conflicts stirred up by the slave trade caused many chiefs to shower strangers with spears and poisoned arrows rather than with gifts.
But between 1856 and 1876, the White Nile would at last yield up its secrets to an idiosyncratic group of exceptionally brave British explorers, who would solve the mystery of the source bit by bit – despite many illnesses, including loss of sight and hearing, and in one instance, for a time, the use of both legs. They also suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, malaria, colonic haemorrhage and deep spear wounds. Ironically, after their journeys were over, almost all would disagree profoundly about which one of them had won the crown.
Fifty years ago, Alan Moorehead’s international bestseller about the search for the source of the Nile was published. Although, in the decades since The White Nile first appeared, a mass of previously unknown facts relating to the search have come to light, both in manuscript and in published form, no full-scale attempt has been made until now to write a further book on the subject, in which the new material is used to deepen and redraw the characters and relationships of the original Nile explorers, to re-examine their journeys, and to reassess up to the present day the enduring and tragic consequences of nineteenth-century exploration of the Nile basin. New information exists that sheds light on all the above subjects, but also on more personal matters, ranging from Speke’s alleged betrayal of Burton, to how Baker acquired the mistress he took to Africa, to whether Speke had an affair with a Ugandan courtier, and to whether the real Livingstone and the real Stanley resembled their portrayals in The White Nile. I give a full account of related books and my own researches at the end of this volume on pages 438-42.
Today, the mid-nineteenth-century explorers are often assumed to have been motivated by an avaricious desire to exploit Africans and Africa for commercial gain, or for the dubious satisfaction of wielding power over the powerless. In reality, a decade before the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley and nearly twenty years before gold was found on the Witwatersrand, the motives of men like Burton, Speke and Grant were quite different from those of the European administrators, soldiers and traders who went out to Africa in the 1880s and 1890s when the Scramble for Africa was in progress. In the 1850s and 1860s love of adventure played a greater part in motivating men to risk their lives to make ‘discoveries’ than did the desire to carve out markets. Indeed, a longing to escape from what Stanley called ‘that shallow life in England where a man is not permitted to be real and natural’, first drew him and the rest to Africa.3
Only ‘the Dark Continent’ and other wild places appeared to offer to high-spirited individuals in the industrialised countries a chance to escape from the factories, offices and counting houses of the expanding cities. Most would have empathised with Rimbaud’s oft-quoted lament before he left Europe for Harar in Ethiopia: ‘What a life this is! True life is elsewhere.’ Samuel Baker wrote of longing to be ‘a wandering spirit’ and to plunge ‘into the Unknown’.4 When Speke had been granted periods of leave from the Indian Army, he had travelled to the mountains of Tibet or to Somalia rather than return to the tame tea cups and social chit-chat of England. An early missionary in Nyasaland (Malawi) put his finger on an essential part of the appeal of Africa. ‘The sense of individuality is the main attraction. In the constant whirl of civilization the personal element is somewhat lost in the mass. Out in the forests of Africa you are the man amongst your surroundings.’5
Burton echoed these sentiments but went a Nietzschean step further. ‘Man wants to wander,’ he declared, ‘and he must do so, or he shall die.’ Famously, he described for the benefit of a friend: ‘Starting in a hollowed log of wood – some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself “Why?” and the only echo is “damned fool! … The Devil drives.”‘6 Many other explorers relished living on the razor’s edge and typically experienced long depressions on coming home after prolonged periods exposed to danger.
For a former workhouse boy like Henry Morton Stanley, Africa offered a chance to transform himself and assume a fresh identity with a new mission in life. Riding into the bush on his white stallion on his way to find Dr Livingstone, he was quite literally a man re-made, with his old, unwanted persona and nationality (even his name) discarded. In Africa, he declared, the human spirit is ‘not repressed by fear, nor depressed by ridicule and insults … [but] soars free and unrestrained … [and] imperceptibly changes the whole man’.7
Then there was the urgent hunger for discovery which all these men felt – an intensified form of the innate curiosity of all humans. ‘Discovery is mostly my mania,’ confessed Burton.8 This ‘mania’ seemed at times to consign explorers to membership of a separate species, set apart by extreme purposefulness and an extraordinary capacity to suffer and take risks. But the ‘mania’ was not always masochistic or even purely egotistical. Speke described how his determination to be an explorer had ‘led on from shooting, collecting, mapping and ranging the world generally’ to the point where he felt himself ‘gradually wedded with geographical research’.9 ‘Wedded’ was a strong word, and Speke would indeed be utterly single-minded about making precise scientific observations even when this demanded that he sit up all night in bad weather waiting for a break in the clouds to calculate his lunar angles. Stanley was also determined to make his maps accurate at a heavy personal cost.
Along with undoubted dreams of personal glory through best-selling books and social advancement, most of the Nile explorers harboured a genuine belief that they were making geographical discoveries for the benefit of the human race at large and not just for themselves. Whether or not fame would ultimately be theirs, the achievement of reaching any long-pursued lake, river or spring bestowed a joy that was almost religious. Believing that he was looking down at the principal reservoir of the Nile, the normally brash Baker thanked God that: ‘I had been the humble instrument permitted to unravel this portion of the great mystery … I felt too serious to vent my feelings in vain cheers for victory.’10 Of all the explorers, David Livingstone seemed least affected by the desire to achieve personal
glory. He wrote: ‘When one travels with the specific object of ameliorating the condition of the natives every act becomes ennobled … the sweat of one’s brow is no longer a curse when one works for God.’11 Yet even Livingstone longed to ‘cut out’ his rivals by finding the Nile’s source and restoring his reputation as the world’s greatest explorer.
When Baker saw Speke and Grant emerge from central Africa on the upper Nile, gaunt and sun-browned, their clothes in tatters after three years of travelling, he cried out spontaneously: ‘Hurrah for Old England!’ Simple patriotism was certainly a great spur to these explorers at a time when Britain was master of the seas and the undisputed ‘workshop of the world’. Speke told a friend that he had gone back to Africa because he ‘would rather die a hundred times’ than wake up and learn that ‘any foreigner should have taken from Britain the honour of discovery’.12 But he did not mean to stake out territory for Britain. His pride was in being the first, as he thought, to have made a particular discovery ahead of the explorers of other nations.
Yet the explorers’ motives would shift and change as time passed. While the Nile mystery was being solved between 1856 and 1877, humanitarians, sportsmen and adventurers were in the ascendant along the river and in Equatorial Africa. Thereafter political interests intruded, and came to dominate. Samuel Baker returned to Africa to fight the slave trade but also to extend the territory of the khedive of Egypt, and Henry Stanley sailed for West Africa to launch steamships on the Congo and build a road and trading posts for King Leopold II of Belgium. Meanwhile the journeys of Hermann von Wissmann and Karl Peters would be used to justify Germany in claiming the greater part of East Africa. By then de Brazza’s rivalry with Stanley had led the French government to earmark a vast territory along the north bank of the Congo.
It was suggested by Malawi’s first ‘President for Life’, Dr Hastings Banda, that the whole idea of European explorers making ‘discoveries’ was insulting and absurd. ‘There was nothing to discover,’ said Dr Banda, ‘we were here all the time.’13 And of course African eyes had looked upon all the great lakes and rivers for countless generations before any European explorer ever managed to do the same. Yet no African knew the extent of the watersheds of the Nile, Congo or Niger, nor understood how Africa’s lakes and rivers were connected. The distances that had to be travelled before conclusions could be reached about such matters ran into thousands of miles, and the same problems that had made travel so difficult for Europeans also existed for Africans, who, even if they had learned where the Nile’s or Congo’s sources were situated, would not have had access to the chronometer watches, sextants and artificial horizons that would have enabled them to place the headwaters on an accurate map.
Chief Kasembe, when asked by Livingstone about the direction of a local river and its source, replied: ‘We let the streams run on, and do not enquire whence they rise or whither they flow.’ Another chief declined to talk about a nearby lake on the grounds that it was ‘only water – nothing to be seen’. Questions about such matters struck many Africans as suspicious and pointless.14 In the case of places that had not been visited before, most villagers judged that there would probably be supernatural reasons for this, and that such places were best avoided.
It is true that few European explorers gave adequate recognition in their books either to the geographical information they obtained from Arab-Swahili slave traders or to the essential role played by the Africans who accompanied them and made their journeys possible by carrying the trade goods used to buy food en route and pay chiefs for the right to pass through their territories. Africans also acted as interpreters, guards and guides. But some explorers did give credit where it was due. Livingstone often praised his men despite their frequent desertions and thefts. Speke sided with his porters against Burton in a long-running dispute over alleged misbehaviour, and Stanley often paid tribute to his men in print. ‘Their names should be written in gold,’ he wrote of the brave crewmen who volunteered to accompany him in a small boat on the uncharted waters of Lake Victoria.15 The most famous African leaders of caravans, such as Sidi Mubarak Bombay and Abdullah Susi acquired their experience and expertise on many journeys – Bombay having served Speke twice, before working for Stanley, and Susi having been freed from a slave caravan by Livingstone, and then working for eight years for him, before serving Stanley on the Congo. Most explorers owed their lives to their porters, often several times, but to suppose that such men, in different circumstances, might have taken equivalent risks on their own account in order to make similar geographical discoveries, would be fanciful.
Richard Burton once complained that:
The Anglo-African traveller in this section of the nineteenth century is an overworked professional … expected to survey and observe, to record meteorology and trigonometry, to shoot and stuff birds and beasts, to collect geological specimens and theories … to advance the infant study of anthropology, to keep accounts, to sketch, to indite a copious legible journal … and to forward long reports which shall prevent the Royal Geographical Society napping through its evenings.16
All this work had to be done against a background of very real danger. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when few European travellers entered the East African interior, three had been murdered there – and this was at the very time when Speke and Burton set out for Lake Tanganyika, and when Livingstone began his last journey. The Nile explorers only had to study the fate of the earlier West African explorers to know that whole expeditions had died of malaria. During Mungo Park’s 1805 expedition, forty out of forty-four Europeans had perished, with Park himself being murdered. In Richard Lander’s expedition on the same river thirty years later, thirty-eight men succumbed out of forty-seven, and Lander died of the after-effects of a bullet wound. Between 1853 and 1856, Livingstone demonstrated that quinine aided resistance to malaria – though all Stanley’s white companions perished on successive journeys, and the same fate would befall V. L. Cameron’s two European colleagues.
The courage and resourcefulness of the Nile explorers and their capacity for transcending ordinary human limitation was demonstrated again and again during their epic twenty-year quest. Speke in 1861, on his magnificent journey from Unyanyembe to Buganda, faced repeated illness, months of forced detention and robbery, and the mass desertion of his porters. In 1868, David Livingstone was deserted by all but three of his men, but still had the temerity to set out for Lake Bangweulu in the midst of the rainy season.17 In 1877, when many of Stanley’s men were starving on the lower Congo, and had lost the will to live, he led by example and inspired them to struggle on, shooting the rapids and saving themselves.
Daring to complete death-defying quests chimed with the Victorians’ passion for medieval chivalry, and with the Christian idea of redemption through suffering which resonated so deeply with them. So the modern penchant for calling men like David Livingstone and Henry Stanley self-destructive or perverse would have caused great surprise to most of their contemporaries, for whom the discovery of the Nile’s source was an event as momentous as the moon landings would be when witnessed a century later. Nor is it appropriate to stigmatise these extraordinary men for possessing the exploitative vices of a later generation of European adventurers and settlers. (That change in attitudes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is the subject of later chapters in this book.)
In retrospect it is possible to see the search for the source of the Nile as the last flowering of the spirit of adventure before ‘Great Power’ competition, and the ‘scramble’ for colonies, elbowed aside extraordinary individuals, and replaced them with government expeditions marching ever faster along the jingoistic path that led, at journey’s end, to the final death of adventure in the mud of the Western Front.
Tim Jeal
London, 2011
PART I
SOLVING THE MYSTERY
ONE
Blood in God’s River
In March 1866, David Livingstone, wearing his trademark p
eaked cap, landed at Mikindani Bay on the East African coast and strode inland followed by thirty-five porters and a bizarre assortment of baggage animals, consisting of four buffaloes, six camels, four donkeys and six mules. The day was fiercely hot, and Dr Livingstone and his polyglot following of coastal Africans, Indian sepoys and mission-educated freed slaves were soon struggling along a valley choked with rank grass that towered above their heads and made them feel as if they were being smothered.1 By a characteristic piece of bad luck, the doctor had chanced to step ashore at one of the few points on the coast where dense jungle stretched far into the interior. Soon the undergrowth became thicker, and his men were obliged to use their axes to hack a path wide enough for the swaying camels to negotiate. Within hours the overloaded animals were being bitten by tsetse fly. As they weakened and slowed, the porters beat them to restore their energy. When Livingstone objected, the first mutinous voices were raised against him. His troubles were just beginning.2
Just over a year earlier – despite being a decade or more older than his principal rivals – the 53-year-old medical missionary turned explorer had been commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society, the world’s principal sponsor of exploration, to do nothing less extraordinary than solve the planet’s greatest remaining geographical mystery by finding the River Nile’s headwaters. In recent years, other explorers, notably John Speke, Richard Burton and Samuel Baker, had claimed to have reached the river’s source, or at least one of its main reservoirs; but there was no consensus among geographers about whether any had proved his case. So Sir Roderick Murchison, the elderly President of the RGS, had decided in Livingstone’s self-approving phrase, ‘to take the true scientific way of settling the matter’ by inviting him ‘to ascertain the watershed’.3 Had Sir Roderick chosen anyone else, Dr Livingstone, who prided himself on travelling ‘beyond every other man’s line of things’,4 would have thought it anything but ‘the true scientific way’. In fairness to him, no other explorer had spent anything approaching his twenty-one years in Africa, nor come close to overhauling the vast mileage he had tramped.
