by Tim Jeal
Who could accompany the people of Dugumbe and Tagamoio … and be free from blood-guiltiness? … The open murder perpetrated on hundreds of unsuspecting women fills me with unspeakable horror.
It was now out of the question for him to go anywhere with Arabs. But could Livingstone trust his ten slaves and four loyal men to stay with him on a journey of thousands of miles down the Lualaba, contending with cataracts, and facing hostile people on the banks day after day? When his Zanzibari slaves told him next day they would prefer to follow Tagamoio and capture slaves, Livingstone knew that his situation was hopeless.
The terrible scenes of man’s inhumanity to man brought on severe headache … I was laid up all yesterday afternoon with depression at the bloodshed … I cannot stay here in agony.
David Livingstone left for Ujiji with his fourteen men and an unknown number of women on 20 July. He had been delayed at the last moment by one of his slaves, who had pretended to be ill, so that he and his fellows gained ‘time to negotiate for women with whom they had cohabited’. Disgusted by his followers, and traumatised by the killings, against his will Livingstone was turning his back on the river that had carried all his hopes. On the very edge of achieving something more wonderful than all his past achievements combined, everything had been snatched from him. The best he could hope for was to reach Lake Tanganyika and Ujiji in three or four months’ time, and from there send letters to Zanzibar appealing for new and more carefully chosen men and supplies to be sent from the coast. With luck, they might arrive ten months after a caravan had departed with his letters. After that it might be another six months or more before he was back at Nyangwe.62 Twenty months in all, or two years – time which his age and health told him he might not have.
Once again he was struggling through an immense and impenetrable forest, where the light of the sun was filtered by the canopy to a dim haze. In the semi-darkness, the sense of isolation was overwhelming – as was the constant fear. Livingstone felt as if he were running the gauntlet, with hidden spearmen waiting to strike on either side, believing that ‘if they killed [him] they would be revenging the death of relations’. How ironic if the man who longed to expose the traders should die because mistaken for one of them.
From each hole in the tangled mass we looked for a spear; and each moment expected to hear the rustle which told of deadly weapons hurled. I became weary with the constant strain of danger, and – as I suppose happens with soldiers on the field of battle – not courageous, but perfectly indifferent whether I were killed or not.
Then one morning, when he was threading his way along ‘a narrow path with a wall of dense vegetation touching each hand, a large spear almost grazed [his] back, and stuck firmly into the soil’.63 Another spear whipped by less than a foot ahead of him. He and his men fired into the foliage, but hit no one.
Though he meant to do everything in his power to return to Manyema, Livingstone feared he might never see the Lualaba again. In the meantime, the world’s geographers would be left knowing that there was, at the heart of Africa, an immense northward-flowing river, the ultimate direction of which they could only guess at.
‘A large spear … stuck firmly into the soil’ (from Livingstone’s Last Journals).
TWO
A Great Misalliance
In November 1853, eighteen years before Dr Livingstone stumbled away from the Lualaba in despair, a man whom the doctor would come to detest for what he called ‘his bestial immorality’,1 booked in at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. His name was Lieutenant Richard Francis Burton, and he intended, while recovering from dysentery, to work on a mould-breaking travel book. His hope – even expectation – was that its subject would make him famous.2 While writing up his recent Arabian adventure, Burton had no premonition that before he left Cairo the geographical goals of his ‘mania for discovery’ – as he himself described his wanderlust – would have changed decisively.3
During a year’s leave from the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, the 32-year-old officer had completed the pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a Muslim peddler of medicines and horoscopes. Whether he would have been killed if unmasked is far from certain, although Burton meant to give that impression. His book could only create a sensation if he appeared to have risked a public beheading, or a knife in the back. Before setting out, he had not only chosen his identity as an Afghan Sufi, but to be safe had arranged to be circumcised.4 His voluntary subjection of himself to this painful procedure would not stop critics calling his pilgrimage a theatrical sham.
In truth, the hajj had been successfully completed only forty years earlier by the Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who had entered Mecca dressed as a Muslim merchant, and had published no fewer than four fat volumes about the experience. Over the centuries, numerous self-professed converts to Islam had made the journey openly as Westerners, in perfect safety. But Burton’s passion for disguise – which his gift for languages facilitated – ran very deep. While working for General Napier’s intelligence section in Sindh, India, he had already assumed a false identity as an Iranian traveller in fine linens. For a man who was alienated from his British origins, missions requiring him to assume alternative identities had helped him reinvent himself as ‘Ruffian Dick’, a perpetual maverick and outsider. He would claim that while staying at Shepheard’s in Cairo, he wore his Arab clothes to dismay his fellow-European guests into thinking they were under the same roof as an Arab. They would have disapproved even more had they known that ‘the Arab’ was really an Englishman, who had recently visited a nearby brothel, where, as he told a friend, he had participated in ‘a precious scene of depravity … beating the Arabian Nights all to chalks!’5
Though born in the respectable seaside town of Torquay on England’s south coast, Burton had spent much of his childhood and adolescence travelling from town to town in France, Italy and Sicily at the whim of his hypochondriac father, who, after retiring early from the British Army as a lieutenant-colonel, had left England for the sake of his health. This was not improved when his two teenage sons took to visiting local brothels and having love affairs with married women. On several occasions the threat of scandal caused sudden departures from otherwise pleasant places.
Richard, who was Joseph Burton’s second son, was sent briefly to England: at first to a third-rate private school in Brighton and later to Trinity College, Oxford, where he deliberately contrived his own sending down to stop his father forcing him into Holy Orders. Burton’s experiences in his native land had convinced him that he would never feel comfortable with his fellow-countrymen. In India, he had been equally ill at ease in the company of civil servants of the East India Company and their wives, and scornfully described middle-class ‘society’ in the sub-continent as being ‘like that of a small county town suddenly raised to the top of a tree [where it] lost its head accordingly’.6
By becoming fluent in Hindustani, Marathi and Gujerati, he got to know the local people, and at the same time gained promotion in his regiment. He studied with munshis (Indian teachers), and was not displeased when his visits to their homes led to his being called a ‘white nigger’.7 He liked to shock respectable people, provided it caused no lasting offence to his military superiors. Most officers – and he was no exception – had Indian mistresses; but since this fact was never mentioned in public, it carried no stigma. Burton despised ostentatious piety and deplored attempts made by missionaries to convert colonised peoples. Yet he was no liberal, and his respect for Indian culture did not stop him kicking servants and boasting of ‘well deserved beatings’. In truth, he believed in British superiority and was a convinced imperialist.8
Outwardly sure of himself, his opinions were often contradictory or ambivalent. Indeed, Burton regretted that his peripatetic early life had left him rootless and unattached. He believed that if his father had only sent him to Eton, he would have found his passage through life far easier.
In consequence of being brought up abroad, I never thoroughly understood
English society, nor did society understand me … it is a real advantage to belong to some parish … In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light without a focus.9
He found his ‘parish’ and his ‘focus’ by entering the Arab world, and through dangerous journeys like the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Yet despite his fluency in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, and his justifiable pride in being an outstanding Arabist, he could never fully take on the mental, as well as the physical, clothing of a true Bedouin. His enjoyment of being in the desert, and dressing as an Arab, weakened his sense of his English self but did not replace it. He neither converted to Islam nor gave up his military career, despite his continuing need to escape from ‘civilised life’ and from the social conventions of his class. The result was a dissatisfaction with himself that was only appeased by visiting wild places.10
‘Man wants to wander and he must do so, or he shall die,’ he wrote while still in Cairo.11 Because he was dismayed to have no new adventure in prospect, he was overjoyed when an old friend, Dr John Stocks, who had served with him as a medical officer in Sindh, arrived at Shepheard’s Hotel with news that the Royal Geographical Society wanted to sponsor an expedition to Somaliland (later Somalia). Burton wrote at once to Dr Norton Shaw, the RGS’s secretary, whom he knew already, thanks to the society’s sponsorship of his journey to Mecca, and confided his keenness to lead any future expedition to Somaliland. In parentheses Burton mentioned to Shaw that the Bombay government would have sent an exploring expedition to East Africa a year before, if the man appointed to lead it had not suddenly pulled out because of ‘not relishing the chance of losing his cod’. It was said that the Somalis were ‘in the habit of cutting them off and hanging them as ornaments round their arms’. This alarmist talk did not bother him, Burton assured Shaw, and since he expected to have recovered his health within a few months, he would be ready to start for Somaliland early in 1854 after the hot season was over. But that was not all. What he wished to do too, he explained, was go on to Zanzibar from Somaliland and then head eastward into the African interior.
‘You will ask why I now prefer Zanzibar to Arabia,’ he went on, before explaining that a German missionary called Krapf had recently ‘arrived (in Cairo) from Zanzibar with [talk of his] discoveries about [the source] of the White Nile, Kilimanjaro & Mts of Moon which reminds one of a “de Lunatico”. I have not seen him,’ Burton admitted, ‘but don’t intend to miss the spectacle’.12 Despite the humorously dismissive tone of his letter, Burton was madly excited by Krapf’s remarks. Like Livingstone, he knew all about Ptolemy’s report of Diogenes’ claim to have located ‘the Mountains of the Moon, from which the lakes of the Nile receive the snows’.13 And now this German missionary, Dr Johann Ludwig Krapf, was asserting that in May 1848 his missionary colleague, Johann Rebmann, had become the first European to see a snowy mountain peak in sub-Saharan Africa. Its local name was Kilimanjaro, and it was 175 miles inland from the coast. In the following year, Krapf gained a distant view of Mount Kenya, another snow-mountain, a hundred miles to the north-west. Then Burton heard something really startling that Krapf was telling people. ‘When in Ukumbani [the area of both mountains], I heard of a mighty inland sea, the end of which was not to be reached after a hundred days’.14 So there were two snow mountains in East Africa and also a lake – or possibly two – again as Ptolemy had stated – perhaps fed by glacier water flowing from the as yet undiscovered ‘Mountains of the Moon’, placed by the Greek geographer just south of the lakes. Mounts Kilimanjaro and Kenya were said by the missionaries not to give rise to any rivers, but the existence of snow-clad summits south of the equator seemed to point to the probable existence of other tall mountains, perhaps an entire range.
Burton suggested to Shaw that these recent discoveries could turn Krapf into his [Burton’s] ‘John the Baptist’. This blasphemous comparison of himself with Christ would have entertained Burton, as would its arrogant subtext that he would now complete what the missionary had merely started.15 Krapf did not stay long in Cairo, and it is doubtful whether Burton actually met him. So he would not learn for several years that in Masailand, with his colleague Rebmann, Krapf had narrowly escaped being killed by a group of Masai warriors who had butchered their African porters almost to a man.16 But, at this date, Burton did at least know that, in 1844, a young French naval officer, Lieutenant M. Maizan, journeying inland from the coast, had been caught, tied to a tree, mutilated and then beheaded by tribesmen – another clear indication that trying to reach the Nile’s source from Mombasa or Zanzibar, rather than directly upstream from Egypt, was unlikely to be problem-free.17
So why not try the direct route up the Nile? Throughout recorded history it had been blocked by the swamps of the Sudd. But in 1841, the Egyptian viceroy, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a modernising Francophile, had sent an expedition of several boats commanded by Selim Bimbashi, a corpulent Turkish captain, who, accompanied by his favourite concubine and a eunuch, had forced a way through the floating islands of aquatic vegetation, and had then sailed on to Gondokoro, 700 miles south of Khartoum as the crow flies.18 The Upper Nile had thus become viable for traders, missionaries, big-game hunters and adventurers. So, for two decades, a motley group of people launched a series of uncoordinated attempts to reach the source. Because they lacked proper funding, exploration had to be fitted in with trading or with sporting pursuits. Andrew Melly, a Liverpool businessman, had plenty of money, but he made his Nile attempt purely for pleasure in the company of his son, his daughter and his wife. Their tinned salmon, champagne and other provisions had been purchased at Fortnum & Mason, and they had no intention of risking their lives. Even so, Melly died of fever at Shendi near Khartoum in 1850.19
Most of the Europeans who travelled south at this time were Frenchmen and Italians hoping to get rich in the ivory trade. Instead, the majority died of malaria. More successful was a determined Maltese trader, technically a British subject. By 1851 the moustachioed, cane-carrying Andrea De Bono employed 400 men as porters and boatmen in his ivory company. Occasionally he would capture a lion and sell it to a zoo or menagerie. De Bono’s enemies swore that he and his nephew bought and sold human beings as well as exotic animals. At this time, De Bono moved his headquarters south from the slaving town of Khartoum to distant Gondokoro, described by one traveller as ‘that Babylon of prostitution’.20 From this stinking, rat-infested string of slave and ivory camps beside the Nile, De Bono, and his friends and business partners, launched themselves up the river. But a combination of cerebral malaria, cataracts and hostile Africans defeated them. In 1853, while Richard Burton was writing his book in Cairo, entirely unknown to him De Bono travelled up the Nile once again and passed through the land of the Bari and the Obbo to within eighty miles of Lake Albert. A few years later, Jules Verne would pay tribute to the Maltese trader’s achievement in his adventure novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, by having one of his characters look down through binoculars and spot De Bono’s initials, which he had carved on a rock on an island, near Fola Rapids. ‘It is the signature of the traveller who has gone farthest up the course of the Nile!’21 Although other attempts were soon made – several ending tragically – De Bono’s most southerly point would not be bettered until 1860 when the extraordinary Italian polymath, Giovanni Miani – who had written operas and been a professional wood carver before starting to trade in ivory – struggled as far south as modern Nimule, near the present Ugandan border, before being forced back by illness and an attack by Madi tribesmen.22 Miani would die in 1872, aged sixty-one, still trading on the upper Nile and its tributaries. His last written words were: ‘Adieu so many great hopes: the dreams of my life.’23 Since De Bono and Miani did not know precisely how close they had been to making significant discoveries, the world would remain ignorant of their achievements.
Blissfully unaware of what had been happening on the upper Nile, Burton stayed on in Cairo for three leisurely months, only leaving in mid-January 1854. On reaching India in
mid-February, he delayed till April before submitting to the Bombay government his application for leave of absence and permission to explore Somaliland, and then head south and travel into the interior from Zanzibar. Since it was not unusual for favoured officers to be given paid leave in which to make journeys likely to increase the company’s knowledge of the lands bordering its territories, he was not surprised when the required permission was formally confirmed by the East India Company in London, and a grant of £1,000 was promised.24 But he was appalled to be given only a year’s leave of absence since this would make it all but impossible to attempt his all-important second objective: a journey into the heart of the continent from Zanzibar to find the Nile’s source. How disappointed he was can easily be imagined after reading this declaration in his application to the Bombay government. Despite the maddeningly pedantic style of the communication, his passionate desire to solve the age-old mystery shines through:
It may be permitted me to observe that I cannot contemplate without enthusiasm, the possibility of bringing my compass to bear upon the Jebel Hamar, those ‘Mountains of the Moon’ … a range white with eternal snows even in the blaze of the African summer, supposed to be the father of the mysterious Nile … a tract invested with all the romance of wild fable and hoar antiquity, to this day the [most] worthwhile subject to which human energy could be devoted. For unnumbered centuries, explorers have attempted the unknown source of the ‘White River’ by voyaging and travelling and literally against the stream. I shall be the first to try by a more feasible line to begin with the head.25
