Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  The thought of finding the Nile’s source now became for Burton ‘the mot de l’énigme, the way to make the egg stand upright, the rending of the veil of Isis’. and, of course, the way to become a great deal more famous than his journey to Mecca was ever likely to make him.26 But that would have to wait till he could persuade his employer to grant him more time. But a year might nevertheless be long enough to bring back a wealth of new information about Somaliland and its people – enough, perhaps, to persuade the grandees of the East India Company to send him to find the Nile’s source.

  To prepare for his expedition, Burton arrived at the coaling station of Aden, on the southern Arabian coast, in advance of the men he had chosen as expedition members. Later, he would claim that it was entirely due to advice tendered by the over-cautious British Political Resident, Brigadier James Outram, that he decided to journey without his fellow officers into south-eastern Ethiopia to visit Harar, which was then considered to be Islam’s fourth most holy city, after Mecca, Medina and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.27 In truth, he had never intended to take any colleague with him, and had always planned to claim sole credit for becoming the first European to enter this fiercely religious place, which was said to be closed to foreign visitors and therefore dangerous to enter. That Burton was eager to upstage his companions in a reprise of his Mecca adventure would not have mattered if one of them had not been destined to become his partner on his next and far more important East Africa journey, targeting the Nile’s source.

  Burton had wanted to take to Somaliland his friend Dr John E. Stocks, a military surgeon, who is thought to have circumcised him before his trip to Mecca. But Stocks, who lived hard – ‘an excellent chap, but a mad bitch’ according to his friend – died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage, and so Burton was left looking for a last-minute replacement.28 He had already chosen Lieutenant William Stroyan of the Indian Navy, and Lieutenant G. E. Herne, who had both worked on the Sindh survey with him. Then pure chance delivered to him the man who would be his nemesis, and whose well-merited place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest explorers Burton would later work so hard to obliterate. Right on cue, Lieutenant John Hanning Speke – ‘Jack’ to his friends – stepped ashore on a hot day in mid-September 1854 at Steamer Point, Aden, from a P&O steamship from Calcutta. One of the greatest misalliances in history was about to begin, without either party having the least presentiment of trouble ahead.

  THREE

  A Rush of Men Like a Stormy Wind

  Most of Richard Burton’s many biographers have seen John Hanning Speke as a being inferior to their own complex and multi-talented subject in virtually every respect.1 But Burton himself did not make the same mistake. Almost twenty years after the two men had first met – by which time Burton would have long since come to detest the man and his memory – he could still vividly recall the favourable impression which Speke had made upon him.

  A man of lithe, spare form, about six feet tall, blue-eyes, tawny-maned; the old Scandinavian type, full of energy and life, with a highly nervous temperament, a token of endurance, and long wiry, but not muscular limbs that could cover the ground at a swinging pace.2

  Jack Speke’s willowy figure, his fair-skinned, fresh-faced good looks, and his assured but reserved manner, contrasted strikingly with Burton’s swarthy, almost oriental appearance, and his dark-eyed, melodramatic presence. As tall as Speke, and broader shouldered, Burton, with his high cheekbones, black hair and luxuriant moustache, looked exotic and foreign – rather gypsylike – although he sprang from the English upper-middle-class, as did the new arrival. Burton’s face often bore an expression of ferocious cynicism, which one of his recent biographers has attributed to resentment of his superiors in India for failing to appreciate his merits.3 His heavy brows and darkly brooding expressions sometimes led acquaintances, and even friends, to call his appearance Satanic.4 But it was the sociable Richard Burton, and not his fiercely combative doppelgänger, who greeted Speke under the dark cliffs of Aden’s extinct volcano.

  Jack Speke had just been to see Brigadier Outram, who, as Political Resident of this recently snatched British outpost, ruled it with paternal zeal, and had conscientiously refused the young officer permission to cross the Gulf of Aden to hunt game in Somaliland and Ethiopia because ‘the Somalis were the most savage of all African savages’ and would very likely kill him.5 But if Lieutenant Speke could persuade Lieutenant Burton to take him with him on his expedition, then Outram would be delighted to change his mind and even ask the East India Company to allow him to serve on full pay.

  Later, Burton would claim that in 1854 Speke had been an inexperienced greenhorn, who had arrived unprepared, with no knowledge of Somaliland or its language. He would also mock the younger man (at twenty-seven, Speke was six years his junior) for having brought with him ‘all manner of cheap and useless chow-chow, guns and revolvers, swords and cutlery, which “the simple-minded negro of Africa” would have rejected with disdain’. Burton next derided Speke’s attempt to engage as guides ‘the first mop-headed … donkey boys’ he encountered.6 Yet, in reality, far from accepting Speke out of pity as he later made out he had, Burton was eager to have him on the expedition, and appealed to Outram to ‘allow [him] to enrol Lieut. Speke’.

  The more he learned about Speke, the more Burton realised that his innocent, enthusiastic manner masked a loner’s steely self-reliance. Something else struck him about the outwardly easy-going officer. Although he joked about being a Masti Bengali (‘a bumptious Bengal-man’), for all his humorous self-deprecation, ‘he had a way as well as a will of his own’, after being ‘for years his own master’.7 While on leave from the 46th Regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, Speke had not gone home to England but had travelled in the unexplored mountains of Tibet with a couple of servants, mapping the country and collecting specimens of wildlife for the museum he had created in his father’s house. He was an exceptional shot, and a capable soldier, having served in General Sir Colin Campbell’s brigade during the Sikh Wars.8 Unlike Burton, he drank little alcohol, and on his Tibetan journeys had risen ‘with the freezing dawn, walked in the burning sun all day, breaking his fast upon native bread and wild onions, and passed the night in the smallest of “rowtie” tents’.9 As Burton conceded, Jack Speke had rare gifts such as ‘an uncommonly acute eye for country – by no means a usual accomplishment even with the professional surveyor’.10

  While they were still in Aden, Burton and his new expedition member had a conversation that would have momentous consequences. The subject was ‘Krapf’s snow mountains’. Burton confided to Speke that within a year or two, he meant to travel westward from Zanzibar into the African interior to find the Nile’s source. Although Speke was surprised to learn that his leader was planning anything so ambitious, he declared an existing interest of his own. Ever since seeing the Mountains of the Moon depicted in a reproduction of Ptolemy’s famous map, he said he had deduced that these snow peaks must feed the Nile, just as the Himalayas’ glaciers fed the Ganges. But though Burton must have been struck by what the new arrival said, his discovery that their minds were running on similar lines did not cause him to invite Speke to go with him to the mysterious city of Harar. From now on, however, Speke knew that in order to be chosen for a future expedition to the Nile’s source, he was going to have to seem to be on friendly terms with Burton, whatever he might secretly feel about him.11

  In the meantime, it vexed Speke to have nothing to do while Stroyan and Herne were being sent to Berbera with orders to detain the Emir of Harar’s caravan should Burton be held captive in the ‘forbidden city’. So rather than be left kicking his heels, Speke ‘volunteered to travel in any direction [his] commandant might think proper to direct’. Burton decided to send him to a region known as the Wadi Nogal, where he was to collect specimens of flora and fauna, and buy camels for the journey south to Zanzibar.12 Since collecting specimens was what he would have been doing had Brigadier Outram allowed him to go to Somaliland on his o
wn, Speke was mollified, until Burton ordered Herne, Stroyan and him to wear Arab clothing. Speke’s huge turban and long close-fitting gown were intolerably hot, and because he looked so odd in them they seemed likely to endanger his life rather than preserve it. But because Burton believed that he would never be allowed to enter Harar unless disguised, ‘he thought it better,’ wrote Speke sardonically, that ‘we should appear as his disciples’.13

  Somaliland and the Horn of Africa.

  Burton had laughed at Speke’s donkey boys; but if Speke had engaged them, they could hardly have performed worse as guides than Sumunter and Ahmed, the duo chosen to be his abbans by Burton. From time immemorial in Somaliland, guides for foreigners had been called abbans – the word meaning protector, as well as guide. Since the only language Speke shared with Sumunter was Hindustani, in which neither of them was even moderately fluent, communication was haphazard. In no time, Sumunter tried to fleece Speke so blatantly that the young officer was forced to stand and defend his ‘date and rice bags with his gun’. Various locals were then incited to join in robbing him. Soon Speke knew he was never going to reach the Wadi Nogal. But, realising that his present mission was really a test of his fitness to be chosen to accompany Burton on any future Nile expedition, Speke kept up his journal and pressed on with his collecting, eventually securing a new species of snake, some rare fossils and numerous antelope heads and specimens of indigenous birds.14

  After two months of what Speke described as ‘this useless journey’, he rejoined his colleagues at the coast and sailed to Aden to re-supply for the expedition’s second and more important phase. Although Speke was eager to forget his humiliation by his insubordinate abban, Burton decided that Sumunter must be prosecuted, since he had treated other travellers in the same way. The abban was duly tried, found guilty, and sentenced to two months in prison. After the trial, Burton sounded off in public about the system of abban-ship being ripe for abolition.15 Both the abban ’s trial and Burton’s remarks caused great indignation among Somalis in Aden and news of the vengeful behaviour of the British officers spread swiftly to Berbera and the Somali coast. Colonel R. L. Playfair (Outram’s political assistant) would later describe Burton’s criticism of abban-ship as ‘the termina causa of all the mishaps which befell the expedition’.16

  But for the moment, Speke was worried only by his failure to reach the Wadi Nogal. He felt all the worse because Burton had successfully entered Harar and had returned to tell the tale – or as much of it as he thought consistent with striking a heroic pose. Unknown to Speke, Harar had disappointed his commander architecturally, culturally, and as ‘a forbidden city’. Far from being threatened and imprisoned, Burton had been allowed to leave the decaying place as freely as he had been permitted to enter it. If Burton had ever let Speke know that he judged his own mission a failure, Speke would have been less upset by his leader’s condescending remarks about his failure to reach the wretched Wadi Nogal.

  Nor did Speke have any idea that Burton’s experiences on the way to Harar had destroyed an important part of his self-image: namely his faith in his talent for disguising himself as ‘a native’. On this occasion, his Somali servants had rumbled him with ease and had broadcast his identity to strangers along the way.17 Rather than become a figure of fun, Burton had rapidly discarded his turban. If he could not pass himself off as a Somali, he would fail hopelessly among darker-skinned Africans, so in future he knew he would have to travel as a British officer. Some years later he admitted with uncharacteristic honesty that he had gone to Harar principally ‘for display of travelling savoir faire’ but he had actually ‘displayed’ the reverse.18

  ‘Privately and entre nous,’ he told Norton Shaw of the RGS, thinking of the epic journey which he hoped would follow this one, ‘I want to settle the question of Krapf and “eternal snows”. There is little doubt of the White Nile being thereabouts. And you will hear with pleasure that there is an open route through Africa to the Atlantic. I heard of it at Harar.’19

  Burton arrived at Berbera on 7 April 1855 in time for him and his companions to link up with the Ogaden caravan, before it headed south from Berbera in the second week of April. Yet most unfortunately, soon after his arrival, he changed his mind about doing this, preferring to run the risk of going south on his own. The reason he gave for remaining encamped outside Berbera was the desirability of hanging on there long enough to take delivery of the ‘instruments and other necessaries [arriving] by the mid-April mail from Europe’. But another consideration influenced him more. This was his desire ‘to witness the close of the Berbera fair’ – a memorable event, to be sure, attended by thousands of buyers and sellers of slaves, camels, ivory, cloth, metal, beads and rhinoceros horn, but hardly a spectacle worth risking life and limb to see.20

  So, while the immense Ogaden caravan was snaking away southward – with several thousand camels, 500 chained slaves, and 3,000 head of cattle – the four British officers remained in their tents, strung out in a line by the small seaside village of Kurrum outside Berbera.21 Here, they continued to make leisurely preparations for their eventual departure. Behind a superficial friendliness, the local people hid a deep antipathy. In their eyes, the Englishmen had come to collect information about the slave trade, probably in preparation for its suppression – an outcome certain to impoverish the whole region. Many locals were still smarting from Burton’s public criticism of the system of abban-ship. But neither he, nor any of his officers, suspected that they were in danger. Speke knew perfectly well that Somalis visiting Aden were considered so dangerous that the authorities regularly disarmed them, but bizarrely neither he nor Burton considered posting more than two sentries at night. It seemed inconceivable to them that the locals would dare attack them and bring upon themselves a naval blockade of the port of Berbera.22 How wrong the young Englishmen were.

  At about 2.00 a.m. on 19 April, their camp was invaded by about 200 armed Somalis. ‘Hearing a rush of men, like a stormy wind’, Burton sprang up, and yelled at a servant to bring his sabre. Herne was sent out into the darkness to investigate and darted back into the tent having fired a few shots at the advancing attackers with his Colt. In his separate tent, Speke heard Burton calling to Stroyan to get up, and he also heard shots, but at first he thought these were being fired at imaginary intruders by trigger-happy sentries. But hearing footsteps immediately outside, he leapt from his bed and sprinted to Burton’s tent. While trying to do the same, Stroyan was slashed across the head with a sword, and then killed by a single spear-thrust to the heart.23

  Burton and Herne, in their shared tent, were soon fighting for their lives as Somalis fired shots into the canvas and threw heavy javelins through the entrance. Although Burton was a formidable swordsman, his sabre was no help, and as Speke arrived with his revolver, it fell to him to defend the tent. Herne’s powder was exhausted and he could neither find his flask, nor any alternative weapon.24

  At this point, Speke, who had been keeping the attackers back from the entrance with his Adams five-shot revolver, was hit on the knee by a stone. Because his view was obstructed by the fly of the tent, he ducked down under this flap to get a clearer view of his assailant. Misconstruing his sudden movement, Burton roared at him: ‘Don’t step back, or they’ll think we are running.’25 Enraged by what he thought was a veiled accusation of cowardice, Speke, according to his own account, ‘stepped boldly to the front and fired at close quarters into the first man before [him]’. He did the same, he said, to two more men in his path, and then placed the muzzle of his gun ‘against the breast of the largest man before him and pulled the trigger, but pulled in vain; the cylinder would not rotate’. Just then a club struck his chest, knocking him to the ground. ‘In another instant … a dozen Somalis were on top of [him].’26

  Burton thought Speke had panicked and had no idea that he had dashed ahead, firing left and right, in response to his spur-of-the-moment words. Terrible things were about to happen to both men, but, for Speke, Burton’s rebuke woul
d be his most painful recollection.27 As the Somalis tried to flatten the tent, intending to tangle Burton and Herne in its folds, the two Englishmen dashed out, Burton slashing right and left with his sabre. In the darkness, Burton mistook his Somali factotum for an attacker and was about to cut him down when the man’s cry of alarm made his master freeze. ‘That instant’s hesitation allowed a spearman to step forward, and leave his javelin in my mouth,’ wrote Burton. The spear entered on one side of Burton’s face and came out on the other, cleaving the roof of his mouth and smashing out two molars. Struggling against increasing faintness caused by pain and loss of blood, Burton somehow reached the shore where a vessel – whose crew had brought him mail from Aden two days earlier – remained moored. Here at last the javelin was removed from his mouth and his wound was dressed.28

  On the ground, gasping for breath, with men binding his hands behind his back, Speke could feel fingers exploring around his genitals:

  I felt as if my hair stood on end; and not knowing who my opponents were, I feared that they belonged to a tribe called Eesa, who are notorious for the unmanly mutilations they delight in. Indescribable was my relief when I found that the men were in reality feeling whether, after an Arab fashion, I was carrying a dagger between my legs …29

  At dawn, the Somalis pillaged the camp, while Speke was held by a rope. Later, he described how, without warning, the man keeping him tethered ‘stepped up close to me, and coolly stabbed me with his spear’. Further jabs were aimed at his shoulder, one narrowly missing his jugular. He only prevented a stab to the heart by blocking it with his tied wrists, which were cut to the bone deflecting the weapon’s point. The next lunge was to his thigh, and he heard the spearhead grind against the bone. To save himself, Speke grabbed the spear, but a whack on the arm with a club sent it clattering to the ground. He saw his captor: