by Tim Jeal
While steaming across the Indian Ocean towards Zanzibar, Burton did not tell Speke that he had become engaged to be married before leaving England. The girl’s parents were unlikely to give their consent and the engagement therefore had to remain secret. But if Speke had known about this romantic event, he might have looked upon Burton with a little more sympathy. In truth, the self-created ‘Ruffian Dick’ had felt isolated, even vulnerable on the brink of a journey from which he might never return. His mother was dead; his brother had returned to Ceylon; and his sister was preoccupied with her children and her husband. The parents of the two women he had loved – one of whom had been a cousin – had rejected him as a man without money or prospects. Nor had his failure in Somaliland helped his self-esteem, so despite the critical success of his account of his journey to Mecca, he knew that his entire future hinged on the outcome of his new African venture. So it was a blessing that at this time of high anxiety, his personal life offered new hope.
In 1850, he had met nineteen-year-old Isabel Arundell, who had promptly fallen in love with him. She was not strikingly beautiful, had no fortune and her membership of an aristocratic Catholic family seemed unlikely to help his career. But after they chanced to meet again in August 1856, they contrived further meetings and in early October Burton proposed. Before leaving for Africa, he gave her a poem he had written, entitled ‘Fame’, which told the infatuated Isabel more about Burton’s ambitions as an explorer than about his love for her. Indeed there is no evidence that he had fallen in love. He would be far from chaste in the months to come.32 But there was no doubt that he had never been loved so much before. Here at last was someone who would care whether he lived or died, and if it was to be the latter would venerate his memory – a comforting thought to take to Africa.
So in Zanzibar, where the duo arrived on 2 December, neither man had the measure of the other. Burton had no idea that his companion was still brooding over First Footsteps, and Speke had no clue that Burton was a man with strong emotional needs and self-doubts. Yet they were embarking on a dangerous venture which friendship and understanding would have made far easier to endure.
FIVE
Everything Was to be Risked for This Prize
Sighting the African coast from the sea, Jack Speke, who rarely enthused about scenery, was mesmerised by the white coral sands, vivid blueness of the ocean, ‘and green aquatic mangrove growing out into the tidal waves’.1 Soon the minarets of Zanzibar’s mosques pierced the skyline above the barrack-like Sultan’s palace and the grey-stone consulates. Next, a spidery tangle of ships’ masts and rigging came into view as the breeze wafted seaward the scent of cloves, mixed less pleasingly with the odour of tar, hides, copra and rotting molluscs. A corpse floated near the foreshore which Burton remarked did not discourage ‘the younger blacks of both sexes from swimming and disporting themselves in an absence of costume which would startle even Margate’. He was soon delighted to find that prostitutes were easily procurable in Stone Town.2 A hundred thousand people -Arabs, banians, slaves, freemen, dark-skinned Swahili-speaking Afro-Arabs, and a few hundred consular and trading Europeans – were crammed onto the island.
The two men had arrived on 20 December at the start of what Speke matter-of-factly described as ‘the very worst season of the year for commencing a long inland journey’. At present, the interior was tinder dry, but within weeks the rains would arrive, inundating tracks and paths, and turning vast tracts of country into a quagmire.3 So they decided to wait several months before setting out for the ‘slug-shaped’ lake. This gave them time to seek out Johann Rebmann at his mission near Mombasa, in the hope of persuading the discoverer of Mount Kilimanjaro to join their expedition. But he found Burton ‘facetious’ and also suspected that he would use unjustified force against Africans during the march to the lake.4 But though declining to accompany the young travellers, he did influence Burton in one crucial way: by dissuading him from travelling inland from Mombasa on the direct route through Masailand. The old Burton would have tried to ‘walk round the Masai’ on the shorter route to the Lake Regions, as Speke claimed he would have preferred to do. But the shock of events at Berbera had changed ‘Ruffian Dick’ forever.5 This was a great pity, since, if Rebmann’s warnings about the Masai had been ignored, Speke and Burton would very likely have shared the expedition’s greatest discovery at an early stage and would never have embarked upon their disastrous feud.
Journeys of Burton and Speke, and of Speke and Grant
Back on Zanzibar the poor health of the British Consul, Lieutenant-Colonel Atkins Hamerton, gave notice of what African fever could do to a man over the years. Though dying, Hamerton hoped to shock the would-be explorers into going back to India while they still could. So he took them to the local prison to make the acquaintance of one hapless convict, chained so tightly to a gun that he could not stand up or lie down. This man’s crime was to have beaten a drum, while Lieutenant Maizan (the young French traveller) had been tortured, mutilated and then beheaded in a macabre ceremony.6 Though shocked, Speke and Burton knew there could be no turning back
A notable difference between the pair became apparent while they were still on Zanzibar. Everywhere they went slaves of both sexes and all ages could be seen in streets and alleys. Burton guessed there were 25,000 of them on the island – some owned by locals, some in transit to the Gulf, and others for sale.7 Speke was the more shocked of the two by what he saw at the slave market:
The saddest sight was the way in which some licentious-looking men began a cool, deliberate inspection of a certain divorced culprit who had been sent back to the market for inconstancy to her husband. She had learnt a sense of decency during her conjugal life, and the blushes on her face now clearly showed how her heart was mortified at this unseemly exposure, made worse because she could not help it.8
By contrast, Burton gazed with detachment at the ‘lines of negroes [as they] stood like beasts’, later describing what he called ‘hideous black faces some of which appeared hardly human’.9 Burton took pride in refusing, as he put it, ‘to adorn this subject with many a flower of description; the atrocities of the capture, the brutalities of the purchase’. He was convinced that Britain, through a treaty agreed in 1845 with Seyyid Said, the former Sultan of Zanzibar, was making the lives of slaves worse by using the Royal Navy – ‘the sentimental squadron’, as he called the Indian Ocean Anti-Slavery Flotilla – to stop their export. The price of a slave was ten times higher in Oman than in East Africa, and, as Burton pointed out, the more valuable a human chattel was, the better he or she was cared for. So any policy stopping the export trade, and thus keeping more slaves in Africa, lowered their price, and so harmed the slaves themselves. Slavery in Africa, argued Burton, had not been invented by ‘foreigners’, such as his beloved Arabs, but by the Africans themselves, who regularly fought ‘internal wars, whose main object is capturing serviles [sic]’. He seemed blind to the fact that the treatment of domestic slaves, however benign, could not justify their brutal capture, or their long and often fatal journey to the coast.10 Speke did not analyse the situation intellectually, but knew on an intuitive level that the entire trade – both domestic and export – should be suppressed because of the suffering and desolation it caused. Burton thought Africans contemptible and to blame for their misfortunes, despite his enthusiasm for recording their habits and customs. But while at times Speke could also write insultingly about them, he came to like and admire them.11
The expedition started with Burton committing a major error of judgement. With sole responsibility for buying the expedition’s supplies from Zanzibar’s Indian merchants, and only half the funding he had hoped for, he had to buy wisely. He purchased from Ladha Damha (or Damji), a leading merchant, excellent presents for chiefs: sprigged muslin for turbans, embroidered hats and coats, and white and pink Venetian beads. But regarding the all-important basic trade goods, he later confessed he had ‘made the mistake of ignorance of not laying in an ample store of American domest
ics [versatile sheeting fabric known locally as Merikani cloth], and a greater supply of beads’.12 Basic trade goods were essential for buying food and paying for the right of passage through the territory of African chiefs. So to have skimped on these essential commodities was folly. His initial failure to recruit enough porters led him to leave behind the expedition’s portable boat. This was another bad mistake. ‘She would indeed have been a Godsend,’ he admitted later, ‘sparing us long delay, great expense and a host of difficulties and hardships.’13 But, leaving Zanzibar, Burton felt euphoric.
Naval vessels at Zanzibar (from Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone).
Of the gladdest moments in human life is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of carking care, and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of youth, excitement gives a new vigour to the muscles.14
Just before leaving, he and Speke visited the young Sultan Majid, who over sweetmeats and glasses of sherbet, alarmed them by suggesting that they take a field gun.15 The route they meant to follow to the lake had been pioneered by Arab-Swahili slave traders twenty years earlier, and although Hamerton warned them that ‘contact with slave-dealers had increased African cupidity and diminished hospitality’, the two explorers believed that because Africans were now accustomed to seeing travellers, they would be unlikely to harm them if they stuck to the known path.16
Burton’s RGS instructions required him ‘to penetrate inland’ to the ‘unknown lake’ – which was of course only ‘unknown’ to Europeans. Many Arabs had stood on its shores since Sayf bin Said el-Muameri had reached it in 1825. Burton was tasked by the RGS ‘to proceed northward towards the range of mountains [Mountains of the Moon] marked upon our maps as containing the probable source of the “Bahr el Abiad” [White Nile], which it will be your next great objective to discover’.17 Burton believed that any man succeeding in linking mountains and river should ‘justly be considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science’. But because the celebrated German explorer of the Sahara, Heinrich Barth, had told him ‘that no prudent man would pledge himself to discover the Nile sources’, he timidly redefined his mission as being ‘to ascertain the limits of the Sea of Ujiji [Tanganyika], to learn the ethnography of its tribes, and determine the export of the produce of the interior’.18 It would be nine months before he discussed the source of the Nile again with Speke, although both men knew very well that they would be judged by how much they contributed to the solution of the world’s greatest geographical mystery.
The success or failure of expeditions depended not just on the tenacity of individual explorers, but as much on the experience and motivation of their African guides, porters and servants. By great good luck, Burton and Speke had managed to employ Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who would become the expedition’s principal factotum. When only twelve, Bombay had been captured between Kilwa and Lake Nyasa by Arab-Swahili slave traders, and then sold to an Indian merchant, who had taken him to work for him in Sindh, where he had learned Hindustani. After the merchant’s death, Bombay was freed and sailed to Zanzibar, where the two explorers met him. Since Burton and Speke both knew Hindustani, communication with Bombay was easy. Even before the journey started Speke wrote that he had ‘become much attached to Bombay’ and asserted that he had never met any black man as honest, generous and conscientious as he was.19 They had engaged at the same time another man also destined to become one of East Africa’s great caravan leaders, Mabruki (later known as Mabruki Speke), a member of the Yao tribe like Bombay.
Sidi Mubarak Bombay.
On condition that Burton paid each man five Maria Theresa dollars a month,† the Sultan of Zanzibar agreed to lend him a dozen Baluchi soldiers – originally from Baluchistan to the north-west of Sindh – and a one-eyed jemadar (native officer) to command them. An Indian merchant called Rush Ramji rented to the expedition nine slaves, whose ‘only object’ according to Burton was to capture further slaves. Rather surprisingly, he condoned this ambition, insisting that he ‘had no power to prevent [his] followers purchasing slaves’. But Burton would at least refuse to accept slaves as presents. He had already chosen as personal servants and ‘cook boys’, Valentine and Gaetano, half-Portuguese and half-Indian teenagers, who could sew, cook and speak Kiswahili.
The entire caravan was under the orders of its cafilah-bashi or headman, Said bin Salim, whose father was an Omani Arab and his mother an African. He carried ‘a two-handed blade fit for Richard of England’, could recite poetry in Arabic and would soon fall out with Burton, though not with Speke. Said bin Salim brought along four slaves as his personal servants: three females, including ‘Halimah, his acting wife, and one boy’.20 The total recruited on Zanzibar was thirty-one, not counting Speke and Burton. Said bin Salim was sent ahead to the mainland to try to recruit 140 porters. He would only manage to engage thirty-six at the coast, but within a month the expedition’s numbers would rise to 132, thanks, in part, to some men who had failed to present themselves at the coast unexpectedly turning up a month later, inland. Thirty baggage asses were also acquired by Said bin Salim.21
The expedition’s principals sailed from Zanzibar to the mainland in mid-June 1857 on the Sultan’s 18-gun corvette, which Colonel Hamerton had borrowed to ensure that the two young officers would arrive rested on Africa’s shores. Since he was dying, the consul’s concern for their well-being was greatly to his credit.22 Hamerton knew that many British explorers had died in Africa earlier in the century: among them Mungo Park and Richard Lander, both murdered on the Niger; Gordon Laing killed near Timbuktu, and Hugh Clapperton dying from dysentery at Sokoto. James Tuckey and fourteen of the thirty men who had volunteered to go with him beyond the first cataracts on the Congo had succumbed to fever before travelling a hundred miles. According to Mr Frost, Hamerton’s physician, the consul mistrusted Burton and feared he would be a poor leader. Frost claimed that Hamerton murmured to Speke, at the moment of parting: ‘Good luck, Speke; you know I would not travel with that man under any condition.’23
Speke and Burton and their people were landed at Kaole Point, eighty miles south of Bagamoyo, on 16 June 1857. Ten days later, after watching his protégés’ heavily laden caravan lumber out of the cantonments into the bush, Colonel Hamerton sailed for Zanzibar. He died on board nine days later.
Preceded by the Sultan’s blood-red flag, which was carried at the head of all Zanzibar caravans, the column marched along the coast for several miles before heading inland, led by the Baluchis, armed with archaic muzzle-loaders and German cavalry sabres. Immediately behind them, the main body of porters straggled for several hundred yards, their seventy-pound loads chafing backs and shoulders not yet hardened to them. They were carrying not only cloth and beads, but tinned food, tea, coffee, sugar, a box of cigars, a tent, camp beds, chairs, carpenters’ tools, books, a table and a chest of scientific instruments. Within a fortnight, all of the expedition’s three chronometers were out of commission due to nothing worse than a few sharp jolts. Evidently these precious clocks had not been swaddled in cotton wool and carried by the most reliable porters. This was a serious oversight since without the help of at least one chronometer synchronised to Greenwich Mean Time, longitudes were going to be very hard to calculate, which in turn would make it impossible to furnish the RGS with accurate maps, unless either of the white officers could show rare ingenuity.
Speke marched ahead of the column, while Burton brought up the rear, riding on one of the expedition’s thirty donkeys, most of which were girthed with coir rope, tied too loosely to prevent their 200-pound loads from slipping. So ‘they rushed against one another, bolted, shied, and threw their impediments’.24 If the beasts were anarchic, so too were the men. Being used to obedient soldiers, both Speke and Burton found their Nyamwezi porters and their concubines and hangers-on hard to manage. The problem of how best to prev
ent thefts and desertions became a conundrum they never could solve.
An open plain dotted with termite mounds and baobab trees stretched westwards for a hundred miles and would have to be crossed before they reached the cooler terrain of the Usagara Mountains. For several days they marched beside the Kingani river& (the Ruvu) on whose banks villagers grew sweet potato, tobacco and rice. Soon jungle and swamp replaced these cultivated fields. Hours of fiery sunshine alternated with brief but violent tropical showers which soaked them to the skin. At night, the air was muggy and clouds of mosquitoes tormented them. Away from the villages, zebra and kudu could be seen grazing. Eleven days after leaving the coast, Burton rose one morning feeling ‘weak and depressed, with aching head, burning eyes and throbbing extremities’. He was oppressed by a conviction that he would fail in everything. Speke had already shaken off the same symptoms, and was providing meat for the entire expedition with his gun.25
