by Tim Jeal
In order to put all the blame on Speke for the mutual dislike that followed his return from the lake, Burton would make out that the two of them had been good friends until the difference of opinion about the lake wrecked everything. ‘Jack changed his manners to me from this date,’ wrote Burton. ‘His difference of opinion was allowed to alter companionship.’ But Burton’s ‘memories’ of earlier days on their journey, when an admiring Speke had brought his diary to him for correction and the two of them had read Shakespeare together, like master and pupil, were fanciful. Not only had Speke been alienated by Burton’s treatment of his Somali diaries long before their Tanganyika journey, but also his down-to-earth, masculine literary tastes (he most enjoyed ‘political, statistical or descriptive reading’) made a scenario of reading Shakespeare together wholly implausible. Burton’s most sympathetic biographer, Mary Lovell, has shown him tenderly nursing a sick and increasingly disagreeable Speke, although Speke had actually been nursed by Zawada – one of Said bin Salim’s concubines. Rarely generous with money, Burton was so impressed by Zawada’s gentleness that he ‘liberally rewarded’ her for her devotion.23
During their return march to Zanzibar – when Speke was also ill enough to be carried in a litter – a shocking incident occurred. The kirangozi taken on at Ujiji had loitered behind for several days because his slave girl had been too footsore to walk at the caravan’s pace. ‘When tired of waiting,’ recorded Burton, ‘he cut off her head for fear lest she should become gratis another man’s property.’ If this brutal murder had been committed in a caravan commanded by Stanley or Baker, the kirangozi would have been arrested and handed over to the authorities in Zanzibar or Khartoum. Livingstone would have done the same if he had managed to command the obedience of his other porters. But it seems that Burton did not do anything at all. This is puzzling since earlier he had taken away a much beaten five-year-old slave from Mabruki, and given him to the kindlier Bombay.24 Both Europeans were still too sick to stand, and Speke was unable to keep a diary at the time. So their physical state may explain the lack of immediate punitive action. But two months later, Burton appeared to have forgotten about the crime entirely. In his report to the Secretary of State for India, he said that because this same man had ‘behaved well in exhorting his followers to remain with us’, he had ‘rewarded the kirangozi ’.25
The two explorers finally reached Zanzibar on 4 March 1859 after a futile eleventh-hour diversion to Kilwa, made at Burton’s insistence despite the approach of the rains and there being a cholera epidemic in the area. Burton appears to have been looking for almost any excuse to delay his return to London, where he would clearly have to pay tribute to Speke’s achievement. Back at the British Consulate Burton confessed that he sank into ‘an utter depression of mind and body’, in which even speaking was too much effort.26 Without a word to Speke (at this time or later), he penned a letter to Norton Shaw, which must have been extraordinarily painful to write. Enclosing Speke’s map of the Nyanza, Burton wrote:
To this [Speke’s map] I would respectfully draw the attention of the committee as there are grave reasons for believing it to be the source of the principal feeder of the White Nile.27
Having made this brave admission, Burton was to prove incapable of ever making it again, and he compounded the dishonesty of keeping his true beliefs to himself by embarking on a long and increasingly vindictive campaign to discredit Speke. His justification was that hitting back was the only natural response to Speke’s treachery. Burton’s accusation, which has damned Speke’s reputation ever since, was that he betrayed his erstwhile leader on his return to England – by going to the RGS alone, having promised only to go there with Burton. It was in this underhand way, said Burton, that Speke cut him out and gained for himself sole command of the next Nile expedition. This notion, that Speke behaved in a totally unprincipled way, has been believed, and repeated, by five out of six of Burton’s most recent biographers, and also by the author of Speke’s only biography. But was Speke really ‘a cad’ as one of Burton’s best-known biographers has insisted he was?28
After sailing together from Zanzibar on 22 March 1859 on the clipper Dragon of Salem, the pair disembarked at Aden on 16 April, and stayed with Burton’s old friend, Dr John Steinhaeuser, the civil surgeon of the colony.29 A dozen years later, Burton would write that Steinhaeuser ‘repeatedly warned me that all was not right’ – implying that his friend suspected that Speke was hatching some mean-minded plan. In fact, in the same paragraph, Burton stated that, while at Aden, he and Speke ‘were, to all appearance, friends’. Whatever the doctor really thought, he realised that Burton was a very sick man and recommended ‘a lengthened period of rest’. So it came as no surprise to anyone that Burton was not granted a medical certificate to travel, whereas Speke was.30 They had been three days at Aden when a warship, HMS Furious, docked. She was due to sail again the moment she finished coaling, so the two explorers had to decide at once whether to take up the offer of a passage up the Red Sea to Suez. Speke accepted and Burton (presumably not having any choice) declined. And now the crucial words are supposed to have been uttered, which contain Speke’s alleged ‘promise’. They are usually imagined to have been noted down by Burton soon after being spoken.
… the words Jack said to me, and I to him, were as follows:- ‘I shall hurry up, Jack, as soon as I can,’ and the last words Jack ever spoke to me on earth were, ‘Good-bye, old fellow; you may be quite sure I shall not go up to the Royal Geographical Society, until you come to the fore and we appear together. Make your mind quite easy about that.’ [in italics in Volume I of The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton compiled by Isabel Burton]31
If all the above words were written at the same time – and there is no reason for thinking they were not – that time must have been after Speke’s death in 1864, because the phrase about their being ‘the last words Jack ever spoke’ is integral. But 1864 was five years on from the parting in 1859, and this makes it seem unlikely that Burton would have remembered the dialogue verbatim. Eight years after Speke’s death, Burton would allege, in support of the ‘dialogue’, that Speke wrote to him from Cairo in April 1859 – en route to England – ‘reiterating his engagement and urging me to take all the time and rest that broken health required’.32 No biographer or archivist has ever seen this letter. This is suspicious, since what appears to be a complete run of Speke’s correspondence with Burton has survived in Burton’s letter books, now in the British Library.33 On balance, it seems unlikely that this key letter, which Burton would have been especially eager to preserve, ever existed. To be concerned about such things is not to split hairs. Speke’s supposed ‘betrayal’ of Burton at this time has been thought to prove that Speke was an unprincipled and devious man, who wronged a more trusting and honourable companion. The truth about whether Speke was indeed to blame for the bitter feud, that would do lasting damage to his reputation as a man and as an explorer, hangs to a large extent on what if anything was actually promised by him. History’s favoured scenario is that Speke promised not to go to the RGS on his return to England unless accompanied by Burton, but then did exactly what he had sworn not to do -and thus secured backing for his own African expedition cutting out his former leader. That is why the evidence for the ‘promise’ deserves close scrutiny.
I found it surprising when reading Speke’s only biography, and the six most recent lives of Burton, not to learn anything about Speke’s version of events in Aden. It appeared that he had never written anything on that subject. But, incredibly, he did write his own account, which remained generally unknown until some details of it were published in 2006, in a slim volume by a retired American professor.34 The greatest revelation in Speke’s account is contained in a single sentence concerned with the very point at issue: what Burton said to him at their moment of parting. Casually, after dealing with other seemingly more important matters, Speke mentions that just before his ship sailed: ‘Captain Burton said he would not go to England for many months
as he intended to go to Jerusalem.’ Then, after a few sentences devoted to his medical certificate, and his voyage home, Speke adds: ‘A fortnight after my landing in England, Captain Burton unexpectedly arrived …’35 There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the two versions! So which was true? Burton’s or Speke’s?
The fact that Burton’s famous lines of dialogue did not appear in print until 1893, three years after Burton’s death, must damage their credibility. Burton’s original journals were destroyed by his widow, so cannot be used for comparison. Consequently, the famous dialogue is only to be found in Isabel’s printed biography of her husband – a volume that contains many passages of dubious dialogue and numerous untruths.36 In fact her denigration of Speke flags up the possibility that Isabel may herself have been the author (or at least the improver) of the suspect dialogue. Burton himself, however, provided the best reason for doubting the dialogue’s authenticity. He had started his memorable letter to Norton Shaw (the one in which he admitted that Speke’s lake could well be the source of the Nile) with the information that because of his poor health, he would be leaving Aden ‘a short time’ after Speke. He then added: ‘Captain Speke, however, will lay before you maps & observations, & two papers, one a diary of his passage on the Tanganyika lake … and the other his exploration of the Ukerewe or Northern Lake.’37 So – far from expecting Speke to wait for him to return to England before going to the RGS – Burton had actually expected Speke to do the opposite. But while this seriously undermines the notion that Speke promised not to go to the RGS unless accompanied by his former leader, Burton’s statement to Norton Shaw, that he would be back in London ‘a short time’ after Speke, torpedoes the idea that he had ever had any genuine intention of returning home via Jerusalem. So was Speke as unreliable as Burton, and did he invent the projected trip to the Holy Land?
The only reason Speke might have cooked up this story would have been to make his pledge-breaking visit to the RGS seem less dishonourable by exaggerating the length of time Burton had led him to believe he would be away from England. But since Burton actually expected Speke to go to the RGS without him, this idea falls to the ground. It is more likely that Burton was the liar, telling Speke he would return via Jerusalem, without having any intention of doing so. By pretending it would be many months before he would return to England, he could have hoped to lull Speke into imagining that he had plenty of time in hand, and need not hurry to the RGS the moment he landed. Then, if Burton caught the very next homeward-bound steamship, and Speke in the meantime had gone to the country to relax with his family, Burton might even arrive first at the RGS and grab command of the next expedition!
The obvious reason for doubting the truth of Speke’s Jerusalem claim was that he never published it in any book or article – and therefore never had to defend it in public. But letters are in existence, showing that Speke wanted to publish in 1864 and only held back because his paternalist publisher, John Blackwood, and his controlling mother put him under intense pressure not to append to his forthcoming book an eight-page coda, or ‘Tail’, containing the Jerusalem claim along with criticisms of Burton relating to both expeditions.38 But though at first Speke allowed the ‘Tail’ to be excluded, by the summer of 1864 he was agitating for it to go into the second edition of his What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.
Blackwood was not worried about Speke’s description of his parting from Burton in Aden (and what they did or did not say to one another), but he strongly advised against entering into any public argument with Burton over his failure to pay his porters properly. Details of Burton’s meanness to his African employees occupied half of the ‘Tail’s’ eight pages. Blackwood feared that by digging up this dispute, Speke would look vindictive. The other pages had mostly been devoted to Burton’s failure to grasp the immense importance of going north to Uganda before leaving Africa. Speke argued fiercely for publication of the ‘Tail’, but eventually his publisher managed to persuade him to exclude it from all copies, except from a few specially printed volumes to be presented to three or four members of Speke’s own family.39 But, by mid-August 1864, Speke had decided, whatever the consequences, to publish the ‘Tail’ in the next edition of What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile and instructed Blackwood’s chief manager, George Simpson, to include it in the second edition. He informed Simpson that ‘the ladies’ (his mother and his aunts) now agreed with him that ‘the best policy is to speak the truth and shame the Devil’ – aka Richard Francis Burton.40 At the same time, in an attempt to reassure Blackwood, Speke told him that he would be able to ‘prove all I have said’.41 So Speke had been prepared to defend his claim about Jerusalem.
The only reason that the ‘Tail’ did not appear in a second (or any other) edition of What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile was that Speke died before a fresh printing could be undertaken. Then, after his death, his grieving mother and brothers were in no mood to publish anything likely to involve them in a public row with Burton about unpaid porters and his shortcomings as an explorer. So for almost 150 years the ‘Tail’ would continue to exist only between the covers of those three or four copies.42
Although the odds are heavily against Speke having made a pledge to his former leader, Burton’s cry of betrayal was also based on what he alleged was done in London in May and June 1859. ‘I reached London on May 21st,’ he would write, ‘and found that everything had been done for, or rather against me.’43 So what had been done?
SEVEN
A Blackguard Business
According to Burton, the day after Captain Speke returned to England:
He was induced to call at the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society and to set on foot a new exploration. Having understood that he was to await my arrival in London before appearing in public, I was too late with my own project.
Although this is a bizarre distortion of what actually happened, it is an account that would broadly speaking be accepted by historians.1
In reality, on 8 May 1859, the day Speke landed in England, he had booked a room at Hatchett’s Hotel, Piccadilly, and did not need to consider whether to contact the RGS since news of where he was staying had leaked out. Without his doing anything, a note arrived from Dr Norton Shaw inviting him to come to the monthly meeting of the RGS at Whitehall Place on the following day.2 Speke wrote back agreeing to attend ‘tomorrow’s discourse’. Knowing that discussion would centre on the Nyanza, he wrote with greater caution than he had yet shown: ‘I believe most firmly that the Nyanza is one source of the Nile, if not the principal one.’3 Shaw knew from Speke’s earlier letters that he, rather than the less resilient Burton, had been responsible for making all the expedition’s scientific observations and maps and had independently visited the Nyanza. For this reason, he seems to have decided that Speke’s arrival ahead of Burton presented the RGS with an opportunity that should be grasped. He therefore took Speke to the Belgravia house of the secretary designate of the RGS, Clements Markham – a former naval officer, traveller and occasional journalist – so the three of them could discuss, in confidence, what should be done. The upshot, in Markham’s words, was that: ‘We talked the whole matter over for some time, and the next day I went with him [Speke] to Sir Roderick … [who] at once took him up.’4 Speke may just possibly have manipulated Shaw and Markham into engineering a meeting with Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the RGS, but it seems far more likely that the two RGS officials decided for themselves that Speke ought to meet Sir Roderick as soon as possible.
Sir Roderick Murchison.
In any case, on the 9th, Speke met Murchison, showed him his map of the Nyanza, and told him that the Kivira river fed the White Nile. ‘Sir Roderick, I need only say, at once accepted my views,’ wrote Speke, adding joyfully that the RGS President’s parting words had been: ‘Speke, we must send you out there again.’5
Burton arrived at Southampton docks on 20 May, and later complained that on arrival he found that ‘ev
erything had been done for, or rather against me. My companion stood forth in his true colours as an angry rival.’6 But was Speke angry, and had ‘everything been done against’ Burton? On 19 May – soon after learning that Burton’s arrival at Southampton was imminent -Norton Shaw asked Speke to prepare a paper for the regular meeting at the RGS on the 23rd. Speke replied in a courteous, rather than an angry spirit:
