by Tim Jeal
Sir Roderick Murchison was not the only one who let himself down at this meeting. Speke also made a serious error when he made public his suspicion that the lake might have as many as three outlets. In reality the one he had discovered was unique, and by speaking of others he devalued his ‘source’. Later, it would be pointed out that he had neither sailed around the lake nor even visited the western shores when staying with Rumanika. The fact that he had stood on the southern shore of a lake at Mwanza, and then on the northern shore of a lake 200 miles to the north of that first position, did not necessarily mean, his critics would say, that he had been viewing the same stretch of water on both occasions. Even though African and Arab testimony supported the idea of a single lake, Speke had still not made it impossible for his critics to argue with some degree of plausibility that there might be two or more lakes in the intervening space. Nor had he established a foolproof link between the Nyanza and the Nile at Gondokoro.
Facing such scepticism, Speke’s best policy would have been to have written a detailed report for the RGS without delay. A clear and full presentation of his arguments, accompanied by a map founded on his lunar observations would have armed Sir Roderick and his committee with just the right ammunition to confound envious critics. Unfortunately, Speke remembered offering his Somaliland diaries to the RGS in 1859, and being unofficially advised by the Society’s secretary, Norton Shaw, ‘not to be so liberal, but to profit by publishing a book [of his own] the same as everyone else does’.6 Speke knew from personal experience that general publishers like Blackwood could bring an explorer’s discoveries to the attention of a far wider readership than the RGS could reach through its in-house publications.7 And since all publishers preferred to print original material that had not previously been cherry-picked by the editor of some learned journal and then leaked to the press, his course had seemed clear.
Yet with a formidable enemy like Burton due to return to England in a matter of months, Speke should have published something in an RGS journal as soon as he had conveniently been able to do so, in order to retain Sir Roderick’s vital support. But, as if unaware of the importance of keeping the RGS’s white-haired president happy, he signed a book contract with John Blackwood, which committed him to a task that made it exceptionally unlikely that he would manage to publish anything else before the end of the year. Since his aim after that was to make good the omissions of his previous journey – while crossing Africa from the east coast to the west – he needed to keep Murchison and the RGS on board, since only with their endorsement would the British government be likely to fund this expensive venture.8
So Speke would have been well-advised to avoid unnecessary controversy. But instead, a few months later, he hinted in a speech made in Taunton, near his father’s country estates, that Petherick had let him down and had been involved in the slave trade. On hearing about Speke’s attack, Petherick wrote at once to The Times angrily protesting his innocence.9 John and Katherine Petherick’s first letters of self-exculpation reached Murchison in August 1863. Katherine gave a heartbreaking account of their tribulations, without either mentioning Petherick’s theft of cattle or his attempt to force women and children to become carriers. She explained how Speke had given to Baker the task of reaching the unknown lake, ensuring that therefore ‘there was to be no opening for Mr Petherick’. Such letters persuaded Murchison that the Pethericks had done everything they could to aid Speke and were being unfairly maligned by him.10
Only that long-awaited report from Speke might have persuaded Murchison otherwise and restored the explorer to favour. But struggling with the endless task of writing his book for Blackwood, the floundering Speke kept the committee waiting seven more months for what would turn out to be an insultingly brief account of his discoveries. Deeply aggrieved, Murchison lost much of his former enthusiasm for his protègè’s project for an east-west African journey and dismissed his criticism of the Pethericks as ‘Speke’s visions’. ‘It is very annoying to have the dispute between Speke & Petherick going on,’ he complained to Grant. ‘There has been much misapprehension as to what Petherick engaged to do. He, P, never engaged to go himself to relieve you – but to send boats and grain for a given time to Gondokoro.’11 Actually, Petherick’s RGS instructions had required him to ‘proceed [in person from Gondokoro] in the direction of Lake Nyanza with a view of succouring Captain Speke’.12 Two years later, an RGS committee of inquiry found that Petherick had not fulfilled his promise to search in person for Grant and Speke. But by then it was far too late to restore Speke in Murchison’s eyes.13
In August 1864 – just over a year after Speke and Grant returned to Britain – a still resentful Richard Burton came home on leave from the British Consulate on the fever-ridden island of Fernando Po, West Africa. Because Burton had quarrelled with the East India Company and the Foreign Office, this obscure diplomatic posting had been the best he could obtain. The contrast between his declining fortunes, and the apparently glittering prospects of his famous former ‘sub’, made him seethe with jealousy. No sooner aware of the quarrel between Speke and Petherick, Burton decided to support the latter, on the age-old principle that his enemy’s enemy was his friend. He formed an alliance with the armchair geographer James McQueen, who was a close friend of Petherick’s brother-in-law, Peter McQuie, and began work with McQueen on their book The Nile Basin, which turned out to be a vitriolic and libellous attack on Speke’s geographical claims and on his character. By the late summer of 1864, Burton had effectively become leader of all those geographers and explorers who saw Speke’s account of the Nile as a threat to their own theories.14
In the months before Burton’s arrival in England, Speke had been working on a book to follow his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, which had appeared the previous December. This new book was going to cover his travels with Burton and was intended to contradict what had been said about him in Burton’s Lake Regions of Central Africa. During many months of work, Speke inevitably relived their bitter disputes, and felt belittled by him all over again. His publisher was concerned that this new book would simply offer Burton new targets to shoot at. Speke’s reply (written shortly before Burton’s return to England) was not reassuring.
Don’t be afraid of what I have written, for it only rests between B the B and myself whether we fight it out with the quill or the fist. I won’t let him come to England quietly … He was cut by his Regt for not accepting a challenge, and now my Regt expects me to tackle him some way or another, to say nothing of my feelings of honour. I think I have been very mild, considering the amount of injustice he has done me. I have been cautious because I can prove what I have said, whilst he, being the aggressor has brought it all on himself.15
It was unfortunate for Speke that just when he should have been giving his undivided attention to securing patronage for his next African expedition, he was writing about his travels with Burton and worrying about the need to counter whatever the man might say about him next.
Speke was also preoccupied with nothing less momentous than how best to help Africa and its inhabitants to prosper and progress. In January 1864, he wrote to his friend, Sir George Grey, the former Governor of Cape Colony, asking him to put his ‘powerful influence [behind a] project for the regeneration of Africa’.16 A month later, Grant was told by Speke that he ‘had in view a scheme for civilizing Africa and putting a stop to the slave trade’.17 In an astonishing departure for an army officer turned explorer, Speke published two broadsheets: ‘Scheme for Opening Africa’ and ‘Considerations for opening Africa’, and in March, he launched his new project at a meeting in the Belgravia town house of a wealthy social reformer. Although clearly influenced by Livingstone’s ‘civilising’ formula of ‘commerce and Christianity’, Speke had ideas of his own and appealed to the British government to put pressure on the khedive of Egypt to use force to end the Egyptian and Arab slave raids on the upper Nile. He not only wanted to end the persecution of the Bari, but to use the Nile
‘to open a direct trade’ between Britain and the kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro and Karagwe. Missionaries as well as traders, he said, should be sent to the three kingdoms.18
Sir Roderick Murchison was no admirer of missionaries (with the single exception of Livingstone), so he found Speke’s new interests puzzling and even distasteful. But the worldly RGS president had not yet given up all hope of sending Speke back to Africa, and it occurred to him that if the explorer was genuinely eager to persuade the Egyptians to crush the slave trade on the river, he might be happy to sail up the Nile with an escort of Egyptian soldiers, on his way to mapping the river’s upper reaches. Murchison reckoned the British government would be delighted if the Egyptians could be shamed into paying a significant percentage of the costs of the expedition by providing its manpower.
On 12 May, Speke wrecked this plan by storming into the office of the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, and telling him that the RGS had asked him ‘to explore the head basin [by] forcing his way up the Nile with Egyptian troops’. He confided to Russell that he had never shot Africans or Arabs and did not intend to do so now. Instead, he wanted to enter Africa through Masai country ‘as a British envoy to open a legitimate trade with the king of Bunyoro’, and only after that would he fill in the gaps he had left in his earlier exploration of the Nile basin, and continue across Africa to the Atlantic.19
A month after Speke’s visit to the Foreign Office, Lord John Russell had still not taken the hint and appointed him to a roving consulship. Nor had the RGS made him any offer of support.20 This indifference persuaded a humiliated Speke to revert to a foolish plan he had briefly considered in February and March -which was to involve the Emperor Napoleon III of France in an Anglo-French expedition. Although France was still considered the old enemy, Speke meant to invite French explorers to set out east from Gabon on the Atlantic coast and then meet him in the region of Buganda and Bunyoro after he had reached these places either by travelling up the Nile or approaching from the East African coast. He held back at first, knowing that the plan was controversial; but in the late summer, when his relations with Murchison had become seriously strained, Speke contacted his friend Laurence Oliphant, now living in Paris, and asked him to contact the British Ambassador, Lord Cowley, about a possible meeting with the Emperor. Not perhaps understanding the full implications, Cowley obliged and Speke was granted an audience with Napoleon III on 25 August 1864. The explorer came away believing that the Emperor was ready to finance a joint expedition.21 At this date, one French expedition was already pushing into the West African interior up the Ogowé river, and others were under way on the Niger and in Senegal. So Speke had been preaching to the converted. The Emperor was already keen to extend French influence to the east – perhaps even as far as the Sudan. That this would very likely conflict with British interests at some future date was something which Speke chose to ignore. An explorer could only explore if someone provided him with the funds to do so. If Britain denied him what he needed, he would go elsewhere.
The very idea that Speke might aid France in Africa horrified Sir Roderick and he told Austen Layard of the Foreign Office that he ‘deeply regretted these aberrations, as Speke has in other respects the greatness to ensure success as a bold explorer’.22 Murchison also wrote to Grant bemoaning his failure to persuade Speke to drop his wild schemes and limit his objectives ‘to finishing off and completing much of what you [both] necessarily left in an uncertain state’.23
By the end of August Speke’s book about his travels with Burton, What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, had been printed, though not as yet published. He was dividing his time between his parents’ town house in Pimlico, London, and their estates in Somerset, and seemed content to be living in the countryside he loved. Of course his future was uncertain, but as a stop-gap he decided to go shooting in India for a few months in the autumn. After that, he meant to ask the East India Company for a three-year furlough so he could return to Africa if anyone had the wit to back him.24
Then, in early August the postman brought a letter that would have disastrous consequences.
FOURTEEN
Death in the Afternoon
Sir Roderick Murchison had sent Speke a momentous letter, inviting him to address the September meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. A discussion about the Nile’s source was to be the principal attraction on the schedule of talks and debates mounted by the Geography and Ethnology section of the association. On 12 August, Speke replied to Murchison: ‘I shall be only too glad to meet and converse with Livingstone [about the Nile], to test the matter by fair arbitration on amicable terms.’ He did not mention Burton, but could not have expected to avoid debating with him too.1 A few weeks later George Simpson, Blackwood’s senior manager, wrote indignantly to his employer:
Speke’s enemies are preparing a savage attack upon him at the Bath meeting, headed by Burton, aided by Livingstone. So much the better … Speke will know how to meet them & turn the affair to the advantage of our gallant but most imprudent friend.2
Speke was ‘imprudent’ because in Simpson’s opinion, he had made too many ill-judged public remarks about Petherick and Burton. Worse still, he had caused unnecessary offence to Livingstone as well as to Murchison.3 When Speke heard that Burton was saying that the Rusizi river linked the northern end of Lake Tanganyika (Burton’s own lake, as Burton saw it) with the Luta N’zige – the more northerly lake, which Baker was about to investigate – he (Speke) was very angry. To make this claim Burton had needed to ‘forget’ the inconvenient fact that he and Speke had been told, emphatically, by the three sons of a local chief, that the river at Tanganyika’s northern end flowed into, rather than out of the lake. But since it might well be many years before any explorer managed to see this river with his own eyes, Burton appeared to have calculated that he could safely reverse the flow of the Rusizi and get away with it, perhaps for a decade – all the while undermining the claims which Speke had made for the Victoria Nyanza.
It came to Speke that he could pay back Burton for his unscrupulous volte face by resorting to some armchair geography of his own. Since no explorer had visited either the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, or the northern end of the more southerly Lake Nyasa, nobody in Europe could be sure whether or not a southward-flowing river linked the two lakes. If it did, the Rusizi could not possibly flow out of Lake Tanganyika to the north, or the lake would have been drained of all its water eons ago. Fortunately – from Speke’s point of view – a substantial river (the Shiré) flowed out from the southern end of Lake Nyasa. So what could explain this strong southern outflow, except a comparable inflow into Nyasa from the north? This was a powerful argument for a link with Tanganyika; but it was one that, if deployed, ran the risk of aggravating the famous Dr Livingstone, who, though he had turned back before reaching the northern end of Lake Nyasa, had informed the RGS that four or five small rivers flowing into the western side of the lake, produced more than enough water to explain the Shiré’s outflow.
Although, at times, Livingstone cultivated an air of saintliness, he always counter-attacked fiercely when potential rivals disagreed with his geographical theories.4 So, when the doctor returned to Britain in July 1864, and heard what Speke had said about Lake Nyasa at the RGS a month earlier, he was apoplectic. Livingstone’s reputation had been tarnished by his disastrous Zambezi Expedition, but many people still saw him as the country’s greatest explorer and a man capable of extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice. So it was worse than ‘imprudent’ of Speke to have turned him into an enemy, and shoved him into Burton’s camp. Indeed, Livingstone was soon arguing that Speke’s little effluent at Ripon Falls ‘would not account for the Nile’, and telling his eldest daughter that Captain Speke had ‘such slender mental abilities that silence in this & other matters would have better become him’.5 Livingstone detested Burton for his contempt both for Africans and for missionaries, but despite this visceral dislike he confided to Sir Roder
ick Murchison, that he, like Burton, believed the Nile’s source was more likely to lie in Lake Tanganyika than in the Victoria Nyanza. More precisely, Livingstone was starting to think that the true source probably lay somewhere to the west of Lake Tanganyika, and would flow into Lake Tanganyika, exiting it as the Rusizi, and then flowing on north to the Upper Nile through the Luta N’zige.6
Although Speke had expected to have a debate with Livingstone, Murchison had always meant him and Burton to head the bill at the big meeting in Bath. Indeed their anticipated collision was soon being advertised as ‘the great Nile debate’. It seems that by pitting him against Burton, Murchison was punishing Speke for his supposed ingratitude to the RGS and for not sending in a proper report. Livingstone was expected to act as an unofficial referee, while the real battle was to be with Burton. Given the man’s reputation as a debater, Speke could not have looked forward to taking him on, but he passionately believed that he had found the Nile’s source, and so had no intention of giving ground. As he told Blackwood, it was a matter of honour for him to face Burton – akin to fighting a duel.7 Speke was no coward, though he knew he would be vulnerable – and not only because he had failed to map the Victoria Nyanza.
Since the incident with the beetle, he had been deaf in one ear. Poor sight also continued to dog him, and was worse after his long literary labours. Feeling utterly exhausted, he had told Blackwood that he would ‘never think again of writing a personal narration, since it only leads to getting abused when disclosing disagreeable truths’.8 Blackwood was worried about his famous author becoming embroiled in arguments. He felt that in speeches and letters to the press ‘Speke’s imperfect powers of explanation [had] been more hurtful to himself than [to] anyone else’, often resulting in him being ‘looked upon as the reverse of the generous simple hearted fellow he was’. He begged Laurence Oliphant to do what he could ‘to keep him from putting his foot in it … He is a real good one who requires a friend.’9 But Oliphant – although he liked Speke – was mischievous, and made no effort to save him from the great debate. On the contrary, Oliphant egged on Burton by telling him that Speke had recently said to him that if Burton came to Bath, ‘he would kick him’. Burton had replied, according to his wife Isabel: ‘Well that settles it! By God, he shall kick me.’ Of course Burton would have gone to Bath anyway, being eager to do Speke any harm he could. He had already applied to the Foreign Office for an extension of leave simply in order to be able to attend the meeting.10
