Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  For a while King stayed where he was, dazed by the position in which he found himself. Then, belatedly, he realized that the Aborigines could not be far away. Following their tracks, he traipsed into the bush, shooting crows as he went. It was the sound of his gunfire that attracted the Aborigines. They led King to their camp, nourished him back to health – even though their own food was scarce – and allowed him to accompany them when they moved on. ‘They treated me with uniform kindness, and looked upon me as one of themselves,’ King recorded. He was to stay with them for a period of almost two months.

  Brahe, meanwhile, was back in the field. When he returned to Melbourne with his disquieting news of Wright’s incompetence and of Burke’s apparent non-return from the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Royal Society of Victoria at last realized that something must be done. It despatched no less than four rescue expeditions, by land and by sea, to find the missing men. It was assumed that if Burke’s party was alive it must be either at the Gulf or stranded by a waterhole somewhere in the interior; it was to these goals, therefore, that the rescuers were directed. There was no evidence to suggest that Burke might have reached Cooper’s Creek; nevertheless, it was thought best to send a small group to Depot LXV just in case. Led by a local businessman and geologist, Alfred Howitt, and guided by Brahe, the nine-man team left Melbourne on 9 July. By 13 September they were at the depot. Nothing had changed since Brahe’s last visit. There were signs that Aborigines had passed through, but otherwise everything was as before. There were no blazes on the trees; nothing had been added to the ‘DIG’ message; the cache did not seem to have been disturbed. Had they opened it they would have found Burke’s and Wills’s letters. But they did not open it. As Howitt later explained, why should they? It contained nothing but food, and their supplies were quite adequate. Thus it was not until the 15th, by which time they had moved down the creek, that they learned of the disaster. It was not Brahe or Howitt, but a surveyor named Welch, who found King. Prompted by Aborigines who pointed north, crying, ‘Gow,!’ ‘Go on!’, he rode into their camp. The inhabitants scattered, leaving ‘one solitary figure, apparently covered in scarecrow rags and part of a hat, and prominently alone on the sand ... [I]t tottered, threw up its hands in an attitude of prayer, and fell on the ground.’ When summoned to the scene, Howitt was appalled. ‘[King] presented a melancholy appearance; wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a civilised being but for the remnants of clothes upon him. He seemed exceedingly weak, and found it occasionally difficult to follow what we said. The natives were all gathered round, seated on the ground, looking with a most gratified and delighted expression.’ While King was fed spoonfuls of rice, butter and sugar, Howitt’s doctor examined him. His diagnosis was that, in his current state, he could not have survived more than a few days.

  Over the following weeks Howitt and Brahe visited each gravesite, returned to Depot LXV, and then departed for Melbourne with Wills’s journals (the last section of which had been buried alongside him) and the damning letters from the ‘DIG’ cache. Their arrival caused such a furore that a Royal Commission was convened to investigate the circumstances surrounding the expedition’s failure. Nobody – from Brahe to Wright to the members of the Royal Society of Victoria – emerged blameless. But nobody was judged guilty either. The conclusion was that Burke had done what he had been asked to do. He had opened a route from Victoria to the Gulf of Carpentaria and had therefore answered the question which had been posed on his outset: whether there ‘really existed within [the] great continent, a Sahara ... great lakes ... or watered plains which might tempt men to build new cities’. Whether somebody else might have done it better, and without loss of life, was beyond the Commission’s remit. Neither did it take into account the fact that Burke’s rival, Stuart, had travelled much further across the truly inhospitable Northern Territory and in doing so had uncovered far more about the Sahara (yes, it did exist) that covered much of Australia. Whatever Stuart had done, Burke’s foray was judged a success. In later years the territory he had covered would be colonized by ranchers, and his expedition would become one of the legendary moments of Australian history.

  THE SOURCE OF THE NILE

  Richard Burton and John Speke (1857–65)

  Of the many secrets which darkest Africa hid from early Victorians, the source of the Nile was the most penumbrous. Everyone knew that this great river had given rise to one of the earliest recorded civilizations; that its annual floods had produced the prosperity on which the pyramids were built; and that it was the economic, topographical and cultural given of North-East Africa. But they did not know where it came from. According to the Greek scholar Ptolemy, it originated in a region of vast, sub-equatorial lakes hemmed by a range of mountains that he called Lunae Montes, or Mountains of the Moon. (Which was not far off the mark.) However, Ptolemy’s map of Africa dated from AD 140. It had already been found wanting in practically every respect and, 17 centuries later, geographers saw no reason to trust his assertions about the Nile.

  In the 1840S, however, three German missionaries, Jacob Erhardt, Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, reported some startling facts about the geography of East Africa. Probing west from Mombasa, they encountered a huge, snow-capped mountain; and according to the natives there existed in the vicinity a great inland sea that they judged to be approximately the size of the Caspian and to which Erhardt gave the name ‘Sea of Ujiji’ after a town on its coast. Did this mean that Ptolemy was right after all? Had Erhardt, Krapf and Rebmann discovered the Mountains of the Moon, whose rivers fed the lakes that ultimately fed the Nile? By 1857 Richard Burton was on the spot.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, scar-faced and aggressive, Burton was the bad boy of British exploration. Sent to Oxford University at the age of 19 on the assumption that he would become a cleric, he had swiftly decamped to India and thence the Middle East, where he proved himself a talented linguist (during his lifetime he would master 29 languages) and an anthropologist of unique, if unorthodox bent, establishing himself as the foremost authority on sexual practices in the Orient. Tough, intelligent, and irrepressibly curious, he was exotically anti-establishment, protesting that England was the only place in the world where he did not feel at home. He was also extremely competitive: as he once remarked, having climbed a peak in Cameroon, ‘to be first in such matters is everything, to be second nothing’. According to one contemporary, he prided himself on looking like Satan – which, in some lights, he did.

  In 1857 Burton was 36 and had determined that he would be the first to discover the source of the Nile. Unfortunately, the various learned bodies and governmental departments that had sponsored his expedition had determined that the discovery could not be his alone. They had sent him to Africa in the company of one other Briton: John Hanning Speke. Ten years Burton’s junior, a well-travelled, well-spoken army officer who had served in India, Speke was also excitable, touchy and somewhat naïve. But he was strong and brave, an indefatigable hunter of game and a capable outdoorsman. He had also accompanied Burton on an expedition to Somalia and had served with him in the Crimean War. Burton did not like him overmuch.

  The two men landed at Zanzibar on 20 December 1856 and spent six months there, during which time they gathered a caravan of 130 men and 30 animals to carry them into the interior and Burton not only became fluent in Swahili but collated enough material to fill a two-volume account of the island (his vivid descriptions of filth-strewn streets, slave traders and disease caused quite a stir on publication). Then, in June 1857, they set out for the interior with a cargo of brandy, camp beds, books, rifles, bullets, moulds for making more bullets, trade goods, umbrellas, tables, chairs, plus a quantity of daggers, knives and swords.

  Through forest, bog and open bush they tramped, attacked by insects and ants of every species, which bit them mercilessly. The Africans they met were, in Burton’s words, ‘a futile race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive; boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy and thriftl
ess’. Speke linked their lack of fibre to spiritual poverty. Burton put it down to the sapping effects of sexual prowess – a judgement that illustrated perfectly the differences between the two. However barbaric the natives may or may not have been, they were sufficiently well informed to provide Burton and Speke with details about the topography to the west. Erhardt’s ‘Sea of Ujiji’ was, in fact, a series of lakes, two of which were much larger than the others. It was on the largest and southernmost of these two that the town of Ujiji lay. Burton guessed that the two lakes might be joined by a river and, further, that the northernmost lake might eventually flow into the Nile. If that was the case, the southernmost one would be the river’s ultimate source and Ujiji was the place for which they should aim.

  The two white men were by now beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Speke envied Burton’s command of the language and his familiarity with the natives. He resented his refusal to halt the expedition so that he could go game-shooting. And he disliked his overbearing manner. He was ‘a blackguard’, he concluded; a man ‘who never can be wrong, and will not acknowledge an error’. Burton, meanwhile, thought Speke was a boastful incompetent, a bearer of petty grudges, possessed of ‘an immense and abnormal fund of self-esteem, who ever held, not only that he had done his best on all occasions, but also that no living man could do better’. The state of the two men’s health did nothing to help matters. Burton was stricken so violently by malaria that he temporarily lost the use of his legs and had to be carried in a hammock. And Speke contracted an eye infection that all but blinded him. Still, they persevered in their quest and on 13 February 1858, from the peak of a hill so steep that Speke’s ass collapsed and died during the ascent, they finally caught sight of their goal. Filled, in Burton’s words, with ‘admiration, wonder and delight’, they became the first Europeans to set eyes on Lake Tanganyika.

  They staggered into Ujiji where, after a brief rest, Speke’s eyes began to improve. Burton, however, deteriorated to the point where he barely had the strength to talk, let alone move. Weakly, he instructed Speke to hire a dhow and explore the lake; in particular, he was to search for the river that connected it to its northern counterpart. Speke returned four weeks later with a badly infected ear – he had tried to extricate a burrowing parasite with his penknife – and the news that there was only one ship on the whole lake, that its owner demanded an extortionate price for its hire and that, in any case, it would not be free for another three months. Damning his compatriot’s uselessness, Burton purchased a couple of leaky dugouts, had his bearers carry him to the largest and then, Union Jack fluttering in the breeze, set out with Speke on a tour of Lake Tanganyika.

  Paddling northwards, Burton was relieved to hear that there was indeed a river – the Rusizi – linking Lake Tanganyika with the lake to its north (Lake Kivu). But he was less pleased when he learned that the Rusizi flowed into rather than out of Lake Tanganyika. His attempts to ascertain the truth were thwarted by the absolute refusal of his canoemen to go anywhere near the Rusizi: it was the home of cannibals, they said; they were also unwilling to go any further because the rainy season was upon them. So he and Speke returned to Ujiji a month later, sodden, surrounded by heaps of excrement which no one dared jettison for fear of attracting crocodiles, and little the wiser as to whether Lake Tanganyika was (as Burton still hoped) the source of the Nile.

  By now their supplies were running out, and Ujiji did not have the resources to feed the vast caravan the white men had brought with them. Accordingly, Burton and Speke were forced to return to Mombasa. Speke found the trek intolerably boring: ‘There is literally nothing to write about in this uninteresting country,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Nothing could surpass these tracts, jungles, plains for same dullness, the people are the same. Everywhere in fact the country is one vast senseless map of sameness.’ Halfway to the coast, at the town of Tabora, Burton had to halt because of his malaria. At a loose end, Speke proposed a little excursion on his own to the north: he might shoot something and, possibly, he might find a lake that was rumoured to be in the vicinity. Relieved to be rid of him, Burton waved him goodbye.

  In less than three weeks Speke made a discovery that turned Burton’s theories on their head. He found not just a lake but an expanse of water so vast as truly to merit the term ‘inland sea’. Through an interpreter he questioned the shore dwellers as to its extent. They shrugged their shoulders: nobody had ever been to the other side; for all they knew it did not have one. Here, Speke was convinced, lay the true source of the Nile. He christened it Lake Victoria Nyanza and rushed back to tell Burton the news. Jealous of Speke’s success and piqued at his unilateral naming of the lake, Burton feigned indifference. Perhaps, he conceded, Speke might have found a feeder lake, but Lake Tanganyika was more probably the source. When Speke urged him to see Victoria Nyanza for himself, Burton replied that he was too ill and their supplies were too low. Better to return to civilization and regroup for a new expedition. Speke reluctantly acquiesced.

  The journey home was marked for both men by debilitating attacks of fever. Speke was seized by fits, during which he dwelled deliriously on the Nile and Burton’s personal failings. Burton, himself sickly, acted as unwilling nursemaid through his illness (which he caustically described as hydrophobia). Then on the ship home Burton was crippled so severely by malaria that he had to convalesce in Aden, leaving a now healthy Speke to continue alone to Britain. Speke’s parting words were a promise not to speak about the Nile – a subject on which they had agreed to disagree – until Burton returned to London: ‘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.’

  When Burton reached London in May 1859 he found that Speke had not only discussed the matter with the Royal Geographical Society but had persuaded its president to fund a new expedition, led by himself, to Victoria Nyanza. His companion would be a Scot named James Augustus Grant. Tall, strong and, like Speke, an ex-Indian officer who was partial to a bit of shooting, Grant was also unassuming and happy to accept orders. It was these last qualities that Speke valued most: he did not want a repeat of his experience with Burton. In response, Burton prepared his journal for publication. In Lake Regions of Central Africa he waxed ungenerously on Speke’s failings – ‘unfit for anything other than a subordinate capacity’ – and spoke proprietorially of the ground that Speke intended to cover, protesting that he had reneged on his promise and had ‘lost no time in taking measures to secure for himself the right of working the field I had opened’. When the book came out in 1860 it was read with concern. But Burton was not there to enlarge on his criticisms: he had embarked with his wife on an investigation of West Africa; by that time Speke and Grant were already in East Africa.

  Speke’s plan was to march inland to Tabora and then strike north to Victoria Nyanza. Once there, he and Grant would skirt around its western coast in search of the outflow. If the lake emptied to the north, as seemed likely, then they would continue in that direction until they reached Gondokoro, a drab outpost, first attained from Cairo in 1839, that represented the non plus ultra of southwards exploration. Here, it had been arranged, the British consul John Petherick would furnish them with supplies and boats for their journey to Cairo.

  After considerable delays the two men reached Tabora, and by the end of 1861 were in the kingdom of Karagwe, to the west of Victoria Nyanza. Grant had an infected leg wound, so Speke left him in Karagwe and continued on his own to the neighbouring kingdom of Buganda. Here he was excited to learn of a river that flowed from the lake’s northern shore. On 7 July, Grant having finally caught up, Speke marched off to find what he was convinced could only be the Nile. Grant, however, was not allowed to accompany him; instead, he was instructed to proceed to the next kingdom up, Bunyoro. Both men later claimed that it was a joint decision; but in likelihood Speke wanted to have the discovery of the Nile to himself. Sure enough, on 21 July 1862, while Grant was toiling t
hrough Bunyoro, Speke became the first European to see what he described as ‘a magnificent stream ... dotted with islets and rocks’. Travelling upriver for some 40 miles, he saw an even more magnificent sight: a series of waterfalls 12 feet high and 700 yards wide, over which Victoria Nyanza emptied into the Nile. ‘The expedition,’ Speke wrote, ‘had now performed its functions.’

  Or had it? When Speke rejoined Grant in Bunyoro he learned of another great lake ten days’ march to the west called Luta Nzige that bisected a mighty river. If this river connected with the Nile – as Speke suspected it might – then it would mean the river had a secondary source. And if Luta Nzige was connected to Tanganyika then maybe Victoria Nyanza was not the main source of the Nile after all. Maybe, horribly, Burton was right. Speke ignored this possibility and marched north with Grant to Gondokoro, where they arrived, ragged and sunbaked, on 15 February 1863. Petherick was not there.

  Having waited for almost two years in this godforsaken spot – little more than a tented entrepôt for the slave trade – Petherick had gone on safari. In case Speke turned up while he was away, he had left four boats and a pile of supplies. But Speke refused to use them. Petherick, in his opinion, was a deserter and backslider – possibly, too, a slave trader. Instead, he availed himself of the assistance proffered by a fellow Briton whom he had met once before in London and who was now in Gondokoro. His name was Sam Baker.

  Baker was Speke with added caffeine. Bearded, hearty, and a dedicated big game hunter, he had fought a bit, farmed a bit (first in the English county of Gloucestershire, then on a desolate Sinhalese mountain), and had travelled copiously. In 1858, while passing through the Balkans, he had acquired a teenage Hungarian slave, Florence, who would in due course become his wife but for the moment was his ever-present paramour and companion. He had heard of Speke’s expedition from the Royal Geographical Society and, being a man of independent means, had decided to strike south in the hope of being able to participate in the quest. And that was why, when Speke arrived at Gondokoro, he was greeted by a man whose basso profundo was loud enough to rattle window panes, who carried 14 guns in his personal baggage and who was accompanied by a tough, young, blonde-haired woman who spoke German.