The Explorers Read online

  America, Lincoln was saying in not so many words, is settled.

  At one point, Lincoln even invoked the spirit of exploration by laying his hand upon a globe. “I tell you that there are people here in this wigwam,” said America’s sixteenth president, referring to the White House, “who have come from other countries a great deal farther off than you have come. We pale-faced people think that this world is a great, round ball, and we have people here of the pale-faced family who have come almost from the other side of it to represent their nations here and conduct their friendly intercourse with us, as you now come from your part of the round ball.”

  Whereupon Lincoln asked an academic in the audience to step to the globe and deliver a brief lecture on the history of exploration.

  Naysayers point to such moments as proof that exploration is wrong, or arrogant, or heartless, and ought not to be pursued. But Lincoln’s speech was none of those. In fact, it was a lesson in realpolitik, spoken by a man known to be thoughtful, reasonable, and compassionate. The history of the world is the history of exploration—and its repercussions. Ever since that first man strolled out of Africa thousands and thousands of years ago, great tribes of people have followed him into the unknown. Inevitably, they came in contact with another tribe. One of two things then took place: either the new tribe supplanted the occupants, or they retreated in the face of a more powerful foe. As heartless as it might appear, Lincoln was just speaking the hard truth to make the transition easier—and save thousands of lives.

  Speke’s message was about to start that same process in Africa.

  There could be no turning back. For the first time in history, Speke had shown it possible to link northern Africa with sub-Saharan Africa. Within thirty short years all of Africa would be carved up by European nations ranging from Germany to Belgium to England. Sadly, this transition would go even less smoothly than in America, which was hardly smooth at all. Wars, slavery, mutilations, genocide, and reprisals would continue to mark the relationship between Europeans and Africans for years to come—and still do to this day.

  None of this was obvious, however, as Speke’s message flashed to London. Murchison passed it along in an address to the RGS, telling them with great confidence that the “problem of all ages” had been solved.

  Soon enough Speke and Grant arrived in Cairo, where they experienced the luxury of the Shepheard HotelII and arranged for ocean passage home for themselves and their porters. On June 17, 1863, Speke and Grant returned to England after an absence of three years, stepping off yet another P&O steamer (the Pera)III in Southampton as triumphant heroes. In keeping with the understated manner of all British exploration, and in continuance of the stiff upper lip with which Speke had masqueraded for almost three years, there was little fanfare. Emotional dockside family reunions, complete with flowers and tears and hugs, were nowhere to be seen.

  Too bad.

  Dick Burton was not in England at the time. He had begun his new career as a minor diplomat on the unsavory West African island of Fernando Po,IV and was not inclined to return home as a welcoming party. Bitter to the end, he had not let go of his hatred for Speke. Burton, so recently spun from exploration wunderkind to has-been thanks to the man he had so severely underestimated, was as eager as ever to disprove any geographical theories that Speke might set forth.

  Now that Speke had returned to civilization, it would seem that his dependence on self-discipline would no longer be required. Ironically, after three years in Africa, the trait of self-discipline would never be more necessary. Burton was keen to attack Speke’s one true weakness: his intellect. And the mere fact that Speke had not followed each and every mile of that waterfall’s course after it flowed out of Victoria Nyanza gave Burton hope that his own arguments about Tanganyika might be proven—that somehow, the outflow Speke had followed to the sea actually began in Tanganyika.

  Presenting the world a stiff upper lip was not enough anymore. Now Speke needed to endure—to persevere. Or, as Nile duel moderator David Livingstone liked to say, Speke would need to “Bash on, regardless.”

  Perseverance, this seventh and final trait of the explorers, takes Speke out of the abstract of the wilderness and places him in the context of real life. As we’ll soon see, it’s sometimes easier to risk death in some unexplored land than to persevere with all the slings and arrows that come from personal attacks, bad relationships, and public criticism.

  In August 1864, Richard Francis Burton finally returned to London. His satchel contained his usual palette of darkness and retribution. So it was that the long, strange duel between Speke and Burton was about to end.

  Badly.

  * * *

  I. Hemingway once famously said that he drank “to make other people more interesting.” The Times of London reported on December 14, 2013, that researchers in Finland and Britain discovered that many intelligent people do the very same thing. The London School of Economics collected data from 17,000 people born in Britain in 1958 as part of the National Childhood Development Study. Their findings show a correlation between an elevated IQ and the tendency to enjoy an adult beverage. The Times went on to suggest that those with higher IQs needed a drink “after a hard day dealing with stupid nondrinkers”—which puts its own spin on Hemingway’s quote.

  II. Built in 1841 by Englishman Samuel Shepheard, it was for a time the most celebrated hotel in Cairo. Situated on lush grounds that Napoleon’s army used as its headquarters during his invasion of Egypt, its many visitors included T. E. Lawrence, Henry Morton Stanley, Theodore Roosevelt, the Prince of Wales, King Faisal of Iraq, the Aga Khan, and Winston Churchill. The original structure burned down in 1952 during civil unrest relating to the Egyptian revolution. Rebuilt at a new site in 1957, it was prominently featured in the Academy Award–winning 1996 film The English Patient.

  III. There were three Peninsular and Oriental steamers named SS Pera, and all found unique ways to sink. The first was rechristened the Alma almost as soon as she left the shipyard in 1855. She ran aground off Jabal Zugar Island in the Red Sea on December 6, 1859, sinking in 40 feet of water with the loss of one life. The second SS Pera, and the one on which Speke and Grant sailed, was also launched in 1855. The P&O sold it in 1880 to William Ross & Co. out of Belfast, who put it into Atlantic service. On October 6, 1882, she hit an iceberg off St. Mary’s Bay in Newfoundland. The entire crew was rescued by the nearby schooner Florella and the SS Lake Manitoba. Perhaps thinking the name cursed, the P&O launched no more Peras until 1903. However, she was also sent to the bottom in 1917 by the German submarine UB-48, helmed by Captain Wolfgang Steinbauer, while transporting coal from Liverpool to Calcutta. The wreck can be found in the Mediterranean, 105 miles north of the Libyan port of Marsa Susa.

  IV. Now known as Bioko, it is 19 miles off the coast of Cameroon, in the equatorial Gulf of Guinea.

  PERSEVERANCE

  If you find yourself going through hell, keep going.

  —Winston Churchill

  1

  Viewers of the popular BBC television series Downton Abbey are well acquainted with the sprawling English country house that appears in the show’s opening credits and gives the series its name. The architect was Sir Charles Barry, who remodeled an existing home on the property immediately after he had overseen the building of the Houses of Parliament in 1839. The JacobethanI design shares the same high towers as that iconic structure on the Thames, giving it the stately appearance that made it the perfect site to locate a modern-day show about the bygone days of British estates and the people who lived and worked there.

  There was, of course, no Lord Grantham. Nor was there a Lady Grantham. But the building that doubles for Downton is an actual mansion, rather than a theatrical facade. The home sits on land that has belonged to the Earl of Carnarvon’s family since 1692. Its real name is Highclere Castle, and it is germane to this chapter because within those walls
exists a museum that testifies to the enormous power of perseverance. Appropriately, the saga behind the museum was played out along the banks of the Nile.

  It all began in 1901, when irrepressible George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert—also known as the fifth Earl of Carnarvon—was badly injured in a driving accident. Lord Carnarvon was thirty-five at the time, and notorious for his reckless lifestyle, which included ownership in racehorses and a fondness for driving too fast in that brand-new invention known as the automobile.II The one great enduring image of the earl is a painting that sums up his personality at a glance: unfiltered cigarette burning between two fingers of his right hand, broad-brimmed Homburg worn at a rakish angle, a confident clipped mustache, and lips pursed in what initially appears to be a smirk, until you see that they are counterbalanced by tired eyes. “Motor” Carnarvon’s driving habits were radical enough that he appeared before the local magistrate on several occasions to explain why a man needed to travel at the extraordinary rate of twenty miles per hour. The Autocar periodical marveled that he drove “like a flash.”

  The accident was nearly fatal and highly regrettable for a wealthy playboy man in the prime of his life, but it could not have been unexpected. Nonetheless, the aftereffects were dramatic. During his subsequent recovery, the nearly six-foot-tall Carnarvon shriveled to just 114 pounds. The great drafty corridors of Highclere and the damp British winters became unbearable, so he took to wintering in Egypt. But Carnarvon quickly grew bored in sultry Cairo. Searching for a way to pass the time, he traveled south down the river to Luxor, and began a search for ruins of ancient Egyptian civilization—or Egyptology, as it is known.

  This is where exploration comes full circle. Just as with the Leakey excavations in Olduvai Gorge, this process of traveling back to early civilizations is as much about reconnecting the peoples of the world as traveling into new and uncharted lands. This is the Indiana Jones form of exploration, a dazzling world of treasure, history, and intrigue that requires the explorer to piece together the story of a bygone time by finding its bowls and amulets and stone carvings, then figuring out what they mean. This is no different than Burton’s ethnography or Cook describing Antarctic ice for the first time. The trick is to find out what was myth and what was real, because the archaeologist is not an eyewitness, but a reconstructor.

  Visits to those great museums in London, New York, Cairo, and other assorted cities that house Egyptian artifacts make it appear as if these shards of history were simply plucked from the desert floor and driven straight to the display case. There is such an enormous supply of them, from so many eras and dig sites, that this seems the only logical conclusion. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Centuries of shifting sands and civilizations built atop other civilizations mean that Egyptology is perhaps the most labor-intensive and boring form of exploration ever contrived. The results are sexy, but the nine to five of the task is not. Suffice to say that Lord Carnarvon did not show up for work each morning with a handgun and a bullwhip. He spent each night at the lavish Winter Palace Hotel,III crossed the Nile in the morning by sailboat, was driven across the desert into the range of low mountains that concealed a burial site known as the Valley of the Kings, and then entered a special screened cage that kept the flies away while allowing him to watch teams of hired Egyptian diggers sift shovels full of dry desert sand in the hopes of finding something resembling an artifact. The excitement came from the constant daily hope that one of those diggers would overturn a spade of earth that would reveal a pharaoh’s tomb. For the great Egyptian rulers were always buried with their earthly possessions. A good tomb could yield a fortune in gold, ivory, and precious antiquities. And while Lord Carnarvon had no financial concerns, he craved the adrenaline rush and celebrity of that one great discovery.

  At the same time, there lived in Egypt a struggling young Briton searching for the same elusive find. Self-educated and lacking much of a future in England, Howard Carter had a talent for sketching and watercolors that led to his being hired to do pen-and-ink drawings of an Egyptian dig site at the precocious age of seventeen. Carter took to Egypt, and developed a passion for all things Egyptological. He soon became an expert on ancient Egyptian civilizations.

  Over time, Carter also became what can only be described as a determined failure. He was priggish, self-righteous, and arrogant; an archaeological gigolo who hired out his excavation services to whichever wealthy suitor owned a legitimate claim to dig in the Valley of the Kings. When money was tight he eked out a living selling watercolors in front of the Winter Palace. Through it all, Carter was an idealist. He remained steadfast in the belief that there was still one great undiscovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings—and that one day he would be the man to find it.

  “The Valley of the Kings” has such a regal and majestic sound that upon first visit one finds it hard to reconcile that title’s intended splendor with the landscape’s stark emptiness and the intense desert heat. There is nothing inviting about the terrain, which is precisely why the ancient Egyptians buried their pharaohs in its crags. This was to discourage grave robbers while also providing a true resting place. Very often, slaves were paid to carve a tomb out of the desert rock, then killed upon completing the job so that they would never whisper a word about its location.

  The Valley of the Kings now houses a parking lot, a visitor center, and a number of large tombs into which one can walk. Their entrances are so large that Howard Carter often took refuge from the sun and heat inside these very tombs during his workday, eating his lunch at a large table placed inside the entrance for that very purpose.

  But let’s say you’re not visiting the Valley of the Kings in modern times. Let’s say you’re there a century ago, when the road from the Nile was unpaved and the Valley of the Kings was in the early stages of revealing its secrets. You would be looking at nothing but mounds of rocks and dirt, you would be sweating profusely from the unbearable heat, you would do just about anything for sunblock and a floppy hat to keep the sun off your face, and you would slowly be driven insane by the constant action of swatting away the swarms of flies that torment one and all who visit the valley.

  But you do all of this because you know that somehow, beneath one of those piles of desert flotsam, is a tomb. And that finding the tomb might make you rich. So you dig and dig and dig, aided by an army of local men. You do this for a year, maybe two, before realizing that the mound into which you are digging contains no tomb at all. In fact, it contains nothing but dirt and more dirt.

  So you dig someplace else. This goes on for another year or two. Maybe you find something, maybe you don’t. Maybe that thing you pluck out of the dirt is just an ancient piece of broken pottery, which is immediately scrutinized and analyzed: does it belong to a pharaoh? Or was it left here by a tomb robber 1,000 years ago?

  2

  I once traveled thousands of miles to stand in the Valley of the Kings. I’d read up on its history, and knew the location of several key tombs—some of which I had to hunch down to squeeze into, and others into which I strolled upright. After a good six hours in the Valley of the Kings I felt like I’d experienced something profound. It was beautiful in its austerity, magical for its timelessness, overwhelming in the harshness of its climate, stunning in the way the clearest imaginable blue sky contrasted so sharply with the dun-colored cliffs and crags; and how, viewed from a trail high atop the valley floor, the distant slithering Nile and the carpet of greenery lining each of its banks contrasted so vividly with the utter nothingness of desert stretching out in all directions.

  In a word, the Valley of the Kings was exceptional.

  But by the time my wife and I piled into our taxi for the trip back to Luxor, I had seen all I wanted to see. Ever. I don’t feel any need to return to the Valley of the Kings.

  But Howard Carter returned. Day after day after day, year after year after year, scraping at the earth, standing around for hours in the heat, directing digge
rs into one pile of rock after another, perhaps growing bored but never losing hope in his gut belief that there was more to be found. He teamed up with Lord Carnarvon in 1907, and used the earl’s financing to dig for that elusive tomb. Carter toiled in the valley for so many years that his task became Sisyphean. He dug through the entire valley, finding jars and small tombs and statuary, but the impoverished Carter never found the big payday that would allow him to live out his life in comfort. By 1921, when Carter was forty-seven, Egyptology was falling out of favor in England. World War I had sobered the nation. What had once been a stimulating series of discoveries on par with the poles and the source no longer fascinated the nation—mostly because it appeared that there was nothing left to find. And even Carnarvon was tired of pouring money into excavations. Clearly, the Valley of the Kings had been worked out. It was no different than a gold miner who realizes that his claim will yield no more treasure. The earl summoned Carter to Highclere Castle to give him the bad news that he was giving up—there would be no more digging.

  Carter begged for one last chance. There was a small triangle of land in the valley that had never been excavated. Carter was so insistent that Lord Carnarvon was swayed. Thus the digging continued, and on the Wednesday morning of November 1, 1922, Carter found the location of King Tutankhamen’s tomb. King Tut, as it became known, was a virgin find, full of the dazzling wealth Carter and Carnarvon had long been seeking. There has never been a greater discovery in the history of archaeology. Everyone got rich. People around the world were suddenly awash in a resurgent passion for Egyptology.

  All because Carter and Carnarvon wouldn’t quit. All those years of perseverance paid off. The results can be viewed in museums such as the exhibit within Highclere dedicated to the earl’s collection of artifacts discovered during the years he indulged his passion for Egyptology.IV