The Explorers Read online

  So ends the Victorian Age of Discovery. What began with the death of Captain James Cook ended with the discovery of King Tut. It was a span of 143 years. During that time, the poles were settled, the source of the Nile was located, the Amazon and her many tributaries were unveiled, North America’s peaks and great canyons were measured, the Pacific islands were knit together like so many squares of fabric in a great oceanic quilt, vast and barren Australia was traversed north to south—and east to west, and circumnavigated, making it the first time in history that the mainland of a continent had been so thoroughly explored—and the great hidden mountains of the Asian subcontinent were located and verified as the world’s tallest. Men such as Sir Francis Younghusband crossed the Gobi Desert and bridged the divide between India and China, setting forth a great game of geopolitical cat and mouse that almost led to war with Russia, thus confirming what everyone had known all along: as bold and adventurous as the explorers might have been, exploration and empire went hand in hand.

  Everest had not yet been climbed on the morning when Howard Carter first saw “wonderful things” gleaming inside Tut’s small tomb,V but British mountaineers were sniffing around its edges, searching for a path to the roof of the world. And though man had not yet set foot on the moon, the progression from first flight to biplane to single-wing propeller to jets to rockets was already ongoing. Truth be told, all that was left was for a then-twelve-year-old Jacques Cousteau to invent the Aqua-Lung so that mankind could venture into the depths of the oceans—most of which remain uncharted to this day.

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  There will be other discoveries as the Amazon, Africa, and Antarctica are penetrated deeper, and the subsequent findings of Louis Leakey about the origins of man in the Olduvai Gorge take the story right back to that first intrepid explorer who wandered away from his village one day and then kept right on walking. But as the RGS would note soon enough by the sort of undertaking they rewarded when bestowing their gold medal, the glory days of global exploration were at an end.

  Each discovery in the 143 years between Cook and Carter was powerful in its own right. Yet one stood out above the rest. One, more than any other, defined Victorian exploration: Speke’s discovery of the Nile’s source. The subsequent debate about the veracity of his findings only added to the drama.

  On September 19, 1909, the New York Times reflected back on the Burton and Speke argument as a reference point when another such disagreement reared its head. “The Peary-Cook controversy, which promises to occupy people’s minds for some time to come,” the paper wrote in reference to dueling claims between Frederick Cook and Robert Peary over who reached the North Pole first.VI “Fifty years ago something similar agitated all those interested in exploration. It lasted for years, with ever increasing feelings of bitterness on both sides, and was not definitely settled until one of the principals had died.”

  As the Times suggests, the same perseverance that leads a man to walk through the wilderness for years on end, or use a toothbrush to softly bristle away the sands of time (literally) to excavate a pharaoh’s tomb, transferred itself into the grudge match that became Burton and Speke’s geographical pas de deux.

  What triggers perseverance? Pleasure. Or, more accurately, the hit of dopamine that the brain releases when an action produces a positive result. On an immediate level, this is the whoosh of an orgasm that prompts the male of the human species to duplicate the reaction. Individuals who perform great feats of perseverance find the same pleasure in the act of work or the small triumphs that accompany a long-term trial. This, in turn, boosts confidence, which triggers a dopamine release. The amount is not the same flash flood as an orgasm, but is enough to appeal to the prefrontal cortex (the brain’s logical thinking center) and convince it that continuing this act is a rational idea. This simple act of continuation constitutes perseverance.

  If the process of achieving goals ceases at some point, so does the secretion of dopamine. This is why we often abandon a demanding or long-term process. Or, in terms of explorers, the lack of a discovery forced many men and women to turn back. The great explorers endured long spells with little success, but continued to press forward because they found pleasure in the experience, and also because their hopes for a great success propelled them toward their goals. For in that hope came the promise of the dopamine release—and perhaps in a flash flood far more extraordinary and long-lasting than the buzz of an orgasm.

  Think of John Hunt’s euphoric comments after leading the 1953 Everest expedition. And also think of men such as the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who endured years of staring at that black line on the bottom of the pool in the hopes of winning an Olympic medal. In peak phases of training, he swam 50 miles a week. This came to 6 hours a day in the water, along with three times a week in the weight room doing dry land training. The focus of all that work was a competition that occurs only once every four years. There were smaller meets in between, such as the world and national championships, but that Olympic gold is the be-all and end-all of the swimming world. An athlete’s legacy depends upon the color and number of medals. Over the course of three Olympics (2004, 2008, 2012), Phelps won twenty-two, of which eighteen were gold. This is the most ever won by any athlete in Olympic history, in any sport. The dopamine release that came with each victory must have been enormous, overwhelming the naysayer portion of the brain (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that might have suggested he not devote his life to such a goal, or even hope that he would achieve something so grandiose.

  We’re not all going to discover the source. Just as we’re not all going to win an Olympic gold medal. But there is great inspiration in these moments when human beings push themselves beyond the limits of mediocrity, in the process achieving a sublime glory that most of us experience rarely or never at all. This is one of the reasons why athletes cry during their national anthem. Standing atop the podium, mind and body numbed by dopamine, they realize that their perseverance has paid off. Part relief, part disbelief, it is one of those ultimate highs that life does not proffer easily. I suspect, though this is just a guess, that the reason entire nations bond together while watching the Olympics, learning the names of athletes from small, neglected sports and shedding tears of utter happiness when they triumph, is because their success offers us all a taste of that transcendence. Life is hard, and offers few chances to rise above the ruts and snares that cause us to settle for less than our personal best. But by watching others experience greatness, we know a little bit of that, too. It’s why we become inspired by the Olympic Games, or any other moment of spectacular accomplishment. It’s the emotional adhesive that resonates within our brains, making us think that we can attempt something just a little bit great—not Olympian, but something on a modest personal level—that will provide that same euphoria. There’s dopamine aplenty in training for a marathon, writing a page per day on that long-neglected novel, or performing any of a number of feats that propel you outside your comfort zone.

  So don’t quit. And when a task becomes difficult and the lack of dopamine makes it hard to push forward, remember that perseverance can be learned. It’s as simple as (1) taking a hard look at any new goal that has presented itself; (2) realistically believing that the goal is attainable; (3) begin working toward that goal (initial whoosh of dopamine just for moving forward!); (4) establishing milestones for motivation when times get tough; (5) being unafraid of veering away from the initial plan in order to realize a goal (with the new whoosh of dopamine that comes with owning the process); (6) accepting the mental and physical hardships that come with chasing this new dream; and (7) continuing to push forward.

  “Never give up. Never give up. Never ever, ever, ever give up,” Winston Churchill once said.

  Because to quit, or to have hope turn to despair, can produce low levels of the chemical serotonin. This is the opposite of dopamine, and can plunge an individual into a deep trench of depression that seems to have no bottom.

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  So it was with Jack Speke. He returned to England after not only making a profound and monumental discovery, but also accomplishing a journey that mankind had long dreamed of; an act of perseverance begun by countless men down through the centuries, all of whom quit before it was completed. It is safe to assume that Speke expected two things: fame and peace of mind. The former would come through formal recognition by the British government, perhaps in the form of a knighthood. The peace of mind would come through widespread acceptance that he had pinpointed the source of the Nile, once and for all. This would forever put an end to his quarrels with Dick Burton, and ensure that there would be no further attempts to discredit his discovery.

  Alas, neither was to be. Lord Palmerston,VII the aged British prime minister, thought so little of Speke’s incredible journey that he ignored Sir Roderick Murchison’s barrage of pleas that Speke be knighted. This wouldn’t have been such a slight, if Palmerston didn’t also manage to cast doubt on Speke’s discovery by writing that “The question arises whether there are not other African explorers, as for instance Livingstone . . . who could make such a claim” as to the source’s true location.

  Palmerston did make it possible for the Speke family to add a hippopotamus and crocodile to their coat of arms as a symbol of Speke’s journey, but Palmerston’s public dismissal of Victoria Nyanza as the source had a snowball effect. Murchison was overwhelmingly fond of Livingstone, thinking him the greatest of his “lions,” as he called those RGS explorers specializing in the African continent. His allegiance to Speke went nowhere near as deep. The seed of doubt planted by Palmerston soon took hold.

  Speke then unwittingly broadened the gap when he authorized a publisher to turn his journals into a book. To ensure that the words would draw the greatest possible sales from the reading public, he did not excerpt or write a synopsis for inclusion in the RGS’s in-house journals. Speke didn’t help matters by publicly stating that John Petherick, a Welshman whom the RGS had enlisted to resupply Speke in the Sudan during his journey, had profited from the slave trade while in Africa. And then Speke went one better, and opened old wounds by beginning work on a second book about Africa. This one would be based on his journey with Burton, but this time telling Speke’s side of the story.

  Speke most likely experienced a dopamine boost with these acts of defiance, but his perseverance in the matter of the source soon took on a bitter quality. Rather than setting aside his geographical debate with Burton, whom he hadn’t seen in years, Speke wrote to friends about “the amount of injustice he has done to me,” and fumed about getting revenge.

  Speke’s rapid tumble from grace continued. From national hero and much-admired Nile conqueror, Speke descended from favor with Murchison, then slowly saw the possibilities of his new dream of an east-to-west expedition across Africa dwindle due to this new political isolation. He then made matters far worse by meeting with French emperor Napoleon III in August of 1864, hoping to secure funding for the journey. Explorers were well known for exploiting any avenue to pay for a new journey, and even under the best of circumstances they were not only poorly funded—even by the RGS—but also held accountable for every expenditure. The 1834 RGS gold medal recipient William Ross, the man who endured four winters in the Arctic, paid for that expedition through an endowment from a gin distiller named Felix Booth. Not only did he Latinize his discovery and name the new land Boothia Felix, but the name stuck—and is quoted to this day as part of Ross’s gold medal pronouncement.VIII So in the absence of financial support from the British government or the RGS, Speke was well within his rights to court outside investors.

  But Speke was landed gentry, born into a family that had maintained an estate on English soil for centuries. He was thought to be a proper Victorian gentleman, not a mercenary. And while Speke may have felt simmering outrage about not being knighted, there was something extremely distasteful about taking his financial concerns to the French, of all people.

  As it has been well documented, the British and French have disliked one another to an extreme degree for a thousand years. Speke’s indiscretion was an act that effectively severed, at least temporarily, the goodwill between himself, the RGS, and those members of the British establishment paying attention to such matters. Given that the RGS worked closely with the British Foreign Office to ensure that exploration was soon after followed by colonization or some other incursion designed to capitalize on a region’s assets, Speke’s behavior could only have been seen as an act of betrayal, if not treason. The mere thought of the French taking over Britain’s hard-won—and RGS-backed—lands in Africa must have sent Sir Roderick Murchison into a state of apoplexy.

  The same lack of discretion that would soon prove the demise of Livingstone, and had once been the downfall of Captain Cook, had burrowed into Speke’s more rational veneer. Rather than the great hero who had endured two heinous expeditions into Africa, Speke became a villain.

  So it was interesting when Sir Roderick did something that was either incredibly cruel or incredibly kind: he invited Speke to the resort city of Bath, where a debate over the source of the Nile would take place as part of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s meeting. On one side would be Dr. David Livingstone, newly returned from an expedition of his own to the Zambezi that had not only gone poorly, but had resulted in a number of deaths—including that of his wife. His job was to appear resolute and learned, rather than as the crazed martinet that some from the expedition were now portraying him. At age fifty-one, his body playing host to a number of African parasites that he would never shake, Livingstone was now the elder statesman of RGS explorers. The former missionary was not at all happy that a new generation of explorers was making discoveries of significantly greater public interest.

  And while Livingstone remained passionate in his belief that the Zambezi River was the greatest of all African waterways, the hard truth was that the British people were much more curious about the source of the Nile—which bothered Livingstone no end. And there was nothing he could do about it. The outcome of the debate would establish once and for all the true source of the Nile. Livingstone’s beloved Zambezi would be relegated to second-tier status.

  Livingstone’s role as moderator was meant by Murchison to help restore some of the former missionary’s august reputation. And while Livingstone was too proud and far too independent to consider his appearance in Bath as an act of public contrition, that’s exactly what it was. Because there was every chance that the Zambezi expedition had been Livingstone’s last.

  Burton would also be standing on the speaker’s platform. Speke had somehow managed to offend almost everyone associated with British exploration by then, and in particular, the saintly Livingstone, who was feeling more and more proprietary about Africa. Thus the deeply Christian David Livingstone stood to be the ally of Muslim-centric Dick Burton during the Nile duel—a brotherhood that came together only because both men despised Speke just slightly more than they loathed one another.

  The arguments between Burton and Speke were meant to take place in the Royal Mineral Water Hospital in the heart of Bath. The building still exists, and if you can distract the orderly at the front desk, as my wife once did so that I might get a glimpse—or perhaps, simply ask permission—it’s possible to venture inside and get a feel for what “the Min”—as it is informally known—must have been like on September 16, 1864. The regal building with the faux-columned exterior has the timeless appearance of a facility whose foundation stone was first laid in 1738, and is still very much in business. A direct hit from a German bomb destroyed portions of it in 1942, and an extensive modernization project in 1962 revamped much of the interior. The gist of the Royal Mineral Water Hospital is its stately grandeur. In every way, it was an ideal location to settle the matter of the Nile. The fact that a divisive geographic riddle about the precise location where water spewed from the Earth would be debated inside a facility that ow
ed its existence to the healing power of a natural spring could only have been Sir Roderick Murchison’s idea of a fine inside joke.

  So the crowds of the learned, the curious, and those fond of dramatic spectacle took the train from London to Bath as the weekend approached, then lined up outside the Min on that wet September morning. Their wool and fur coats must have smelled horribly from the rain, and the clamor for tickets into the sold-out debate would have made for a growing excitement. The Nile Debate—the “Nile duel,” as many also called it, rightly guessing that one man would emerge victorious and the other all but dead to British society—would be the undoubted dramatic conclusion to a drama that had been escalating for almost a decade.

  Little did those thousands of spectators realize, but the Nile duel’s final moments would be far more explosive than any man or woman in that crowded, damp, overflowing hall could possibly imagine.

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  The outcome, in fact, had already been decided.

  It happened the night before, in the sedate autumn fields of Neston Park. Standing just 60 yards from his cousin Jack Speke as the two men hunted birds, George Fuller turned toward the sound of a muffled shotgun blast.

  At the exact same instant, one hundred small round pellets of #8 lead birdshot ripped through Jack Speke’s torso.

  George Fuller watched his cousin topple off the low stone wall over which he’d been climbing just a moment earlier. The Lancaster shotgun with the Damascus steel barrels fell harmlessly to the ground. One round was still chambered. George and Daniel Davis, the gamekeeper assisting with the hunt, sprinted to Speke. The explorer was collapsed on the grass and moaning. His body lay parallel to the wall, right next to the Lancaster. The shotgun’s empty left barrel and its right barrel were still at half cock. Blood flowed from the gaping entry wound on the front of Speke’s body and the large exit wound on his back, making small crimson puddles in the dying grass that grew larger and more troubling by the instant.