The Explorers Read online

  George Fuller pressed his palm down hard on the great explorer’s chest, desperately applying pressure to stop the bleeding. There was no sound. No conversation. Just three men in an empty field as the unseen sun dropped lower and lower in the sky. It soon became apparent that Jack Speke might die on this obscure patch of soil. Not alongside hundreds of other men on the great battlefields of India and the Crimea upon which he once fought for God and country. And not in the teeth of a crocodile. Speke would never be dismembered by a hostile tribe, driven to insanity by an insect lodged in his ear, or once again racked by malaria.

  In fact, as he lay bleeding on the grass, those years on the Nile counted for very little to John Hanning Speke. The Nile duel meant even less.

  Richard Francis Burton’s geographical posturing meant nothing at all.

  “Don’t move me,” Speke insisted.

  He was lying on British soil, among people who loved him as family, wearing comfortable hunting tweeds and expensive boots of soft leather.

  Five minutes passed. Speke began to lose consciousness. George Fuller ordered Daniel Davis to place his own hands over his cousin’s wounds to stanch the bleeding. After wiping his bloody hands on the grass, George ran hard back to the house to call for Dr. Snow, the surgeon living in the nearby town of Box. It was a desperate race against time. With any luck, Dr. Snow might be at Speke’s side within the hour—if Speke could last that long.

  Snow arrived to find Speke precisely where he had fallen, a wound on the left side of his body “such as would be made by a cartridge if the muzzle of the gun was close to the body. It led in a direction upwards and toward the spine, passing through the lungs and dividing all the large blood vessels near the heart.”

  But Dr. Snow reached the scene far too late. Speke stopped breathing just fifteen minutes after the Lancaster blew a hole in his torso.

  John Hanning Speke was thirty-seven years old: discoverer of Victoria Nyanza, first man in history to travel from the coast of eastern Africa all the way to the Mediterranean; and, as the Latin inscription on his black marble sarcophagus would soon read, deeply, completely, and unabashedly “Illustrious for the Nile.”

  If there was a saving grace to his tragic death, it was that Speke was not alone in his final moment, as he might have been had he died in Africa.

  He had Daniel Davis there to comfort him on the dying grass of Neston Park as he breathed his last.

  In this way, John Hanning Speke died in the arms of a fellow explorer.

  6

  Burton took his place first atop the speaker’s platform, quietly sitting before the crowd of two thousand curious armchair adventurers. He held in his hands a thick set of arguments in favor of Tanganyika and the Rusizi. As time passed and his opponent failed to appear, rumors spread through the crowd about a delay. By eleven o’clock, the scheduled starting time, the room was nearly manic with excitement. The Bath Chronicle reported that “the crowd gave vent to its impatience by sounds more often heard from the audience of a theater than a scientific meeting”—which was appropriate, because the British Association for the Advancement of the Sciences had been infiltrated by a legion of men and women who cared nothing at all about science but everything for the soap opera drama between Burton and Speke.

  It was 11:25 when the great wooden doors opened and Sir Roderick Murchison walked somberly to the speaker’s platform. “I have to apologize but when I explain to you the cause of my being a little late in coming to take the chair, you will pardon me.”

  The audience leaned in, desperate to hear his next words.

  “Captain Speke,” Murchison said solemnly, “has lost his life.”

  The Chronicle reported that “Sensation” roared through the room.

  Burton would later note that Speke was a stickler for gun safety, and that “even when our canoe was shaken and upthrown by hippopotamus, he never allowed his gun to look at him or others.” The question soon sweeping through the room was one that overshadows Speke’s legacy to this day: did he kill himself, or was it an accident? He will be remembered more for the mystery behind his death than for the majesty of the way he lived.

  Burton collapsed in his chair, apparently stricken with grief—though not enough to later stand and deliver a treatise dealing with his personal thoughts on exploration. He would still be alive in 1877, when Henry Morton Stanley returned from a 999-day journey across Africa that confirmed Speke’s Victoria Nyanza as the premier source of the Nile by proving that the Rusizi River flowed into Lake Tanganyika. This forever erased Burton from the historical record. That fact would be reinforced during the passion-fueled journey of Ewart Grogan from Cape Town to Cairo just before the turn of the twentieth century, when he completed the exploration of the watershed between the Rusizi and Victoria Nyanza that Burton and Speke had been tasked with forty-five years earlier.

  Strangely, the cult of Burton would grow and grow. His legend would far eclipse that of Speke. Burton had an antagonistic flair for the dramatic that made him Victorian exploration’s rebel without a cause.

  Jack Speke was nothing like that. He was an ordinary person accomplishing extraordinary things. Speke was, in other words, the epitome of an explorer. No cult following is necessary to document the fact that he found a way to push his personal limits, step outside his comfort zone, and change the world, however staid and boring he might seem alongside the rage-fueled Burton.

  7

  Curiosity. Hope. Passion. Courage. Independence. Self-Discipline. Perseverance.

  And, of course, the overlooked final trait: Discretion, that cohesive and rational ability to bind each surpassing achievement with a clear sense of perspective. In discretion we see our personal expeditions not as the be-all and end-all of daily existence, but as a form of enrichment that spills over into relationships, outlook, and overall quality of life. Discretion is the art of knowing better. An accumulation of life’s wisdoms prevents us from making the same mistake twice, or allows us the forethought to prevent that mistake from happening at all. Research has shown that this rational thought process can be assisted by aerobic exercise—running, long walks, cycling, paddling, and the like. These simple physical acts make changes to our body through the regulation of dopamine and serotonin, acting to reduce impulsivity and encourage wise decision-making.

  But discretion is hard to come by once emotional variables enter the picture, no matter how many long walks an individual takes—and African exploration was nothing but a series of very long walks. David Livingstone, for instance, needed three things as the Nile duel came to an abrupt halt: (1) money, because he was broke and had little savings to provide for his children’s inheritance; (2) a restoration of his good name as Africa’s greatest explorer after his Zambezi debacle; and (3) a newfound desire to be the man who discovered the source of the Nile.

  Sir Roderick Murchison came calling soon after the Nile duel came to its unsatisfying conclusion. The great showman prevailed upon Livingstone to undertake one last great expedition into Africa to solve the great unanswered geographical riddle, proving whether it was Burton or Speke who had located the source of the Nile.

  This was the journey from which Livingstone got completely lost.

  It was also the journey from which he never returned.

  The lack of discretion was not that Livingstone undertook one last great adventure in middle age, nor that he abandoned his children forevermore to do so, nor even that he refused to return to civilization after Henry Morton Stanley so famously found the good doctor after years of being lost in the wilderness.

  No, the great lack of discretion came from the wizened Livingstone’s ego. He ignored the findings of Speke and Burton almost entirely. Instead of focusing his attentions on Lake Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza, he fixated on his beloved Zambezi as being the source. The fact that he eventually blundered into Ujiji was an act of provenance. From there he could have marched north int
o that watershed between Tanganyika and Victoria that Burton and Speke had left unexplored. But instead, after being reprovisioned by Stanley, Livingstone once again marched due south to the Zambezi River—and to his death.

  8

  Jack Speke’s career marked the zenith of exploration, a high point from which this calling slowly descended until it doesn’t exist at all.

  The Neston Park country house and estate still stand. The wall that Speke clambered over can be found just a few hundred yards off A365, or the Bath Road, as it is commonly known.IX The fields are pastoral and calming, dotted with organically raised cows and sheep. It is easy to get a sense of why Speke chose that spot to wander and hunt in order to calm himself before doing battle with his archrival.

  Perhaps the potential of death by his own handX is why Murchison chose to erect an obelisk rather than a statue in Speke’s likeness to commemorate his passing. Whether or not this is the case, the monument is actually more powerful for not being normal statuary. Look for yourself. It can be found in London’s Kensington Gardens, some 300 yards from the Peter Pan statue personally commissioned by author J. M. Barrie.XI

  The Speke monument is a towering obelisk carved from red Aberdeen granite. The people of Kensington paid for it through public subscriptions shortly after his death, and the memorial looks as smooth and unweathered today as when that great Victorian showman Murchison oversaw its unveiling in 1866.XII A small wrought-iron fence keeps visitors at arm’s length. An inscription on the face of the obelisk reads: “In Memory of Speke, Victoria Nyanza and the Nile.”

  It’s interesting to note that in 1866, nobody was absolutely positive that Speke had truly located the source; thus the lack of the word “discovery” in the inscription. It would seem that the time and trouble of designing and building the monument were just a bit premature. But there it is. Murchison, whether out of a deep distrust of Burton, regret over turning his back on such an accomplished young lion, or a melancholy eagerness to name Speke the winner of the Nile duel, raised the money and had the granite quarried and polishedXIII a decade before it was confirmed that Speke was, in fact, discoverer of the source.

  Further complicating matters is the location of the obelisk. It would appear that Speke benefited from his era’s passion for Nile exploration. For all the legendary discoveries by the British Empire’s legion of adventurers, Speke is the only one honored with a statue in London’s most public and well-traveled park. It can be argued that fellow African explorer David Livingstone or Antarctic hero Ernest Shackleton was more courageous, or at the very least more intrepid, but their statues are limited to small vestibules along the brick exterior of the Royal Geographic Society, just across Kensington Road from Hyde Park. Even the one man who can lay claim to the title of “World’s Greatest Explorer,” Captain James Cook, is limited to a relatively anonymous location behind the Old Admiralty Building.XIV Speke’s legacy is the least remembered of that Murderers’ Row of exploration greats.

  Nonetheless, there it stands in the sprawling grandeur of Kensington Gardens, Speke’s name boldly etched in that pillar of polished stone. The absence of his likeness gives the monument a timeless appearance. We don’t glimpse his fussy Victorian clothing or the floppy felt hunting hat or an artist’s rendition of his long, wispy beard. What we gaze upon instead is a powerful and tapering four-sided column that comes to a point at the top, a construct first discovered and named by the Greek explorer Herodotus in the fifth century BC—while exploring the Nile, no less—that alludes to a sense of greatness and imagination. Small wonder that obelisks are used more often than any other shape as a remembrance of explorers.XV

  So in a way, it is not Speke whom the monument honors, but the spirit of exploration. Standing before it on a raw February morning, reading exotic words about “the Nile” and “Victoria Nyanza” is to be swept away on a wave of possibilities. A flickering spirit of adventure makes the mind wander. Images of a mighty river, a barren desert, deadly crocodiles, and a sultry African dawn whisk the reader away from cosmopolitan London, if only temporarily.

  And of a lone explorer, striving against all odds to accomplish something considered impossible, if only because his life will not be complete until he does so.

  9

  The history of exploration is a vivid record of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Jack Speke wouldn’t have described his career in that fashion, nor would most anyone who tramped through the wilderness or sailed the 100-foot waves of the Southern Ocean to unveil those dark spots on the map once marked “Unknown.” They were just performing a job they enjoyed, that they accomplished with spectacular proficiency, and that would have left them deeply unhappy if they hadn’t seen it through to its completion.

  But no one remains in the wilderness for life.

  “You cannot stay on the mountain forever,” wrote René Daumal in Le Mont Analogue, his 1952 philosophical exploration of mountaineering. “You have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”

  So it is that mountain climbers turn their backs on the great peaks. Pilots land one last time. Arctic explorers take off their anoraks. And African explorers only see lions in the zoo.

  But that doesn’t mean they stop challenging themselves.

  The same should be true for us all.

  Within each of us beats the heart of an explorer. Though it’s true that there are no new continents to be discovered, each of us, just like the explorers, faces a daily barrage of adversity, complication, and decision. Our personal journeys through the wilderness go on each and every day. Within some of us is a mountain climber, within another a brilliant entrepreneur. In our lives we will be faced with great unknowns: the diagnosis of cancer, the call to help a troubled friend, or the need to move forward after tragedy. As professionals we will attempt to chart paths that, however modest our lives may appear on the outside, involve deep moral decisions and complex tactical judgments.

  But they are paths into the wilderness we must follow, even if we don’t know where they lead and the potential for getting hopelessly lost is enormous.

  Because sometimes, as the explorers learned, it is only by getting lost in this wilderness that we find out who we truly are.

  * * *

  I. A blend of Tudor and Renaissance styles. The surrounding grounds were designed by the renowned British landscape architect Capability Brown.

  II. First conceptualized by Jesuit missionary Ferdinant Verbiest, the modern automobile was invented by Karl Benz in 1878, who patented his first engine in 1879 and the Motorwagen design in 1885. It featured three spoked wheels and an open carriage. A fellow German engineer named Gottlieb Daimler was also experimenting with automobile designs at that time. He died in 1900, but his design company, DMG, lived on, producing the vehicle known as the Mercedes in 1902. After World War I the Benz and Daimler corporations were merged. Mercedes-Benz is its trademark, but not the company name. The actual corporation is now known as Daimler AG.

  III. The Winter Palace is still as lavish and well maintained one century later. Even if one does not spend the night at the Winter Palace, no visit to Luxor is complete without a walk through the lobby and gardens.

  IV. Lord Carnarvon died just five months after the discovery of Tut’s tomb. He had traveled to Egypt to see it for himself, where he was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito carrying the deadly erisypelas bacteria. Carnarvon mistakenly shaved over the bite. It became infected, and he succumbed to pneumonia on April 5, 1923, at the Continental Savoy Hotel in Cairo. His death gave rise to rumors of a suspected curse related to the opening of King Tut’s tomb. Others affected by the a
lleged curse were Carter’s pet canary, which was eaten by a cobra on the day the tomb was opened; and Carnarvon’s three-legged terrier, which is said to have howled and dropped dead at the exact moment the earl died. Carnarvon is buried on a hill overlooking Highclere Castle.

  V. Some of the more prominent tombs in the Valley of the Kings have the cavernous feel of a parking garage. Tut’s is the size of a studio apartment.

  VI. The coincidentally named Cook also claimed to have been the first man to summit Mount McKinley. Both claims were later proven false. It’s interesting to note that Cook was also a good friend of Roald Amundsen, whose own journey to the North Pole may likely have been the first, instead of Peary’s. As for Mount McKinley, this highest North American peak was originally named Denali by the native Koyukon Athabascan tribe that inhabited the region. During Russia’s occupation of Alaska (from early in the nineteenth century until October 18, 1867, thanks to Seward’s Purchase; that calendar date is also famous for being the birthday of Lee Harvey Oswald, in 1939) the name was altered to Bolshaya Gora (Great Mountain). However, a supporter of William McKinley renamed it in the then president’s honor at the turn of the twentieth century, which it remains to this day. The state of Alaska has reverted to Denali, but congressmen from McKinley’s home state of Ohio have blocked requests to make the change official on the United States Board on Geographic Names. Yes, there is such an august body. The BGN was created in 1890 by order of President Benjamin Harrison. Its purpose is to determine and maintain standard usage of geographic names, and its decisions are binding to all of the federal government’s agencies and departments. This quiet powerhouse also holds sway over place names in Antarctica and below the ocean surface.