Into Africa Page 3
The grail became more exalted as the failures mounted, as tackling the summit of Everest would become a century hence. Britain's growing sense of empire gave that nation a proprietary interest in finding the source first. The reign of Queen Victoria, which began inauspiciously in 1837 with a botched coronation, had become a time of international expansion for Great Britain. Her citizens and companies controlled colonial outposts around the world, insinuating British ways and words into China, the South Pacific, South America, India, North America, and Africa. The term “the sun never sets on the British Empire” began during those heady times. No empire in history had ever been as vast, and the British were fond of comparing their empire with the Greek and Roman ones. The Nile was a viable connection to that past. Finding the source would heighten that connection.
“In the absence of adequate data we are not entitled to speculate too confidently on the source,” Sir Roderick Murchison told Britain's unofficial governing body of exploration, the Royal Geographical Society, in 1852. The eminent geographer and RGS founder's attention focused on the Mountains of the Moon. “It must be said that there is no exploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached than an ascent of these mountains from the east coast, possibly from near Mombasa. The adventurous travelers who shall first lay down the true position of these equatorial snowy mountains and who shall satisfy us that they throw off the waters of the White Nile . . . will be justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science.”
It was April of 1855 when Speke and Burton made their first source bid. Their pairing was accidental: Speke was on leave from his regiment, the 46th Bengal Native Infantry, in India. They met in Aden, where Burton was finalizing his journey. Speke had planned to hunt big game, find the source by himself, then float downriver to Cairo. Burton invited him to join his expedition instead. They were accompanied by a pair of British military men, Lieutenants William Stroyan and G. E. Herne, and the usual phalanx of porters vital to African travel. Instead of beginning at the mouth of the Nile in Egypt and working upriver, as explorers had done since Herodotus, Burton and Speke proposed to penetrate Africa from the east, beginning in Somalia then cutting the tangent from the Indian Ocean along the equator to the Mountains of the Moon's theoretical location. The northern regions of Africa were already mapped, as were the continent's southern and coastal fringes, but theirs would be a bold gambit through uncharted land. If the source truly resided in the Mountains of the Moon, the shortcut would save them over two thousand miles of travel in both directions.
Burton and Speke made it to Africa but never even left the coast on that first expedition. Their forty-two-man caravan was camped along the Somali shore, waiting for the monsoon season to pass so they could move inland. Sentries were posted around the camp and a fire burned into the night to ward off Somali bandits, legendary as the “penis-cutting people” because they emasculated vanquished enemies. When the attack came, however, the expedition was unprepared. It happened at 2 A.M. on the morning of April 18, 1855. Sentries and porters were slaughtered first by the Somalis, who wielded sabers, curved daggers, war clubs, and six-foot-long spears. Burton stepped from his lean-to at the first sound of violence, brandishing a saber. Stroyan rose to his side clutching a Colt revolver in each hand. Together they battled the Somalis, even as the remaining porters fled into the night or were butchered alive.
Speke stayed in his tent through the early part of the battle, saying later that he mistook the sounds of gunfire for warning shots fired by spooked sentries. But then the Somalis began using the British tents as snares, collapsing them atop men, and thrusting spears into the writhing piles of canvas. Speke grabbed his pistols and stepped from the solitude of his tent into the frenzy. Burton was still alive but Stroyan had run out of bullets. He was being hacked to pieces by the Somalis, even as he swung his empty pistols like clubs. Speke began fighting his way through a cloud of Somalis to rescue Burton when a warrior stepped between them. The interloper thrust a javelin clean through Burton's face and fled before Speke could shoot. The spear remained stuck in Burton's head, jabbing out at right angles. He had lost teeth, and blood poured from his mouth and both cheeks. Unable to pull out the javelin and unable to link up with Speke, the would-be explorer miraculously escaped into the night before another warrior could finish him off.
Speke, however, was taken prisoner. The Somalis could have killed him quickly like Stroyan, but with the battle winding down they had the luxury of enjoying his terror. Speke's hands were tied behind his back and he was shoved to the ground. The Somalis began fondling his genitals as if debating the most wrenching means of slicing them off. His captors, though, turned their attention to looting the camp before they could finish the job. Just to make sure Speke didn't escape while they were gone, the Somalis plunged spears deep into his thighs. They narrowly missed his groin but severed the muscles of his hamstrings and quadriceps.
In his agony, Speke still managed to slip his bonds and escape without being detected. He dragged himself three miles down the beach to where a British ship was anchored. And somehow, miraculously, Herne and Burton—javelin still jutting from his face—were waiting. All three were soon on their way back to England.
Lesser men would have set aside exploration after that—G. E. Herne certainly did. But no sooner had their wounds healed than Burton and Speke, who were both army officers before venturing into exploration during peacetime, resumed their army careers to fight Russia in the epic British blunder known as the Crimean War. When the war came to an end it was back to Africa to find the source, this time funded by the Royal Geographical Society. Burton and Speke were brave loners, a type of personality society idealizes from a polite distance but finds discomfiting up close. Speke was often blunt and inappropriate, and since childhood had fled to the hunting fields to regain his inner strength. Burton simply scared people. The facial craters from the Somali spear made him all the more terrifying.
The life of an explorer, then, was almost a mandate for both of them. Explorers, by the original Latin definition, are those who cry out. The men earning that title first were searchers for game instead of searchers for geographical features. They walked far ahead of hunting parties, shouting out the locations of animals they discovered. As tribes became kingdoms and kingdoms became countries, the searchers were called on to look for new lands instead of game. They returned home to cry out what they saw so that civilization might follow in their wake. Then, because a searcher's special talent belonged to the wilds, not cities, they went back again. And again.
Burton and Speke fit this description. Neither man was suited to holding down a steady job. Both their childhoods had been marked by loving mothers and diffident fathers. In the absence of paternal guidance, Burton and Speke had navigated their own paths through life, making up the rules as they went along. The chip on each man's shoulder was prohibitive, diminished for brief periods by the euphoria of achievement. Africa, or some other land without limitations, was where they belonged.
Their second source attempt began two years later, in the spring of 1857. It was a smaller expedition—just Burton and Speke and their porters this time, no other Englishmen. As expedition leader, Burton made the decision to start farther south, in an area where tribes were less hostile and where Arab traders had been penetrating inland for centuries. After purchasing supplies on Zanzibar, where “gonorrhea is so common it is hardly considered a disease,” according to Burton, and corpses floated in the city harbor, Burton and Speke sailed for the mainland. They put ashore just north of the port of Bagamoyo. If the shape of the African continent is an east-facing skull, their landfall was a point somewhere just below the nose. That region would become the pivotal jumping-off point for African exploration over the next half century. In Burton and Speke's case, the proposed journey was an eight-hundred-mile trek through swamps, savannah, and forest to a village known as Ujiji, on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika. Arab traders had been going there for ove
r three decades. En route, Burton and Speke would seek information about the source's location.
In early June the monsoon season ended. Burton and Speke augered inland leading a column of thirty-six porters and thirty pack animals. They were an odd-looking pair—Burton favoring Arab robes and Speke wearing English hunting flannel under a broad-brimmed felt hat. They carried tents and hammocks, navigational aids, brandy and food, cloth and wire, assorted medicines, and an arsenal of daggers, swords, rifles, and pistols. Progress averaged less than six miles a day, beginning after an early breakfast, halting in midday for a respite from the heat, then continuing again to late afternoon. As the sun set and the porters danced or told stories around the fire, Burton would record observations in his journal. Latitude and longitude were noted. Elevation was determined by using a thermometer to check the temperature at which water boiled. Burton was taken with the adventure, but found the continent much more brutish and forbidding than he'd imagined it could be.
Among their caravan was a hard-working young African named Sidi Mubarak Bombay, whom Burton referred to as “the gem of the group.” Bombay was a member of the Yao tribe who had been captured by Arab slave traders at the age of twelve, then sold in the Zanzibar slave market to an Arab merchant. When that Arab moved to the city of Bombay shortly after, his young slave came along. After his owner's death, the slave was given his freedom and the adopted name of his new hometown. Upon returning to Africa sometime in his early thirties, Sidi Mubarak Bombay joined the Sultan of Zanzibar's army as a soldier, and was posted to a garrison in Chokwe. That outpost seven miles from the Indian Ocean coastline was where Burton and Speke met up with the industrious, grinning former slave. By arrangement with the garrison commander, Bombay and five other soldiers were hired to accompany the British caravan. Bombay's work ethic and linguistic skills soon made him invaluable to Burton and Speke. Unbeknownst to Bombay, his soldiering career was at an end, replaced by a new line of work.
Bombay spoke fluent Hindustani, as did Speke, so Bombay served as Speke's gun bearer and translator. “He works on principal and works like a horse,” Burton wrote of the short ugly man with filed-down teeth and an aversion to bathing, “candidly declaring that not love of us but duty to his belly makes him work. With a sprained ankle and a load quite disproportionate to his puny body, he insists on carrying two guns. He attends us everywhere, manages our purchases, carries all our messages, and when not employed by us is at every man's beck and call.” Bombay would go on to become the talisman of African exploration, an essential roster member on any serious expedition for decades to come.
Before the expedition Burton had written that Speke was a “companion and not a friend, with whom I was strangers.” Speke still chafed that Burton placed more emphasis on exploration than hunting, but as the journey progressed Burton and Speke became solid companions. Burton was officially the expedition leader, but he and Speke behaved more as equals. They had already fought a battle together. Now the shared agony of swamp fever, malaria, and mutinous porters only brought them closer. They nursed one another through Africa's strange new illnesses and wearying tribulations. They read Shakespeare aloud to one another at night. Back home, Speke had his mother and Burton had his conquests, but neither man had a close friend. In the loneliness of Africa, however, they needed each other. Burton wrote that Speke was “as a brother.”
That brotherhood saw great trials. The first months of the journey were a slog through claustrophobic jungle, where the thick, dank air pressed down on their shoulders and poured into their lungs. The porters deserted in ones and twos, in the dead of night, stealing precious supplies before fleeing back to the coast. A morass of palm trees, strangler figs, leopard orchids, black mambas, green mambas, cobras, monkeys, mosquitoes, and tsetse flies defined the expedition's days. The going was slow. Malaria and sleeping sickness afflicted those porters who didn't desert.
The route climbed to a plateau a little over two hundred miles inland. The scenery changed abruptly, magically, as if a new backdrop had been unfurled on a vaudeville stage. Gone was the jungle. In its place was a dun-colored grassland. Acacia trees, with their stratified branches looking like low wispy clouds, hovered randomly. Clusters of shrubs seemed as islands on the sea of grass. Otherwise the land was wide-open space as far as the eye could see. Herds of elephants, zebras, giraffes, hyenas, and wildebeest became commonplace. Lions and hyenas were a nightly threat, prowling outside the camp in the darkness, waiting for the campfire to burn too low, sniffing for stragglers and scraps. Water was scarce. Shade was a luxury. Burton and Speke were sick frequently but they pushed on. By November, after traveling 600 miles, they arrived in the village of Tabora. It was a snake-infested, dusty oasis of mud homes surrounded by low rolling hills, but the Arab traders had made it the premier stopover on their way inland. Canned goods, goats and bulls for milk and slaughter, and reminders of home such as tea were available. Burton and Speke regained their strength. There were women, too. Burton was sated.
After five weeks they pushed on. Speke was in favor of traveling north, to where a large lake was reputed to exist, but Burton insisted they go west. The path changed from savannah to swampy sycamore forests. Both men were almost killed by malaria and had to be carried. But by February 1858, with Burton and Speke blinded by illness, Bombay first spied the shining waters of Lake Tanganyika. The caravan soon stood on the banks of the enormous lake. As Burton's and Speke's eyesight returned they saw before them a lake like none they'd ever seen, wider than the English Channel and stretching far over the northern and southern horizons. Surely, they agreed, this was the source. Speke, enraptured by the peaks surrounding the lake, wrote confidently in his journal, “this mountain range I consider the true Mountains of the Moon.”
Burton and Speke stayed three months, searching for that elusive river leading north out of the lake, into the Nile. They never found it. Regardless, the journey home began May 26, 1858. The porters who had deserted had stolen most of the cloth and beads necessary to barter for food. It was urgent that Burton and Speke race for the coast or risk starving to death.
However, malaria again crippled Burton. The impoverished caravan was forced to halt in Tabora so he could recuperate. Speke, who found the Arabs repulsive and disliked Burton's fondness for their clothing and customs, was impatient for a way to pass the time. He wanted to investigate those rumors of another great lake to the north. Taking Bombay and a handful of porters, Speke began the journey in July 1858. The Burton and Speke expedition had been traveling through Africa for thirteen mostly agreeable months. All of that, however, was about to end.
Six weeks after leaving, an excited Speke strode back into Tabora. He had not only found the rumored lake, naming the hill from where he'd seen it for the Somerset region and the lake itself for Queen Victoria, but he had immediately set aside his previous convictions about Lake Tanganyika. Victoria Nyanza was the true source. “I no longer felt any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of what has been so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers,” he corrected in his journal. Years before, as an officer in India, Speke had harbored the secret desire to make his name by discovering the source. On August 3, 1858, he was sure he had done so. He didn't walk around the lake to make sure the Nile flowed from it, so he never actually saw the river. But Speke interviewed the local population and drew a map of the lake based on their opinions. The map definitively showed the Nile flowing out of Victoria Nyanza. That done, Speke had raced back to Tabora.
Fearful of being rebuffed, Speke delayed telling Burton about his theory until the morning after his return. “We had scarcely breakfasted,” Burton wrote, “before he announced to me the startling fact that he had discovered the sources of the Nile. The fortunate discoverer's conviction was strong, but his reasoning was weak.”
Their relationship would never be the same. “Jack changed his manners to me from this date,” Burton later wrote of August 26, 1858, in a profound underst
atement. And while Burton had tolerated the nonintellectual aspects of Speke's personality before, he began treating the younger man like a fool.
Burton demanded that they walk north to double-check Speke's claim. Speke, however, reminded Burton that they lacked the cloth and beads vital for purchasing food. They had no choice but to head straight for the coast. The hotheaded Burton reluctantly agreed.
The feud escalated during the four-month walk back to Bagamoyo. Speke endured an African illness that made him delusional and racked with pain, and both men almost died of malnutrition, but their argument raged. When they finally reached the coast, the two men split up, returning to London on different ships. Their good-byes in Aden were the last words they would utter to one another.
Speke's HMS Furious arrived in England first. He raced to the Royal Geographical Society and pronounced himself the discover of the source. His claim was audacious and unproven, but the world was ready to believe that the source had been found. By the time Burton made it home just weeks later, Speke was the toast of London. “I reached London on May 21,” Burton wrote. “My companion now stood forth in his true colors, an angry rival.”
For five long years the debate raged—in the most elite circles of society and in commoners' pubs as well. There were other world events to draw England's attention during that time (across the Atlantic, America was now embroiled in a Civil War that Britain, for the sake of trade and naval supremacy, was keen for the South to win) but nothing had eclipsed it. The escapism of Burton and Speke's adventures proved much more intriguing than worries about another nation's internal strife.
The two men traded slings and arrows in public speeches, published articles, and competing books. Burton accused Speke of being an incompetent geographer. Speke accused Burton of “incompetence, malice, cowardice and jealousy.” Burton married. Speke returned to Africa with another man to prove his claim. “The Nile,” Speke pronounced upon locating the river's effluence from Victoria Nyanza, then following the river three thousand miles north to the Mediterranean, “is settled.”