The Explorers Page 6

  And this was just the first two months of the trip. Before the journey ended two years later, Columbus endured shark attacks, warfare with local tribes, mutiny, waterspouts, the loss of one of his three ships, an infestation of shipworms, predicted a lunar eclipse that saved the lives of him and his men, and for one long year on Jamaica, shipwreck. As all this was going on, he also suffered from gout and a temporary blindness known as ophthalmia, which came about from staring too long at the sun-drenched sea.

  The fourth (or “El Alte Viaje”—the high voyage, as Columbus considered it his best work) was a journey where anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Yet Columbus never stopped looking for that path to Asia. Driven by hope, he pressed on, even as those shipworms were making his vessels so porous that the hulls were filling with seawater. Like Brendan and Cook, those other two tent poles of nautical exploration, Columbus did not undertake his discoveries in a linear, point-to-point, fashion.II Instead, he wandered back and forth across the seas like a bloodhound stalking a scent, sailing this way and that in search of new peoples, lands, rivers, and oceans. Hardships and setbacks may have been nuisances, but they were also expected facts of life if dreams were to become reality.

  Big dreams die hard, but on Christmas Day 1502 Columbus let the discovery of Asia slip away. With that, his exploration career effectively came to an end. Beaten down by setbacks and painful inflictions, Columbus anchored in a small protective harbor and gave up his quest. He then careened his ships up onto the beach and spent a week repairing them for the long journey back to Spain.

  If only he had known how close he was to seeing that dream come true. The Pacific Ocean, and its direct route to Asia, lay just a thirty-five-mile march through the jungle, for Columbus had inadvertently and quite miraculously dropped anchor at what is now the mouth of the Panama Canal. By sending his men overland, Columbus could have become the first European to find the Pacific.III But the great admiral had no way of knowing this. Instead, stripped of all hope, he weighed anchor and began his trip home. Columbus arrived in Spain just in time to see his beloved Queen Isabella on her deathbed, but Ferdinand denied him the opportunity to visit with her one last time.

  Mapmakers would name the New World after Amerigo Vespucci, a banker with a flair for self-promotion, who wrote widely read published accounts of his time as a passenger on two voyages to what became known as the Americas.IV

  Columbus died two years after Isabella, in 1506, at age fifty-four, whereupon Spanish politics contrived to have his voyages written out of the history books for the next three centuries. Much attention has been placed on Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and how it changed the course of civilization. His New World exploded into a land of great cities and the flourishing of ideals such as democracy. Explorers crossed from east to west and north to south, charting its interior. Roads were built. The New World’s advances were breathtaking.

  Yet Columbus was considered a failure in his day. His discoveries did not yield the gold, spices, or slaves for which the Spanish sovereigns longed. It was Portuguese navigators such as Da Gama and Dias who were lauded for the manner in which their great successes enriched the country’s throne.

  And they did it by finding a way to chart, and then plunder, the continent of Africa—in particular, the areas south of the impassable Sahara Desert.

  Their solution was to approach central Africa by sea.

  4

  Somewhat problematically, there was nothing inviting about this portion of Africa. Danger was, literally, everywhere. Half of all white men died within two years of setting foot on the continent. Almost every native tribe was hostile. The animals weren’t just large, they were enormous, prehistoric, and terrifying—lions, crocodiles, elephants, hippopotamuses—the like of which Europeans had never seen before. Dozens of varieties of poisonous snakes slithered through the thick jungles and across the grassy plains. The equatorial temperatures were unbearably hot. Malaria, sleeping sickness, and other equatorial parasites killed more men than all those other dangers combined. And the weather was so fierce it became synonymous with Africa itself—the term “dark continent” had many meanings, but one of them referred to how the sky could turn pitch black at noon when a storm drenched the horizon.

  As other nations began to develop a nautical ability on par with that of the Portuguese, and to thumb their nose at the Treaty of Tordesillas,V the Portuguese were suddenly forced to share eastern Africa.

  The English, as all of this was happening, stayed home. Their seafaring abilities were limited to trips across the English Channel and North Sea. Until the seventeenth century, the term “British explorer” was an oxymoron. Those English navigators who stumbled into exploration, à la Sir Francis Drake and William Dampier, did so as a by-product of piracy. Britain was an island nation and content to stay that way.VI

  Then in 1688, William of Orange ascended to the throne, bringing with him the vaunted power of the Dutch navy. From then on, Britain became obsessed with colonizing the world to exploit its wealth (colonies provided raw goods for British manufacturers, whose products could then be exported).

  Thus Britain, over the next one hundred years, became a nation of explorers—nautical explorers. The pinnacle of this era were Cook’s voyages, which commingled with the Age of Reason to shrink the globe and make mankind want to know more about it. By 1788 the British capital had followed in the footsteps of Rome, Beijing, Seville, and, for a flicker, Lisbon, to become that era’s hub of global discovery. “London,” as the Times proudly noted of the Earth’s largest city, “is the emporium of all the world and the wonder of foreigners.”

  Nevertheless, it was Columbus who reduced the somewhat dazzling concept of sailing across the ocean into a common occurrence. Before we leave him, it’s important to note that while Columbus was brimming with hope on each and every one of his voyages, he was also a decided pessimist. This would seem like cognitive dissonance, but in fact hope and optimism are two very different things. Hope begins with a dream, turns that dream into a goal, and mentally comes up with a solution to see that dream come true.

  Optimism, on the other hand, is merely a belief that everything’s going to be okay. There’s no plan or attention to detail that will make this sentiment a reality. People with hope tend to have a powerful belief that they control their destiny. Optimists, on the other hand, tend to set what are known as mastery goals, which are easily attainable, and depend upon sheer willpower and happy thoughts. Too often, however, that willpower fades when the goal becomes harder and harder to attain. Frustration sets in. The individual quits. This leads to a sort of learned helplessness, where individuals feel that they are powerless over their future. Despair follows.

  On the other hand, those who possess hope have the ability to tap into “divergent thinking”—which is essentially the brain’s ability to let random thoughts ricochet around, using every single bit of knowledge it contains to find an optimal outcome. Hope, one 1997 study showed, was a greater indicator of success than “training, self-esteem, confidence, and mood.”VII

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  In 1735, during a French expedition to the equatorial region of South America’s Andes mountain range, explorer Charles Marie de La Condamine employed a surveyor named Jean Godin to make scientific measurements. History does not record whether Godin was very selective, extremely lonely, or merely unattractive. At any rate, he was a thirty-five-year-old man who soon fell in love with a mere child. Isabel Grameson was the fourteen-year-old daughter of a local administrator—and Godin’s bride, as of two days after Christmas in 1741. Isabel was beautiful, but her family was also very wealthy, which might have enhanced the attraction. At any rate, the unlikely couple soon began a family and lived together happily for eight years. But in March of 1749, Godin received news from France that his father had died. He decided it was time to return home, and bring his family with him. Godin then undertook the rather extraordinary feat of traveling all t
he way from one side of South America to the other—literally, the length of the Amazon River—to his nation’s nearest diplomatic outpost in French Guiana to acquire the necessary permissions.

  There was, however, a problem: Spain and Portugal were at odds with France. So when Godin tried to travel back upriver to Ecuador, Portuguese officials in Brazil denied him permission to reenter the Amazon basin. Traveling around to the other side of South America via sailing ship was also out of the question, because, as a Frenchman, he would be denied entry into Ecuador by the Spanish authorities controlling that country.

  So Godin did the only thing he could do: wait. He became a resident of French Guiana, and for years and years, scanned the horizon each morning for the arrival of his wife, knowing that she would arrive eventually. In 1765, after more than fifteen long years, Portuguese officials relented. It was arranged that a boat would travel up the Amazon to fetch Godin’s beloved Isabel. This, in itself, was an epic journey. To make matters more arduous, Isabel would have to travel up and over the Andes, one of the world’s premier mountain ranges, to meet the ship at the Amazon’s headwaters.

  Isabel was nearly forty by then. She hadn’t seen her husband in two decades. All but one of their children had died of smallpox. Ignoring those in her village who suggested she was undertaking a suicide mission, Isabel walked off to meet her husband.

  At first, Isabel was not alone. When she left the village of Riobamba at the end of 1769 she traveled with her grown son Joachim, her two brothers, a nephew, thirty-one Indians, three servants, and three traveling Frenchmen. From Riobamba they traveled to Canelos, a mission station at the head of the Bobonaza River. It took them seven days to travel the 60 miles, during which time a smallpox virus devastated Isabel’s fellow travelers. Just a handful remained alive when Isabel and the remaining group pressed on down the Bobonaza in dugout canoes. One of the Frenchmen soon fell overboard and drowned. Another, thinking their plight hopeless, elected to go ahead alone and return with help. He never came back.

  After four weeks, Isabel’s dwindling expedition numbered just seven. They were out of food and their canoes had rotted. She constructed a raft from native trees and set off again, but the raft hit a submerged obstacle almost immediately and fell apart. Another member of her expedition died of fever that night, followed by two more the next. One woman wandered off into the forest, never to be seen again. Isabel’s two brothers and her nephew died. Then Isabel herself was laid low by sickness. She slipped into an unconscious state for two days. When she woke up, dead bodies were all around her in the jungle. Isabel was alone. She had no means of transportation, no food, and no supplies. But she was alive, and determined to see her husband once again.

  After wandering alone in the rain forest for nine days, she encountered two Indians who took her to the mission station in Andoas. When they arrived she rewarded them with the two gold necklaces she had been wearing. But the mission’s two priests confiscated the necklaces, saying the Indians were unworthy of such wealth. An incensed Isabel set off alone from the mission immediately, ignoring the priests’ demands that she stop. She was naked, save for “the soles of the shoes of her dead brothers.”

  Isabel walked along the muddy banks until she reached another mission. There the priests offered to pay for her to return to Riobamba, a suggestion so appalling that she immediately set out again. Finally Isabel reached the waiting ship and traveled down the Amazon to be with her husband. In all, she journeyed 3,000 miles over the course of ten months before finally wrapping her arms around Jean. “After twenty years absence and a long endurance, I again met with a cherished wife who I had almost given up every hope of seeing again,” he wrote of that day.

  But Jean didn’t give up hope, and neither did Isabel. Their story would not be possible without it. Isabel’s adventure down the Amazon was etched so indelibly in her soul that to her dying day, she refused to enter the woods ever again. Luckily for her, that dying day took place in France, twenty-two very happy years after leaving the Amazon behind. She outlived her husband by just six months.

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  From Brendan to Columbus to the Portuguese to Isabel Godin, the lineage of exploration and success in the face of impossible odds was marked by an abiding belief in the power of hope. And so as the next link in that centuries-long chain of men and women who earned the title of explorer, Jack Speke and Dick Burton were also consumed with a sense of hope as they pondered a return to Africa.

  As the Crimean War wound down, separately, and unbeknownst to one another, Speke and Burton were longing to venture back into the continent that had almost killed them. Some two years after the debacle on the beach in Somaliland, his wounds now nothing more than rather gruesome scars, Speke was telling friends that he “was dying to go back and try again.” This appeared to be a lost cause, because he wasn’t fluent in Arabic or any of the native languages (nor any but his mother tongue), lacked credibility as an explorer due to the Somaliland failure, and, because he had never attended university, lacked the education to qualify as a scientific observer of any new discoveries.

  Burton was highly qualified to return, but his handicaps were far more profound and of his own making. As leader of the previous expedition, its public failure—which included the gruesome death of an English gentleman—was deemed his responsibility. Electing to fight in the Crimean War was a means of getting out of London long enough for the pressure to die down and for things to be forgotten. Having this absence correspond with military service added elements of patriotism and heroism, which helped Burton’s public image. Even more so, Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, Burton’s book about his daring adventure into Mecca, had finally hit British bookstores in early 1855, adding to his growing legend. Put all three of those together—military service, time away from London, and fame as a risk-taking explorer—and Burton was soon finalizing plans to take another shot at finding the source.

  Which begs the question: Why the Nile? Why not the Amazon or the Mississippi?VIII Burton and Speke would have found plenty of adventure on either of those mighty rivers. The same combination of hostile indigenous peoples, terrifying snakes and mammals, and deprivations incumbent with a plunge into the vast unknown awaited them there as well.

  The answer is twofold. The first is practical, having to do with Britain’s desire to exploit a continent within their frame of reference. Portugal controlled the Amazon, and the United States was in the process of sending thousands of families across the Great Plains on the Oregon Trail, effectively cementing sea-to-shining-sea control of almost all the North American landmass. Britain might succeed in sending explorers up the Amazon and the Mississippi, but little short of a military invasion would have allowed them to harvest any natural resources for British use.

  Not so with the Nile. The interior of Africa was still wide open to exploration and exploitation.

  The second reason for choosing the Nile is far less practical. That reason was immortality.

  Not even the great empires of Egypt, Greece, or Rome were able to find the source, despite centuries of theorizing and countless failed attempts. And Britain, which fancied itself an empire every bit the equal of those three, considered this just one more achievement that would prove it.

  Broken down to its essence, finding the source is simply a search for water—two hydrogen molecules bonding with a single oxygen molecule in the bowels of the Earth, then seeping forth somewhere in the heart of Africa. The water becomes a trickle, then a stream, then a mighty river—the longest on Earth, rolling effortlessly from mountains through jungle through the Sahara through Cairo and into the Mediterranean. The river takes its name from the Egyptian nelios, meaning “river valley.” Mankind’s most prolific kingdoms have risen and fallen on its verdant shores. Moses, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon drank her waters. The Nile never shrivels, despite not having tributaries, substantial rainfall, or other obvious means of replenishment. She even floods during September, t
he hottest month of the year in northern Africa. Farmers plant their crops in her fertile silt once the floodwaters recede. Lush green fields blossom in the desert as if the Nile is life itself.

  Theories about the source’s location ranged from the equator to the bottom of the world—or maybe an even greater river, fed by an ocean, that slices like an aqueduct across the entire African continent. In 460 BC, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” took it upon himself to find out.

  Herodotus imagined enormous fountains spewing the Nile geyser-like from the Earth, and set off alone to witness the spume and mist. But 600 miles inland from Cairo, the languid brown snake turned white at the waterfalls that would someday become known as the First Cataract. Like sentinels, they guarded the Nile’s inner reaches. The desert turned to jungle and swamp. The civilized world ended and a land of cannibals began. Herodotus turned back.

  The mystery was still unanswered when Ptolemy drew the first conclusive world map in AD 140. Basing his speculation on African legend, he said that the source lay in snow-covered peaks along the equator, which he dubbed “the Mountains of the Moon.” Critics wrongly ridiculed that idea, saying that snow couldn’t possibly exist in equatorial latitudes. Neither Ptolemy nor those critics traveled up the Nile to see if he was right. The source’s mystery and mystique eventually became legend. The source became a force unto itself, too great for man to divine or witness. “It is not given to us mortals,” the French author Montesquieu wrote in the eighteenth century, “to see the Nile feeble and at its source.”

  Centuries passed. Global exploration turned away from Africa. The reason was simple geography: it is almost impossible to travel from northern Africa to central Africa on land. The endless sands of the Sahara Desert are part of the reason. The other is the Nile itself. Soon after the First Cataract, it slows to a quagmire known as the Sudd, an impenetrable morass of water hyacinths and papyrus that stretches for hundreds of miles. The dense swamp is home to crocodiles, hippopotamuses, thick black clouds of mosquitoes, and the 400-pound Nile perch. Half of all water flowing into the Sudd evaporates into the atmosphere, thanks to the steamy equatorial heat. Which is why the roaring Nile, after 3,000 free-flowing, undisturbed miles, slows to a near halt.