The Explorers Page 9

  III. That honor would fall to Vasco Núñez de Balboa ten years later. Balboa, who took up exploration after being inspired by Columbus’s journeys, later fell victim to political intrigue and was beheaded by Spanish officials in the New World. It is said that it took the executioner three swings of the ax to sever his head.

  IV. This same Latinizing of a name would eventually swing Columbus’s way. The District of Columbia, the Columbia River, Columbia University, and the nation of Colombia all get their names from Columbus.

  V. A pact splitting the known world into two spheres of influence, one controlled by Portugal and the other by Spain. It was brokered by a pre-Reformation pope in 1494, and meant little to nations no longer in lockstep with Rome.

  VI. The explorer Sebastian Cabot made several voyages to the New World for England in the late 1490s and early 1500s. A Venetian by birth (real name: Sebastiano Caboto), he shifted his allegiance to Spain during the reign of Henry VIII due to their greater emphasis on exploration. It’s worth noting that the actor Sebastian Cabot, who rose to fame as the beloved Mr. French on the television show Family Affair in the late 1960s, was born with that name and did not borrow it from the famous explorer. The same can also be said for the Welsh actor Richard Walter Jenkins. The twelfth son of a hard-drinking coal miner, he adopted the last name of Burton to honor a beloved schoolmaster—not, as it is easy to assume, as an attempt to co-opt the swaggering reputation of the explorer Richard Burton.

  VII. “Hope and Academic Success in College.” Research done at the University of Kansas. Work published in the Journal of Educational Psychology 94, no. 4 (2002): 820–26.

  VIII. The Nile is the longest river in the world, the Amazon is number two, and the Mississippi is number four. At the time, the British were unaware that China’s Yangtze would have nestled into the third position.

  IX. A matriarchal Egyptian goddess worshipped as the patron of nature and magic.

  X. The man-eaters of Tsavo were a pair of lions that ate 135 construction workers during the development of the Kenya–Uganda Railway in 1898. The 10-foot-long animals stalked the men like prey, sometimes even pulling them from their tents in the night. Both lions were shot and killed after six months of terror. Their stuffed remains are on view at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

  XI. Columbus originally sought funding for his first expedition from the Portuguese. Dias’s success in opening a new trade route to Asia put an end to that, causing him to seek funding from the Spanish instead. In an ironic twist, Columbus’s ships were boarded off the Iberian coast after his first voyage of discovery, and Dias led the boarding party. Dias would drown on May 23, 1500, when his ship was lost in a storm.

  XII. Both ships would be immortalized in literary history. Joseph Conrad mentioned them by name in Heart of Darkness as a testimony to the perils of exploration. Jules Verne did the same in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

  XIII. An official search and rescue party wasn’t launched until spring of 1848. Lady Franklin became a very public symbol of personal loss as it became clear that her husband and his men would never return. Ultimately, more than two dozen search parties were launched to find Franklin. The graves of some crew have been found, but Franklin’s body is still missing.

  XIV. Many believe it was apocryphal. Real or not, it has only added to the Shackleton legend.

  XV. Among other adventures. Markham is perhaps history’s most diverse, prolific, and unknown explorer. He made extensive journeys into South America, Ethiopia, India, and the Arctic. Markham left the navy in 1851 to protest the use of corporal punishment on board ships, and was later responsible for allowing women membership into the RGS.

  XVI. This is still in some dispute. Many believe Peary falsified his journals. If so, Amundsen would lay claim to the triple crown of polar exploration by making an undisputed journey to the North Pole in 1926.

  XVII. A body of water contiguous to the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, beginning at 60 degrees south latitude. Its high salinity, pack ice, strong average winds (highest on Earth), and powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current differentiate it from those other waters.

  XVIII. Named by Captain Cook for George III, King of England at the time of his journey. George and his wife, Charlotte, were the recipients of more place names around the world than any two people in history, thanks to Cook’s extensive travels.

  PASSION

  Of the gladdest moments in life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into an unknown land.

  —Richard Francis Burton, on the eve of his journey into Africa with Speke

  1

  It was December 20, 1856, when Burton and Speke’s sloop-of-war sailed into Zanzibar’s Stone Town Harbor. The small island just off the African coast smelled sweetly of the clove plantations covering its rolling inland hills. The bone-white sands of the beaches and turquoise coastal waters mesmerized the two travelers, and the sense of enchantment was so strong that Burton described Zanzibar as “wrapped in a soft and sensuous repose, in the tranquil life of the Lotus Eaters, in the swoon-like slumbers of the Seven Sleepers, in the dreams of the Castle of Indolence.”

  Burton’s overwriting aside, first appearances were deceiving. The shores along the main harbor were piled high with garbage, human waste, and even a floating corpse. Zanzibar had long been a crossroads of the Indian Ocean, a place where Arabs, Indians, Africans, Europeans, and even Americans came together to swap goods and services. The harbor was fronted by the consulates of various nations, with tall-masted ships poised to load and unload cargoes of spices, ivory, and people. The smell of cloves mingled with the equally powerful smell of the unwashed men, women, and children sweating freely in the tropical sun, soon to be sold at auction and packed tightly into the holds of those many resplendent vessels. Slavery did a booming business in Zanzibar. Those who died from floggings or illness were simply hurled into the sea, and those dead bodies washing ashore were quickly eaten by the packs of wild dogs roaming those pearly beaches. So while the island might have been more attractive to the eye than the coal piles of Aden, the home base for their first journey into Africa, in truth it was far more wretched.

  Within two weeks Speke and Burton left the fetid confines of Zanzibar behind, with its epidemics of syphilis, “bad water and worse liquor,” and then sailed across a narrow channel to the African continent to begin their journey.

  Yet the expedition had arrived at perhaps the worst time of the year. The rainy season would soon be upon them, which would turn much of coastal Africa into muddy torrents and vast temporary lakes. So it wasn’t until six months later, in June of 1857, that Burton and Speke gathered on a beach just south of the small village of Bagomoyo to get under way. The newly hired caravan of porters was assembled, the red flag of the Zanzibar sultan was hoisted as a show of respect, and the Burton and Speke Expedition officially hit the trail. Their plan was to follow a well-trod slavers’ path first navigated by the Arabs in 1825, stretching 745 miles from Bagomoyo to Ujiji, Burton’s chosen destination.I

  Bagomoyo would be the first of the “Three Jewels” to the Arab slave traders—stopovers where they might replenish themselves in safety and relative luxury while at work in Africa. The other two were Kazeh (now Tabora), in the heart of the savanna; and Ujiji, on the shores of the great shining lake named Tanganyika that no white man had ever seen.

  Their guide was a short man with flat teeth named Sidi Mubarak Bombay, widely reputed to know all the great routes into the continent. Their caravan consisted of thirty-six porters and thirty pack animals laden with tents, hammocks, brandy, food, carpeting, compasses, sextants, cloth, beads, wire, daggers, swords, rifles, pistols, bullets, and cigars. The first miles away from the beach took them through a jungle morass of palm trees, strangler figs, and leopard orchids.

 
The mental image of a caravan is that of a long single-file line of African men carrying heavy loads on their shoulders, followed by two white Englishmen carrying nothing at all. In fact, the truth was far more freewheeling. Concubines and camp followers trooped alongside the porters; protective guards from the Asian subcontinent known as baluchis provided an armed escort; and, instead of being completely African, the faces of so many in the convoy were half Arab or half Indian. This pointed to the obvious fact that while Africa was still a mystery to Europeans, Arabs and Indians had long ago made themselves at home.

  An even closer look at the caravan would have revealed that Burton and Speke barely communicated. Despite having spent half a year together, basically doing nothing more than waiting for the weather to improve, the two were virtually unknown to one another. One would think that they had passed the time hanging out with the individual with whom they would soon tramp into the unknown—particularly since absolutely no one else would speak their language, and all they would have was each other.

  Yet Speke, in Burton’s words, was “a companion and not a friend, with whom I was strangers” that June afternoon. Speke preferred to march in front of the column, rifle in hand, while Burton rode a donkey at the rear. Speke was silent, where Burton was often fatuous. Speke was still miffed by Burton’s high-handed behavior about the Somaliland failure, while Burton felt completely justified in his boorish attitude. Yet rather than air his frustrations, Speke chose to adopt the very Victorian attitude of keeping a stiff upper lip. He said nothing, but his anger ran quite deep. Speke would nurse his rage throughout their journey, eventually extracting his revenge in a most ingenious (and, to Burton’s mind, deceitful) fashion.

  Burton seemed oblivious to Speke’s quiet loathing. He patronized Speke whenever possible, never missing the opportunity to paint him as an underling in his journals.

  The daily ritual of caravan travel involved rising well before dawn, lighting the cooking fires in 3:00 a.m. darkness, and hitting the trail soon after. The oppressive African heat made this necessary, as it did numerous halts for rest when shade made itself available. Travel was sometimes just five or ten miles per day. In the early stages it was a trudge rather than an adventure, with Burton and Speke constantly on the watch for load bearers who planned to steal, desert, or even murder them. There was little attempt at friendship between the explorers and their employees, as this might be perceived as a sign of weakness. One day Burton, who had the advantage of being fluent in so many languages, overheard two men plotting to kill him. Without hesitating, he pulled his dagger, spun around, and stabbed one of them dead.

  The other quickly fell to his knees and begged for mercy, which Burton granted.

  2

  The Victorian era of African exploration marked the first time since Homo sapiens stood upright and marched away from their forest hunting camps hundreds of thousands of years before, slowly crept into what would later be known as the Middle East and Europe, and then spread throughout the world, that his far-flung descendants were drawn back to the continent with the same sense of discovery that marked his exodus. But a breath in the greater scope of history, the heyday of African exploration was a seventy-year period that was both shorter than, and took place entirely within, the nineteenth-century reign of Britain’s Queen Victoria.

  Muslim traders from Arabia, Oman, and Persia had been doing business up and down the East African coast as early as 1200, but their interest revolved around monetary gain, not exploration. Thus their influence didn’t extend inland at first. It was left to the Portuguese to send men into the interior, starting in the late fifteenth century. The heyday of African exploration, however, took place almost 250 years later. What a brilliant time to be an explorer, and what a perfect land through which to wander. For centuries, Africa had been so unwilling to give up her secrets that she was almost entirely uncharted. Cartographers were so mystified about what lay within the skull-shaped continent that they merely drew it black on maps and stamped the word “Unknown” (hence another reason for the “dark continent”II). Slowly, however, mythical cities such as Timbuktu were located and proven to be real, the sources of the Congo and the Zambezi were discovered, natural phenomena like Victoria Falls were seen by Europeans for the first time, and animals such as the gorilla became known to the outside world.

  It was Paul Du Chaillu, later to become the inspiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, who first reported that such creatures existed. Short, droopy-eyed, and given to speaking with a Cajun patois, the mixed-race explorer was always very mysterious about his origins. Sometimes he claimed to be from London, and other times Paris or New Orleans. In fact, he was born on that tiny volcanic island known as Réunion in 1831, the result of a dalliance between a French trader and his African mistress. Fifteen years later, when his father moved his business to the island of Cape Verde, on the opposite coast of Africa, Du Chaillu went along.

  Through a whirlwind series of events, Du Chaillu made his way to America for his formal schooling, and then came back to Africa to begin his exploration career by collecting specimens for the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. After two successful journeys up the Ogobe River (he is credited with discovering gorillas and Pygmies), Du Chaillu retired to the Marlborough Hotel in New York to write children’s books. A wanderer to the end, he died in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1903.

  Unlike nautical exploration, most men and women who traveled into Africa in the nineteenth century did not explore at the behest of a government. Their primary fuel was not duty, but passion.

  Passion becomes an even more intriguing motivator when one realizes that the dangers awaiting Burton and Speke extended well beyond capture, torture, and bodily dismemberment.

  Death seemed to be everywhere, from those corpses floating in Zanzibar’s Stone Town Harbor to the very air that they breathed. Dysentery—that bloody, mucus-filled, endless torrent of diarrhea caused by parasitic, viral, and bacterial infections—was a very real threat, against which there seemed no defense. There was also the mysterious “fever,” which broadly described any illness involving sweats, chills, and a drastically elevated body temperature. The heat and delirium came without warning or cause, striking virtually anyone, sometimes killing and sometimes not. There was no known cure.

  This is how Congo explorer James Hingston Tuckey died in 1816. It could have actually been anything from cholera to typhoid fever that killed him. The Irish-born Tuckey spent eight months marching up the Congo, whose mouth is on the west side of Africa. The habit of purifying water through boiling was not yet common practice, so Tuckey’s 300-mile upriver journey meant that he quenched his thirst each day by drinking water of many colors and textures, and absorbing countless unknown parasites and bacteria into his colon. Maybe it wasn’t the water that caused Tuckey’s high temperature and shakes, but something got to him. In the absence of modern forensics, or at the very least an autopsy, the vague “fever” was given as cause of death. As is so often the case with exploration, when news of Tuckey’sIII demise reached England, a new wave of explorers were inspired to continue his unfinished work.

  At least the disease known as malaria had a specific name. The air in Africa and other tropical climes could be very malodorous (Burton was revolted by the sight of people defecating openly on the beaches of Zanzibar, and the smells of raw sewage emanating from these otherwise idyllic white sands, which masked the otherwise intoxicating fragrance of nearby clove plantations), so medical officials were certain that the shaking, flu-like symptoms and anemia of malaria came through breathing bad air—hence, “mal aria.” And while the idea that the air we breathe can cause illness seems antiquated or uninformed, the very real fact is that airborne pathogens in certain parts of Africa can cause severe sickness.

  In 1880 it would be discoveredIV that malaria is caused by the bite of the female anopheles mosquito, which injects the disease into the human circulatory system, where it takes root in t
he liver and reproduces. But mosquitoes appeared to be nothing more than harmless annoyances to Burton and Speke. The African horse fly, on the other hand, had a bite that drew blood and was longer by a third than a honeybee. The African driver ant traveled in a swarm that ate everything in its path—including those human beings too old, infirm, or inebriated to get out of their path. Its bite is so powerful that African tribes often used the mandibles to suture open wounds. This was accomplished by allowing an ant to bite on either side of the gash. Once its jaws had locked into place, the rest of the body was snapped from the head, sealing the wound just as effectively as modern surgical staples.

  A small innocuous brown fly known as “tsetse” seemed harmless, but was actually the cause of a deadly ailment known as sleeping sickness. Annually, this disease killed more people in Africa than lion, hippo, and crocodile attacks combined. Tsetse flies were such a scourge to horses and donkeys that explorers were reluctant to depend on them as pack animals, knowing that great swarms of flies would eventually infect them with their bites. This meant that local men were hired to carry these heavy loads on their shoulders. The Burton and Speke expedition would enlist more than a hundred such laborers.

  And then, of course, death could come through those legendary and monstrous animals that haunted men’s dreams. Of the world’s dozen most dominant animal species,V six make their home in East Africa. The lion and crocodile (and even the wily hyena, with its bone-cracking jaws and ultrastrong stomach juices that allow digestion of these shards) were obvious perils. But perhaps most dangerous of all was the hippopotamus. Falling into one of the lakes or rivers that they called home could result in a brutal and violent death.