by Jan Morris
On March 14,1864, Baker spurred his ox up a hill on a fine spring morning, and looking down a steep granite cliff at his feet, saw the lake they were looking for. It was like a sea of quicksilver, he thought, bounded far in the distance by blue mountains, and glittering in the sun. ‘England had won the source of the Nile! Long before I reached this spot, I had arranged to give three cheers with all our men in English style in honour of this discovery, but now … I felt too serious to vent my feelings in vain cheers for victory, and I sincerely thanked God for having guided and supported us through all dangers to the good end. As an imperishable memorial of one loved and mourned by our gracious Queen and deplored by every Englishman’ (Baker ambiguously adds) ‘I called this great lake “The Albert Nyanza”’—and so the White Nile acquired, in both its branches, an imperial pedigree.1
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The twin reservoirs of the river were thus identified, but even so the Nile was not settled. During Baker’s absence the controversy between Burton and Speke had reached its climax, with public opinion veering now towards Burton’s view that the true source of the Nile was much farther south, in the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika. Neither Victoria nor Albert had yet been circumnavigated: it was possible that Tanganyika and Albert were in feet linked by a river, or that another big river flowed into Victoria. For by now the search for the true source was becoming a little farcical, and the hunt was being pursued or argued from lake to feeder, feeder to tributary, tributary to spring, to locate the very farthest point from which the principal flow of the river could be said to issue—a river which, though in its last thousand miles it receives no tributary at all, in the first thousand miles is fed by dozens of streams, lakes and ancillary watersheds. The mid-Victorians believed in ultimate truths. Bruce had discovered the actual group of springs from which the Blue Nile issued. His successors were determined to pinpoint the exact damp origin of the White.
In 1865, the R.G.S. accordingly turned to an elder statesman among explorers, David Livingstone, and commissioned him to settle the issue. At 52 this marvellous and maddening Scot stood in a different class from all his colleagues. He was the Christian hero, in an age when the cult of the hero, particularly one both holy and remote, was in the ascendant. The son of a modest tea-merchant, with a medical degree from Glasgow, he had gone to Africa as a medical missionary, but was famous for his great exploratory journeys—across the Kalahari, down the Zambesi, through the basin of the Nyasa. He had done more than anyone to expose the continuing evils of the African slave trade, and he had established relations with the African peoples different in kind from those of other explorers and missionaries. Idiosyncratic though he was, quarrelsome, stubborn, conceited, he had a magic gift. People of unexpected kinds responded to him, and those who did not detest him loved him devotedly.1
Livingstone’s prestige was enormous—Florence Nightingale called him the greatest man of his generation. Though in fact his life had been largely a life of failure, personal and professional, still he was one of the most famous men on earth, idolized by the public and respected by the scientific community. He would be the perfect arbiter of the Nile dispute, in the field as in the debating chamber: so at the beginning of 1865 Murchison invited him, on behalf of the R.G.S., to return to Africa to solve ‘a question of intense geographical interest … namely the watershed or watersheds of South Africa’. Did Lake Tanganyika empty itself to the north? And if so, could the river that flowed out of it possibly be the Nile?
It was Livingstone’s last and greatest adventure, and it was purely secular, unless one argued that British supremacy in geographic science would be best for the natives in the long run. On the whole Livingstone supported Burton’s theories. He thought the true beginning of the Nile would prove to be a river that arose south-west of Tanganyika, called by the Africans Lualaba. This might itself be the Nile, he thought, or alternatively, Albert and Tanganyika might form part of a central chain of lakes, through all of which the Nile flowed. In April 1866, he set off from Zanzibar to find out, accompanied by no Europeans, but by four old African friends, Chuma, Susi, Amoda and Wikatani. Before he reached Lake Tanganyika a terrible calamity occurred. He lost his medicine chest. ‘I felt,’ he wrote, ‘as if I had now received the sentence of death.’ Certainly from that moment nothing went right. Delayed by tribal wars, constantly sick, losing his teeth one by one, no more, he said, than ‘a ruckle of bones’, he pushed slowly on to the eastern shore of Tanganyika, reaching the Arab slavers’ village of Ujiji very near death.
He had hoped to find supplies there, but they had all been looted, and there was no mail for him either. He was almost beaten by these disappointments, and spent six whole months at Ujiji trying to regain his strength. Then he moved painfully westward once more. Months and years passed in his wanderings, 1869 into 1870, and then into 1871, and still he looked for the Lualaba. By now hardly anyone would help him. He had never disguised his enmity to the Arab slave-traders of the interior, while the local Africans were too terrified of the slavers to come near him. Even his own porters deserted. He could get no reply to the messages he sent to Zanzibar. His shoulder, torn by a lion years before, was giving him great pain, he was half-starved and had practically lost hope. When at last, after five years in the field, he reached the banks of the Lualaba, nobody would row him down the river to see which way it turned in its flow, or whether it really could be the Nile.
So he limped back to Ujiji and threw himself upon the mercy of the Arabs, hoping somehow or other, one day, to continue his quest. There he lay sick, penniless and exhausted, lost to the world, utterly out of touch with Europe, his mission a failure, his whereabouts one of the mysteries of the age: and there on November 10, 1871, Henry Stanley of the New York Herald, advancing into his camp beneath the Stars and Stripes, with his caravan of porters loaded with bales of food, tents, expensive equipment and ingenious accessories to African travel, walked through the wondering crowd of Arabs, took off his hat, and uttered one of the epic texts of the Victorian age, as sacred to the faithful as it was comic to the irreverent: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’
‘“Yes”, he said with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.’
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Stanley was a Welshman. Born John Rowlands at Denbigh in 1841, he had run away from the workhouse at St Asaph, and shipped as a cabin-boy for the United States. There he was adopted by a kindly cotton-broker, Mr Stanley of New Orleans. After fighting on both sides in the civil war (he was never a man of strong convictions) Stanley had taken to journalism, becoming the best-known special correspondent of the New York Herald. Having distinguished himself in reporting a small war in Abyssinia, Stanley had been given an agreeable roaming commission. ‘Go to Jerusalem, Constantinople, the Crimea, the Caspian Sea, through Persia as far as India. After that you can start looking round for Livingstone. If he is dead bring back every possible proof of his death.’
Stanley had done as he was told. He had travelled through the Holy Land, had scratched his graffito upon the walls of Persepolis, had reported on imperial India, and in January 1871 had arrived at Zanzibar, tough, 30 years old and very bumptious, on the last stage of his mission. He knew nothing about Africa, or about exploration, but he was a hard-bitten, ambitious, able and healthy young newspaperman, ready to do anything for a good story. Finding Dr Livingstone would be an incomparable scoop, to use the word just coming into vogue in American newspaper offices. He had plenty of money, so he bought all the best gear and hired all the most reliable porters: but he took no chances, in the way of his trade, and told nobody in Zanzibar the purpose of his journey. If anyone asked him where he was going, he simply said ‘To Africa’.
He followed the now familiar route west, along the tracks of Burton, Speke, Grant, the slave caravans, and on the way he repeatedly heard rumours of a European living on the shore of Lake Tanganyika—an old wan man with grey moustaches—a man walking, wearing American suiting and a cap—a white man at a place called Urua—finally, as he approached the lake, a
n old sick man with hair upon his face, who had come from a very far country, and was living at Ujiji. Stanley’s excitement was transferred professionally to the pages of his book How I Found Livingstone. ‘Hurrah! This is Livingstone! He must be Livingstone! He can be no other!’ As they approached Ujiji he ordered Old Glory unfurled (though he thought of himself still as British, he was an American citizen), and soon he was surrounded by hundreds of negroes and Arabs from the village, shouting ‘ϒambo, bwana, ϒambo!’—‘Welcome!’
Down they all went into Ujiji, and there in the distance on the verandah of his hut they saw Livingstone. ‘I see the doctor, sir’, said one of Stanley’s Africans. ‘Oh, what an old man! He has got a white beard!’ As for Stanley himself, ‘what would I not have given for a bit of friendly wilderness, where, unseen, I might vent my joy in some mad feat, such as idiotically biting my hand, turning a somersault, or slashing at trees, in order to allay those exciting feelings, that were well-nigh uncontrollable’. He did control them, however, not wishing to ‘detract from the dignity of a white man appearing in such extraordinary circumstances’, and so gave his folk-phrase to the language—‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’.
Livingstone, it seemed, did not in the least wish to be rescued. Now that fresh supplies were at hand, he wanted only to complete his task. Stanley had other duties to perform, and taking Livingstone’s precious journals with him, and bidding an affectionate and respectful goodbye to the old man, in March 1872 he left for the coast to sublimate his scoop—which very rightly made him celebrated throughout the world. From Zanzibar he sent back to Livingstone a team of porters, and in August the doctor set out once more on his travels. He had been reprieved, he thought, in order to crown his life with the supreme African discovery. ‘No one will cut me out after this exploration has been accomplished, and may the good Lord of all help me to show myself His stout-hearted servant, an honour to my children, and perhaps, to my country and race….’
By now he had some doubts about his own theory, fearing that the Lualaba might prove to be not the Nile, but the Congo, but he laboured on nevertheless—week after week, mile after mile, his body growing frailer with dysentery and exhaustion, his journal more despondent. ‘Weary! Weary!’ he writes one day. ‘I am ill with bowels, having eaten nothing for eight days.’ ‘Inwardly I feel tired.’ ‘Rain, rain, rain.’ ‘The water was cold, and so was the wind.’ ‘Wet, wet, wet.’ ‘A dreary wet morning, and no food that we know of near.’ ‘This trip has made my hair all grey.’ ‘I am pale, and weak from bleeding profusely.’ ‘I am excessively weak, and but for the donkey could not move a hundred yards.’ ‘Tried to ride, but was forced to lie down.’ The bold inked handwriting of the journal degenerates into faint and indistinct pencil: and the last entry of all, April 27, 1873, says: ‘Knocked up quite and remain—recover—sent to buy milch goats. We are on the banks of the Milimamo’.
On April 30,1873, Livingstone called for Susi and asked him how far it was to the Lualaba. Three days, he was told. He murmured ‘Oh, dear, dear’, and dozed off. Next morning they found him dead, kneeling by the side of his bed, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow, as if in prayer.
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So it happened after all that the mystery of the Nile was solved not by one of your Indian Army gentlemen, nor by a rich game-hunter, nor even a saintly missionary, but by the brashest, least-educated and most successful explorer of them all. Now 34, Stanley was suspect in England. People thought him a charlatan, a fortune-hunter, an exhibitionist. He was disliked for his humble origins, his American citizenship, his Welsh showiness, his trade and his thick skin, and because he made few gestures towards higher motives.
Methodically and expertly, nevertheless, this formidable man planned a new expedition to Africa, this time jointly for the Herald of New York and the Daily Telegraph of London. First he would circumnavigate Victoria. Then he would circumnavigate Tanganyika. Finally he would sail down the Lualaba wherever it went. Thus he would, in one immense and dramatic journey, solve the problem of the Nile and make clear the shape of Central Africa. And everything he set out to do, he did. With his three young English toughs, his five English dogs, his 350 porters, his eight tons of stores and his 40-foot wooden boat the Lady Alice‚ out he went from Zanzibar once again. It was a truly imperial journey. If Africans opposed you, you shot them down. If you could not keep up, you died. Reaching Victoria Nyanza in April 1875, Stanley sailed round the whole lake and thus proved that Victoria was a single sheet of water, and that no big river flowed into it. Next, pausing only to massacre some natives on the island of Bumbiri, who had been rude to him, off he went to Lake Tanganyika, and launching the Lady Alice with dispatch, in a few weeks he had circumnavigated that too, and proved that it had no outlet that could qualify as a Nile source.
There remained the enigmatic Lualaba, which flowed no man knew where, and which still might prove to be the headwaters of the Nile. Two of Stanley’s three Englishmen were dead by now, and Stanley himself had no notion where the voyage would take him, whether he would land up in Egypt or on the Atlantic coast, or would merely be disgorged into one or other of the lakes. But indomitably they launched the Lady Alice and paddled away downstream. It was the most sensational journey of all. The river led them through every kind of African hazard—fearful cataracts, cannibal assaults, portages through python-infested forests, running battles with savages in war-canoes, hunger, sickness, treacherous guides and the eerie threat of war-drums in the wilderness. Stanley’s last English companion was drowned. Stanley himself was given up for dead when the Lady Alice was swept away in a river turbulence. But on January 20,1877, he took an altitude reading, and found that they were 1,511 feet above sea level—some 14 feet below the level of the Nile at Gondoroko, where Speke and Grant had met the Bakers fifteen years before. So he knew that the Lualaba was not the Nile but the Congo, and that it was taking them not northward to the Mediterranean, but westward to the Atlantic Ocean.
Thus, though it was to be another seven months before Stanley’s exhausted expedition arrived at the estuary of the Congo on the Atlantic shore, that day the Nile was settled.
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Speke was right, Burton was wrong: but before we leave this, the central saga of exploration in the imperial age, and the beginning of the ‘scramble for Africa’ which was to give a new style to imperialism, let us go back to Bath again, in 1864, and take our leave of the original antagonists. Burton and his wife had characteristically put up at a hotel near the railway station, but Speke stayed no less typically with his cousin, George Fuller, at his agreeable country house Neston Park about ten miles from Bath. They saw each other for the first time since 1859 at a preliminary meeting in the Mineral Water Hospital on September 15, the day before the scheduled debate. It was a moment charged with unexpected pathos, if we are to believe Isabel Burton’s account. The two men did not speak, but their eyes met. ‘I shall never forget his face’, wrote Isabel of Speke. ‘It was full of sorrow, and yearning, and perplexity. Then he seemed turned to stone.’ After a while, she reported, he began to fidget, and exclaiming half aloud, ‘Oh, I cannot stand this any longer’, got up from his seat. ‘Shall you want your chair again, sir?’ asked a man standing behind. ‘May I have it? Shall you come back?’ ‘I hope not’, Speke said, and left the hall.
So at least Mrs Burton described it. Certainly Speke left, and following the habit of a lifetime drove out to Neston to let off steam with an afternoon’s shooting. By 2.30, we are told, he and his cousin, with a gamekeeper, were out in the fields looking for partridges. Neston stood on an outcrop of the Cotswolds, and they were shooting across a stony, bare and bleak countryside, where the autumn light was often moist and misty, and the air dank. It was native ground for Speke. Not only were those fields his cousin’s property, but in a house nearby lived his own elder brother William. Speke had, in feet, hurried from Section E home to his roots—away from the word-splitting and the hypotheticals back to the rough, where a chap was not stifled by science
or twisted by recriminations, but could breathe freely among his own kind, in good country air with a gun under his arm.
At about four o’clock, as the three men crossed a field near the Bath road, a shot sounded. Speke was at that moment climbing a drystone wall two or three feet high, and the others looked around to see him falling off it. They ran to the spot, and found him bleeding profusely from the chest. He was conscious, and asked them not to move him: but by the time Fuller had got hold of a doctor and returned to the scene, Speke had died where he fell, watched by the helpless keeper. His body was taken to his brother’s house, and an inquest was convened for the following morning, the very day of the great debate.
When the news was announced to the expectant Section E next day, even Burton was stunned for a moment. Unable, he said, to speak himself, he asked Murchison to read a statement on his behalf, expressing his ‘sincere admiration of Speke’s character and enterprise’, despite their differences of opinion. Within a few moments, though, he had recovered sufficiently to read a paper he happened to have with him about the current state of Dahomey in West Africa, with particular and detailed reference to the habit of human sacrifice. We are not told how the audience reacted to this ghoulish alternative, but the Chronicle did report in the same issue both Speke’s announced intention of returning to Africa ‘to spread the blessings of Christianity’, and Burton’s heretical conclusion on Dahomey—‘under these circumstances it is pleasing to remark the gradual but sure advance of El Islam, the perfect cure of the disorders that rule the land’.