The Explorers

by Martin Dugard

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  The Seven

  Curiosity

  Hope

  Passion

  Courage

  Independence

  Self-Discipline

  Perseverance

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  For Callie

  “We rejoice in our sufferings,

  knowing that suffering produces

  endurance, endurance produces

  character, and character produces

  hope. And hope does not

  disappoint us.”

  Romans 5:3–5

  THE

  EXPLORERS

  PROLOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 15, 1864

  Soon it will be over.

  John Hanning Speke has waited five years for the verdict. Now, on the eve of the great debate that will decide the outcome, he stalks through the dying grass of his uncle’s estate in soft, precise steps. A Lancaster breechloader shotgun is cradled in the crook of his right arm. The left barrel is cocked and ready to shoot. George’s man beats the brush out front, doing his best, but having an unlucky day scaring up partridge. The ancient Romans used to call such men “explorers,” from the Latin explorare—“to cry out.” But the definition has changed. No longer does it only apply to men who wander ahead in the fields and flush game. Now it also defines those adventurers who travel deep into undiscovered lands, then return to civilization to tell others what they saw.

  Which is why, on this day, Daniel Davis is more commonly known as a groundskeeper, while John Hanning Speke is famous around the world as an explorer.

  George Fuller himself, Speke’s cousin, walks sixty yards to his right. This way their fields of fire don’t overlap. Not that it matters—Speke and Fuller have pulled the trigger twice in the past two hours, hitting nothing at all.

  Speke is unbothered by their failure. Killing small birds is not why he insisted on a few hours in the fields before dinner. The hunt is Speke’s escape. Before he was an explorer, before Burton and the Nile, and before the public accusations that made his life a living hell, he was a hunter. He stalked and killed beasts of all sizes and ferocity, in Europe and Asia and Africa. His prowess is so renowned that a rare species of gazelle was named in his honor—a species that he personally discovered and then promptly shot. The hunt is where his nerves grow calm and insecurities cannot intrude. Everything is simple on the hunt, just like Speke. The fancy words and well-crafted arguments of a hedonist intellectual like Richard Francis Burton have no place.

  Today, of all days, as Speke’s mind races and he tries to arrange his words for that moment tomorrow morning when he will gingerly step up onto the speaker’s platform before a crowd that will be no less ferocious than a lion in the wild, he desperately needs the clarity and calm of the hunt.

  The field here at Neston Park, as the Fuller family estate is known, is separated from another by a two-foot-high stone wall. The young aristocrat can easily step over with the shotgun in his hand, but he chooses to wedge the butt in the rocks, so that the barrels point to the sky.

  Tomorrow Speke will travel to Bath and debate Richard Francis Burton in the great auditorium. The newspapers are calling it the Nile Debate. Tickets are sold out. Thousands are taking the train from London to decide for themselves which man discovered the source of the Nile River, solving a geographical mystery that has perplexed mankind since the ancient Egyptians.

  The winner will be known throughout history for the achievement. He will be wealthy and famous, and a legend in his own time—if not forever.

  The loser will be disgraced and considered a fraud, his every accomplishment subject to newfound scrutiny.

  It will all come down to how each man presents his argument. This is where Speke is at a disadvantage. Never mind that he has traveled into deepest Africa on three occasions, risking his life in the name of exploration. Or that his travels have been more epic, and have revealed far more about the unknown world, than Burton’s. No one in the audience will care about anything but the Nile, and which of them persuades them that he is the very special man who found that hole in the ground from which it springs.

  Speke is an anxious, celibate loner. Burton is a black-eyed, priapic genius for whom exploration is secondary to learning obscure languages and having sex with native women. Speke knows that Burton will try to ruin him; that the former friend with the scars across both cheeks will stop at nothing to humiliate, to embarrass, and to destroy.

  But he feels powerless to stop him. Speke’s stumbling public speaking and limited intellectual capacity pale in comparison to Burton’s dazzling oratory.

  It is not hard for Speke to imagine the golden words that will spill forth from Burton’s lips tomorrow, convincing one and all in rational, thoughtful sentences, planting great seeds of doubt about Speke’s theories.

  Those seeds will be followed by whispers of derision from the audience, building to scorn and perhaps even laughter as the debate progresses. Speke knows it. Burton, who already awaits him in Bath, knows it. All of England knows it, thanks to the newspapers making much of the Nile duel. The thought is almost too much to bear.

  The Lancaster has no safety. Speke feels the shotgun muzzle push against his breast as he straddles the stone wall. He puts his hand atop the smooth rocks to brace himself, even as the weight of his body presses down hard on the twenty-eight-inch Damascus steel barrels.

  He has no choice. No choice at all.

  The air smells like rain. Dusk is falling.

  Meanwhile, in Bath, Burton awaits.

  THE SEVEN

  A half million or so years ago, depending upon the latest anthropological theories, the fertile forest hunting grounds of central Africa began to feel overcrowded to its human population. The actual date doesn’t matter. What’s important is that one day, very long in the past, a traveler—alone, most likely—began marching north and east from the lush Olduvai Gorge, just to see what was over the horizon. When he liked what he saw, he kept going. The lone figure was an unconventional sort, or he would have been quite content to remain home with his tribe. He was probably more bored than bold; or maybe just hungry, in search of game. He didn’t know how far he would travel, or if he would return once he grew homesick or scared. In his mind, he was off for a long walk, nothing more. But it was something more—something far more—for that adventurous stroll constituted the first journey of exploration.

  And that lone man was the world’s first explorer.I

  Encouraged by their friend’s success, a handful of his tribe’s more daring members took a peek over the horizon, too. Liking what they saw, they also kept going. Over the course of thousands of years, countless more joined the migration. We know that they reached modern-day Ethiopia at least 197,000 years ago, and modern Israel by 25,000 BC. Their descendants traveled into Europe, across Asia, through Siberia, and over a land bridge into the Americas. In time they invented numbers and alphabets, built great cities, painted magnificent works of art, and sailed the seas in mighty vessels handcrafted for just that purpose. They kept on sailing until the oceans had
been charted. Then they stepped back onto land and wandered across all they had not seen before, until there was no horizon over which mankind had not peered.

  In London, a diagonal mile through Kensington Gardens from the Speke obelisk, rises Lowther Lodge, the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society. The RGS, as it is known by its membership, has been the unofficial sanctioning body of global exploration for almost two centuries. The lodge is a tall brick building constructed in the style of Queen Anne architecture, with gable roofs, five lofty chimneys, and a fleet of mud-spattered Range Rovers in the gravel parking lot. Granite statues of David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton hover in the second-story alcoves overlooking the sidewalks of Kensington Gore, as if urging the shoppers en route to Harrod’s department store to seek a somewhat more adventurous calling.

  Inside, the great rooms are drafty, the unpolished floorboards creak, and almost every bookshelf could use a good dusting. But some of history’s most intoxicating discussions about exploration have taken place within those walls: Shackleton lectured about his famous open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean; Robert Falcon Scott discussed his upcoming (and, eventually, ill-fated) race to the South Pole; Sir Edmund Hillary briefed the Society upon his return from Everest, and Neil Armstrong spoke about becoming the first man to set foot on the moon. When David Livingstone’s mummified body was returned from Africa, it was displayed in the RGS map room before being borne to Westminster Abbey for burial.II Thousands filed through to pay their respects. To add the feeling of a proper African jungle, the fellows arranged for a thicket of potted palm trees to be placed along the walls.

  Upstairs in the attic, the Society’s archives contain the original letters of explorers who charted Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Out back, in a glass structure that looks and feels very much like I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, are more of exploration’s greatest relics: rare rocks, clothing, journals, letters, and the first maps of new lands, hand-drawn by the explorers themselves.

  The most coveted item at the RGS, however, is a simple award bestowed every year (except during wartime) since 1831, when King William IV of Britain offered an annual gift of 50 guineas to encourage discovery. In 1839, rather than merely giving a cash prize, the RGS minted a gold medal of equal value for the winner. The men and women who have won that award read like a who’s who of exploration: Ross, Franklin, Scott, Peary, Fremont, Stanley, Lindbergh, and on.

  A proclamation accompanies each medal, citing the discoverer’s great accomplishment. Captain Sir John Ross in 1834, for instance, was praised “for his discovery of Boothia Felix and King William Land and for his famous sojourn of four winters in the Arctic.” Thomas Simpson, when receiving the first gold medal in 1839, was given the award “for tracing the hitherto unexplored coast of North America.”

  These are achievements that stir the soul, fire the imagination, and (in the case of Ross and his four polar winters) cause a subconscious shiver at the mere thought of the hardship endured. More than simple journeys, the gold medal adventures were ordeals in the loftiest sense of the word. Left unsaid in the proclamations were words like “frostbite” and “starvation” and “suffered the death of his comrades,” which were just as much a part of an endeavor as the eventual accomplishment—in fact, more so. Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world, fought four continuous days of storm as he exited the Strait of Magellan. African explorer Mungo Park walked until he nearly dropped dead from thirst. Shackleton went almost sixteen days without sleep during his open-boat journey. His clothes, constantly drenched from sea spray, froze each night.

  This is how Apsley Cherry-Garrard described a five-week Antarctic expedition he and two men undertook in 1911. “The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated. And anyone would be a fool who went again. It is not possible to describe it. It was the darkness that did it. I don’t believe that minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight—not comparatively bad, when you see where you are going, where you are stepping, could read the compass without striking three or four boxes to find one dry match. In the mornings it took two men to get one man into his clothes, because sometimes our clothes were so frozen not even two men could bend them into the required shape.”

  “The journey,” concluded Cherry-Garrard, “had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.”

  The reason the trio endured such hardship? Not gold. Not conquest. But merely to collect emperor penguin eggs for scientific study.

  The annals of exploration prove that the journey was more important than the destination. Travel became a defining personal odyssey. The weak grew strong and the strong carried on. And for every Ross or Cherry-Garrard returning home to fanfare and acclaim, there were a dozen who perished or turned back, done in by the journey despite years of planning and physical preparation. Their loss was cause for despair, but nonetheless accepted as the price to be paid for unveiling the secret corridors of the globe. Left unsaid was that successful explorers seemed to possess physical and mental attributes that the unsuccessful lacked. These traits gave them an almost preternatural ability to withstand starvation, deprivation, torture, storms (both natural and personal), or just plain bad luck.

  This was why, for instance, the RGS was loath to send a rescue party after Speke when he was “lost” in Africa, or to do the same when Sir John Franklin was overdue during his search for the Northwest Passage—this, even though the idiosyncratic navigator was one of the Society’s founders. These explorers had gotten themselves into trouble, went the thinking; they would find a way to get themselves out. Speke survived this school of thought. Franklin did not.

  The character attributes of successful explorers were the hardiest, most resilient set of traits any individual might hope to possess—among them curiosity, perseverance, and a sort of learned fearlessness. Those were traits anyone could use, in any walk of life or in any desperate situation. Yet they were never plumbed for commonalities, so that outsiders might similarly equip themselves.

  This oversight became moot in 1979. Just a decade after Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind, the RGS awarded their gold medal to a Dr. David Stoddart for “contributions to geomorphology, the study of coral reefs, and the history of academic geography.”

  Stoddart was a Cambridge lecturer who had spent the summers studying the flora and fauna of the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean.III Stoddart’s enthusiasm and perseverance were commendable. However, his gold medal marked a turning point in the history of the Royal Geographical Society. This was an award that had once been synonymous with travel into the unknown; with pushing mental, physical, and emotional limits. Now the RGS was awarding it to a research scientist. In doing so, those learned fellows were tacitly admitting that the age of exploration was done. Not just the age that began with King William’s bequest; nor the age that began when “explorer” ceased to be a hunting term, and was first applied to those traveling to a new country in search of discoveries; nor even just the Victorian Age of Discovery, that most far-reaching of all epochs of exploration, with the heart-stopping adventures of Burton, Speke, and their search for the source of the Nile as its dramatic centerpiece.

  No, this admission applied to all of exploration, beginning when the first human beings strode upright out of Africa and began propagating the Earth a hundred thousand or more years ago.

  The Earth is a vast planet. It weighs some 6.6 sextillion tons. Measured around the equator, its circumference is 24,901.55 miles (polar circumference is 42 miles less). The average surface temperature is a mild 59 degrees Fahrenheit, but the Libyan Desert can hit 140 and the South Pole can sink to that same temperature on the minus side. More germane to the topic of exploration, the Earth’s surface area is 196,800,000 square miles, of which 57,300,000 is dry land.

  Now th
e RGS was saying every last inch had been explored. There was nothing left to find. Just to prove that Stoddart’s win wasn’t an aberration, the RGS proceeded to award the next twenty-five consecutive gold medals to men of science. Nowadays, instead of “for his perseverance and success in exploring the territory and investigating the resources of British Guyana,” as Robert H. Schomburg’s citation read in 1840, the wording is more along the lines of, “for contributions to the development of process-based geomorphology,” as when Professor Mike Kirby won in 1999, or Professor Brian Robson’s “contributions to urban geography” in 2000.

  Interestingly, a Dr. David Livingstone won in 2011, “for the encouragement and promotion of historical geography,” a pursuit no doubt unaccompanied by the dysentery, parasites, and lion attack that the previous winner of the same name endured in Africa while earning his gold medal in 1855.

  The passing of exploration went unnoted. There was no deep collective breath to frame the world’s most adventurous time span with proper perspective. It was a glaring oversight. No other group of achievers has been so bold—or foolhardy. Explorers mapped the Sahara’s burning sands, charted the mountains of Tibet, and rediscovered lost civilizations. They died of frostbite, expelled their innards through amoebic dysentery, and sometimes simply disappeared. They did those things and so much more, making the world, through their travails and hardships, a better place. “This discipline of suffering—of great suffering,” as philosopher Friedrich Nietzche once wrote, “know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced the elevation of all humanity?”

  They were dreamers, botanists, entrepreneurs, librarians, dropouts, missionaries, captains, widows, and more. Their stations in life were diverse and often unremarkable. A few were wealthy, though most were not. Some were comfortable with solitude, while others traveled in groups. An intriguing percentage were second children. Some were gay. Many undertook just one great journey in their life, a two- or six-year season of extreme personal risk before returning home to comfortable obscurity. Others made exploration their life’s work. Few thought themselves particularly brave. “It requires far less courage to be an explorer than to be a chartered accountant,” wrote mountain climber Peter Fleming. “The courage which enables you to face the prospect of sitting on a high stool in a smoky town adding up figures over a period of years is definitely higher, as well as a more useful sort of courage, than any which the explorer may be called upon to display.”