Livingstone is an example that failure is not fatal. It is just as much a natural by-product of passion as success. Great explorers such as Livingstone used failure as a valuable learning tool that would assist them on their next journey. Lesser explorers, most of whose names have long been forgotten by history, simply gave up.
Even in the midst of that deeply flawed Zambezi journey, Livingstone vowed to never quit exploring. “I will go anywhere,” he wrote, “provided it is forward.”
These words would prove prophetic. He returned from the Zambezi in 1864 and was back in Africa to start yet another journey by 1866. It began well enough. “The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great,” he wrote after setting out into what is now Mozambique. “The body is soon well knit; the muscles of the limbs grow hard and seem to have no fat. The countenance is bronzed and there is no dyspepsia.”
Whereupon Livingstone got famously lost—and stayed that way for six years. His fame ensured that people around the world began wondering about what had happened to him. In England, Sir Roderick Murchison wrote constantly to the Times of London, reassuring readers that rumors of Livingstone being eaten by cannibals or killed by hostile tribes were all nonsense. Murchison did everything in his power to support Livingstone—except, of course, send a search party.
Much to Murchison’s chagrin, the American newspaper the New York Morning Herald launched a covert Livingstone rescue operation. Reporter Henry Morton Stanley marched alone into Africa and found him in Ujiji, of all places.XXI Stanley not only located the now-destitute Livingstone, but also provided him with a fresh batch of supplies. This allowed Livingstone to continue his explorations even though he was nearly sixty years old, had almost no teeth, and had reached a point in his travels where it was quite clear that he had no intention of ever returning to civilization.
Stanley left Africa to tell the world he had found Livingstone, becoming forever famous in the process. His original greeting to the lost explorer—“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”—would become the best-known quotation in the annals of exploration. Stanley was proud of the comment when he first slid it into a dispatch to the Morning Herald, even though ample evidence points to the fact that he never actually said those words. But it would haunt him for the rest of his life. Stanley would come to regret that he ever claimed to have uttered those words, which remain his greatest legacy to this day.
Meanwhile, Livingstone chose to remain behind on his beloved continent, continuing his daily process of “bashing on, regardless,” as he liked to say. Livingstone not only disagreed with Burton and Speke’s theories about the source of the Nile, but also thought its discovery beneath his considerable talents. He had intentionally ignored it for the first twenty-five years of his career. However, he also considered Africa his sole domain. It riled him when Burton and Speke became famous. If anyone was going to find the source, he was determined that it would be him, if only to reclaim the mantle of top African explorer.
Sadly, Livingstone’s theories were wrong. He was 1,000 miles south of the source by April 1874—and marching in the opposite direction. There was no way he would ever find it. Burton and Speke—or one of them, at least—was right about its location.
By then, Livingstone was literally walking in circles around East Africa. One night, the former missionary got down on his knees to pray at bedtime, only to topple forward onto his pillow as his body finally gave out. Cause of death could have been any of a number of the maladies coursing through his system, courtesy of African exploration: anemia, malaria, and/or the rampant course of violent dysentery that had been forcing him for weeks to step off the trail and relieve himself every few hundred yards. It’s worth noting that “fever” was never considered. The man whose physical health was once so robust that he bragged of drinking water “putrid with rhinoceros urine and buffalo dung” had become a living petri dish. The surprise is not that he died from all those bugs and bacteria, but that they took thirty-three years of exploration to do him in.
The body was discovered the next morning. Livingstone’s loyal assistants, knowing precisely what they must do next, made an incision into Livingstone’s lower abdomen and removed his internal organs. The heart was buried under a baobab tree, so that a part of the explorer might always remain in his beloved Africa. Livingstone’s corpse was then mummified by stuffing it with salt and sand, and then drying it in the sun for two weeks. Chuma and Susi, as these assistants were named, then wrapped Livingstone in bark and sailcloth and hand-carried him more than 1,000 miles back to the coast. The body was placed on a British ship and returned to England, where he was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.XXII
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Passion made Livingstone successful, made him famous, made him fearless, cost him his family, gave him a small fortune,XXIII heightened his ambition, killed him, and led to his heroic burial. Nothing great in this world happens without passion, but it is also a dangerous thing, and not to be taken lightly. It is the TNT of our emotional makeup: fragile to manage, capable of great destruction, and the instrument for stunning achievement.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the breakthrough moment in which Speke saved the collective behinds of himself, Burton, and the entire expedition. The man whom Burton so often tried to paint as mentally inferior ingeniously invented a method for gauging longitude without the broken marine chronometers. Using a sextant, a Nautical Almanac, and a four-ounce rifle ball attached to a string, Speke was able to figure Greenwich Mean Time by shooting the moon and recording its angle to various stars. Night after night after night, Speke peered into the nighttime sky and honed this new skill. His ingenuity was extraordinary, particularly in light of the fact that Burton did absolutely nothing to help, and showed no interest in finding a new method of determining longitude. In time, Speke’s lunar distances proved to be so accurate that even the jaded Burton was awed—though he tried very hard to appear unimpressed.
Needless to say, the expedition was resuscitated. And though both men were once again grappling with malaria’s delirium and shakes as August turned to September, they could both rejoice in the knowledge that the coastal plain was behind. At long last, the African savanna lay before them. On November 7, 1857, exactly five months after setting out, Burton and Speke arrived in the Arab trading post at Kazeh.XXIV They had traveled 600 miles in 134 days. They were eagerly adopted by the Arab sultans, who housed them in a small cottage and lavished them with beef, coffee, cakes, and other vestiges of civilization.
But even in this moment of great accomplishment, there was conflict between Burton and Speke. The schism between them had never healed during their many months of travel, and Burton soon widened it by using his fluent Arabic to glean new nuggets of geographical information from their hosts—none of which he shared with Speke. The gist was this: a powerful river flowed out of a large lake a few hundred miles north of Kazeh. A second lake, 200 miles due west, also existed. This was the lake on which their original destination of Ujiji was located.
Unfortunately for Burton, Speke figured out that something funny was going on. He used his knowledge of Hindustani to learn what the Arabs had been sharing with Burton, and then enthusiastically suggested they change their plans and march north. Surely, this large lake had to be the source of the Nile.
Burton wouldn’t hear of it. And as expedition leader, he had the final say.
Unrelated to that discussion, Burton then got very sick. He could not walk, or even stand. In fact, he would not walk unsupported for almost a year. “The whole body was palsied, powerless, motionless, and the limbs appeared to wither and die,” he later wrote. The nameless condition persisted, and after weeks of suffering, his condition only grew worse. His hands and feet began to feel as if they were engulfed in flames. Speke feared that Burton was near death.
At the risk of sounding heartless, one has to ponder the very different life that John Hanning Speke would have enjoyed
if Burton had simply died. Speke would have taken control of the expedition. The RGS had specifically ordered Burton and Speke to locate the lake at Ujiji and then travel northwest in search of the source. Speke would have done precisely that. He would have returned to London with maps pinpointing the source. There would have been no Nile Debate. No soul-searching afternoon of hunting on the eve of that great debate.
But Burton would live thirty-two more years. He would return to England, marry Isabel Arundel, set aside his Muslim leanings as an act of youthful indiscretion by converting to Catholicism, and be laid to rest in the cemetery at St. Mary Magdalen’s Roman Catholic church in Mortlake, just outside London. His elaborate handcarved stone tomb would bear the design of a Bedouin tent, in which the coffins of Burton and Isabel would rest side by side for all eternityXXV—and where they can still be seen to this day, thanks to a viewing window and ladder around the back of the tomb.
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Perhaps fearing that Speke would abandon him and complete the RGS mission all by himself, Burton summoned what can only be described as superhuman powers. He ordered that the expedition leave the comforts of Kazeh and immediately make for Ujiji. Burton still couldn’t walk, so a litter was fashioned and six porters were hired to carry him.
Speke had suffered his own share of illness, but his constitution was the sturdier of the two men. So it seems unfair, or at least bad luck, that he was struck by a bout of ophthalmia several weeks after setting out from Kazeh.
He could not have picked a worse time to lose his vision.
Ophthalmia is what happens when the eyes are subjected to day after day of intense glare and the retinas burn. This is why it is important to wear sunglasses. For Speke, the bloody eyes and inability to see came from the African sun. Christopher Columbus suffered this condition often, thanks to the glare bouncing off the sea, and it was said that his eyes bled. Burton, who also endured ophthalmia periodically, described it as “an almost total blindness, rendering every object enclouded as though by a misty veil.”
Meanwhile, Burton’s health was not much better than Speke’s. The journey was growing so difficult that Burton was on the verge of turning back to Kazeh. The westward path was a continuum of swamps, dense jungle, and bamboo. Monsoon-force rains alternated with periods of scorching sun, making for constant daytime misery. Burton’s carriers all ran off, stealing many of his possessions and losing his bedding. Speke’s blindness made it impossible to travel on foot, forcing both men to depend upon donkeys as a mode of transportation.
So it was that on February 13, 1858, Burton and Speke were both perched atop donkeys as the small remainders of their caravan marched up a rocky hill, past thorn trees, and through thick grass. A porter led Speke’s animal. The donkey struggled with its burden and needed to be coaxed up the uneven climb. It finally reached the summit, only to collapse and die. Burton then ordered the group to stop and rest.
The expedition’s goals appeared futile. There was no point in going on. To Burton, it made more sense to march back to Kazeh to convalesce, then try again to find the lakes of central Africa when he and Speke were completely healed.
Then Burton saw something shiny and silver far below. “What is that?” he asked Sidi Mubarak Bombay, his lead porter.XXVI
“I believe it is the water,” replied Bombay.
Both men knew what he meant. Not just any body of water, they were at long last gazing upon Tanganyika. Everyone, that is, except Speke.
The emotional significance of the moment overwhelmed both of the Englishmen. Looking to the left and then to the right, Burton realized that the lake was so massive that it was impossible to see the north or south shores of Tanganyika.XXVII The far bank looked to be 35 miles away.XXVIII
“Nothing,” he later wrote, “could be more picturesque than this first view of the Tanganyika Lake, as it lay in the lap of the mountains, basking in the gorgeous tropical sunshine.” He added descriptions of “zigzag” paths and emerald green hills, and of the gleaming yellow sands and small breaking waves.
Burton developed an immediate emotional connection to Lake Tanganyika. Thanks to Speke’s temporary blindness, he was the first European to lay eyes upon it. It was a bond to which he would never let go. For the rest of his life, that body of water would be a source of pride to Richard Francis Burton. Tanganyika was his lake. The expedition reaching its shores was his accomplishment. Burton would barely see more of its shoreline than the village of Ujiji, and yet he would later expound one theory after another about its geography, as if he had circumnavigated each and every inch of his beloved lake’s shoreline.
Burton would also convince himself of one other great truth: Lake Tanganyika was the source of the Nile River. It was a truth that Burton would soon defend with a fiery passion.
Speke didn’t experience that emotional connection to Tanganyika. After seven long months on the trail he couldn’t even see the shining blue waters, let alone feel passionate about it. If anything, he sulked. “The great lake in question was nothing but mist and glare before my eyes,” he wrote despondently. “The lovely Tanganyika Lake could be seen in all its glory by everybody but myself.”
With that, the Richard Burton Expedition gamely made their way down the mountain into Ujiji, where they arrived on February 14. Appropriately, this marked the seventy-ninth anniversary of the murder of Captain James Cook—the very death that propelled Britain from nautical exploration to land-based exploration, opening up the era of African discovery. If this was, indeed, The Source, the coincidence could not have been more profound.
Speke and Burton soon settled in for a rest in Ujiji, where they experienced even more of the luxury and abundance that they had experienced in Kazeh. Speke purchased a pair of stained glass spectacles at the Arab market to protect his eyes from the sun. Burton slept on the mud floor of their rented hut, slowly regaining his health. There was still much work to be done to fulfill their RGS orders, but making it to Ujiji was a significant milestone.
It can be argued that until this point in their journey Burton and Speke were merely wanderers—intrepid wanderers, but wanderers nonetheless, simply following in the footsteps of Arab slave traders. But Ujiji, that bustling town on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with its bountiful markets and newly captured slaves, was where they were forced to blaze their own trails.
Curiosity and Hope were long ago specters in their rearview mirrors. Passion had driven them from Zanzibar to Ujiji on a journey fraught with near death, blindness, ineptitude, and brilliant solutions to impossible problems.
Now it was time to step off into the unknown. For that, Burton and Speke would require a brand-new trait.
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I. “The Central Slave and Ivory Trade Route,” as it is now known, was submitted to the United Nations as a potential World Heritage Site by the United Republic of Tanzania in 2006.
II. Weather, the unknown, and the dark skin tone of Africa’s populace were all reasons for this term.
III. Tuckey is a tragic, forgotten figure who did a great deal to advance African exploration. He went to sea as a boy, and climbed through the ranks to receive his commission at the relatively advanced age of twenty-six. His ship was captured by the French in 1805, and he spent nine years as a prisoner of war. During that time Tuckey married fellow prisoner Margaret Stuart and whiled away the hours compiling the four-volume Maritime Geography and Statistics. His first assignment upon his release was the Congo expedition, which sought a way to connect the Congo with the rivers of inner Africa, a task that would be completed by Henry Morton Stanley eighty years later.
IV. Ronald Ross, a British officer in the Indian Medical Service, was the first to confirm that mosquitoes transmitted malaria. The theory was first put forth by French military doctor Alphonse Laveran nearly two decades earlier, for which Laveran was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1907.
V. A subjectiv
e list compiled by the author, defined as those land-based animals with total superiority and no physical rivals in their environment: cape buffalo, grizzly bear, polar bear, hippopotamus, salt water crocodile, rhinoceros, African lion, Bengal and Siberian tiger, bull elephant, and Nile crocodile.
VI. Feral rock pythons have been discovered in the Florida Everglades since the 1990s, thanks to modern snake owners who dispose of their pets once they become too oversized to keep within the confines of a small home ophidiarium.
VII. Incredibly, the discovery of a new species of venomous viper was announced in 2012. Known as the Matilda viper, it has black and yellow scales, and devil’s horns over its eyes. It is named for the daughter of the man who discovered it.
VIII. The vertical lines on a map. Latitude are the horizontal lines, denoting the Earth’s width. The shorthand “lat is fat” is a handy reminder when confused about which is which.
IX. Wristwatches didn’t come into vogue until the 1920s.
X. In 1675, when the Royal Observatory was first built.
XI. Something about turning forty left a mark on many an explorer. Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but Davison, Cook, and Columbus all set out on their journeys at this point in their lives.
XII. First summited in 1889 by German climber Hans Meyer and Austrian Ludwig Purtscheller.
XIII. In 1913, by Alaska native Walter Harper.
XIV. A term first coined in the 1952 book The Mountain World by Swiss doctor Edouard Wyss-Dunant.
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