The Explorers

by Martin Dugard

  If only in Britain, and its obsession with all things Nile, Burton and Speke would be immortal.

  Which may explain why Speke got a little antsy once he could see again. Burton, with his own blindness and paralysis, was slipping closer to death, and Speke was eager to explore the far side of Lake Tanganyika. On March 3, after consulting with Burton, Speke and a small complement of the caravan boarded a dugout canoe to make the crossing. The journey could not have been comfortable. Twenty-three men were crammed into the long, flimsy wooden craft, including an interpreter, a cook, two armed Baluchi guards for protection, and eighteen paddlers. As anyone who has ever traveled by canoe can attest, no sitting position in this cramped world of knees, elbows, and hard seats remained comfortable for long. Reclining, with so many bodies in such a confined space, was out of the question. Speke’s only solace was his pipe, which he silently sat and smoked while keeping a sharp eye for the crocodiles that were fond of climbing into canoes and hauling men away.X

  Inclement weather restricted their travel to the shoreline for the first few days, but the party finally made it across to the other side on March 8. The locals turned out to be friendly, if slightly fearful of a lone traveler, for such men were often slavers. One night while sleeping, Speke suffered the indignity of a beetle boring deeply into his ear, scratching its way deeper and deeper into his skull. Poking a finger into his auditory canal to flush out the insect only pushed the beetle in deeper. Speke then poured hot butter into the orifice, which had no effect. Spearing the beetle with the sharp tip of his knife finally killed the insect, but also punctured Speke’s inner ear. The wound soon became infected, causing his face to become covered in boils. The hole in his ear would not heal for seven months, causing temporary deafness and a whistling sound every time Speke blew his nose. Legs and wings and other beetle body parts would emigrate out of the opening for almost a year. Speke would later refer to this random attack as some of the greatest pain he had ever known.

  Yet Speke pushed on, trying his best to explore the lake in search of the mysterious river leading north.

  But he failed. Making matters worse, when Speke returned to Ujiji after almost four weeks with nothing to show for his time and hardship, Burton not only mocked him for having achieved very little, but also made sure to write it up in his journal so he could once again publicly skewer Speke upon its publication.

  The fact remained that they had to find that mysterious river. Burton was still not healed, but on April 9 he joined Speke for a second attempt. He was dragged to the lake and placed inside a dugout. What followed was a miserable adventure. Torrential rains pelted them daily. The men hired as paddlers smoked a great deal of cannabis, which brought about sleepiness and lack of motivation. Burton’s tongue began to swell from severe ulcers. Crocodiles, mosquitoes, malaria, and cannibals along the shoreline (some who were known to prefer men roasted, and others known to eat them raw) were constant threats. There were villages along the coast so fierce that not even Arab slavers paid a visit. Finally, when Burton and Speke were literally hours away from the long-sought river, they put ashore to rest. There, the sons of a local chieftain informed them that this river—the Rusizi, as it is known—flowed into Lake Tanganyika, not out of it. Clearly, this could not be the source.

  One would imagine that if an individual had walked halfway across Africa, enduring as many hardships and setbacks as Burton, that he would order the paddlers to travel just six short more hours up the shoreline so he could see the Rusizi’s flow for himself. There was always a chance that the chieftain’s sons were wrong, or that they were trying to keep white men from paddling there to capture slaves.

  But Burton’s famous reservoir of fearlessness had run dry. The man who boldly infiltrated the brothels of Karachi, the holy city of Mecca, and allowed himself to be held prisoner in Harar, now wanted no part of the Rusizi. Henry Morton Stanley, who would undertake this same journey twenty years later, would write that the instant Burton gave the order to turn around, his “struggle for the mastery over African geography ceased.”

  When pressed to explain himself later in London, Burton would insist that he lacked enough cloth and beads to finish the task. These were the standard form of currency in Africa, used for everything from payment for food to safe passage through a tribal homeland. At this point in the journey, Burton would argue, he barely had enough of these precious items to make it home. This was true. However, by a stroke of good luck, an Arab trader in Kazeh had thoughtfully sent a fresh shipment of cloth and beads to Ujiji. It arrived just before Burton and Speke began their return trip to civilization. Burton could have easily resupplied and continued his quest for the Nile. By then, however, he was done.

  The US Navy SEALs force those who want to quit their rigorous basic training (BUDS—Basic Underwater Demolition School) to ring a ship’s bell three times. Many times, as young men come to the end of their rope and reach for this bell, the school’s instructors encourage them to rethink what they are about to do. Once that bell has been rung, it can’t be unrung. The individual has then quit, and is no longer a viable candidate to be a SEAL.

  Many would-be SEALs rethink their decision. Yet almost all of those who initially change their mind about ringing the bell later come back to once again tug on the clapper three times. They quit. The SEALs believe that when an individual comes to the conclusion that giving up is an option, there’s no turning back. This is the opposite of choosing courage. And whether through fatigue, cold, starvation, pain, illness, homesickness, or any of a number of reasons, they give in to their fears. Their minds transition away from managing the discomfort of their rigorous training and begin to imagine how good it will feel when the discomfort ends.

  Soon enough, it does.

  5

  This is precisely what happened to Burton. He was lame and often blind. His tongue had been covered in so many ulcers that he couldn’t speak. The waters of Lake Tanganyika are not suitable for drinking or bathing by humans, given the preponderance of helminth parasites that cause an infection known as schistosomiasis, and yet Burton’s chief complaint during the three-week canoe journey was that the paddlers kept splashing water on him. So he could have very well picked up that disease.

  Any of a number of other illnesses, such as dengue fever, leishmaniasis, onchocerciasis, and filariasis could also have been responsible for his lethargy and inability to see (onchocerciasis is also known as river blindness). His effectiveness as an explorer was minimal, because he wasn’t ambulatory. And the days of eating, drinking, and sleeping in Ujiji might have been a welcome respite when they first arrived, but a man of Burton’s rapacious intellectual thirst would have grown bored after months of having nothing to read, write, or accomplish.

  A “strange, inexplicable melancholy” began to haunt Burton. Africa’s verdant landscape no longer enchanted him, and he began to long for his favorite haunts of Egypt and Arabia and the “rare simplicity of the desert.”

  Mentally, physically, and emotionally, Dick Burton was finished. This is not what he would tell the RGS upon his return to London, but it’s precisely what happened. In fact, he would lie about his reasons for returning home before completing his mission, explaining to Sir Roderick Murchison, “I was compelled by want of supplies to desist from exploration.”

  The truth of the matter is that Dick Burton quit.

  Speke, however, was not ready to give up.

  He was eager to return to the Rusizi to confirm the direction of its flow. But the choice was not his to make. On May 26, 1858, at Burton’s order, he and Speke turned their backs on Lake Tanganyika and began the long trip home to London.

  Ironically, the British capital was a potentially more lethal place than the heart of Africa at that very moment, thanks to an overwrought city sewage system that would soon see the Thames overflowing with untreated waste and the city reeking of fecal matter in the hot summer sun, giving it a mal aria on par with vulg
ar Zanzibar—and far transcending the pristine air of the African savanna.

  But there’s no place like home, and with no way of knowing that London would soon have the potential to become the source of an enormous cholera outbreak, the Speke and Burton Expedition began the long march back to civilization.

  Burton planned that they would lay over in Kazeh along the way to regain their health once and for all. Hearing this, Speke realized he might have one last chance to go see the northern lake he had been told of earlier. He quietly schemed to make a trip north to explore that other great inland sea they had heard about. “If you are not well enough when we reach Kazeh,” he suggested to Burton, “I will go myself, and you can employ this time taking notes from the traveled Arabs.”

  This sentence must have been spoken delicately.

  Speke was requesting to depart from the caravan and undertake a solitary exploration. It was also a veiled insult. While Speke was eager to see for himself whether the northern lake existed, Burton was content to write down the secondhand accounts of the Arabs who claimed to have seen it. It was Speke who tracked game, drew maps, and followed the nightly stars to accurately assess longitude—activities commensurate with exploration. With the exception of their soggy three-week canoe trip up the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika, Burton’s major contributions to the journey since he laid eyes upon the lake were detailed ethnological observations about African tribes and customs.

  But Burton was no longer interested in exploration by the time Speke made his request. He had become a traveler, a man on the outside looking in, eager to be home. This is not to denigrate the hardships and misery Burton had endured, nor to minimize his achievements. By the time the expedition arrived in Kazeh on June 20, 1858, he’d been in Africa for a year. He had every right to look forward to a rendezvous with Isabel rather than more sickness, blindness, paralysis, and misfortune.

  Burton’s supporters are legion, even today, and far more numerous than those of the less glamorous Speke. Biographers write of Burton’s rage and passion, glamorizing his eccentricities and ignoring the very obvious fact that his greatest days as an explorer were already behind him when Speke asked if he might set off alone to investigate the northern lake. But Burton was done with Africa. Upon his return to London, he would begin a new career as a diplomat, forever turning his back on the man he had once been.

  By their very nature, the seven traits of the explorers are a reminder to keep pushing, always. The lofty and impossible nature of their business left ample room for compromise, as seen by Burton. He had accomplished a lot, and had drawn some informed conclusions. As Speke stood before him, asking whether he might travel northward for a short period to investigate this uncharted lake, it was easy to rationalize that that was probably good enough. After all, Burton had found Lake Tanganyika.

  But he hadn’t finished the job. The RGS’s orders had explicitly stated that the expedition was to travel northward from Lake Tanganyika to ensure that a northward-flowing river connected with the Nile.

  I would suggest that Burton felt more than a little sheepish about the crisis of courage that prevented him from taking the time to heal, rather than traveling north with Speke. He would have some explaining to do in London. Nonetheless, Burton reluctantly agreed to let Speke leave Kazeh and search for the northern lake.

  6

  On July 9, 1858, still a little deaf and occasionally blind from his damaged retinas, John Hanning Speke marched north from Kazeh with a thirty-four-man caravan. He was known as “Mzungu”—the white man—to his porters and to the villagers he would meet along the way.

  Speke walked north for three weeks. The landscape was dry and forested. The nights and early mornings were crisp and cold, even in the midst of summer. Speke’s Victorian clothing, felt hat, pale skin, and light brown hair were invariably the subjects of much scrutiny when he entered a new village. The daily peril was hardly less than anywhere else in Africa he’d been so far. Speke grew so tired of explaining to locals why he would do something as “stupid as to go through danger and discomfort” needlessly that he invented the explanation that he was off in search of hippopotamus teeth.

  There was a lightheartedness to Speke’s solitary travel that hadn’t previously existed. It was as if he were back in the wilds of India and Nepal on a solo hunting trip. But this was even better. Speke was having the adventure of his life and was in no hurry to return home. He simply kept walking farther and farther north, hoping that reports of a great lake were true.

  They were. On August 3, John Hanning Speke discovered the source of the Nile.

  Sort of.

  * * *

  I. The brain does not record all events with the same clarity of memory. It would appear that the enhanced memory of a fearful event would be to prevent an individual from repeating it. When an event becomes too traumatic, the brain often distorts this memory, perhaps as a coping mechanism.

  II. Sometimes we place too much emphasis on the wrong fears. For instance, the odds of death by snake bite is 1 in 145 million. The odds of death by heart disease? 1 in 400.

  III. We all daydream; some of us just hide it better. A Harvard study of 2,250 subjects showed that their minds were wandering an average of 47 percent of the time. There is a close correlation between daydreaming and creative problem-solving, which is why a long run or shower tends to aid the creative thought process. It’s worth noting that the only activity to which the subjects of the study committed complete and total focus was lovemaking.

  IV. An Englishman, Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, explored Western Australia, and rescued Alexander Selkirk (the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe) from the Pacific island where he’d been stranded. Jonathan Swift mentions him by name in Gulliver’s Travels. He also introduced the words barbecue, avocado, subspecies, and chopsticks to the English language.

  V. Parry’s enduring legacy was the introduction of canned food to polar exploration.

  VI. The 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition was led by none other than Mount Everest climber Sir Edmund Hillary.

  VII. The original home of Angostura bitters, a concentrated mix of alcohol and spices still used to flavor drinks and food.

  VIII. With the exception of a journey across Russia, that was the end of Humboldt’s exploration career. He died in Berlin at age eighty-nine.

  IX. The world leader in naming places was Captain Cook, whose charting of the Pacific allowed him to name hundreds of bays, islands, capes, and heads. A very large proportion are named for either King George III, the British monarch at the time of his voyages; George’s wife, Charlotte; or various officials in British government at that time. A Latinization of the monarch’s name gives us Georgia, as in South Georgia Island, to which Ernest Shackleton so famously sailed in his open boat.

  X. They are still very much a danger. One mythic crocodile of this region has been named Gustave. Researchers who have tried to capture him estimate that Gustave is 60 feet long, weighs 1 ton, and is 60 years old. As of 2008, it was estimated he had eaten 300 humans.

  INDEPENDENCE

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

  —Teddy Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” April 23, 1910

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  The true source of the world’s longest river, as ascertained in 2006 by a team of adventurers known as Ascend the Nile,I is a muddy section of jungle in Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Forest.II The water seeping from the earth then rolls downhill, becomes a stream, and finally a river that flows into the vast inland sea Speke located on August 3, 1858.

  Others say that the source is a small bubbling spring in the mountains of Burundi, located in 1937 by Dr. Burkhardt Waldecker. The Kasumo, as this creek is known, is actually the source of a river known as the Ruvyironza, which, in turn, is a tributary of the 400-mile-long Kagera River that eventually flows into the lake Speke discovered.

  Many a small jungle creek, in fact, can make a legitimate claim to being the one true source.

  This bears repeating: there is no single source of the Nile River.

  The truth is that thousands of remote jungle springs eventually feed into the shimmering body of water on which Speke gazed that warm summer day in 1858.

  So what had Speke discovered?

  A historical asterisk.

  Historical asterisks are misconceptions that get passed down through generations. In that time, two things happen: (1) the world at large comes to believe them as whole truth; and (2) history geeks study and debate them endlessly as a means of divining how we should record what really happened.

  Christopher Columbus, for instance, is a historical asterisk. Elementary school textbooks say that he discovered America. There is a Columbus Day celebration on the second Monday each October each year to commemorate this achievement. However, every person who has visited or resided in North America since 1492 can rightfully claim that they got there before the great navigator. This is because Columbus never actually set foot on what is now US