Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  … [drop] the rope-end, walk back a dozen paces, and rush on me with savage fury, plunging his spear through the thick part of my right thigh into the ground, passing it between the thigh-bone and the large sinew below … Seeing that death was inevitable if I remained lying there a moment longer, I sprang upon my legs, and gave the miscreant such a sharp back-hander in the face with my double-bound fists that he lost his presence of mind and gave me a moment’s opportunity to run away … I was almost naked and quite bare upon the feet, but I ran over the shingly beach towards the sea like wildfire. The man followed me a little way, but finding I had the foot of him, threw his spear like a javelin, but did not strike me … he then gave up the chase. Still I had at least forty more men to pass, who were scattered about the place, looking for what property they could pick up … However I dodged them all by turns … bobbing as they threw their spears after me, until I reached the shore.30

  Burton would describe Speke’s escape as ‘in every way wonderful’, which it certainly was.31 The three surviving officers (Herne being the only one unscathed) sailed for Aden the following day in the small sailing vessel, to which they had managed to stagger after the attack. During the voyage, Stroyan’s corpse began to smell so offensively that the crew persuaded Burton to bury him at sea, rather than bring him back to Aden, as he had wished.32 The death of a colleague, who had been a friend in India, was very painful for Burton. Not least because it was obvious to all that, if he had stuck to his original plan to join the Ogaden caravan, Stroyan would still be alive, and he and Speke would not be lying wounded on the vessel’s poop deck. On Speke’s arrival in the colony, the civil surgeon looked at the deep wounds and lacerations to his limbs, which were now contracted into grotesque positions, and predicted that it would take three years for him to recover fully. The same surgeon expected Burton to heal more swiftly. In fact Speke would be walking with a stick by the time he sailed for England three weeks later, and Burton would be an invalid for several months.33

  Speke’s escape from his captors (frontispiece of Speke’s What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile).

  Speke’s resentment against Burton for implying that he had been retreating at the height of the attack was not his only complaint against his leader. As expedition leader, Burton had taken possession of his junior officer’s diary and, although Speke could hardly object to a copy being sent to the Bombay authorities, he knew that Burton was an author and suspected that he might make personal use of the copy he had retained. He was also shocked when Burton told him that he was bound by his instructions to send to the Calcutta Museum of Natural History all the animals’ heads and other specimens he had collected. Speke had hoped at least to send duplicates to his own private museum in his father’s house.34 Yet it could be said in Burton’s favour that he was at least trying his hardest to get back the £510, which Speke had lost, along with a further thousand lost by other expedition members in the destruction of their camp. Speke was always aware of the need to keep on good terms with his leader in order to be invited to accompany him on his next expedition. So he did not reproach Burton for failing to negotiate a penny of compensation from the East India Company.

  While at Kurrum, Speke had heard of the existence of a vast inland lake, which ‘the Somali described as equal in extent to the Gulf of Aden’.35 This information made him all the keener to keep in with Burton – although there could be no denying that their Somaliland expedition had been such ‘a signal failure from inexperience’ that it had probably damaged their reputations too much to make funding a new journey a practical proposition.36 Yet Burton had at least reached Harar, so his credibility had not been entirely ruined. Yet even supposing Burton managed to gain support in the right quarters, Speke doubted whether his former leader would want to return to Africa with a man who had written no books, knew no Arabic, and had failed to reach the objective he had been set.

  FOUR

  About a Rotten Person

  When Richard Burton arrived in England on sick leave in June 1855, the two volumes of his Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah were in the shops and had just received the kind of press that normally makes an author well known for life. But circumstances were far from normal, with public attention riveted by the Crimean War and the cholera, starvation, dysentery and official incompetence that were together killing more British soldiers than the enemy. Britain and France were at war with Russia in defence of threatened Turkey and their own interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Though Burton had returned from Africa marked for life by a livid facial scar, he wanted to go and fight. Not that patriotism fully explained his ardour.

  He had just been severely censured by Aden’s new British ruler, Brigadier William Coghlan, for his ‘want of caution and vigilance’ as leader of the Somali Expedition.1 Fearing that Coghlan’s report could blight his chances of returning to Africa, he decided that a stint in the Crimea might persuade the Bombay government to view him more favourably. The best he could manage was a staff appointment with Beatson’s Horse, a lawless brigade of Turkish irregulars. However, within three months – during which Burton saw no action – he and the brigade’s other British officers failed to stop their ill-disciplined Turks, Syrians and Albanians clashing with French troops, their allies. General Beatson was forced to resign, and Burton, as his chief staff officer, had no choice but to follow him home.2 Yet at this apparently disastrous moment, luck came to his rescue in a most unexpected way.

  Dr James Erhardt, a missionary colleague of Dr Krapf and Johann Rebmann, sent a map of a gigantic slug-shaped central African lake to the secretary of the Church Missionary Society, who forwarded it to the Royal Geographical Society, where it was discussed at meetings in late November and early December 1855 – the very time when Burton had just come home. Although the geographers’ general opinion of this map – which was based on the testimony of Arab-Swahili slave traders – was that it incorrectly conflated a southern lake with one, or possibly two lakes further to the north, its implications for the search for the Nile’s source were electrifying.3 Because Burton knew the RGS’s secretary, Dr Norton Shaw, he had been kept abreast of the Society’s evolving plans, and so was in pole position to apply for the leadership of a new East African expedition. Indeed, Burton’s letter of application reached the Society two days before their Expeditions’ Committee resolved on 12 April 1856 to send an exploring party ‘to ascertain . . . the limits of the Inland Sea or Lake . . . [and, if possible, achieve] the determination of the head sources of the White Nile’.4 By the time Burton wrote again, a week after this meeting, it was evident that he had already been informed sub rosa that the RGS meant to back him. At any rate, he felt confident enough to discuss with them a pivotal matter – which was whether to go alone, or accompanied. He plumped for the latter option, because ‘it would scarcely be wise to stake success upon a single life … I should therefore propose as my companion, Lt. Speke of the B.A. [Bengal Army]’.5

  If Speke had been in a position to hear that Burton had made him his first choice at this historic moment, he would have been amazed. But he was out of contact in the Crimea, and currently stationed at Kertch as second in command of the Turkish contingent of the 16th Regiment of Infantry. But, as he told a friend at this time, he had no interest in the war and ‘was dying to go back and try again [at the Nile]’, but doubted whether he would ever be given the chance.6 So when he eventually received the good news from Norton Shaw, he was planning a hunting expedition in the Caucasus Mountains.7

  Although still smarting from the accusation of cowardice and the theft of his specimens, Speke did not hesitate to accept Burton’s invitation. His former commander – as he was aware -’knew nothing of astronomical surveying, of physical geography, or of collecting specimens of natural history’, so he was confident that his own practical skills would be invaluable.8

  It is not easy to judge what the two men thought of one another before they began their second journey. This is because, after it, every wor
d they wrote (and they wrote a good many) would be coloured by their great falling out. Burton’s own version of why he invited Speke to accompany him is highly suspect:

  The history of our companionship is simply this: – As he had suffered with me in purse and person at Berbera in 1855, I thought it but just to offer him the opportunity of renewing an attempt to penetrate into Africa. I had no other reasons. I could not expect much from his assistance; he was not a linguist – French and Arabic being equally unknown to him – nor a man of science, nor an accurate astronomical observer.9

  This flatly contradicts Burton’s later admission that Speke had possessed ‘an uncommonly acute eye for country – by no means a usual accomplishment even with the professional surveyor’. It is, of course, inconceivable that Burton would have chosen someone to accompany him on the most important journey of his life, simply because he had suffered misfortune on an earlier occasion. If a better-qualified man had been available, Burton would have chosen him without hesitation. But Speke had much to offer. Even after they had fallen out, Burton would still feel compelled to praise his ‘noble qualities of energy, courage and perseverance’, and would pay tribute to his skill in ‘geodesy’, demonstrated by his use of a watch, the sun and a compass to fix the position of geographical features on a map.10 Burton also knew that Speke understood how to measure the moon’s position, relative to other stars, in order to determine longitude – another exceptionally useful accomplishment. But perhaps what weighed most with him was his memory of the miraculous way in which Speke had escaped what had looked to be certain death. This feat had required outstanding physical fitness, and an unbreakable will.

  Such qualities apart, what did Burton think of him as a person? Certainly, Jack Speke was not as well educated as he was, neither having been to a university nor having written books and mastered numerous languages. Speke’s parents -though they could have afforded the fees of a leading public school – had sent him as a boarder to unremarkable Barnstaple Grammar School, fifty miles from their estate in Somerset. Like many of his contemporaries at famous schools, Speke did little work, often cutting class and preferring country pursuits to Latin and Greek.11 But though his teenage delinquencies were no match for Burton’s youthful love affairs, the pair still had one significant formative experience in common. Both had grown up in households where the mother was the dominant parent.

  Speke’s reclusive father, William, although rich and head of a family that had owned land in Somerset since Norman times, had refused to stand for parliament, even when urged to do so by William Pitt, the prime minister, who was a neighbouring landowner. All he asked was to be left in peace to manage his estate, as had generations of his stay-at-home forebears. This slightly dull county family was certainly not one that might have been expected to produce, out of the blue, a man destined to rip the veil from the heart of Africa. Jack was the second of William’s four sons, but would be the only one sufficiently favoured by his mother to be given her maiden name, Hanning, as one of his forenames. Indeed she always addressed him as Hanning, his second name, in preference to John or Jack.12 Georgina was an heiress with ambitions for her family. In later years, when ‘Hanning’ went abroad, it would be she, rather than her husband, who would correspond with her favourite son’s publisher and with the RGS on his behalf.13 In a letter to John Blackwood, his publisher, Speke describes ‘leaving the mammy strings … [for] the life of a vagabond’, implying that his journeying sprang from the need to escape his mother’s control.14

  Richard Burton’s equally strong-minded mother, Martha -besides influencing him more than his professional invalid of a father – was fascinated by young tearaways like her remittanceman half-brother – another Richard Burton. Her son Richard definitely believed that his own ‘madcap adventures … developed a secret alliance between them … Like all mothers she dearly loved the scamp of the family.’15 Georgina Speke also seems secretly to have admired high-spirited misbehaviour. A curious passage was deleted by Blackwood from the proofs of Speke’s first book, in which the explorer advised an African monarch how to increase his chances of impregnating his wives. The young ruler, he suggested, should limit the number of times he had sex and ‘refrain from over-indulgences, which destroy the appetite in early youth’. There were plenty of youths in Europe and elsewhere, Speke explained, who, ‘because of the foolish vanity their mothers and nurses have of having forward boys increase their veins in size by over-exertion, and thereby decrease their power’.16

  The routine depiction of Speke by Burton’s biographers as a dullard, with no interest in sex, is given the lie by dozens of risqué passages cut by Blackwood from proof versions of his books. Speke described the cuts disapprovingly as ‘this gelding business’.17 ‘If you persist in gelding me,’ he told Blackwood, ‘I shall think you more barbarous than even the Somalis.’18 Nevertheless, Fawn Brodie, one of Burton’s most respected biographers, stated that ‘Speke at thirty-three was inhibited and prudish’.19 In fact, aged thirty-three he wrote to an officer friend, describing in graphic detail how Somali women’s vaginas were ‘stitched across to prevent intrusion until the bridegroom feels inclined to consummate the marriage’.20

  Speke is said by one biographer to have accused Burton of making sexual advances to him. The evidence is flimsy.21 Certainly Burton was possessed by a passionate sexual inquisitiveness, and had probably had homosexual experiences in India, but he had also kept Indian mistresses and had loved one of them deeply.22 Nor did he suddenly lose interest in women while in Africa. On arrival in Aden, after the Berbera disaster, he had been found by the Acting Civil Surgeon to be suffering from syphilis caught from prostitutes in Egypt.23 And Speke’s behaviour towards African women in Uganda will show that he too was by no means devoid of heterosexual feelings.

  Burton, as the more experienced and celebrated traveller, wanted a colleague who would always do as he was asked and never challenge him. On their Somaliland trip, he had been struck by Speke’s ‘peculiarly quiet and modest aspect’ and by his ‘almost childlike simplicity of manner’. Only later would he detect beneath Speke’s unassuming exterior ‘an immense and abnormal fund of self-esteem, so carefully concealed, however, that none but his intimates suspected its existence’.24 Speke would locate the abnormality elsewhere. As he confided to Norton Shaw several years later: ‘He used to snub me so unpleasantly when talking about anything that I often kept my own counsel – Burton is one of those men who never can be wrong and will never acknowledge an error.’25

  Burton from the start recognised Jack Speke as a risk-taker like himself – someone who instead of going home on furlough had travelled alone to Tibet to shoot bears. Risk had drawn Speke to Somaliland, which he knew to be dangerous, as was his desire to shoot Ethiopian elephants. The two men had seemed to have an identical desire to flee the monotony of everyday life.

  In October 1856, soon after Speke’s acceptance of Burton’s invitation, an event took place which changed his hitherto temperate view of his leader. In Somaliland Burton had taken charge of his companion’s journal as expedition property, and now, at last, Speke was able to see what he had done with it. Burton’s book about the Somali Expedition: First Footsteps in East Africa: or, An Exploration of Harar was published just as the two men were making their final preparations for departure. It contained a thirty-seven-page appendix, insultingly entitled ‘Diary and Observations made by Lieutenant Speke, when attempting to reach the Wady Nogal’. Adding insult to injury, Burton commented that though Speke had been ‘delayed and persecuted by his “protector” [abban], and threatened with war, danger, and destruction, his life was never in danger’.26 Even worse, Burton had printed for public consumption (with one minor change) the words of his warning that had upset Speke so much at the time of the Berbera attack: ‘Don’t step back or they will think we are retiring.’27 The whole diary had been heavily cut, and then re-jigged in the third person, but kept in diary form, strongly suggesting that Speke was so illiterate that his work had
needed to be completely re-written – an insinuation that would eventually be disproved by Speke’s extremely readable books. Burton’s overlong and invariably overwritten oeuvres -although containing many excellent passages – are very hard to get through in their entirety. Speke did not find writing easy, but, unlike Burton, he did at least achieve – with the help of his editors – a fluent and gripping narrative style by writing exactly as he spoke.28

  Though enraged by First Footsteps in East Africa, Speke concealed his hurt feelings. Nor did he for a moment consider resigning from an expedition which promised to make them both famous. Even when his anger was fanned by a review of First Footsteps – forwarded to them en route for Africa – Speke still did not tell Burton what he was thinking. Laurence Oliphant, a writer and traveller who was a member of the RGS Expeditions’ Committee and an acquaintance of both men, had reviewed Burton’s book in Blackwood’s Magazine, and had focussed on the author’s cavalier treatment of diaries, written by ‘so able an explorer as Mr Speke’. The able explorer’s observations, wrote Oliphant, deserved ‘to have been chronicled at greater length and thrown into a form which would have rendered them more interesting to the general reader’.29

  Speke was not a conceited man, but he had a strong sense of his own dignity, and this had been injured by Burton’s condescension. He never understood that Burton’s frequent lurches from sincerity into cynicism and back again in his books, and in his conversation, were symptoms of an insecure need to assume an attitude rather than risk ridicule by speaking sincerely. A friend declared that Burton enjoyed ‘dressing himself, so to speak, in wolf’s clothing, in order to give an idea that he was worse than he really was’.30 It would never have occurred to Speke that there could be any point in acquiring a reputation for wildness and eccentricity, as a substitute for more reputable achievements. When the pair reached Zanzibar, Speke wrote a letter to his mother, only a fragment of which survives. It includes the sentence: ‘Wishing I could find something more amusing to communicate than such rot about a rotten person.’ He then told his mother that he doubted whether Burton had actually been to Mecca or Harar.31