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

by Tim Jeal

  Arriving at Ujiji, the lakeside Arab slave-trading settlement, the explorers were told that the lake measured 300 miles from north to south – in fact it is just over 400, making it the world’s longest. Burton’s guess that it was about thirty-five miles across at its widest point was a slight underestimate.

  Although they were the first Europeans to have reached any of Africa’s great lakes, and had done so despite repeated attacks of fever, partial blindness, and in Burton’s case paralysis of his legs, both men knew that a lot more had to be done to confer greatness on their journey. After all, an unspecified number of Arab and Nyamwezi slave and ivory traders had preceded them to the lake, none of whom had thought it sensible to tell people about it, or worthwhile to explore it thoroughly. Burton’s RGS instructions had required him and Speke to reach Lake Tanganyika and then ‘to proceed northwards’ to find out whether it might in some way be linked with the White Nile and the Mountains of the Moon. If they could make decisive progress in this direction, their journey might yet be acclaimed as one of the greatest ever made on land. While they had been at Ujiji, several informants had electrified them with the news that ‘from the northern extremity of the Tanganyika Lake issued a large river flowing northwards’.54 No Arab they had spoken to had actually seen this river himself, and local Africans claimed to be ignorant of it. So visiting this river in person was of the utmost importance. This was particularly true for Burton, who had chosen to come to this lake rather than to the larger ‘Sea of Ukerewe’ which Speke had been in favour of exploring first.

  The height of Lake Tanganyika above sea level was 1,850 feet, according to the more dependable of the expedition’s two bath thermometers. (Their three specialist boiling point thermometers had all been inadvertently damaged.) Although the true height is 2,600 feet, even that level (had Burton known it) would not have reassured him. Since there were many known cataracts on the Nile – and others still to be discovered – the higher the lake, the greater the likelihood of its having some connection with the Nile. In this connection, it must have troubled Burton to know (as he did) that Kazeh, which was due south of the Ukerewe lake, was 4,000 feet above sea level, making it seem likely that the larger lake, which he had chosen not to visit, was going to be considerably higher above sea level than Lake Tanganyika. Yet Burton preferred to ignore this unwelcome probability.55

  In truth, on his arrival at Ujiji, Burton was too ill to write or even talk, and lay prostrate on the earth floor of a hut for a fortnight, unable to move his legs. He was also suffering from ophthalmia – although not as badly as Speke. Despite his brief period in command, Speke was not prepared to make the next crucial decisions and waited for Burton to recover sufficiently for them to be able to discuss their next moves. Each day at noon, ‘protected by an umbrella, and fortified with stained-glass spectacles’, Speke visited Ujiji’s market. Here he purchased daily supplies for the porters and other servants. Displayed for sale were fish, meat, tobacco, palm oil, artichokes, bananas, melons, sugar-cane and pulses. On certain days, slaves and ivory could also be bought.56

  When Burton felt slightly stronger, he told Speke that they would have to hire from Hamid bin Sulayyan, an Arab slave trader, the only sailing dhow currently on the lake. Hamid lived on the far side of Tanganyika, so somebody was going to have cross in a dugout. Burton dithered because he thought this too dangerous for Speke. Nor did he trust Kannena, chief of the people living in and around Ujiji. ‘Seeing scanty chance of success, and every prospect of an accident,’ Burton decided to send his factotum, Said bin Salim, whose life he felt easy about risking. When the Arab flatly refused to undertake the mission, Speke offered to go in his place. But Burton, who still felt ill enough to die, did not want to risk leaving the expedition leaderless should Speke also perish. With slave traders active on Tanganyika’s shores, all strangers were mistrusted by local Africans, especially those asking inexplicable questions about rivers. So it was brave of Speke to insist on going.57

  On 3 March 1858, Speke embarked in a substantial dugout accompanied by Bombay to interpret, Gaetano to cook, two Baluchis to defend him, and eighteen local tribesmen to paddle. It was a puzzle how to pack everyone into so small a space along with their food and possessions. Almost immediately after they left harbour, storms forced them for three days to creep along the lake’s eastern shore. ‘These little cranky boats can stand no sea at all,’ lamented Speke. On one occasion, when they were camped on land, the appearance of a single man with a bow led the whole party to panic and launch the boat at breakneck speed, so great was the crew’s fear of being attacked. Crocodiles also inspired terror, since they were known to clamber aboard dugouts when hungry. Although Burton wrote that Speke never drank or smoked, in fact he smoked a pipe and found it soothing even in the cramped circumstances of a dugout.58

  In the early hours of the morning of the 8th they crossed the lake and during the passage the crew refused to answer Speke when he asked the names of various headlands and bays. They feared that his unnatural inquisitiveness might lead to disaster. In fact the crossing was uneventful, and the locals welcomed them when they reached Kivira Island, a few miles from Tanganyika’s western shore. When harm came to Speke, it was from an entirely unexpected quarter. After a quiet day spent smoking and story-telling with the islanders, Speke lay down to sleep in his tent. A storm blew up, waking him with its powerful gusts, and then subsiding. He lit a candle so he could see to rearrange his kit, ‘and in a moment, as if by magic, the whole interior became covered by a host of small black beetles’. After failing to brush them off his clothes and bedding, he blew out the candle that had attracted them, and lay down. Although insects crawled up his sleeves, down his back and legs and into his hair, he managed to fall asleep, until woken, as he recalled:

  [By] one of these horrid little insects … struggling up the narrow channel [of the ear], until he got arrested by want of passage room. This impediment evidently enraged him, for he began with exceeding vigour, like a rabbit at a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum … I felt inclined to act as our donkeys once did, when beset by a swarm of bees … trying to knock them off by treading on their own heads, or by rushing under bushes … What to do I knew not. Neither tobacco, salt, nor oil could be found: I therefore tried melted butter; that failing, I applied the point of a penknife to his back, which did more harm than good; for though a few thrusts quieted him, the point also wounded my ear so badly, that inflammation set in, severe suppuration took place, and all the facial glands extending from that point down to the point of the shoulder became contorted … It was the most painful thing I ever remember to have endured … I could not masticate for several days and had to feed on broth alone.59

  For many months Speke would be almost entirely deaf in this ear. Strangely, he found that his misfortune drew the inflammation away from his eyes and actually improved his sight.

  Two days later the wind abated and Speke crossed to the island of Kasenge, where lived Hamid bin Sulayyan, the dhow-owning slave trader. Speke landed in hope but was soon disappointed. Not even his offer of £100 could persuade the slaver to hire out his large dhow. Africans, he maintained, could only manage paddles, and since his dhow had oars it would not be possible to lease it to Speke. He could not lend his crew to him, since he needed them for his own purposes. Nevertheless, Hamid greatly excited Speke with the news that a large river flowed out of the northern end of the lake. Sadly, Hamid had not himself been able to reach it because the behaviour of ‘a barbarous boisterous tribe called Warundi’ had so alarmed him. Hamid had addressed these words not to Speke but to Bombay in Kiswahili, and Bombay had then translated them into Hindustani for his employer – a process which left room for misunderstanding.

  On the island, Speke was horrified when several mothers tried to sell their own children to his Baluchi soldiers for a loin-cloth or two. The destruction of normal maternal feelings brought home to him ‘how foolish were all those other nations who allowed the slave trade to go on’.60 With
no reason to remain longer on this blighted island, he and his men re-crossed the lake without mishap, and were back in Ujiji after an absence of twenty-seven days.

  While Speke had been away, Burton, whose health was little better, had passed the time ‘chiefly in eating and drinking, smoking and dozing’. Yet he saw nothing inappropriate about making fun of an exhausted Speke on his return. ‘I never saw a man so thoroughly moist and mildewed … his guns were grained with rust, and his fire-proof powder magazine had admitted the monsoon rain.’ Speke’s braving of the lake when ill and half-blind deserved better than to be dismissed by Burton in one scathing sentence, which he later published: ‘I was sorely disappointed: he had done literally nothing.’ In fact, though Speke had returned without the expected dhow, he gave Burton an account of the lake’s shape – mainly from Hamid’s information, though partly from personal observation.61 But when Speke announced that a river flowed out of the northern end of the lake, Burton was ecstatic. Now it really seemed that Lake Tanganyika was a source of the Nile, if not the source. Burton’s earlier decision to reject Speke’s request to prioritise the larger lake now seemed vindicated.

  In his journal Burton represented himself as getting healthier and Speke as being the one causing the delays, thanks to ‘punching-in with a penknife a beetle which had visited his tympanum’. But ill though Burton still was, the near exhaustion of their trade cloth ruled out delaying their departure for the north end of the lake. Travelling in dugouts was no picnic for a man in good health, but would be hellish for ‘a sick man, even in the best weather’. And now the rains had started again. ‘I was sorry for it,’ wrote Speke, ‘but anybody seeing him [Burton] attempt to go would have despaired of his ever returning. Yet he could not endure being left behind.’ Indeed, for Burton, reaching the northward-flowing river posed the greatest challenge of his life. ‘Everything – wealth, health, and even life – was to be risked for this prize,’ he declared.62

  So when Kannena – the local chief whose canoes and assistance were essential for their success – refused to help, Burton overwhelmed him with an immense heap of trade goods, including some of his most expensive beads and a six-foot length of scarlet broadcloth ‘that caused Kannena to tremble with joy’ and to agree to travel with the explorers in the larger of two canoes. This craft would also accommodate Burton and thirty-three paddlers provided by Kannena. Speke was to be consigned to the smaller vessel with a mere twenty-two crewmen.

  This crucial trip began in the early hours of the morning of 9 April, with Burton having to be half-dragged, half-carried for three miles over rough ground to the point of departure selected by Kannena for magical reasons. The sailors were serenaded to the shore by ‘their loud-voiced wives and daughters performing upon the wildest musical instruments’. Out on the lake, Burton was soon ordering his crew not to ‘splash water in shovelfuls over the canoe’, and to stop trying to bump the other dugout. While resting, the sailors smoked cannabis. They had no regular halting places or routines, and often slept during cool mornings, before paddling through the heat of the day. Burton thought the local people on the banks were ‘quarrelsome and violent … and addicted, like all their Lakist [sic] brethren, to drunkenness’. Whether sheltering from torrential rain under a sail, or being drenched as his men baled water from the bottom of the dugout, Burton was in constant pain. ‘The crisis of my African sufferings took place during my voyage upon the Tanganyika Lake.’63

  After nineteen days afloat, Burton wrote that he was ‘suffering so severely from ulceration of the tongue, that articulation was nearly impossible, and this was a complete stopper to progress’. This affliction could not have come at a worse time, since, on 28 April, Burton met the three handsome sons of a local chief and heard from their lips the shocking news that the Rusizi river – despite what Speke had been told earlier – flowed into Lake Tanganyika rather than out of it. Bombay then put the matter beyond doubt by admitting that he had long suspected that he and Speke had misunderstood Hamid bin Sulayyan, who had actually meant the reverse of what they had at first believed him to have said. ‘All my hopes,’ confessed Burton, ‘were rudely dashed to the ground.’64

  Even though it now seemed all but certain that Lake Tanganyika could have no relationship to the Nile, it remained ‘a matter of vast importance’, as Burton conceded, to reach the Rusizi river in person to see with his own eyes the direction in which it flowed. So it is baffling that after saying that life itself was to be risked in order to reach the river, Burton put so little pressure on Kannena to persuade him and his men to paddle on for six more hours, which was all it would have taken to reach the Rusizi.65 The question of why his resolution crumbled at this vital moment is one that has not been answered. Henry M. Stanley would write in an essay on ‘Our Great African Travellers’, that Burton’s ‘struggle for the mastery over African geography ceased from this time, and Speke was permitted to come to the front [and] emerge out of the contest with honour and credit’. In Stanley’s opinion this voyage on the lake revealed that Burton was no explorer but ‘a traveller and “litterateur”‘.66

  When the two of them had returned to Ujiji, Speke announced that he ‘wanted to finish off the navigation of the lake’. Burton brushed this aside at once and said ‘he had had enough of canoe-travelling’. He assured Speke that ‘our being short of cloth … would be sufficient excuse’. For two reasons this was a very peculiar response: the first being that very recently Said bin Salim, their major domo, had ‘generously proposed … to return to the Arab depot at Kazeh, and fetch some more African money [cloth and beads] to meet the necessary expenses [for a full survey]’. The second reason, as Speke later recalled, was that while preparing to leave Ujiji ‘by great good fortune some supplies were brought to us by an Arab called Mohinna [Muhinna bin Sulayman of Kazeh] … Help had reached us when we most required it.’67

  Of course what Burton had meant was not that they had no cloth, but that they could plead lack of it to explain and excuse their failure. Indeed, back in Britain, Burton would tell the members of the RGS: ‘I was compelled by want of supplies to desist from exploration.’68

  The decision whether or not to return to the Rusizi was a defining one. A Livingstone or a Stanley would never have allowed a chief like Kannena to thwart him when so close to attaining a major objective. Both would either have attempted the short journey in a smaller canoe, which could have been propelled by a few men, or would have risked marching overland with a few porters. Kannena had refused to go the last few miles to the Rusizi, because the Warundi hated his people (or that was what he claimed) and might have killed them all if they had travelled to the lake’s tip. When Livingstone and Stanley visited this same region a dozen years later, they experienced nothing worse than some shouting and stone-throwing by the Warundi.

  According to Speke, Burton had refused Said bin Salim’s offer to fetch more cloth from Kazeh because his real problem – which he had not wished to admit to – had been a total collapse of his health.69 Burton wrote that by the end of his Tanganyika voyage his mouth ulcers had no longer obliged him to take sustenance through a straw, and that his hands had lost the numbness that for weeks had restricted his ability to write. But he had still lacked the strength to ride a donkey, and left Ujiji (as he had arrived) on a machilla carried by slaves. ‘Only fancy what a time he has had of it,’ wrote Speke to Norton Shaw – not without sympathy – ‘eleven months in a bed-ridden state & being obliged to travel the whole time, more or less.’ So, poor health had indeed lain behind Burton’s decision. But this does not mean it would have been physically impossible for him to have made a final attempt to navigate the lake to its northern extremity. When the moment of choice had come he had lacked the self-destructive courage and obsessive determination of a true explorer. In the same circumstances, Livingstone, Stanley and Speke, who had volunteered, would all have been prepared to endure the pain and privation of one last desperate effort to reach the river. But the sybaritic Burton ‘had had enough of canoe
travelling’, and that had been the end of it.70

  While recuperating in Ujiji in early May, Burton and Speke discussed the desirability of visiting the northern lake, which the Arabs called Ukerewe. Burton, whose health was much the same, said he needed to spend a month with Snay and the other Arabs at Kazeh in order to finish his book. So Speke diplomatically suggested: ‘If you are not well enough when we reach Kazeh, I will go myself, and you can employ the time taking notes from the travelled Arabs.’ Burton agreed to this. But in years to come, in his desperation to make it seem that he had been responsible for initiating Speke’s historic journey, he would write for public consumption that he had ‘despatched him [Speke] from Kazeh’. He knew this was untrue. In a letter to Norton Shaw of the RGS, he stated unambiguously that: ‘Captain Speke has volunteered to visit the Ukerewe Lake.’71

  The journey to Kazeh from Ujiji took from 26 May to 20 June 1858, and during this time Burton ‘again suffered severely from swelling and numbness of the extremities’. En route, a letter was handed to him by a trader, containing the news that his father had died nine months earlier. Though they had not been close, his loss distressed him greatly. Back at Kazeh, with its comfortable tembes standing among shady palms and fruit trees, Burton had to decide, once and for all, whether to go north with Speke and endure more danger and discomfort or whether to stay with his Arab friends and work on his book. He chose to do the latter. ‘I was delighted with the prospect of a month’s leisure for inquiry amongst the intelligent Arabs.’72