by Tim Jeal
They began their journey downstream in a large dug-out on the Kafu river, which joined the main stream after a few miles. ‘This was my first sail on the river Nile,’ enthused Grant, not for a moment doubting that the locally named Kivira was Egypt’s river. Being over 500 yards wide, populated with hippopotami, and fringed with tall papyrus rushes, its appearance certainly seemed to support such optimism. After floating downstream for four days on what Grant called ‘the sacred waters’, they abandoned the river as it turned to the west and foamed over the Karuma Falls. Steep banks, overhanging trees and occasional flashes of white water reminded Grant of ‘our wildest Scottish rivers’.12 Neither Grant nor Speke left a full explanation of why they chose not to follow the river downstream at this crucial point. But, after numerous deaths and desertions, they were down to the last twenty of their original sixty-five Wangwana followers, and so relied heavily on fifty-six porters under the orders of Kidwiga, the leader of the escort loaned to them by Kamrasi.
But it seems to have been Speke’s obsessive determination not to endanger a meeting with Petherick, which decided him against following the great river westward as far as the Luta N’zige. Already, Speke had left a significant gap in his map of the river and knew that he and Grant would be told on their return to England that they had not proved the link with the Nyanza, even up to Karuma. But by missing out the unknown lake, into which the river was said to flow, they would be leaving an even larger lacuna.
From what Grant wrote, it is clear that if they had asked Kidwiga to accompany them to the Luta N’zige, he would have refused because Rionga, a brother of Kamrasi, was his sworn enemy and lived close to the lake. Of course, if they had somehow propitiated Rionga, and managed to reach the Luta N’zige with their twenty men, their position on returning home would have been almost unassailable. So why did they not risk it? Probably because fighting between Rionga’s men and Kamrasi’s had been going on for years, and they might have been killed.13 Also, Speke was well aware that Kidwiga’s men would insist on returning to Bunyoro in a few weeks. This reinforced his determination to join forces with Petherick. If he arrived too late at Faloro, he would risk having to travel north with only twenty men, through regions where slave raids had made the tribes murderously hostile.
The explorers’ route from now on would be due north through Acholiland to Gani. Almost at once they were struggling through sharply pointed, head-high grass that threatened to blind them. Underfoot, the ground was swampy, with unseen rocks and ruts frequently tripping them. Since both were unwell and exhausted, they longed for a change of landscape.14 At last, they emerged into a low, flat country of yellow grass. It was a surprise, after the civilised trappings in Buganda and Bunyoro, to see women wearing no more than a fringe of leaves suspended from the waist and a pendant of chickweed behind. The equally naked men concentrated their sartorial energies on dressing each others’ hair with shells, beads and feathers. Their villages of cylindrical huts were encountered every few miles in flat grassland. For their benefit, Speke put a bullet through a buffalo and stood aside while they set about despatching it with spears ‘in their own wild fashion’.15
On 3 December they arrived at Faloro – a trading post less than twenty miles from the river, which, though the explorers did not know it, had very recently flowed northwards out of the Luta N’zige. Here, Speke and Grant joyfully prepared to join hands with John Petherick. ‘Our hearts leapt with an excitement of joy only known to those who have escaped from long-continued banishment … to meet with civilized people and join old friends.’ Yet something was wrong. Speke could not understand the appearance of three large Turkish flags at the head of the procession which was now leaving the camp to the music of fifes and drums. If Petherick was really here, the flags should surely be British? Nor did these few hundred people look like the followers of an honorary British consul. No two were dressed alike, and most of their archaic guns were different. They appeared to be Egyptians or Sudanese of African stock, presumably sent south as ivory traders. There were many slaves in the ranks from many different tribes.
Speke halted his men just before the procession reached them.
[As it did] a very black man, named Mohammed [Mohammed Wad-el-Mek], in full Egyptian regimentals, with a curved sword, ordered his regiment to halt and threw himself into my arms, endeavouring to hug and kiss me. Rather staggered at this unexpected manifestation of affection, I gave him a squeeze in return for his hug, but raised my head above the reach of his lips, and asked who was his master? ‘Petrik,’ was the reply. ‘And where is Petherick now?’ ‘Oh, he is coming.’ ‘How is it that you have not got English colours, then?’ ‘The colours are Debono’s. ‘Who is Debono?’ ‘The same as Petrik.’
What this meant, Speke could only guess at, not knowing who Andrea De Bono was, and not yet realising that all these men belonged to the Maltese trader, rather than to Petherick.
Mohammed had no written orders, but said he was De Bono’s wakil (agent), and had been instructed by him to take the two explorers to Gondokoro and to collect ivory while waiting for them to appear. So where was John Petherick and why, if he had been unable to come himself, had he not sent his men to meet them in his place? Public money had been subscribed for Petherick or his men to be available to help the two officers. Could he have betrayed them? Until Mohammed had appeared, Speke had been certain that Petherick was in the camp. This was because Bombay – who had been sent to Gani by Kamrasi – had brought back news a month later that Petherick’s initials had been found cut into a tree not far from Faloro. So they were shocked to find that Mohammed knew nothing about Petherick having made any such journey. Indeed, he thought that ‘Petrik’ was at present at one of his trading stations twenty marches or more to the north.16 Speke was appalled to hear this, having abandoned his attempt to reach the Luta N’zige largely because he had been so eager to meet Petherick.
It was exasperating to reflect that whereas Petherick could have been expected to do everything in his power to help them reach Gondokoro, this task ranked very low on Mohammed’s list of priorities. For the moment, the trader’s most urgent need was to secure 600 Africans as carriers for the immense amount of ivory which he and his men had stolen from the Madi people. To compel locals to become porters, he threatened to kill their families, to burn their huts and steal their possessions. And to show he meant business, he did burn huts, and kill people (about a dozen on this occasion). He also stole a hundred cows, but needed many more.17 Further south Mohammed had enslaved 200 boys and women, and now would go nowhere until he had rustled enough cattle to feed these slaves and preserve their value. So for five and a half frustrating weeks the explorers had to kick their heels at Faloro, where even local marvels, such as rare butterflies and huge plums, gave them no pleasure. When Speke asked to be given guides to enable him and Grant to leave at once with their twenty men on an unassisted march through the Bari country, Mohammed refused to provide any, telling the explorers they would be murdered if they were foolish enough to travel ahead of the caravan.18 If they slept in the open, even for a night, he warned them that they would be speared to death. Such ‘revenge’ attacks, the explorers discovered, were directly due to the brutality of slave traders like Mohammed himself. Nowhere else in Africa had Speke seen the inhabitants of entire villages run away at the approach of a caravan.
At last, on 11 January 1863, they were on the move again, and two days later reached Appuddo (Nimule), which was unquestionably on the White Nile, as Mohammed confirmed. The Arab took Speke and Grant to the river, where it flowed between wooded islands, and showed them the initials cut into the trunk of a nearby tamarind tree. The carver, he said, had been a bearded white man, who in 1860 had followed the Nile upstream from Khartoum, without leaving it for a day. The bark had grown inwards into the letters, obscuring most of them, leaving only two clearly defined: MI. These plainly had nothing to do with Petherick. The explorers would learn several months later that the traveller was Giovanni Miani, a Venetia
n trader and adventurer, who had struggled on a few miles further south from here before abandoning his attempt to reach the source of the Nile.19
When Mohammed’s thousand followers camped a few miles outside Gondokoro, the Bari beat their drums and set fire to the surrounding grass, announcing that they meant to annihilate their enemies in the morning.20 Fortunately for Speke and Grant this turned out to be bluster, and early next day they walked into Gondokoro without incident. Their first task was to find John Petherick and take possession of the goods and boats he had purchased for them. But when the two men called on a local trader, Khursid Agha, and asked where they might find the Welshman, ‘a mysterious silence ensued’. Speke and Grant wondered what the consul could possibly be doing that was more important than coming to congratulate them after one of the greatest African journeys ever made by Europeans? Both men still clung to the hope that they would find him here.
After walking past the vessels moored along the riverbank, Speke drew level with the deserted Austrian Mission house, and saw hurrying towards him a bearded white man. For a moment he thought that this was Petherick. But when the approaching man raised his hat, and held out a hand, Speke saw at once that he was someone else entirely.21
TWELVE
The Nile is Settled
The burly, bearded Englishman, hurrying towards the two explorers and intending to shower them with praise, was Samuel White Baker, the eldest son of a wealthy Devon family. Forty-two years old now, and uncomfortably aware of the fact, Baker was not content to have founded a thriving agricultural community in the wilds of Ceylon or even to have written two readable books about it. From the mid-1850s he had been unsuccessfully chasing the chimera of fame as an African adventurer. In 1858 he had failed to persuade Dr Livingstone that he could be of use to him on the Zambezi, and had been further mortified to hear at that time that John Speke – who, like himself, had been raised in England’s West Country – had just been chosen to accompany Richard Burton to the African lakes. A brief meeting with Speke on board ship between India and the Gulf in 1854 had first alerted Baker to the younger man’s interest in African exploration and had sharpened his own fiercely competitive interest in that field.1
But it would not be until six years later that Baker saw how to use Speke and muscle in on the search for the Nile’s source. This was by writing to John Petherick and offering to join him on his mission to ‘succour’ Speke and Grant on the last leg of the journey they had embarked upon in the spring of 1860. Baker secretly hoped that if the pair were dead, or had been detained somewhere far to the south, he might even manage to beat them to the source. But the RGS had vetoed his joining Petherick’s expedition, and had instead suggested that he explore the Ethiopian tributaries of the Blue Nile to determine the contribution these waters made to the annual flood in Egypt. So, between March 1861 and June 1862, Baker, who was rich enough to need no patronage, had explored the Ethiopian Highlands, discovering in due course that the torrential summer rains which fell there each year accounted almost wholly for the life-giving floodwaters that poured into the White Nile between June and September, irrigating the entire valley of the lower river. But this important scientific finding had in no way appeased Baker’s longing to make the most glamorous discovery of all.
Just before setting out to map the Blue Nile and the Atbara, he had been asked by the Egyptian governor of Berber where he was going, and had replied without any attempt at subterfuge: ‘To the source of the White Nile’. Baker had been accompanied then – and still was, on arrival at Gondokoro – by a slender white woman, dressed like himself in trousers, gaiters and a masculine shirt. Observing her youth and apparent fragility, the governor had urged the Englishman to leave her behind, since a journey up the Nile ‘would kill even the strongest man’. But Baker, who loved to have his mistress with him, had no intention of heeding such advice.2
The way in which the nineteen-year-old came to be with him in the first place was a story in itself. Baker had purchased his ‘Florence’, as he called her, two years earlier at an auction of white slaves in the town of Vidin in Turkish-administered Bulgaria. Born Barbara Maria von Sass in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, Florence’s parents had been killed in the 1848 Hungarian uprising, and she had later been raised by a business-minded Armenian, who expected to get a good price for her in due course. Whether desire or pity had bulked larger in Baker’s decision to bid for the girl against so many prosperous Turks cannot be known, but he had soon fallen in love with her, subsequently taking a job in Romania as managing director of the Danube and Black Sea Railway solely in order to remain with her. Not that this was suspected by any of his four teenage daughters, who had been cared for in England, after their mother’s premature death, by an unmarried sister and must have found their affluent father’s decision to work in faraway Romania inexplicable as well as hurtful. But as a respectable widower, Samuel Baker had not even considered bringing back to England a mistress twenty years his junior and little older than his own children.
Of course, taking her to Africa, where she would meet nobody he knew (with the possible exception of Speke) had been a different matter. On the point of sailing for Alexandria in February 1861, Baker had briefly debated whether it would be safe for her to accompany him but had been unable to endure the thought of spending night after night in his tent without her. Now in March 1863 in Gondokoro – although planning disingenuously to tell Speke that he had come to Africa only in order to help him and Grant come safely home – he still had not decided how to introduce Florence.3 But as he approached the exhausted travellers, he was able to postpone this delicate decision a little longer, since Florence had stayed aboard their boat that morning, after feeling unwell on waking.
As Baker’s fellow countrymen came ever closer along the riverbank, walking beside a long line of moored vessels, he was overwhelmed with patriotic emotion. Speke with his fair hair and tawny beard was ‘the more worn of the two … excessively lean, but in reality in tough condition … Grant was in honourable rags; his bare knees protruding through the remnants of trousers that were an exhibition of rough industry in tailor’s work’. Yet though ‘tired and feverish … both men had a fire in the eye that showed the spirit that had led them through’.4 Humbled by the length of their journey from the southern to the northern hemisphere, and by their courage, Baker called out: ‘Hurrah for Old England!’ as he hurried up to them; but even as he embraced his compatriots, he felt chagrined that he had not managed to rescue them from ‘some terrible fix’ many miles further to the south of here. Gondokoro seemed suddenly rather tame, although Baker had spent lavishly to get thus far. So when Speke and Grant informed him that they had visited the Nile at enough points on its course to ensure that it originated in the Nyanza, he assumed that his own expedition was over, and felt too crestfallen to wonder if they had really proved their case.5
But, making the best of things, he told the explorers brightly that he had come ‘expressly to look after [them]’ by placing at their disposal a mass of trade goods, over forty men, camels, donkeys, a dahabiya (a ninety-foot Nile pleasure-boat) and two smaller vessels. Given the non-appearance of John Petherick, Grant and Speke were touched that this Good Samaritan was offering to do so much for them out of his own pocket, without having received a penny of public money. Baker now told them that Petherick, by contrast, had received almost £1,000 by public subscription raised so that he could ‘succour’ them.6 Although another dahabiya, the Kathleen, and three cargo boats, had been sent to Gondokoro by Petherick and were currently moored there – and although Speke and Grant would shortly lodge their servants and their stores in the Kathleen – they accepted Baker’s invitation to come and live with him on his dahabiya.7
On his well-appointed boat, he seated them under an awning and called for refreshments. For months, the travellers had tasted nothing even as basic as tea, sugar and bread. Not surprisingly, they eagerly consumed whatever was set before them. When a pretty young woman came on deck, S
peke became flustered. He had heard he seemed to remember, that Baker’s wife had died a few years previously. So, without thinking, he blurted out: ‘I thought your wife was dead.’ After an awkward silence, Baker agreed that his wife was indeed dead, and declared that Florence was his ‘chère amie’.8 Speke’s gaffe, though embarrassing to everyone, including Florence who was feverish at the time, did no harm to the esteem in which Baker was already held by the new arrivals, who considered themselves men of the world. They now described their journey, mentioning, along with much geographical information, the chiefs and rulers met on their way. But this was a mere curtain-raiser to the astonishingly generous suggestion that followed.
Grant and Speke entertained by Florence and Baker on his dahabiya.
Suddenly, Speke proposed to Baker that he, rather than the absent Petherick, should be the one to try to ‘discover’ the Luta N’zige lake, which due to Kamrasi’s prohibitions he and Grant had been unable to reach. This had been a severe disappointment, he explained, since they both believed that the Nile flowed into the Luta N’zige, and then out of it again to the north. This was guesswork of course, since neither had followed the river to the lake, nor seen it flow out.