Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure
Page 22
The debate between the pair was due to take place at Bath’s Royal Mineral Water Hospital on 16 September 1864; and on the 15th, Burton and Speke attended a preliminary meeting, both sitting on the platform close to Sir Roderick Murchison. Burton claimed some years later that he had been shocked by how much older Speke looked after ‘his severe labours’. They glanced at one another without any sign of recognition. Someone beckoned to Speke from the hall at 1.30 p.m. and, according to Burton, he muttered: ‘I can’t stand this any longer!’, and then left the building.11
From Bath, Speke rode to Neston Park, Corsham, the house of John B. Fuller, an uncle whose estate was about ten miles away and with whom he was staying. Speke arrived at Neston Park at about 2.30 p.m. and soon afterwards went out shooting partridges with his cousin, George P. Fuller. A keeper, Daniel Davis, came with them to mark birds. Throughout his adult life, Speke had found shooting a soothing activity and he was very glad of it now.
At about 4.00, John Hanning Speke clambered over a low stone wall, holding the muzzle of his double-barrelled shotgun in one hand, using the stock like a walking-stick to help him keep his balance on the loose stones. Davis, who was 200 yards ahead, saw Speke up on the wall, and the next moment heard his gun go off. Fuller, who was considerably closer, spun round as the shot rang out, and saw his cousin tumble forwards into the field with no gun in his hand. The Lancaster breech-loader had fallen from his fingers the moment it went off, and had clattered down the side of the wall into the field he had just left. The unguarded trigger of one of the barrels seemed to have been snagged by a sapling, sending its contents into Speke’s left side below the armpit. When the shotgun was retrieved, one barrel was seen to have been discharged and the hammer of the other was at half-cock.
Fuller reached Speke first and found him bleeding profusely from a large wound, which he did his best to staunch. Speke murmured feebly: ‘Don’t move me,’ and did not utter again. Fuller duly left his cousin where he was, and went for assistance, leaving Davis with Speke, who was already lapsing into unconsciousness. He died fifteen minutes after the fatal shot was fired.12
The following day, at Monk’s Park, Corsham – a nearby house belonging to Speke’s brother, William – the local coroner held an inquest. George Fuller and Daniel Davis both gave evidence, as did Thomas Snow, the nearest available surgeon, who had been sent for by Fuller, but had arrived shortly after Speke expired. Snow told the jury that the wound was ‘such as would be made by a cartridge if the muzzle of the gun was close to the body. It led in a direction upwards and towards the spine, passing through the lungs and dividing all the large blood vessels near the heart’. The unanimous verdict of the coroner’s jury was that: ‘The deceased died from the accidental discharge of his own gun.’13 The verdict of accidental death was hardly surprising, since no man intending to commit suicide would have chosen to shoot himself while clambering over a rubble-stone wall, and holding his gun in a manner that made it impossible for him to reach the trigger with the fingers of either hand. Nor would anyone intending suicide have chosen to fire into his body from just below the armpit.
None of this would stop Richard Burton saying, soon after he heard the news, that the explorer had committed suicide to avoid ‘the exposure of his misstatements in regard to the Nile sources’.14 Determined to make her husband seem more humane than this allegation suggested he was, Isabel Burton wrote of him weeping about Speke’s death ‘for many a day’. In fact, Burton’s letters to friends reveal a mood closer to gloating than to grief. Two days before Speke’s burial, Burton told a fellow diplomat that: ‘Captain Speke came to a bad end, but no one knows anything about it … The charitable say he shot himself, the uncharitable that I shot him.’15 The idea that Speke, with the confrontation in Bath looming, might have been literally scared to death, was clearly far from displeasing to Burton.
But had Speke really been in mortal terror of the approaching debate? Two days before his death, he had started a letter to John Tinné, the brother of Alexine Tinné, the explorer of the Bahr el-Ghazal, and in it he explained the importance to Egypt, ‘as well as to our own merchants, of opening up the Equatorial regions to legitimate commerce’. So his final letter is filled with hope rather than with fear.16 Speke’s married sister, Sophie Murdoch, was told by George Fuller that while he had been shooting with Speke on the fatal day, her brother had been talking shortly before the accident about his plan to persuade missionaries to come to Buganda and Unyoro – a strange topic for anyone to enthuse about minutes before ending his life.17 Yet Burton would seek to bolster the idea of suicide, not just in letters and conversation, but by inserting into the chapter called ‘Captain Speke’, in his Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast (1872), a number of deliberately suggestive passages. ‘Before we set out [for Somaliland] he [Speke] openly declared that being tired of life he had come to be killed in Africa.’18 Burton plucked this suicidal remark from his memory eighteen years after it was supposed to have been addressed to him. It is neither to be found in Burton’s earlier First Footsteps in East Africa, nor in his Lake Regions of Central Africa, and only made its appearance after Burton had begun insinuating that Speke might have taken his own life. So did Speke really say any such thing? Habitually, he kept his thoughts to himself – as Burton had often complained – and so it is most unlikely that at a time when he was very eager to impress Burton – who was his superior officer, and whom he had just met – Speke would have let slip that he might one day kill himself, and so let down everyone connected with the expedition. James Grant after reading the ‘Captain Speke’ chapter, in Zanzibar, wrote to Rigby, describing Burton as ‘this foul, false libeller … spitting his venom at the memory of poor Speke’.19
Burton and his wife were the only people who would later suggest that Speke had looked distraught in the hall the day before his death.20 Another key passage in Burton’s Zanzibar – much quoted by the few biographers21 who lean towards a verdict of suicide – is as follows:
The calamity had been the more unexpected as he [Speke] was ever remarkable for the caution with which he handled his weapon. I ever made a point of ascertaining a fellow-traveller’s habit in that matter and I observed that even when our canoe was shaken and upthrown by the hippopotamus, he never allowed his gun to look at him or at others.22
According to Speke’s account, he and Burton only pursued hippopotami together in a canoe on a few days in February 1857, and during them their vessel was neither lifted up nor even struck.23
And had Speke really been so wonderfully experienced and cautious in the use of all manner of guns? His cousin, George Fuller, recalled that for many years Speke had shot with rifles, rather than shotguns. Indeed, when shooting with an unfamiliar double-barrelled shotgun on the day he died, Fuller observed that Speke ‘did not seem to have acquired the usual precautions’. Having ‘noticed this carelessness’, Fuller and Davis, his gamekeeper, had both ‘avoided being very close to him when walking the fields … where the accident happened’.24
Speke’s funeral took place in the little church of Dowlish Wake just to the south of his family’s estates. With tears streaming down his face, his father led the cortege along autumnal lanes lined with villagers and estate workers. Joining the family inside the church were Sir Roderick Murchison, David Livingstone and James Grant, who ‘put a small “immortelle” of violets & mignonettes on the coffin as it was borne past’. Livingstone later denied that Grant had sobbed aloud and ‘had gone down into the vault’ with the coffin, as had been reported in several papers.25 Speke was thirty-seven years old on the day he died, and left less than £5,000 – most of it being the earnings from his two books.26
The Times, in its obituary, accepted that on balance it was likely that Speke had found the source of the Nile, but there was no unanimity about this in other papers. Livingstone doubted that the source had been found and explained why – as did Burton, who protested to The Times that the Nile could not be settled until a connection between his own Lake Ta
nganyika and the Luta N’zige had been proved or disproved.27 So with two great explorers, and a number of lesser geographers, including the gold medallist Dr Charles Beke, unconvinced by Speke’s arguments, the dead man’s reputation seemed doomed to remain in a kind of limbo, perhaps for decades. Even the sales of his two books – classics of nineteenth-century travel literature – began to decline, and a second edition of What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile would have to wait many years to make its appearance. With no explorer in the field likely to provide an early answer to the question of whether or not Speke had found the true source, uncertainty about the value of his discoveries became widespread. Sir Roderick Murchison, who despite stating in The Times that he and his friends proposed ‘to bring about the erection of a suitable monument’, had suggested to Livingstone in Bath, that he should return to Africa to solve the Nile riddle. At first Livingstone refused to commit himself, largely because a straightforward search for the source of a river – albeit the longest in the world – would never on its own persuade the public that he was returning to the ‘Dark Continent’ with a missionary’s motives. Nor did he want to appear over-keen to compete with the likes of godless Richard Burton for geographical prizes -even the greatest prize of all.28
Two months after Speke’s death, Burton delivered, at the RGS, the speech he had intended to give at Bath. ‘Be it distinctly understood that … I do not stand forth as an enemy of the departed,’ he assured his audience; yet few of them would have been deceived. He attacked Speke’s claims for all the old reasons and for some new ones too.29 Then a month later he published this speech as Part One of his book, The Nile Basin, in which he claimed that Lake Tanganyika was the primary source of the Nile, despite knowing that Tanganyika’s elevation above sea level was at least 1,200 feet below that of the Victoria Nyanza. He also dismissed the African testimony, which he and Speke had collected, about the direction in which the Rusizi flowed.30 Whatever Speke’s faults as a geographer – including the careless calculations in his first book that had led him to represent the Nile flowing uphill for a short distance – Burton now trumped him with his own absurdities, such as his claim that there were hills in the centre of the Victoria Nyanza and a road running through it.
Part Two of the Nile Basin was even worse, being a reprint of the Morning Advertiser’s review by James McQueen (the octogenarian armchair geographer and friend of the Pethericks) of Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. This review would be praised by Burton for its ‘acumen and dryness of style’, but in reality was a scurrilous attack on Speke’s character.31 The explorer’s description of how he had measured the fat women at Rumanika’s court – though little worse than similar measuring incidents involving penises in Burton’s Lake Regions – had contained some pretty tasteless humour. But the passage did not suggest, as McQueen implied, that Speke had been sexually attracted to these immense females. Nor did Speke’s honesty about his regard for Mutesa’s mother, despite her heavy drinking, mean that he had ‘looked on applauding the scene’ when she and her ministers had been wildly intoxicated. Nor was it fair to imply that his liking for the Baganda people meant that he had condoned Mutesa’s brutal acts.
Every detail of Speke’s love affair with Méri had been cut from the published book, but McQueen still toyed pruriently with the idea that Speke had been actively involved in ‘mixing the blood of mankind’. There should be no surprise, the old geographer declared if, at some future time, ‘on one half black and white head there is seen hair like Speke’s’. Wisely, given his vulnerability in this area, Speke had never considered suing for libel. That McQueen had himself been fascinated by thoughts of amorous shenanigans – and especially by the tiny triangular bark-cloth ‘mbugus’ which were all that concealed the female courtiers’ genitals – is evident from the sheer quantity of ‘mbugus’ that adorns his text. But though this is obvious to anyone reading the review today, it would have been less clear at a time when sexual hypocrisy was a way of life.32 McQueen succeeded in making people wonder whether such a libertine could have had the self-discipline to solve history’s most intractable geographical mystery.
The decision to attack a remarkable man in this scabrous way, so soon after his death, says little for Burton’s judgement – even though his words were less offensive than those of his elderly coauthor. Laurence Oliphant’s scathing and partisan review of the Nile Basin in Blackwood’s Magazine in January 1865 resonates with anger and distaste.
We can only put Captain Burton in his true light by showing that his real object in publishing the work before us … is to discredit, not the discoveries of an explorer, but the memory of a deceased fellow traveller. Would it not have been the instinct of a generous mind to have allowed the controversy to slumber, rather than excite it by the disparagement of one who is no longer alive to defend himself?33
But Burton was soon writing again, this time in the Athenaeum, continuing to distort and belittle.34 In 1873 Dr Georg Schweinfurth, the German explorer of the Upper Nile, published a map showing the area of the Victoria Nyanza dotted with five small lakes.35 It was a happy day for Burton, and a sad one for the memory of the man whose family had failed to preserve a single scrap of paper relating to the first twenty-seven years of his life.36 A cloud of obscurity was fast enveloping John Hanning Speke, even before Dr Livingstone left for Africa and Samuel Baker returned to England as the new hero of the hour. With these larger-than-life, well-documented men now chasing the source, the future looked set to belong to them.
FIFTEEN
The Doctor’s Dilemma
As he entered his fifties, David Livingstone was losing his teeth (due to years of an inadequately prepared African diet) and suffered terribly from piles, but he still believed that he was God’s chosen instrument for opening the ‘Dark Continent’ to the light of the Gospel. Inevitably, he saw other explorers as interlopers trespassing on his turf. During his twenty-one years in Africa he had already ‘discovered’ Lake Nyasa (Malawi), although secretly fearing that the Portuguese trader, Candido de Costa Cardoso had beaten him there. But he had undoubtedly made the first authenticated crossing of the continent by a European, so Speke’s claim to have done something even more remarkable – namely locating the Nile’s source – had not pleased him. In fact he had been grimly determined to prove Speke wrong, even before the young explorer had enraged him by hypothesising (incorrectly, as it happened) that his account of the river system feeding Lake Nyasa was wrong.
The British Association’s meeting in September 1864 had been a turning point for Livingstone. His British government-backed Zambezi Expedition had cost many lives, and had failed to open up a safe and viable district for European settlement in south-central Africa. So on arriving at Bath, wearing his famous explorers’ peaked cap, Dr Livingstone might have looked the part, but in reality he had had no idea what he would be doing next, except that it would have to involve Africa. But to what purpose, and with whose backing, he could not tell.
But at the Bath meeting his imagination had been fired by the rivalry of Speke and Burton, and by their opposing views of the Nile watershed. While there, he had also learned that another contender, Samuel Baker, was travelling south towards the unknown lake, which Speke had learned about while in Bunyoro. Indeed, the day after Speke’s death, a letter from the unhappy Consul Petherick – then in Khartoum – was read to the assembled geographers by Sir Roderick Murchison, informing them that in late May 1864 some men who had accompanied Baker to Shaguzi, then the capital of Bunyoro, had just returned from there to Khartoum. So Baker, it was assumed, would have reached the lake in March or April, or died in the attempt.1 Although at Bath Livingstone had not yet accepted Murchison’s informal invitation to go out to Africa to solve the Nile mystery, Sir Roderick knew that his favourite explorer had been sorely tempted to say yes. So, a few weeks later, to keep him under pressure, Murchison urged him to come to an RGS meeting scheduled for 14 November 1864, at which Richard Burton was expect
ed to argue that the Nile originated in Lake Tanganyika.
Because the outflow from the Victoria Nyanza at Ripon Falls was so small, Livingstone had already written off Speke’s claims for that lake, describing him as ‘a poor misguided thing … [who] gave the best example I know of the eager pursuit of a foregone conclusion’.2 The great doctor, however, saw merit in Burton’s thesis when he first heard it propounded that November at the RGS’s premises in Old Burlington Street. Even so, Burton’s case depended entirely on whether the river at the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika flowed into the lake, or out of it. If it flowed out, then it would almost certainly continue northwards into the unknown lake (Luta N’zige), which Baker was thought to have reached in the spring, and from where it would very likely flow on into the Nile. But Livingstone had a further thought: if the Rusizi did flow out of Lake Tanganyika, there must be a large river pouring an equivalent amount of water into the lake. In Livingstone’s judgement, this inflowing river would be very likely to rise several hundred miles to the south-west – far to the south of all the other explorers’ chosen fields of investigation. So if he could only find this unknown source, he would cut out Burton, as well as the deluded Speke and the rich newcomer, Baker.