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

by Tim Jeal

  Only after this ceremony had taken place on 4 November 1865 – without guests, and with James Baker and his wife, Louisa, the only witnesses – were Samuel White Baker and his new wife ready to step onto the public stage and tell the world what they had found in Africa.

  SEVENTEEN

  A Trumpet Blown Loudly

  On the day of their wedding, Baker and Florence dined with Sir Roderick Murchison and found him still purring with satisfaction at being immortalised by their association of his name with one of Africa’s most spectacular waterfalls. Of course Sir Roderick knew that by failing to visit and then navigate the river flowing out from the northern tip of Lake Albert, Baker had not proved the lake’s connection with the lower Nile – although the oral testimony of Africans and Baker’s calculations for the altitude of the lake and for the Nile at Appuddo had made the link seem almost certain. But likelihood was not proof. Also still unproven was whether Lake Albert was fed by Speke’s Victoria Nyanza. Baker had only managed to travel upstream for twenty miles on the river which flowed into Albert on its eastern shore, before looping south, overland, and resuming his northward journey at Karuma Falls. More disappointing still had been his failure to find a river flowing into Lake Albert’s southern shore that might link it with Lake Tanganyika. Despite this, Baker made extravagant claims for his lake, suggesting that at its widest it was ninety miles across, and in length extended two degrees south of the equator, which would place its southern shores to the west of Karagwe, on the same latitude as the centre of Victoria Nyanza.1

  Though all this was highly speculative, Murchison needed new heroes to boost membership of the RGS and keep fees and donations flowing in. Sir Roderick felt that Speke had let him down by becoming Francophile and eccentric. So with Livingstone on his way back to Africa, and Burton and Grant no longer involved with exploration, Murchison needed someone else to galvanise the public and exert pressure on politicians to finance expeditions. So it was a great blessing that this bearded English gentleman, with his apparently warm-hearted personality and impulsive nature, should have sprung to prominence at the perfect time, claiming to be the discoverer of a great lake possibly the equal of Speke’s Victoria Nyanza.2 Baker delighted Murchison by even managing to describe his discovery without British reserve and false modesty:

  The Albert is the great basin of the Nile … a reservoir not only receiving western and southern affluents direct from the Blue Mountains, but it also receives the supply from the Victoria and from the entire equatorial basin. The Nile as it issues from the Albert lake is the entire Nile.3

  So on his return to England, the man who owed everything to Speke was perfectly happy to pose as a greater explorer than his dead friend. Had Speke been alive, Baker would not have dared make such claims for his lake, or have published the vainglorious map, which would later come to haunt him. It is ironic that Speke – relying solely on African information – drew and published a far more accurate map of the Luta N’zige than Baker could manage after visiting it.4 But Sir Roderick was not worried by a few exaggerations, which were unlikely to be exposed for many years to come. In the immediate future, the manly Baker and his beautiful, suntanned wife would together attract immense publicity, from which Murchison and the RGS could expect to profit. Of course, there was a danger that Florence’s background might prove embarrassing, but since only the discreet and gentlemanly James Grant, and a few equally tactful British diplomats, like Robert Colquhoun, had met Florence with Baker before their marriage, Sir Roderick believed that any scandal could be smothered at birth.5

  Murchison wrote glowingly to a friend about Baker’s ‘little blue-eyed Hungarian wife, who … is still only 23 years of age [and who] we all like very much’.6 To make sure that Grant went on being gentlemanly reticent, Sir Roderick told him that Florence had been ‘announced by Sam Baker as Mrs Baker & received as such by all his family’ and by society at large, including by the Murchisons, ‘and we all like her …’7

  On 13 November Baker was formally welcomed home at a meeting at the RGS’s Burlington House headquarters, and Murchison announced that he had been awarded the Society’s Gold Medal. Baker turned out to be a brilliant raconteur, and after he had spoken of his great discovery, and encounters with wild beasts, slave traders, ‘savage’ rulers, and deadly fevers, he turned to thank Murchison and the Society and declared:

  There is one other whom I must thank … one who though young and tender has the heart of a lion and without whose devotion and courage I would not be alive today to address you tonight – Mr President, my Lords, ladies, gentlemen, allow me [and at this moment he walked to the wings, bowed, and returned with Florence on his arm, perfectly dressed and coiffured] to present my wife.8

  It was his ability to pull off these dramatic effects, along with his gifts as a public speaker that blinded all but a few to his shortcomings as a geographer and explorer. His literary gifts also helped. His book The Albert N’yanza was not just a record of a journey, but a series of well-told anecdotes and adventures. ‘It was [in the words of his biographer] conversational narrative at its best: witty, opinionated, and only rarely pompous.’9 Baker eliminated many of those passages in his diaries, in which he had all but given up hope of surviving, and instead wrote of suffering endured with good humour and fortitude. Indeed, he and Florence had been brave – almost suicidally so after their quinine had been exhausted. The book did not always concentrate on dangers, being homely too, with descriptions of tending an African garden and preparing local foods. There had been nothing like this in books by Burton and Speke. Nor had those earlier volumes contained a record of ‘married’ love in places where some African tribes wore no clothes to speak of and where men and women were enslaved like beasts. At a time when members of ‘the fair sex’ (at least those in comfortable circumstances) were not meant to be exposed to scenes of male nudity, Baker wrote in his diary about the educational value ‘to young ladies’ of a journey up the Nile.10 He did not include such risqué passages in his book, which he dedicated to Queen Victoria.

  The knighthood, which Murchison had failed to conjure up for Speke, in Baker’s case came of its own accord in August 1866. Such was the popularity of Baker’s book and his public appearances that the Prime Minister, Lord Derby, had needed no prompting to see the political benefits of the award. Christopher Rigby, still grieving two years after Speke’s death, was upset by the way his friend had been eclipsed by a man whose ‘statements [respecting his lake’s extent] are purely conjectural’. But, as Rigby told Grant sadly:

  Baker has certainly blown his trumpet rather loudly… he has also put his wife very prominently forward and this has taken wonderfully with the English public; had poor Speke only possessed Baker’s skill with his pen what a different reception his book would have met with.11

  Members of Speke’s family were shocked by the award of a knighthood to Baker for what they believed had been a lesser journey, and a lesser discovery. ‘I think it is the most shameful thing I ever heard of,’ wrote Speke’s brother Ben to a friend. ‘None of our people are going to congratulate the knight. It hurt poor mother very much.’12 Grant, who was made a Commander of the Bath, rather than a Knight Commander of that order, felt just as miserable: ‘By God! I never heard of anything more disgusting to us!’ he complained to Blackwood.13

  Meanwhile, the appeal for a memorial which Murchison had launched soon after Speke’s death had only just received, two years later, enough subscriptions to meet the building costs.14 An obelisk of red polished granite was eventually put up in Kensington Gardens, London, in October 1866, bearing the inscription: ‘In memory of Speke, Victoria Nyanza, and the Nile 1864’. Murchison’s carefully chosen words fell far short of endorsing Speke’s claim to have found the source.15

  The intolerable truth, which tormented Grant, was that unless Speke had generously directed Baker to the Luta N’zige, nobody would have heard of the man who was now the toast of the town. Grant knew with absolute certainty that, whatever it might
have cost him and Speke in blood and treasure, they should themselves have visited this wretched lake and established its precise relationship to the Victoria Nyanza and the Nile. But someone else would have to do that now and sort out the whole central African watershed. It might take many years. A disillusioned Grant returned to India and his old job with the military. Forgetting Africa would not be easy.

  EIGHTEEN

  Almost in Sight of the End

  David Livingstone was in his fifty-third year on 19 March 1866 when he landed on the East African coast 600 miles north of Quelimane and plunged inland into thick jungle. Although he joked about his smile as being ‘that of a hippopotamus’ and himself as ‘a dreadful old fogy’,1 he was physically fit for his age and was convinced that he could achieve his astonishingly ambitious twin aims of solving the Nile mystery and shaming the British government into suppressing the Arab-Swahili slave trade.

  Dr Livingstone’s early years as a child worker in a Scottish cotton mill, and his struggle to educate himself and qualify as a medical doctor, made him scornful of gentlemen who had never had to strive for advancement. Unaware that his own powers of endurance were exceptional, he was intolerant of ordinary human weakness and could not understand why other more gentlemanly explorers so often collapsed when on the verge of making great discoveries. Burton and Speke, when tantalisingly close to their objective, had not managed to reach the northern end of Lake Tanganyika, and had then failed to launch a boat on the great Nyanza discovered by Speke alone. In the same situation, Livingstone believed he would have made the final death-defying push, regardless of ill-health, dwindling stores and deserting porters.

  He tended to forget that his own greatest journey – that had taken him from Sesheke at the heart of Africa to Loanda on the Atlantic, and then right back across the entire continent to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean – had been achieved with the assistance of porters loaned to him by Chief Sekeletu of the Kololo. These men had been ordered to serve him under pain of death. But in 1866, at the start of a journey no less ambitious, Livingstone engaged only four men who had served him on the Zambezi. Knowing nothing about Indian customs and temperaments, he hired a dozen sepoys and a havildar (corporal) from the Bombay Marine Battalion. Equally experimental was his choice of eight ex-pupils from the government-run school for ex-slaves at Nasik. Added to these would be ten men from Johanna, although these islanders had a reputation for laziness and dishonesty. En route, about two months later, Livingstone added twenty-four men giving him a total of fifty-nine – still too few for the immense task in hand.2

  If Livingstone had decided to start his journey at Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, he could have engaged many more experienced and dependable porters, but his over-ambitious plans had led him to reject the obvious course of travelling via Unyanyembe to Lake Tanganyika’s northern end and discovering whether it supplied Lake Albert by way of the Rusizi river. Instead, assuming that the Rusizi flowed out, he intended as his first objective to find and trace the river that must flow into Lake Tanganyika. He was partly motivated by the unpleasing thought that if Tanganyika really was the main reservoir of the Nile, Burton would get all the credit, unless he (Livingstone) had gone one better and actually found the lake’s source. But the problem with this plan was not just that Livingstone would get inferior porters by starting his journey far to the south of Zanzibar, but that Lake Tanganyika might in reality have nothing to do with the Nile.

  Because Livingstone had left England shortly before Baker’s return, he had no idea what the younger man and his mistress had actually found. Before sailing, he had learned from telegrams reaching the RGS that Samuel Baker had almost certainly ‘discovered’ the Luta N’zige (Lake Albert) by March 1864, but this had not told him whether Baker had managed to circumnavigate the lake and prove that it was fed by Lake Tanganyika. In fact even if a large river had been found flowing into the southern end of Baker’s lake, this would still not have been certain proof that it had originated in Lake Tanganyika. So rather than assume the link, Livingstone should have gone straight to the Rusizi to solve this basic problem.

  But Livingstone meant instead to march inland along the River Rovuma, and then, after passing the southern end of Lake Nyasa, to head north towards the region south and south-west of Lake Tanganyika where he expected to find the Nile’s source. When his despatches reached London, he enjoyed anticipating that there would be a great many red faces.

  As he and his men left the coastal belt of jungle and began to climb, he felt all the old exhilaration he had known during his transcontinental journey:

  The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is very great. When on lands of a couple of thousand feet elevation, brisk exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm … Africa is a wonderful country for appetite.3

  His optimism did not last long. Soon he was upbraiding the sepoys and Nasik men for deliberate cruelty to the mules and camels which he had brought to gauge whether they had greater resistance to the tsetse fly than had oxen and horses. The Nasik men, copying the sepoys, engaged local tribesmen to carry their loads on the understanding that the white man would pay. They also offered the party’s Somali guide, Ben Ali, cloth and money to direct them all back to the coast. Eventually Livingstone was obliged to give one of the sepoys ‘some smart cuts with a cane’.4 Yet this was not enough to stop the thieving and the infliction of deep gashes on the baggage animals’ flanks. Many of the poor creatures were dying before May was over; and Livingstone had no idea whether this was due to the tsetse or to the sepoys. Just when tensions within the party were growing worse, Livingstone began to see evidence of terrible inhumanity every few miles. On 19 June he wrote:

  We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become the property of anybody else if she recovered after resting for a time.

  Local people admitted that when they managed to rescue such slaves, they would only feed them up in order to sell them again.5

  This evidence of African indifference to African suffering increased rather than lessened Livingstone’s determination to end the slave trade, and at this time he wrote two well argued despatches to the British Foreign Secretary urging that Zanzibar should be blockaded at once, and the main slave market closed. He gave detailed reasons why he did not believe that this would create anarchy in Zanzibar, or cause smaller slave markets to open up along the coast. There is something extraordinarily impressive about the unemotional and logical way in which he marshalled his facts at a time when he was involved with the far from abstract misery of the slaves themselves. Every few days, he was finding little groups of corpses. Some had been shot, others stabbed, and others tied together and left to starve to death.

  Meanwhile his porters dawdled, stole and threatened to desert. In July the sepoys concocted a story about how a tiger had killed and eaten the expedition’s only buffalo calf. Livingstone asked whether they had seen the tiger’s stripes. They eagerly agreed that they had. Since African tigers have no stripes, the doctor was unimpressed. Next day a sepoy threatened to shoot a Nasik man and another stole a large number of cartridges and cloth from the stores. At last Livingstone had had enough and gave the sepoys eighteen yards of cloth and left them at a village to wait for the next Arab caravan to the coast.6

  On 6 August, when he reached the blue waters of Lake Nyasa, he found ‘a dash in the breakers quite exhilarating’. By now, he was down to twenty-three men, less than half the number he had had in early May. A month later, when he arrived at the crossing point on the Shire river, the ten Johanna porters decided to desert en masse. They had learned from Arab slave traders and local Africans that the country ahead was being pillaged by the ‘Mazitu’ (Ngoni) and since they wished to see their families again would serve no longer. The
y had been almost as troublesome as the sepoys, so Livingstone did not try to detain them. In 1863, he had encountered the ‘Mazitu’ in the same area and knew that the dangers ahead were very real.7

  In January 1867, shortly after the man carrying the expedition’s chronometers had slipped and fallen, damaging these vital clocks and guaranteeing that all Livingstone’s future calculations for longitude would be inaccurate, his medicine case was stolen by a deserter. With most of his party ill with malaria and dysentery, the second loss struck Livingstone as a possible death sentence. But despite this, and although the rains were making travel increasingly difficult, the doctor was focussed again and excited. He was heading for an unknown lake which he believed would be found to feed a river flowing into the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. This lake might therefore prove to be the source of the Nile. On 16 January he described a typical day’s progress: