Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (5 page)

Bombay spoke fluent Hindustani, as did Speke, so Bombay served as Speke’s gunbearer and translator. ‘He works on principle and works like a horse,’ Burton wrote of the short ugly man with filed-down teeth and an aversion to bathing, ‘candidly declaring that not love of us but duty to his belly makes him work. With a sprained ankle and a load quite disproportionate to his puny body, he insists on carrying two guns. He attends us everywhere, manages our purchases, carries all our messages, and when not employed by us is at every man’s beck and call.’ Bombay would go on to become the talisman of African exploration, an essential roster member on any serious expedition for decades to come.

Before the expedition Burton had written that Speke was a ‘companion and not a friend, with whom I was strangers’. Speke still chafed that Burton placed more emphasis on exploration than hunting, but as the journey progressed Burton and Speke became solid companions. Burton was officially the expedition leader, but he and Speke behaved more as equals. They had already fought a battle together. Now the shared agony of swamp fever, malaria and mutinous porters only brought them closer. They nursed one another through Africa’s strange new illnesses and wearying tribulations. They read Shakespeare aloud to one another at night. Back home, Speke had his mother and Burton had his conquests, but neither man had a close friend. In the loneliness of Africa, however, they needed each other. Burton wrote that Speke was ‘as a brother’.

The brotherhood saw great trials. The first months of the journey were a slog through claustrophobic jungle, where the thick, dank air pressed down on their shoulders and poured into their lungs. The porters deserted in ones and twos, in the dead of night, stealing precious supplies before fleeing back to the coast. A morass of palm trees, strangler figs, leopard orchids, black mambas, green mambas, cobras, monkeys, mosquitoes and tse-tse flies defined the expedition’s days. The going was slow. Malaria and sleeping sickness afflicted those porters who didn’t desert.

The route climbed to a plateau a little over two hundred miles inland. The scenery changed abruptly, magically, as if a new backdrop had been unfurled on a vaudeville stage. Gone was the jungle. In its place was a vast dun-coloured grassland. Acacia trees, with their stratified branches looking like low wispy clouds, hovered randomly. Clusters of shrubs seemed like islands on the sea of grass. Otherwise the land was wide-open space as far as the eye could see. Herds of elephants, zebras, giraffe, hyenas and wildebeest became commonplace. Lions and hyenas were a nightly threat, prowling outside the camp in the darkness, waiting for the campfire to burn too low, sniffing for stragglers and scraps. Water was scarce. Shade was a luxury. Burton and Speke were sick frequently but they pushed on. By November, after travelling six hundred miles, they arrived in the village of Tabora. It was a snake-infested, dusty oasis of mud homes surrounded by low rolling hills, but the Arab traders had made it the premier stopover on their way inland. Canned goods, goats and bulls for milk and slaughter, and reminders of home such as tea were available. Burton and Speke regained their strength. There were women, too. Burton was sated.

After five weeks they pushed on. Speke was in favour of travelling north, to where a large lake was reputed to exist, but Burton insisted they go west. The path changed from savannah to swampy sycamore forests. Both men were almost killed by malaria and had to be carried. But by February 1858, with Burton and Speke blinded by illness, Bombay first spied the shining waters of Lake Tanganyika. The caravan soon stood on the banks of the enormous lake. As Burton and Speke’s eyesight returned they saw before them a lake like none they’d ever seen, wider than the English Channel and stretching far over the northern and southern horizons. Surely, they agreed, this was the Source. Speke, enraptured by the peaks surrounding the lake, wrote confidently in his journal: ‘… this mountain range I consider the true Mountains of the Moon.’

Burton and Speke stayed three months, searching for that elusive river leading north out of the lake into the Nile. They never found it. Regardless, the journey home began on 26 May 1858. The porters who had deserted had stolen most of the cloth and beads necessary to barter for food. It was urgent that Burton and Speke race for the coast or risk starving to death.

However, malaria again crippled Burton. The impoverished caravan was forced to halt in Tabora so he could recuperate. Speke, who found the Arabs repulsive and disliked Burton’s fondness for their clothing and customs, wanted to investigate those rumours of another great lake to the north. Taking Bombay and a handful of porters, Speke began the journey in July 1858. The Burton and Speke expedition had been travelling through Africa for thirteen mostly agreeable months. All of that, however, was about to end.

Six weeks after leaving, an excited Speke strode back into Tabora. He had not only found the rumoured lake, naming the hill from where he’d seen it after Somerset and the lake itself after Queen Victoria, but he had immediately set aside his previous convictions about Lake Tanganyika. Victoria Nyanza was the true source. ‘I no longer felt any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of what has been so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers,’ he commented in his journal. Years before, as an officer in India, Speke had harboured the secret desire to make his name by discovering the Source. On 3 August 1858, he was sure he had done so. He didn’t walk around the lake to make sure the Nile flowed from it, so he never actually saw the river. But Speke interviewed the local population and drew a map of the lake based on their opinions. The map definitively showed the Nile flowing out of Victoria Nyanza. That done, Speke had raced back to Tabora.

Fearful of being rebuffed, Speke delayed telling Burton about his theory until the morning after his return. ‘We had scarcely breakfasted’, Burton wrote, ‘before he announced to me the startling fact that he had discovered
the sources of the Nile. The fortunate discoverer’s conviction was strong, but his reasoning was weak.’

Their relationship would never be the same. ‘Jack changed his manners to me from this date,’ Burton later wrote of 26 August 1858 in a profound understatement. And while Burton had tolerated the non-intellectual aspects of Speke’s personality before, he began treating the younger man like a fool.

Burton demanded that they walk north to double-check Speke’s claim. Speke, however, reminded Burton that they lacked the cloth and beads vital for purchasing food. They had no choice but to head straight for the coast. The hotheaded Burton reluctantly agreed.

The feud escalated during the four-month walk back to Bagamoyo. Speke endured an African illness that made him delusional and racked with pain, and both men almost died of malnutrition, but their argument raged. When they finally reached the coast, the two men split up, returning to London on different ships. Their goodbyes in Aden were the last words they would utter to one another.

Speke’s HMS
Furious
arrived in England first. He raced to the Royal Geographical Society and pronounced himself the discoverer of the Source. His claim was audacious and unproven, but the world was ready to believe that the Source had been found. By the time Burton made it home just weeks later, Speke was the toast of London. ‘I reached London on May 21st,’ Burton wrote. ‘My companion now stood forth in his true colours, an angry rival.’

For five long years the debate raged — in the most elite circles of society and in commoners’ pubs as well. There were other world events to draw England’s attention during that time (across the Atlantic, America was now embroiled in a civil war that the British, for the sake of trade and naval supremacy, were keen for the South to win) but nothing had eclipsed it. England had endured a decade of wars in the 1850s, and the escapism of Burton and Speke’s adventures proved much more intriguing in London than worries about another nation’s internal strife.

The two men traded slings and arrows in public speeches, published articles and competing books. Burton accused Speke of being an incompetent geographer. Speke accused Burton of ‘incompetence, malice, cowardice and jealousy’. Burton married. Speke returned to Africa with another man to prove his claim. ‘The Nile’, Speke pronounced upon locating the river’s effluence from Victorian Nyanza, then following the river three thousand miles north to the Mediterranean, ‘is settled.’

But it wasn’t. Not definitely. Speke had failed to circumnavigate Victoria, meaning a river could have fed into it without his knowing, which would prove Burton’s argument. And at one point he had taken a cross-country shortcut rather than follow the river’s snaking course. Short of the two men returning to Africa together, the only way to settle the matter was through a scientific presentation of facts.

In this way, 16 September 1864 was chosen as the date for the Nile Duel. Under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association, against the backdrop of Bath’s fading Georgian splendour, in the East Wing of the Mineral Waters Hospital, mankind’s last geographical mystery would be settled. The hospital contained the only auditorium in town large enough to hold the debate’s crowd. When first constructed in 1737, its creation represented a newfound scientific belief in water’s restorative properties. That a divisive debate over water would be held within its walls was the sort of grand irony the occasion demanded.
The Times
— known as The Thunderer for its
gravitas
— would be on hand to report the action, as would the more accessible papers like the
Daily Telegraph
and Manchester
Guardian
. The Bath
Chronicle
imported forty extra typesetters from London to churn out a new edition immediately after the verdict.

On 15 September, the day before the Duel, Burton and Speke had settled into their chairs for RGS president Sir Roderick Murchison’s opening remarks, seeing one another for the first time since Africa. Speke was overcome. ‘He looked at Richard and at me, and we at him,’
Isabel Burton wrote of that afternoon. ‘I shall never forget his face. It was full of sorrow, or yearning, and perplexity. Then he seemed to turn to stone. After a while he began to fidget a great deal, and exclaimed half aloud, “Oh, I can’t stand this any longer.” He got up to go out. A man nearest him said, “Shall you want your chair again, sir? May I have it? Shall you come back?” and he answered “I hope not” and left the hall.’

Desperate to calm himself, Speke sought out a cousin who lived nearby. Speke suggested they spend the afternoon hunting partridge in Neston Park, about seven miles from Bath.

By the following morning, the debate auditorium was smelling of wet wool, stale tobacco and the myriad odours of bodies wedged cheek by jowl. There were as many women as men. Stomachs rumbled in anticipation of lunch. Eleven o’clock came and passed. Burton waited for Speke. With every tick of the clock, the crowd’s murmurs about tardiness turned to angry rumbles about impertinence and cowardice.

At 11.25, the doors finally opened. All eyes turned quickly, but saw neither Speke nor Livingstone. Instead, the wiry, bald Murchison solemnly entered with a handful of men comprising the Society’s inner council. They took their seats on the speaker’s platform. Murchison waited for the crowd to hush, then began to speak in his usual convoluted delivery. ‘I have to apologize but when I explain to you the cause of my being a little late in coming to take the chair you will pardon me.’ The next sentence, however, was as direct as a punch to the solar plexus.

‘Captain Speke has lost his life.’

Speke had lodged his Lancaster breech-loading rifle, which had no safety catch, into a low stone wall before attempting to climb over. Something had jarred the rifle, making it fire. The coroner would avoid the word ‘suicide’, but his report would show that Speke pressed the barrel directly into his heart as he climbed over the wall. The bullet, the coroner wrote, ‘led upwards towards the spine, and passing through the lungs, dividing all the
large vessels of the heart’. Even though the shot passed through his heart, Speke’s suicide was slow. He bled for ten minutes before dying at the base of the wall.

‘Sensation’, as the
Chronicle
reported the moment, swept the audience when Murchison broke the news. ‘Richard sank into a chair, and I saw by the workings of his face the terrible emotion he was controlling and the shock he had received,’ wrote Isabel. ‘When called upon to speak, in a voice that trembled, he spoke of other things, and as briefly as he could. When we got home he wept long and bitterly, and I was for many a day trying to comfort him.’

Murchison proposed a resolution regretting Speke’s death, with condolences to be passed along to his family. After a unanimous show of hands, it was passed.

As for Livingstone, people were wondering about his absence. When Murchison was asked where the missing explorer might be, he merely shrugged. ‘I expect him at any hour, but I cannot account for his absence.’

‘In fact,’ Murchison concluded, knowing full well that Livingstone had been in seclusion, writing the speech he would deliver a few days later in Bath, ‘he might be in Africa for all I know.’

Two months later, Murchison finally got what he wanted. The Nile Duel was still alive and well, Speke’s theories were being closely scrutinized, and Burton couldn’t be trusted to seek the Source for obvious reasons of non-objectivity. James Augustus Grant, Speke’s companion on the second journey, would be equally subjective; he had thrown himself on the coffin and keened like a grieving widow at Speke’s funeral. Sir Samuel White Baker, the barrel-chested engineer who discovered Lake Albert, was still somewhere in Africa, position unknown. Even John Kirk, the botanist from the Zambezi expedition, was out of the question. He had fallen in love and was about to be married. The timid young minister’s son, who harboured a deep and secret hatred for Livingstone, wanted to settle down and get a good job, not take off for two years in Africa.

Murchison finally approached Livingstone. Livingstone adored Murchison. He owed his fame to the regal geologist. And while Livingstone was aching to return to Africa, having said so during his triumphant speech in Bath on 19 September and then again during an RGS meeting in London on 14 November, his financial concerns were too great to ignore. He wanted to ensure that his retirement would be comfortable, and that his children — Bob (when he returned, which was looking more likely as the American Civil War drew to an end), seventeen-year-old Agnes, six-year-old Anna Mary, fifteen-year-old Tom and thirteen-year-old Oswell, who was his father’s spitting image — would have an inheritance. He couldn’t, in good conscience, return to Africa without solving his money problems first.