Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (19 page)

To Captain Speke [Burton conceded] are due those geographical results to which you have alluded in such flattering terms. Whilst I undertook the history and the ethnography … to Captain Speke fell the arduous task of delineating an exact topography, and of laying down our positions by astronomical observations – a labour to which at times even the undaunted Livingstone found himself unequal.
¹⁴

Yet, within a year, Burton would write in the preface to his
Lake Regions of Central Africa,

I could not expect much from his assistance; he was not a linguist -French and Arabic being equally unknown to him – nor a man of science, nor an accurate astronomical observer … During the exploration he acted in a subordinate capacity, and … was unfit for any other but a subordinate capacity.
¹⁵

Eventually, Burton would claim the expedition’s entire achievement as his alone:

I led the most disorderly of caravans into the heart of Inter-tropical Africa, and succeeded in discovering the Tanganyika, and the southern portion of what is now called the Victoria Nyanza Lake … My labours thus rendered easy the ingress of future expeditions, which had only to tread in my steps.
¹⁶

For a man who had been carried most of the way and had made not one scientific observation, this was quite a claim.

Three separate sources of disagreement had fanned the embers of mutual dislike into hatred by the end of 1859. The first concerned what each man owed to the other financially, the second arose from the publication of Speke’s most recent journals, and the third sprang from a difference of opinion over the payment of the African porters who had accompanied them. The two explorers had returned to Britain in May, and as late as July Speke, at least, was still behaving towards his companion with consideration. When first approaching the Edinburgh publisher, John Blackwood, Speke explained that he wanted his diaries to appear in
Blackwood’s Magazine
(a great
favourite with Indian Army officers) rather than in volume form, because he did not want to bring out a book of his own before Burton could publish his
magnum opus.
‘I would on no consideration be in any kind of opposition to him,’ he insisted.
¹⁷
Nor would Speke write anything offensive about Burton in the text of the published diaries, which would appear in consecutive instalments in
Blackwood’s Magazine
in September and October. He could not have been expecting Burton to react with hostility, since before publication he had told Burton that he hoped his (Speke’s) journals ‘would be of use to him &his writings’.
¹⁸

Yet, in the event, these two seemingly innocuous instalments enraged Burton. ‘They contained,’ he wrote later, ‘futilities which all readers could detect. A horse-shoe or Chancellor’s wig, some six thousand feet high and 180 miles in depth, was prolonged beyond the equator and gravely named “Mountains of the Moon”. The Nyanza water, driven some 120 miles further north than was originally laid down from Arab information.’
¹⁹
Of course Speke’s placing of the Mountains of the Moon in a crescent just to the north of the northern end of Lake Tanganyika (about 200 miles south of their actual position) separated that lake from the Nile but, since he and Burton, while navigating the lake, had been emphatically assured by numerous informants that the river at Tanganyika’s northern end ran into the lake and not out of it, any relationship between Lake Tanganyika and the Nile had been shot to pieces already. In his
Lake Regions
Burton countered by placing
his
Mountains of the Moon to the north of Speke’s Nyanza, blocking
it
off from the Nile, in the spirit of tit for tat, and giving the impression that the Tanganyika was more likely to be the Nile’s source than the Nyanza.
²⁰
This was despite Burton’s earlier opinion expressed to Norton Shaw that the Nyanza was probably ‘the source of the principal feeder of the White Nile’.

Burton’s true statement that Speke had mapped the Nyanza as extending much too far north upset Speke considerably because Burton had had in his possession, while they had been in Africa, an account by the Austrian missionary, Ignatius Knoblecher, of
his travels south of Gondokoro, making clear that the trading station and mission were 200 miles north of the Nyanza. Speke told Norton Shaw angrily: ‘[Burton] ought not to have let my map go home without telling me that I had flooded the mission station with my Lake.’
²¹
To Burton himself, he wrote in great distress: ‘All I can say is that for the sake of Geography it is a shocking pity you did not tell me.’ Burton did not try to excuse himself by denying having read Knoblecher’s book. He had wanted to make a fool of Speke and had succeeded.
²²

Another blow to outwardly friendly relations was a difference of opinion about precisely when Speke should have paid his share of the expedition’s debts, over and above the £1,000 originally voted by the British government. In mid-June he offered to pay half of any sum finally owing to creditors, but only after Burton had made a request to have the money refunded by the Bombay government. The moment any request was refused, he would pay his share.
²³
Burton was irritated by this delaying tactic -as he saw it – but did not get round to submitting a request for a refund from the Bombay government till late March the following year. A refusal finally came back several months later and Speke’s brother Ben paid the debt for Jack who had already sailed for Africa.
²⁴

The argument over whether the expedition’s porters and other servants ought to have been paid anything when the two explorers had returned to Zanzibar, aroused more ill-feeling than the matter of their private debt to one another. It was made more acrimonious by the involvement of Captain (eventually General) Christopher P. Rigby, who had succeeded Colonel Hamerton as British Consul on Zanzibar, and had been Burton’s only rival as an exceptional East India Company linguist in India. Whether Rigby was jealous of Burton is beyond proving, but he certainly disliked him and when he knew that Speke felt the same way, it created a strong bond between them.

Burton maintained that the twelve Baluchi soldiers, who had been provided by Sultan Majid, had been given ‘no regular pay, as they were servants of the prince’. Each man had been
paid ‘an advance’ of 20 Maria Theresa dollars; and, when first engaged, they had been led to believe (and these are Burton’s words) that there were ‘prospects of remuneration on [their] return’.
²⁵
Burton refused to pay them this ‘remuneration’ because of their ‘notorious misconduct’, such as disobeying orders and deserting for brief periods. Given the hardships and dangers of African travel, few porters would ever have been paid anything at all if occasional refusals to march and periodic absences had disqualified them from receiving payments after months of back-breaking work.

This was certainly the line Speke took when he wrote to Rigby on behalf of the Baluchi guards and the rest of the porters and other servants. ‘The Baluchis, I told him [Burton] repeatedly, ought to be paid something.’ The Sultan of Zanzibar agreed, and gave these men 2,300 dollars (£460). Speke took the same line over the ten superior slaves, whose owner, Ramji, had been ‘clean robbed’. Ramji had been paid 300 dollars as an advance, and Burton later refused to pay anything for the eleven additional months these men had been with him. In his view they had been ‘the most troublesome of the party’. Speke disagreed, both in their case, and in the case of Sheikh Said bin Salim, the caravan leader, who had been paid 500 dollars as an advance by Colonel Hamerton and had been promised by him ‘that if he escorted the gentlemen to the Great Lake in the interior, and brought them in safety back to Zanzibar, he would be handsomely rewarded’. It had been Speke’s understanding that Said would receive 1,000 dollars and a gold watch.
²⁶
One reason Burton gave for declining to pay Said bin Salim a penny more was that he had refused to go with Speke to the Nyanza. In fact Burton had forbidden him to go there. Burton also accused Said of carelessness and dishonesty, but Speke considered this unjust and appointed Said to lead the next caravan he took into Africa.
²⁷
According to Speke, Burton’s scandalous meanness to Said had been due to his discovery that he had lied to him about being of royal blood. Being a tremendous snob, Burton had seen this deception as a heinous offence. ‘This was really a blackguard business,’
declared Speke who felt angry enough to provide Rigby with ammunition to send to the Secretary of State for India.

The breach between the two explorers became unbridgeable when Burton learned in early February 1860 that Speke’s damaging letters to Consul Rigby on the subject of the unpaid porters had been forwarded by Rigby to the Secretary of State for India. In due course Burton was asked to answer allegations made by Rigby about his failure to pay his men. His subsequent explanations were rejected and, soon after receiving an official rebuke, Burton told Speke he no longer wished to communicate with him directly.
²⁸

Speke’s true character shines out in a note he wrote to Burton on 16 April 1860, shortly before leaving England. Given how dangerous his journey would be, Speke knew this could be the last opportunity he would ever have to end their feud. Both men had been addressing one another as ‘Sir’ in recent exchanges, but Speke reverted to an earlier, friendlier form of address:

My dear Burton,

I cannot leave England addressing you so coldly as you have hitherto been corresponding, the more especially as you have condescended to make an amiable arrangement with me about the debt I owe to you.
²⁹

The original of Burton’s reply no longer exists, only the draft he wrote out in pencil on the margins of Speke’s conciliatory letter. The debt, he agreed, had been satisfactorily dealt with, then added: ‘I cannot however accept your offer concerning our corresponding less coldly – any other tone would be extremely distasteful to me, I am sir …’
³⁰
Whether Burton mailed this chilling reply exactly as drafted can never be known. His career as an explorer was over, and he was consumed with hatred for the man who had gone out to Africa with him as his ‘subordinate’ and had now supplanted and eclipsed him. As the years went by, he would neglect no opportunity to deride and undermine Speke’s geographical theories and achievements.

EIGHT

Our Adventurous Friend

John Blackwood.

While waiting for the British government to come up with the £2,500 he needed for his new expedition, Speke got on with writing up his journals for publication.
¹
To start with, his chosen publisher, John Blackwood, told him discouragingly that he had found ‘great defects’ in his work, ‘principally arising from your want of practice in literary labour’. But Speke took this in good part, replying with disarming candour: ‘I am a perfect green at the goose quill: my fort [sic] being in the field and not in the cabinet.’
²
But the middle-aged man of letters and the young soldier-turned-explorer soon came to like and respect one another. Very soon
Blackwood revised his opinion of Speke’s work and admitted that he was no longer correcting it as carefully as before, because he often found himself so involved that he ‘forgot to note whether you are writing good or bad English … There is a reality about your description of the escape from the Somali which is better than the finest writing.’ Despite the fact that many of his authors over-wrote – as was then almost mandatory for anyone wishing to acquire a reputation for elegant writing – he assured Speke that he meant to preserve his ‘plain honest narrative & not attempt any literary adornment’.
³
Since Speke had warned him that he would find it ‘intolerable if a confounded fellow’ tried to make him ‘talk about “azure skies”‘, this was just as well.
⁴
It was a token of Blackwood’s affection for his intrepid author that to make up for the inadequacies of his formal education he sent him novels such as
The Mill on the Floss
to help him develop a taste for distinguished writing.
⁵
Writing about Speke, Blackwood told John Delane, the editor of
The Times,