Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (29 page)

As Speke saw things, unless De Bono’s men had chanced to be at Faloro, he and Grant would have been murdered by the Bari before getting anywhere near Gondokoro. Petherick’s apparent failure to recognise the life and death struggle they had been engaged in lay at the heart of Speke’s rage. After a tense conversation with the Welshman, Speke said he could accept
that the consul had been delayed by illness and accidents, but he could not understand why Petherick’s
wakil
(having reached Gondokoro with his boats) had not gone on to ‘search for me up the Nile’.
²¹
According to the consul, lack of funds was the reason. The money subscribed by the public had been only half as much as had been needed. So, according to Petherick, he and Abdel Majid had been forced to travel to the Bahr el-Ghazal to purchase tusks there ‘to effect large sales of ivory’ at a later date, in order to raise more cash.
²²

Unfortunately, the atmosphere on Baker’s
dahabiya
was too highly charged for Petherick to describe in detail the truly dreadful events that had detained him and his wife in the Bahr el-Ghazal: such as their discovery that Abdel Majid had betrayed them and conducted a
razzia
with Khursid Agha. Then their
dahabiya
had sunk, and several hundred porters had been needed to salvage their possessions and carry them with their recently obtained ivory to Gondokoro. Dinka tribesmen had refused to act as carriers, so Petherick had tried to force them at gunpoint to carry for him. They had fought back with spears and Petherick had been obliged to shoot nine dead in self-defence. Still desperate for porters, Petherick had reluctantly decided to capture cattle from a neighbouring tribe in order to pay the Dinka for carriers in the only currency they would accept. This act of armed theft by a British consul led James Murie, a doctor accompanying the Pethericks, to complain about them to Baker. Yet for Petherick – who had been marooned hundreds of miles from his main trading station – it had been impossible to see how else he could have freed himself from his swampy prison and eventually have reached Gondokoro. But for Jack Speke, who had never shot Africans nor stolen their cattle, these bloody events when described to him by Baker, had made him feel even less sympathetic towards the consul.
²³

Petherick took some comfort from the fact that the explorers were still storing their belongings on his boat, the
Kathleen,
so he was deeply shocked when, ‘without any intimation of his reasons for so doing, Speke [began] removing his effects’. The
explorer told the distraught consul that ‘friend Baker had offered his boats’, so he would not need to use Petherick’s vessels for the voyage downstream.
²⁴
Since Petherick’s boats had been waiting for him at Gondokoro between December 1861 and May 1862, and then from October 1862 onwards, the consul was dazed by the unfairness of Baker stepping in at the eleventh hour and usurping the role he had been given by the RGS.

John and Katherine Petherick.

In a final effort to get Speke to reverse his damaging decision to use Baker’s boats and surplus stores, the Pethericks invited the two explorers and Samuel Baker to dine with them on the
Kathleen.
Katherine Petherick cooked a large ham which she had brought out from England, but this tasty peace offering failed to persuade Speke to forgive John Petherick for placing his
trading activities above his ‘succouring’ ones. So when Katherine Petherick leaned across the dinner table in the
dahabiya
’s lamp-lit cabin and made a personal plea to Speke to accept her husband’s aid, he ‘drawlingly replied: “I do not wish to recognize the succour dodge.”‘ Horrified by Speke’s blunt insinuation that her husband had pocketed the subscription money, Katherine ran from the cabin.

A few months earlier Mrs Petherick had been attractive and shapely, with dark ringlets framing her face – but no longer. She had become in her own words ‘a woman clad in unwomanly rags … skin red brown, face worn and haggard, hair scorched crisp, and clad in a scanty dress of gaudy calico’. She and her husband had nearly died on the Bahr el-Ghazal, and had only been sucked into fighting the Dinka by their determination to reach Gondokoro quickly. Miraculously they had arrived a mere five days after Speke and Grant, and seventeen after Baker, who had used his advantage, in Katherine’s words, ‘to supplant Petherick’s expedition for the relief of the Captains’.
²⁵
She was well aware that if it became known in England that Speke had preferred Samuel Baker’s aid to her husband’s, his reputation would be wrecked. So she ‘went to Baker’s boat and implored him not to offer his boats to Captain Speke, as he, Mr Baker, well knew … that our boats had arrived prior to his’. Affecting not to understand why she was so upset, Baker replied blandly: ‘Oh, Mrs Petherick, it will be a positive service to me if he goes to Khartoum in my boats, as the men are paid in advance, and his men will serve as escort and guard.’ Katherine left the
dahabiya
in tears.
²⁶
Later, Speke sent back almost all the supplies which Petherick had bought for his use. He attached a note saying that Baker had already given him everything he needed.
²⁷

Speke’s single-mindedness and his determination to stick to his objectives made him a great explorer, but also made him disinclined to change his opinion once he had made up his mind about a person. But despite what Baker had told him, soon after leaving Gondokoro, Speke wrote an affable, bridge-building letter to Petherick. Perhaps he dreaded the thought of another tormenting public quarrel like the one with Burton. In any case, in this letter he gave Petherick some excellent advice, which he would have been wise to have acted upon at once.

Should you feel inclined to write a full statement of the difficulties you had to contend with in going up the White river, it would be a great relief to the minds of any person connected with the incoming funds, and also to myself, as people’s tongues are always busy in this middling world.

Speke seemed ready to back off if Petherick were to give a convincing account of his problems and also produce figures accounting for the funds already spent.
²⁸

Unfortunately, Petherick and his wife were seriously ill in June and July and so the report was not sent.
²⁹
On 26 July, Katherine Petherick wrote telling Sir Roderick Murchison that her husband was still feverish, and added mysteriously:

I do not feel justified at present to send to you the accounts of Consul Petherick’s disbursement of the £950 subscribed for his expedition under the auspices of the RGS though they have been ready many months … we rest alone upon the consciousness of having done our best, using incredible efforts to reach Gondokoro.
³⁰

Yet the longer Speke was kept waiting for Petherick’s disastrously late accounts and his written explanation, the more mistrustful he inevitably became. Almost a year later, he would write to the secretary of the RGS:

I asked Mr Petherick for his reports and accounts that I might bring them home, but he deferred drawing them up until he had more leisure. Since then, however, instead of using his leisure time in drawing up his accounts, he has been actively writing against me.

Not unnaturally, Speke brooded over why Petherick had been so tardy with his paperwork, and had never ‘sent men above that point [Gondokoro] to look after me’.
³¹
The only answer that occurred to him was that Petherick had used the ‘succouring’ money to benefit his trading.

However, when Speke sailed downstream in ‘friend Baker’s’
dahabiya
in February 1863, he had other things on his mind.
He had to find words in which to announce his discovery of the Nile’s source to the world. In all probability, Burton and his allies would not accept that he had proved his case, so he decided that his announcement should take the form of a gage flung down at their feet. At the British Consulate in Khartoum, he wrote out a telegram for the RGS, dated 27 March:

Inform Sir Roderick Murchison that all is well, that we are in latitude 14° 30 N upon the Nile, and that the Nile is settled.
³²

At Cairo, Speke stayed at Shepheard’s Hotel, where he arranged for his nineteen Wangwana ‘faithfuls’ to be photographed separately and in a group, along with the four women who had accompanied them. Then he gave them all copies of these pictures to improve their chances of employment when they returned to Zanzibar. He also paid them three years’ wages and made a down-payment on a vegetable garden for their use in Zanzibar, sending them more money a few months later, so that its size could be increased.
³³
Bombay, Mabruki, Baraka and the others returned home via Mauritius and the Seychelles, thanks to arrangements made by Speke in concert with Colonel Lambert Playfair, who had recently replaced Christopher Rigby as British Consul at Zanzibar. When Speke said goodbye to his men at Cairo, before they boarded the Suez train, it would have amazed him if anyone had predicted that he would never see these Wangwana porters again. He certainly expected to be back again in Africa within a year or two, at most.
³⁴

THIRTEEN

A Hero’s Aberrations

On 17 June 1863, after an absence of just over three years from their native land, Speke and Grant sailed into Southampton Water aboard the P&O Steamship
Pera.
From Buganda, Speke had written to Sir Roderick Murchison a letter which would not reach him until after its author was dead. ‘As you proved yourself a good father to me by getting up this expedition, so I hope now you will consider me a worthy son, for without doubt … the Victoria Nyanza is the true and indisputable source of the Nile.’
¹
And ‘without doubt’ Sir Roderick – had he received this letter in 1863 – would indeed have responded like an overjoyed father. Even after reading nothing more detailed than Speke’s brisk telegram about the Nile being ‘settled’, he had written at once to Sir Austen Layard, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, urging him to make sure that Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, was ‘not stingy’ when deciding how to honour the new hero for ‘a feat far more wonderful than anything which has been accomplished in my life’. A knighthood at the very least, he hinted would be appropriate.
²
But Sir Roderick would be disappointed. Unimpressed by the courage and perseverance of the two men, the eighty-year-old Prime Minister grumbled to his Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, that,

Murchison was giving [him] no peace about Captain Speke’s discovery … No doubt Speke has at much personal trouble, risks and expense, solved a geographical problem, which it is strange nobody ever solved before & so far he seems deserving of reward; on the other hand, as I observed to Murchison, the practical usefulness of the Discovery is not very apparent, but moreover the question arises whether there are not other African explorers, as for instance Livingstone … who might put forward a similar claim.
³

A month earlier, Murchison had written to
The Times
wholeheartedly supporting Speke’s claim to have found the source; and in a presidential address given a week later at the RGS, he had converted Speke’s original telegram into the much shorter and triumphal sounding: ‘The Nile is settled!’, with its brand-new exclamation mark adding a touch of smugness.
⁴
But by 22 June -the date set by the RGS for Speke’s and Grant’s ‘welcome home’ celebration at Burlington House – Sir Roderick was feeling much less confident. Indeed, Lord Palmerston’s surmise that Murchison’s favourite explorer Dr Livingstone (who had been travelling in Africa since 1858) might believe that the source lay elsewhere, had started to trouble Murchison several weeks before the crowds began to assemble outside Burlington House for the heroic explorers’ official homecoming.