Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (31 page)

The very idea that Speke might aid France in Africa horrified Sir Roderick and he told Austen Layard of the Foreign Office that he ‘deeply regretted these aberrations, as Speke has in other respects the greatness to ensure success as a bold explorer’.
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Murchison also wrote to Grant bemoaning his failure to persuade Speke to drop his wild schemes and limit his objectives ‘to finishing off and completing much of what you [both] necessarily left in an uncertain state’.
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By the end of August Speke’s book about his travels with Burton,
What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile,
had been printed, though not as yet published. He was dividing his time between his parents’ town house in Pimlico, London, and their estates in Somerset, and seemed content to be living in the countryside he loved. Of course his future was uncertain, but as a stop-gap he decided to go shooting in India for a few months in the autumn. After that, he meant to ask the East India Company for a three-year furlough so he could return to Africa if anyone had the wit to back him.
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Then, in early August the postman brought a letter that would have disastrous consequences.

FOURTEEN

Death in the Afternoon

Sir Roderick Murchison had sent Speke a momentous letter, inviting him to address the September meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. A discussion about the Nile’s source was to be the principal attraction on the schedule of talks and debates mounted by the Geography and Ethnology section of the association. On 12 August, Speke replied to Murchison: ‘I shall be only too glad to meet and converse with Livingstone [about the Nile], to test the matter by fair arbitration on amicable terms.’ He did not mention Burton, but could not have expected to avoid debating with him too.
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A few weeks later George Simpson, Blackwood’s senior manager, wrote indignantly to his employer:

Speke’s enemies are preparing a savage attack upon him at the Bath meeting, headed by Burton, aided by Livingstone. So much the better … Speke will know how to meet them & turn the affair to the advantage of our gallant but most imprudent friend.
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Speke was ‘imprudent’ because in Simpson’s opinion, he had made too many ill-judged public remarks about Petherick and Burton. Worse still, he had caused unnecessary offence to Livingstone as well as to Murchison.
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When Speke heard that Burton was saying that the Rusizi river linked the northern end of Lake Tanganyika (Burton’s own lake, as Burton saw it) with the Luta N’zige – the more northerly lake, which Baker was about to investigate – he (Speke) was very angry. To make this claim Burton had needed to ‘forget’ the inconvenient fact that he and Speke had been told, emphatically, by the three sons of a local chief, that the river at Tanganyika’s northern end flowed
into,
rather than
out of
the lake. But since it might well be many years before any explorer managed to see this river with his own
eyes, Burton appeared to have calculated that he could safely reverse the flow of the Rusizi and get away with it, perhaps for a decade – all the while undermining the claims which Speke had made for the Victoria Nyanza.

It came to Speke that he could pay back Burton for his unscrupulous
volte face
by resorting to some armchair geography of his own. Since no explorer had visited either the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, or the northern end of the more southerly Lake Nyasa, nobody in Europe could be sure whether or not a southward-flowing river linked the two lakes. If it did, the Rusizi could not possibly flow out of Lake Tanganyika to the north, or the lake would have been drained of all its water eons ago. Fortunately – from Speke’s point of view – a substantial river (the Shiré) flowed out from the southern end of Lake Nyasa. So what could explain this strong southern outflow, except a comparable inflow into Nyasa from the north? This was a powerful argument for a link with Tanganyika; but it was one that, if deployed, ran the risk of aggravating the famous Dr Livingstone, who, though he had turned back before reaching the northern end of Lake Nyasa, had informed the RGS that four or five small rivers flowing into the western side of the lake, produced more than enough water to explain the Shiré’s outflow.

Although, at times, Livingstone cultivated an air of saintliness, he always counter-attacked fiercely when potential rivals disagreed with his geographical theories.
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So, when the doctor returned to Britain in July 1864, and heard what Speke had said about Lake Nyasa at the RGS a month earlier, he was apoplectic. Livingstone’s reputation had been tarnished by his disastrous Zambezi Expedition, but many people still saw him as the country’s greatest explorer and a man capable of extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice. So it was worse than ‘imprudent’ of Speke to have turned him into an enemy, and shoved him into Burton’s camp. Indeed, Livingstone was soon arguing that Speke’s little effluent at Ripon Falls ‘would not account for the Nile’, and telling his eldest daughter that Captain Speke had ‘such slender mental abilities that silence in this & other matters would
have better become him’.
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Livingstone detested Burton for his contempt both for Africans and for missionaries, but despite this visceral dislike he confided to Sir Roderick Murchison, that he, like Burton, believed the Nile’s source was more likely to lie in Lake Tanganyika than in the Victoria Nyanza. More precisely, Livingstone was starting to think that the true source probably lay somewhere to the west of Lake Tanganyika, and would flow into Lake Tanganyika, exiting it as the Rusizi, and then flowing on north to the Upper Nile through the Luta N’zige.
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Although Speke had expected to have a debate with Livingstone, Murchison had always meant him and Burton to head the bill at the big meeting in Bath. Indeed their anticipated collision was soon being advertised as ‘the great Nile debate’. It seems that by pitting him against Burton, Murchison was punishing Speke for his supposed ingratitude to the RGS and for not sending in a proper report. Livingstone was expected to act as an unofficial referee, while the real battle was to be with Burton. Given the man’s reputation as a debater, Speke could not have looked forward to taking him on, but he passionately believed that he had found the Nile’s source, and so had no intention of giving ground. As he told Blackwood, it was a matter of honour for him to face Burton – akin to fighting a duel.
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Speke was no coward, though he knew he would be vulnerable – and not only because he had failed to map the Victoria Nyanza.

Since the incident with the beetle, he had been deaf in one ear. Poor sight also continued to dog him, and was worse after his long literary labours. Feeling utterly exhausted, he had told Blackwood that he would ‘never think again of writing a personal narration, since it only leads to getting abused when disclosing disagreeable truths’.
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Blackwood was worried about his famous author becoming embroiled in arguments. He felt that in speeches and letters to the press ‘Speke’s imperfect powers of explanation [had] been more hurtful to himself than [to] anyone else’, often resulting in him being ‘looked upon as the reverse of the generous simple hearted fellow he was’. He begged Laurence Oliphant to do what he could ‘to keep him from putting his
foot in it … He is a real good one who requires a friend.’
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But Oliphant – although he liked Speke – was mischievous, and made no effort to save him from the great debate. On the contrary, Oliphant egged on Burton by telling him that Speke had recently said to him that if Burton came to Bath, ‘he would kick him’. Burton had replied, according to his wife Isabel: ‘Well that settles it! By God, he shall kick me.’ Of course Burton would have gone to Bath anyway, being eager to do Speke any harm he could. He had already applied to the Foreign Office for an extension of leave simply in order to be able to attend the meeting.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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