Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (48 page)

In 1875-76, when Stanley proved Speke right about Lake Victoria, the possibility had existed that a river flowing northwards into the southern end of Lake Albert might originate somewhere in the region of Lake Tanganyika (though unconnected with that lake) making it a convincing rival to the headwaters of the Kagera as the ultimate source. Indeed, such a river
did
exist. When Stanley had believed himself to be approaching Lake
Albert in 1876, he had glimpsed a significant expanse of water, shortly before being chased away by Nyoro tribesmen. He had not known it at the time, but this was a small ‘undiscovered’ lake, linked to a larger one, together constituting the source of the Semliki river which flowed on northwards until entering the southern end of Lake Albert. Amazingly, the Semliki was not investigated in 1876, when Lake Albert was circumnavigated by Gordon’s temperamental lieutenant, Romolo Gessi.
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Eventually, it would fall to Stanley, in 1889, to map the Semliki and explore the two lakes – Edward and George – which were its sources.

Over a dozen years before the mapping of the Semliki, Stanley’s companion Frank Pocock had spotted something of great significance: ‘a fine mountain crowned with snow’. The two men and their party had been camped near Lake Edward. Unfortunately, Frank had been ill and had failed to mention the snow to Stanley, so a major discovery had to wait over a decade.
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Misty weather would prevent Baker, Gessi and Emin Pasha from seeing the Ruwenzori Mountains in 1864, 1876 and 1884 respectively. But in 1888 and 1889, Stanley and two of his officers, Dr Thomas Parke and Arthur Mounteney Jephson, all caught sight of the snow-capped Ruwenzoris, which they immediately linked to Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. While tracing the course of the Semliki southwards towards its source, Stanley crossed almost sixty torrents flowing into this river from the foothills of the mountains. He recognised at once the mountains’ rain-making role and saw that melting snow, as well as precipitation, supplied the Nile via the Semliki and Albert. But the Semliki’s twin sources turned out to be on the same latitude as the northern shores of Lake Victoria, so although the river’s considerable volume made a very important contribution to the White Nile, it could not outrank the Kagera’s twin branches.

What militates most against the Kagera and its tributaries being considered the true source of the Nile – rather than the principal feeder of Lake Victoria – is that the Kagera’s outflow into Victoria is separated from Speke’s Ripon Falls by 120 miles of lake, and so cannot with justice be said to be part of a continuous river. So,
where does all this leave Speke’s Nile source? In Stanley’s words, Lake Victoria and the Ripon Falls deserved ‘a higher title’ than could justly be applied to rival lakes or tributaries. Only from the Ripon Falls can the Nile be said to assume a definite course: flowing, at first, through shallow Lake Kyoga (which is more like a wide and overflowing river than a lake) then thundering over the Murchison Falls into Lake Albert, only to leave that lake a few miles away, effectively turning the narrow northern end of Albert into a river, which flows on, always to the north, through gorges and over cataracts to Dufile and Gondokoro. So once Stanley had ruled out the Lualaba as a contender, he really
had
solved the Nile mystery and had correctly awarded to Speke his posthumous prize.
¹⁹
Yet though Stanley had succeeded brilliantly in his Nile quest, his own survival remained anything but certain.

On 11 February 1877, Stanley and his men were attacked with guns for the first time since they had embarked on the river. To watch ‘the smoke of gunpowder drifting away from native canoes’ was a novel and alarming experience. In the ensuing waterborne sniping battle, two of his men were killed and an unknown number of his opponents were struck down. The presence of firearms in the hands of the Congolese proved to Stanley that he had arrived at the furthest point on the river to which indirect Portuguese influence had penetrated from their trading stations near the coast. A few days later, Stanley and his followers were pursued by six canoes and shots were once again exchanged and casualties suffered.
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In mid-March 1877 a worse ordeal began when Stanley started downriver from the vast expanse of water that would be known for almost eighty years as Stanley Pool. He was about to ask for a level of commitment from his Wangwana porters that might reasonably have been asked of soldiers in war, but hardly from contracted civilians. Without such remarkable men, Burton, Speke, Grant and Stanley would have achieved little. As Stanley told a friend, he could not have travelled more than a few days’ journey ‘without the pluck and intrinsic goodness of 20 men’.
Foremost among them were Uledi, Manwa Sera, Chowpereh, Wadi Safeni and Sarmini. His followers’ numbers had dwindled from 228 at Bagamoyo to 129. Fourteen lives had been lost in the four and a half months since leaving Nyangwe. None of them suspected that their worst ordeal was just beginning. The first rapids below the Pool reminded Stanley of ‘a strip of water blown over by a hurricane’. Yet smooth water could be deadly too. On 29 March, the steersman of the canoe in which Kalulu was travelling let his vessel drift into the fastest part of the river and condemned himself and his passengers ‘to glide over the treacherous calm surface like an arrow to doom’. The canoe was whirled around several times at the lip of a fall, before plunging down into the maelstrom below, drowning all six occupants, including Kalulu.
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Death of Kalulu.

On 12 April, Stanley and his crew, in their eleven-foot boat, found themselves descending another set of rapids, out of control.

As we began to feel that it was useless to contend with the current, a sudden terrible rumbling noise caused us to look below, and we saw
the river almost heaved bodily upward, as if a volcano had burst under it … Once or twice we were flung scornfully aside, and spun around contemptuously as though we were too insignificant to be wrecked.
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Somehow they found the strength to keep paddling through the swirling, white water. On 3 June, Frank Pocock – the last of Stanley’s white companions – was drowned when his canoe capsized.
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Wadi Safeni, whose cool head had saved Stanley and his men on their first visit to Bumbireh, suffered a breakdown during this dreadful period and wandered into the bush to die.

When, on 9 August 1877, Stanley and his party stumbled into the Portuguese trading post that was furthest up the river, only 115 people could be counted, and as Stanley recorded, they were all ‘in a state of imminent starvation’. For several months, the locals had been refusing to sell them food. Only 108 men, women and children would return to Zanzibar – significantly less than half of the 228 who had set out. Their epic journey from Bagamoyo to the Atlantic coast had lasted 1,000 days. Stanley was the only one of the four Britons to survive. Although his hair had gone prematurely grey and he had lost one-third of his weight, he had retained an almost mystical self-belief.

This poor body of mine has suffered terribly [he wrote during the descent of the cataracts], it has been degraded, pained, wearied & sickened, and has well-nigh sunk under the task imposed on it, but this was but a small portion of myself. For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.
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Although the laurels for the discovery of the source had been shown at long last to belong to John Hanning Speke, it was inevitable, sixteen years after Speke’s discovery, that it would be upon Stanley’s unrivalled journey that public attention would focus. So the damage done by Richard Burton’s long-sustained belittlement of his travelling companion’s achievement would never be put right. It just might have been, if Burton had behaved honourably and made a statement at the RGS, or even written an honest letter to
The Times,
admitting that he had been completely wrong for nearly twenty years. But instead, he waited
until 1881, and chose to bury his climb-down where nobody would see it, in a commentary on the travels of the Portuguese poet, Luis de Camoens. He wrote, almost as an inconsequential aside, and without naming Speke: ‘I am compelled formally to abandon a favourite theory that the Tanganyika drained into the Nile basin via the Lutanzige.’
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This admission was made six years after Stanley had solved the mystery. Speke’s biographer claims that Burton wrote a letter on his death-bed, in which he told Grant that every harsh word he had ever uttered against Speke was withdrawn. But, since Burton died of a heart attack in the night, this seems unlikely to have been true.
²⁶

Because Burton promoted himself as being more wicked than he really was in order to shock respectable people, and hinted at homosexual encounters as well as numerous heterosexual ones, and because he wrote savagely amusing letters, and made unexpurgated translations of the
Kama Sutra of Vatsayana
and the
Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,
he remains a figure of fascination today – despite, as one scholar has recently put it, the last-mentioned work being ‘lurid and archaising’, and less readable than Edward Lane’s version of fifty years earlier.
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Burton is also remembered for criticising British racism in India – although he was a convinced supporter of the Raj – and for his deep and genuine understanding of Arab and Indian culture. But his many repellent epithets about Africans, such as ‘the quasi-gorillahood of the real “nigger”’ and his references to ‘their chimpanzee-like fingers’
²⁸
have been downplayed by most of his biographers, as has his ruthless destruction of Speke’s right to be remembered, despite his [Burton’s] very early realisation that his ‘subordinate’ was almost certainly right.

Speke not only discovered the Nile’s source but instinctively understood the nature of the whole watershed long before any other European had grasped it. He also enjoyed the company of Africans, much as Livingstone had done, and he relished the uniqueness of the privilege of entering the kingdom of Buganda as the first European ever to have done so. His travel books are more readable than Burton’s and are not self-conscious.
Burton, for all his reputation for unconventionality, yearned for recognition by the state, and resented the fact that Speke’s father had been allowed to add a hippopotamus and a crocodile to his family’s coat of arms (in reality a trifling reward), and told numerous friends that
he
deserved similar changes to his arms and a knighthood as well. ‘I opened the way & did the whole work of opening [the continent] from East Africa,’ he complained to the historian, William Hepworth Dixon.
²⁹
After a spirited campaign by Burton’s aristocratic wife, fought with her husband’s wholehearted approval, he was knighted in 1886 – not for his literary accomplishments, but for his achievements as an explorer. Isabel Burton had sent letters and memoranda to the Prime Minister and his cabinet, to MPs, senior military officers and members of the royal family.
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The same reward had been refused to Speke twenty-two years earlier, despite his immeasurably greater achievements in Africa. Burton had been carried for the greater part of his Tanganyika expedition, and had not visited the western shores of that lake, as Speke had done, nor gone with him to Victoria Nyanza.

In confirming Speke’s greatness, Stanley had upstaged him with his own incomparable journey. Yet his homecoming would be no happier than had been his return to London after his successful search for Livingstone. At Zanzibar he expected to find letters from Alice, his fiancée. Indeed there
were
letters from her, but all were dated 1874. So he remained agonisingly uncertain whether he would be returning to happiness, or to the misery of rejection. A letter from his publisher, Edward Marston, made clear which it was to be.

I now come to a delicate subject which I have long debated with myself whether I should write about or wait for your arrival. I think however I may as well tell you at once that your friend Alice Pike is married! Some months ago I received the enclosed letter saying that Miss Pike is now Mrs Barney! … It will I fear prove another source of trouble to your sensitive nature.
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For a man who dreaded rejection, it was a terrible blow. Mr Barney was both younger and richer than him, being heir to a huge
rolling-stock fortune. Nor was romantic anguish Stanley’s only source of unhappiness. Thanks to his foolish exaggeration of hostile encounters on the river, and his failure to give a proper context to the bloody events on Bumbireh Island – he would return to England to face accusations of brutality from an RGS gold medallist, Henry Yule, and his ally, the socialist writer H. M. Hyndman. Their campaign would be so passionately prosecuted and so prolonged that his moral reputation would be seriously damaged although his critics acknowledged that his journey had been ‘the greatest feat in the history of discovery’.
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Unfortunately for Stanley, six years earlier, in 1872, he had made enemies in the British establishment by falling out with the committee members of the RGS and with Dr Kirk. Consequently, the British government refused to consider commissioning Stanley to go back to the Congo.