Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (37 page)

By now he had some doubts about his own theory, fearing that the Lualaba might prove to be not the Nile, but the Congo, but he laboured on nevertheless—week after week, mile after mile, his body growing frailer with dysentery and exhaustion, his journal more despondent. ‘Weary! Weary!’ he writes one day. ‘I am ill with bowels, having eaten nothing for eight days.’ ‘Inwardly I feel tired.’ ‘Rain, rain, rain.’ ‘The water was cold, and so was the wind.’ ‘Wet, wet, wet.’ ‘A dreary wet morning, and no food that we know of near.’ ‘This trip has made my hair all grey.’ ‘I am pale, and weak from bleeding profusely.’ ‘I am excessively weak, and but for the donkey could not move a hundred yards.’ ‘Tried to ride, but was forced to lie down.’ The bold inked handwriting of the journal degenerates into faint and indistinct pencil: and the last entry of all, April 27, 1873, says: ‘Knocked up quite and remain—recover—sent to buy milch goats. We are on the banks of the Milimamo’.

On April 30,1873, Livingstone called for Susi and asked him how far it was to the Lualaba. Three days, he was told. He murmured ‘Oh, dear, dear’, and dozed off. Next morning they found him dead, kneeling by the side of his bed, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow, as if in prayer.

So it happened after all that the mystery of the Nile was solved not by one of your Indian Army gentlemen, nor by a rich game-hunter, nor even a saintly missionary, but by the brashest, least-educated and most successful explorer of them all. Now 34, Stanley was suspect in England. People thought him a charlatan, a fortune-hunter, an exhibitionist. He was disliked for his humble origins, his American citizenship, his Welsh showiness, his trade and his thick skin, and because he made few gestures towards higher motives.

Methodically and expertly, nevertheless, this formidable man planned a new expedition to Africa, this time jointly for the
Herald
of New York and the
Daily
Telegraph
of London. First he would circumnavigate Victoria. Then he would circumnavigate Tanganyika. Finally he would sail down the Lualaba wherever it went. Thus he would, in one immense and dramatic journey, solve the problem of
the Nile and make clear the shape of Central Africa. And everything he set out to do, he did. With his three young English toughs, his five English dogs, his 350 porters, his eight tons of stores and his 40-foot wooden boat the
Lady
Alice
‚ out he went from Zanzibar once again. It was a truly imperial journey. If Africans opposed you, you shot them down. If you could not keep up, you died. Reaching Victoria Nyanza in April 1875, Stanley sailed round the whole lake and thus proved that Victoria was a single sheet of water, and that no big river flowed into it. Next, pausing only to massacre some natives on the island of Bumbiri, who had been rude to him, off he went to Lake Tanganyika, and launching the
Lady
Alice
with dispatch, in a few weeks he had circumnavigated that too, and proved that it had no outlet that could qualify as a Nile source.

There remained the enigmatic Lualaba, which flowed no man knew where, and which still might prove to be the headwaters of the Nile. Two of Stanley’s three Englishmen were dead by now, and Stanley himself had no notion where the voyage would take him, whether he would land up in Egypt or on the Atlantic coast, or would merely be disgorged into one or other of the lakes. But indomitably they launched the
Lady
Alice
and paddled away downstream. It was the most sensational journey of all. The river led them through every kind of African hazard—fearful cataracts, cannibal assaults, portages through python-infested forests, running battles with savages in war-canoes, hunger, sickness, treacherous guides and the eerie threat of war-drums in the wilderness. Stanley’s last English companion was drowned. Stanley himself was given up for dead when the
Lady
Alice
was swept away in a river turbulence. But on January 20,1877, he took an altitude reading, and found that they were 1,511 feet above sea level—some 14 feet below the level of the Nile at Gondoroko, where Speke and Grant had met the Bakers fifteen years before. So he knew that the Lualaba was not the Nile but the Congo, and that it was taking them not northward to the Mediterranean, but westward to the Atlantic Ocean.

Thus, though it was to be another seven months before Stanley’s exhausted expedition arrived at the estuary of the Congo on the Atlantic shore, that day the Nile was settled.

Speke was right, Burton was wrong: but before we leave this, the central saga of exploration in the imperial age, and the beginning of the ‘scramble for Africa’ which was to give a new style to imperialism, let us go back to Bath again, in 1864, and take our leave of the original antagonists. Burton and his wife had characteristically put up at a hotel near the railway station, but Speke stayed no less typically with his cousin, George Fuller, at his agreeable country house Neston Park about ten miles from Bath. They saw each other for the first time since 1859 at a preliminary meeting in the Mineral Water Hospital on September 15, the day before the scheduled debate. It was a moment charged with unexpected pathos, if we are to believe Isabel Burton’s account. The two men did not speak, but their eyes met. ‘I shall never forget his face’, wrote Isabel of Speke. ‘It was full of sorrow, and yearning, and perplexity. Then he seemed turned to stone.’ After a while, she reported, he began to fidget, and exclaiming half aloud, ‘Oh, I cannot stand this any longer’, got up from his seat. ‘Shall you want your chair again, sir?’ asked a man standing behind. ‘May I have it? Shall you come back?’ ‘I hope not’, Speke said, and left the hall.

So at least Mrs Burton described it. Certainly Speke left, and following the habit of a lifetime drove out to Neston to let off steam with an afternoon’s shooting. By 2.30, we are told, he and his cousin, with a gamekeeper, were out in the fields looking for partridges. Neston stood on an outcrop of the Cotswolds, and they were shooting across a stony, bare and bleak countryside, where the autumn light was often moist and misty, and the air dank. It was native ground for Speke. Not only were those fields his cousin’s property, but in a house nearby lived his own elder brother William. Speke had, in feet, hurried from Section E home to his roots—away from the word-splitting and the hypotheticals back to the rough, where a chap was not stifled by science or twisted by recriminations, but could breathe freely among his own kind, in good country air with a gun under his arm.

At about four o’clock, as the three men crossed a field near the
Bath road, a shot sounded. Speke was at that moment climbing a drystone wall two or three feet high, and the others looked around to see him falling off it. They ran to the spot, and found him bleeding profusely from the chest. He was conscious, and asked them not to move him: but by the time Fuller had got hold of a doctor and returned to the scene, Speke had died where he fell, watched by the helpless keeper. His body was taken to his brother’s house, and an inquest was convened for the following morning, the very day of the great debate.

When the news was announced to the expectant Section E next day, even Burton was stunned for a moment. Unable, he said, to speak himself, he asked Murchison to read a statement on his behalf, expressing his ‘sincere admiration of Speke’s character and enterprise’, despite their differences of opinion. Within a few moments, though, he had recovered sufficiently to read a paper he happened to have with him about the current state of Dahomey in West Africa, with particular and detailed reference to the habit of human sacrifice. We are not told how the audience reacted to this ghoulish alternative, but the
Chronicle
did report in the same issue both Speke’s announced intention of returning to Africa ‘to spread the blessings of Christianity’, and Burton’s heretical conclusion on Dahomey—‘under these circumstances it is pleasing to remark the gradual but sure advance of El Islam, the perfect cure of the disorders that rule the land’.

‘Captain Speke came to a bad end,’ Burton wrote to a friend four days later, ‘but no one knows anything about it.’ In Somerset nevertheless he was given the farewell appropriate to a hero and a favourite son. Muffled bells tolled all day in Taunton, the county town, and Murchison, Livingstone and Grant all went to the funeral in the family church at Dowlish Wake—Grant indeed momentarily descending into the vault with the coffin, carrying a wreath of laurel leaves and everlasting white flowers and sobbing sobs that were ‘audible all over the sacred building’. Speke’s father was granted the right to augment the family arms with ‘the supporters following; that is to say, on the dexter side a Crocodile, and on the sinister side a Hippopotamus’.

But how he died was always to remain obscure. ‘The charitable say he shot himself, Burton wrote, ‘the uncharitable that I shot
him’. Murder by Burton is certainly a tempting hypothesis, and there is an undeniably persuasive frisson to the vision of the great pornographer, cloaked and Satanic, skulking in the lee of the death-wall that September afternoon. But Burton was not really the murdering kind—he loved to shock, not to kill. It was Speke who was truly the man of violence. He it was who, confronted by emotional crises, relieved them by going out and shooting something, and though the local inquest dutifully returned a verdict of accidental death, metaphorically touching its cap to Squire Fuller, still there were many besides Burton to assume, in September 1864, that what he chose to shoot that particular day was himself.
1

Burton lived for another twenty-five years. He never went exploring again, and doubtless regretted to the end of his life the day he allowed Speke to go off to the northern lake without him. But he made his fortune with the first unexpurgated translation of the
Arabian
Nights
, and after a lifetime of furious controversy, fluctuation, scholarship and adventure, died in 1890 famous and a Knight of the Bath—notorious to the end among the orthodox, looking in old age as magnificently sinister as ever, and idolized still by the faithful fatuous Isabel, who took the posthumous precaution of burning most of his journals and many unpublished manuscripts.

For his tomb Isabel erected, in the Catholic cemetery of Mortlake, London, an Arab tent all made of marble, fitted up as a chapel inside, with room for two coffins and real camel-bells that tinkled when the door was opened. On a slab upon its wall was a poem by Justin Huntly McCarthy:

But Speke was buried with a more imperial romance. Deep in the green silence of the Somerset countryside, among thatch and apple orchards, stood the church of St Andrew at Dowlish Wake, the sanctuary of the Spekes. Spekes were everywhere inside. There were Speke memorial windows. There were Speke commemorative plaques. There was a Speke vault, and a Speke chapel, and a monument to a Speke who had died with John Nicholson at the storming of Delhi. And in the heart of it, John Hanning Speke himself presided in stately life-size bust, bearded and masterly, above the big black marble sarcophagus that contained his remains—ornamented by laurel leaves, embellished with gun, sword and sextant, and supported as the College of Heralds had decreed, by a Crocodile dexter and a large Hippopotamus sinister.
2

So Speke won in the end. A family man to the last, an English gentleman of the rooted kind, his half-suppressed, half-ashamed romanticism sustained him in death as it impelled him in life, as in a wider sense it impelled the great Empire itself. Once Henry Stanley from St Asaph workhouse had established the truth of that tragic intuition on the shore of the northern lake, nobody could dispute Speke’s right to the proud Latin epitaph upon his tomb: A NILO PRAECLARUS—
Illustrious
For
the
Nile.