Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (4 page)

Most devastating of all, however, was that Robert, his prodigal eldest son, had secretly sailed to America to fight for the Union Army in their Civil War. Robert Livingstone had been taken prisoner during the Siege of Richmond and been sent to a Confederate prisoner of war camp. There was no news of his whereabouts or physical
condition. Livingstone, tragically, had castigated Robert for being aimless and base not long before the boy fled to America and enlisted.

In Bath that morning, the British public knew nothing of Livingstone’s personal travails. In its eyes, Livingstone was not a legend in decline, but a luminary whose lined, tanned face they longed to glimpse. As eleven o’clock came and went, however, Livingstone, like Speke, was nowhere to be seen. Burton and the audience watched the doors, straining for a glimpse of their entrance. In fact, what would happen in the next few minutes would alter the future of exploration, Africa and the world.

Broken down to its essence, the Nile Duel was simply a search for water — two hydrogen molecules bonding with a single oxygen molecule in the bowels of the earth, then seeping forth somewhere in the heart of Africa, becoming a trickle, then a stream, then a mighty river. The Nile was longer than any other in the world, rolling effortlessly from mountains through jungle through Sahara through Cairo and into the Mediterranean. Mankind’s most prolific kingdoms had risen and fallen on the Nile’s shores. Moses, Cleopatra and Alexander drank her waters. The Nile never shrivelled, despite not having tributaries, substantial rainfall, or other obvious means of replenishment. She even flooded during September, the hottest month of the year in Northern Africa. Farmers planted in her fertile silt once the floods receded. Lush green fields blossomed in the desert as if the Nile was life itself.

The Nile flowed south to north into the Mediterranean, but its Source had always been a mystery. Theories ranged from the equator to the bottom of the world — or maybe from an even greater river, fed by an ocean, that sliced like an aqueduct across the entire African continent. In 460 BC, Herodotus, the Greek ‘father of history’, took it upon himself to find out. He pictured massive fountains spewing the Nile from the earth, and set off alone to witness the spume and mist. Six hundred miles inland
from Cairo, however, the Nile turned white at the waterfalls that would someday be labelled the First Cataract. Like sentinels, they guarded the Nile’s inner reaches. The desert turned to jungle. The civilized world ended and a land of cannibals began. Herodotus turned back.

The mystery was still unanswered when Ptolemy drew the first conclusive world map in AD 140. Based on African legends, he speculated that the source lay in snow-covered peaks along the equator, which he dubbed ‘The Mountains of the Moon’. Critics wrongly ridiculed that idea, saying that snow couldn’t possibly exist in that latitude. Neither Ptolemy nor those critics travelled up the Nile to see if he was right. Centuries passed. The Source became a force unto itself, too great for man to divine or witness. ‘It is not given to us mortals’, the French author Montesquieu wrote in the eighteenth century, ‘to see the Nile feeble and at its Source.’

In 1798, Source still undiscovered, Admiral Lord Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s navy at the Battle of the Nile. Having established a toehold in Northern Africa, the British set to exploring their new land. The seas mapped and the continents defined, finding the Source became the new grail of international discovery. There was no pot of gold, no fountain of eternal youth at the Source, just glory — which, for most, was enough. Between 1798 and 1856 an eclectic collection of loners, thrill seekers and adventurous aristocrats trekked upriver from Cairo, chasing the Source. Most were British. A handful were female. Most died from disease, parasites, animal attack or murder. None found the Source. None came close. And with every failed attempt, Montesquieu’s words rang more true.

The grail became more exalted as the failures mounted, as tackling the summit of Everest would become a century hence. Britain’s growing sense of empire gave her a proprietary interest in finding the Source first. The reign of Queen Victoria, which began inauspiciously in 1837 with a botched coronation, had become a time of international expansion. Great Britain’s citizens and companies
controlled colonial outposts around the world, insinuating British ways and words into China, the South Pacific, South America, India, North America and Africa. The term ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’ began during those heady times. No empire in history had ever been as vast, and the British were fond of comparing their empire with the Greek and Roman epochs. The Nile was a viable connection to that past. Finding the Source would heighten that connection.

‘In the absence of adequate data we are not entitled to speculate too confidently on the Source,’ Sir Roderick Murchison told Britain’s unofficial governing body of exploration, the Royal Geographical Society, in 1852. The eminent geographer and RGS founder’s attention focused on the Mountains of the Moon. ‘It must be said that there is no exploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached than an ascent of these mountains from the east coast, possibly from near Mombasa. The adventurous travellers who shall first lay down the true position of these equatorial snowy mountains and who shall satisfy us that they throw off the waters of the White Nile … will be justly considered amongst the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science.’

It was April of 1855 when Speke and Burton made their first Source bid. Their pairing was accidental: Speke was on leave from his regiment, the 46th Bengal Native Infantry, in India. They met in Aden, where Burton was finalizing his journey. Speke had planned to hunt big game, find the Source by himself, then float downriver to Cairo. Burton invited him to join his expedition instead. They were accompanied by a pair of British military men, Lieutenants William Stroyan and G. E. Herne, and the usual phalanx of porters vital to African travel. Instead of beginning at the mouth of the Nile in Egypt and working upriver, as explorers had done since Herodotus, Burton and Speke proposed to penetrate Africa from the east, beginning in Somalia then cutting the tangent from the Indian Ocean along the equator to the Mountains of the Moon’s theoretical location. The northern regions
of Africa were already mapped, as were the continent’s southern and coastal fringes, but theirs would be a bold gambit through uncharted land. If the Source truly resided in the Mountains of the Moon, the shortcut would save them over two thousand miles of travel in both directions.

Burton and Speke made it to Africa but never even left the coast on that first expedition. Their forty-two-man caravan was camped along the Somali shore, waiting for the monsoon season to pass so they could move inland. Sentries were posted around the camp and a fire burned into the night to ward off Somali bandits, legendary as the ‘penis-cutting people’ because they emasculated vanquished enemies. When the attack came, however, the expedition was unprepared. It happened at 2 a.m. on the morning of 18 April 1855. Sentries and porters were slaughtered first by the Somalis, who wielded sabres, curved daggers, war clubs and six-foot-long spears. Burton stepped from his lean-to at the first sound of violence, brandishing a sabre. Stroyan rose to his side clutching a Colt revolver in each hand. Together they battled the Somalis, even as the remaining porters fled into the night or were butchered alive.

Speke stayed in his tent through the early part of the battle, saying later that he mistook the sounds of gunfire for warning shots fired by spooked sentries. But then the Somalis began using the British tents as snares, collapsing them on top of men and thrusting spears into the writhing piles of canvas. Speke grabbed his pistols and stepped from the solitude of his tent into the frenzy. Burton was still alive but Stroyan had run out of bullets. He was being hacked to pieces by the Somalis, even as he swung his empty pistols like clubs. Speke began fighting his way through a cloud of Somalis to rescue Burton when a warrior thrust a javelin clean through Burton’s face, fleeing before Speke could shoot. The spear remained stuck in Burton’s head, jabbing out at right angles. He had lost teeth and blood poured from his mouth and both cheeks. Unable to pull out the javelin and unable to link up with Speke, the
would-be explorer miraculously escaped into the night before another warrior could finish him off.

Speke, however, was taken prisoner. The Somalis could have killed him quickly like Stroyan, but with the battle winding down they had the luxury of enjoying his terror. Speke’s hands were tied behind his back and he was shoved to the ground. The Somalis began fondling his genitals as if debating the most wrenching means of slicing them off. His captors, though, turned their attention to looting the camp before they could finish the job. Just to make sure Speke didn’t escape while they were gone, the Somalis plunged spears deep into his thighs. They narrowly missed his groin but severed the muscles of his hamstrings and quadriceps.

In his agony, Speke still managed to slip his bonds and escape without being detected. He dragged himself three miles down the beach to where a British ship was anchored. And somehow, miraculously, Herne and Burton — javelin still jutting from his face — were waiting. All three were soon on their way back to England.

Lesser men would have set aside exploration after that — G. E. Herne certainly did. But no sooner had their wounds healed than Burton and Speke, who had both been army officers before venturing into exploration during peacetime, resumed their army careers to fight Russia in the epic blunder known as the Crimean War. When the war came to an end it was back to Africa to find the Source, this time funded by the Royal Geographical Society. Burton and Speke were brave loners, a type of personality society idealizes from a polite distance but finds discomfiting up close. Speke was often blunt and inappropriate, and since childhood had fled to the hunting fields to regain his inner strength. Burton simply scared people. The facial craters from the Somali spear only made it worse.

The life of an explorer, then, was almost a mandate for both of them. Explorers, by the original Latin definition, are those who cry out. The men earning that title first were searchers for game instead of searchers for
geographical features. They walked far ahead of hunting parties, shouting out the locations of animals they discovered. As tribes became kingdoms and kingdoms became countries, the searchers were called on to look for new lands instead of game. They returned home to cry out what they saw so that civilization might follow in their wake. Then, because a searcher’s special talent belonged to the wilds, not cities, they went back again. And again.

Burton and Speke fit this description. Neither man was suited to holding down a steady job. Both their childhoods had been marked by loving mothers and diffident fathers. In the absence of paternal guidance, Burton and Speke had navigated their own paths through life, making up the rules as they went along. The chip on each man’s shoulder was prohibitive, diminished for brief periods by the euphoria of achievement. Africa, or some other land without limitations, was where they belonged.

Their second Source attempt began two years later, in the spring of 1857. It was a smaller expedition — just Burton and Speke and their porters this time, no other Englishmen. As expedition leader, Burton made the decision to start further south, in an area where tribes were less hostile and where Arab traders had been penetrating inland for centuries. After purchasing supplies on Zanzibar, where ‘gonorrhoea is so common it is hardly considered a disease’, according to Burton, and corpses floated in the city harbour, Burton and Speke sailed for the mainland. They put ashore just north of the port of Bagamoyo. If the shape of the African continent is an east-facing skull, their landfall was a point somewhere just below the nose. That region would become the pivotal jumping-off point for African exploration over the next half-century. In Burton and Speke’s case, the proposed journey was an eight-hundred-mile trek through swamps, savannah and forest to a village known as Ujiji, on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika. Arab traders had been going there for over three decades. En route, Burton and Speke would seek information about the Source’s location.

In early June the monsoon season ended. Burton and Speke bored inland leading a column of thirty-six porters and thirty pack animals. They were an odd-looking pair — Burton favouring Arab robes and Speke wearing English hunting flannel under a broad-brimmed felt hat. They carried tents and bedding, chairs, tables, navigational aids, brandy and food, cloth and wire, assorted medicines, and an arsenal of daggers, swords, rifles and pistols. Progress averaged less than six miles a day, beginning after an early breakfast, halting at midday for a respite from the heat, then continuing again to late afternoon. As the sun set and the porters danced or told stories around the fire, Burton would record observations in his journal. Latitude and longitude were noted. Elevation was determined by using a thermometer to check the temperature at which water boiled. Burton was taken with the adventure, but found the continent much more brutish and forbidding than he’d imagined it could be.

Among their caravan was a hard-working young African named Sidi Mubarak Bombay, whom Burton referred to as ‘the gem of the group’. Bombay was a member of the Yao tribe who had been captured by Arab slave traders at the age of twelve, then sold in the Zanzibar slave market to an Arab merchant. When the Arab moved to the city of Bombay shortly after, his young slave came along. When the Arab died, the slave was given his freedom and the adopted name of Bombay. Upon returning to Africa sometime in his early thirties, Sidi Mubarak Bombay joined the Sultan of Zanzibar’s army as a soldier, and was posted to a garrison in Chokwe. That outpost seven miles from the Indian Ocean coastline was where Burton and Speke met up with the industrious, grinning former slave. By arrangement with the garrison commander, Bombay and five other soldiers were hired to accompany the British caravan. Bombay’s work ethic and linguistic skills soon made him invaluable to Burton and Speke. Unbeknown to Bombay, his soldiering career was at an end, replaced by a new line of work that would lead him into the history books.