Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (47 page)

The cause of death: shotgun wound to the chest. In the nineteenth century, deaths from gunshot wounds that were accidental – about a hundred a year – were less likely than a suicide. In fact, a self-inflicted gunshot wound was twice as likely to be an attempt to end one’s own life as a mere accident.

As William Guy wrote in his 1844 book
The Principles of Forensic Medicine
: ‘Suicidal wounds have a character which accidental wounds often, and homicidal wounds sometimes, lack of being inflicted in front on the head or region of the heart.’ Speke’s wound was in the upper left side of his chest. Burton had noted, years earlier, on a hippopotamus hunt in east Africa that even when the boat was charged and almost sunk, ‘[Speke] never allowed his gun to look at himself or at others.’

Had the Nile, the Red Nile, extracted this death as some sort of levy? Or a warning: this river is not to be trifled with? It seems perfectly in keeping with the Red Nile that settling its discovery should end in a horrific death. The world has long argued about whether it was accidental or suicidal. It is my contention that it was neither. I think Speke was murdered.

It started with an insult. What was it exactly, this insult? There were so many, Speke felt, so much he had endured, as the hangdog number two to the mighty Richard Burton. But usually one insult opens the carapace, creates that hairline crack, through which the infection will
pass and poison the man against his former friend. Some line has to be crossed. What was the insult that started it all? Was it the insinuation of cowardice when he took a step back during the attack by spear-throwing Somalis and Burton ordered him forward? Was it the appropriation and yet at the same time dismissal of his Somali expedition diary? Or was it being told that without languages he was useless as an explorer and had only been taken along because Burton felt sorry for him?

Interest in Nile exploration reached its climax during the RGS-sponsored debate between Richard Francis Burton and John ‘Jack’ Hanning Speke. There was a running sore, a deep dispute between the two men that had started as early as 1855 when they explored Somalia together. It was on this trip that Speke had lost a considerable quantity of personal effects, was out of pocket for the whole expedition. And, apart from Burton successfully entering the forbidden city of Harar, the whole trip was a fiasco, both men being wounded during a night attack on their tent by Somalis. Burton received a spear through the face, and as he ran to escape he held the spear in both hands to stop it from dragging along the ground. Speke was wounded in the thigh. But they both evaded capture. It was during this desperate fight that one source of their rift can be detected. Jack Speke was plainly in awe of his friend, though, like all quiet egotists, there were some areas he considered his own turf. One suspects that bravery was one of them – but during the attack he started to fall back and Burton rapped out, ‘Stand your ground, man!’ Speke, in overreaction, rushed forward, thus precipitating the attack they wished to avoid, every inch the man worried that he had been accused of cowardice. He was not scared of death, even if he had been rattled by the attacking tribesmen. Speke once let slip that he had come to Africa to be killed, civilised life holding no interest for him.

This then was their great journey: to travel inland from the port of Zanzibar to investigate the great Lake Tanganyika. Which they did. While Burton was ill, however, Speke made an agreed side-journey to check another lake – which he named Victoria. After merely glimpsing this lake, Speke pronounced it the source of the Nile. It was one of the best guesses in the history of exploration.

It cannot have been easy for anyone travelling with Burton unless they were an acolyte or had a great sense of humour. From all published accounts we see that Burton was a joker, a humorist of the first
rank. Speke, however, was neither funny nor inclined to japery. He didn’t get Burton’s jokes, though he was successful at simulating the appearance of discipleship. He adopted a very meek attitude to Burton that masked his true feelings. In letters home he castigated his leader, but Burton had no knowledge of this.

What Burton didn’t bank on was the way fever and solitude played with Speke’s mind. Not just weeks or months but two
years
of being sidelined in every conversation with the Arabs they dealt with must have been extremely galling. We have a modern equivalent in Gavin Maxwell’s
A Reed Shaken by the Wind
, arguably a better book than Wilfred Thesiger’s
The Marsh Arabs
. We sense Maxwell’s frustration and impotence at having to sit through hours of conversation with Arab elders, with Thesiger in full flow and Maxwell himself, ignorant of Arabic, doodling in his sketchbook. And Burton would have made little effort, one suspects, to include the other man, who in his own proud way refused to study the language yet spent, as Burton observed, stubborn hours perfecting the use of the sextant and surveying instruments. So we have an obstinate man pretending to be an acolyte who, when presented with an opportunity, runs with it. With Burton ill, Speke leapt at the chance to explore the ‘other great lake’ that others had talked about.

As soon as Speke landed in England (Burton was delayed for two weeks), he sent a letter to Murchison at the RGS. Within days he was the talk of the town. He had found the lake that was the source of the Nile! When Burton landed it seemed no one cared much about Lake Tanganyika. He also found that a new expedition would be leaving soon if Lieutenant Speke’s ideas about the Nile were correct. No, he would not be leading it – Speke would, and Speke had requested that he choose his own second in command. It was, from Burton’s perspective, a complete betrayal.

Speke was careful to choose someone who knew no languages and had no experience of exploration – James Grant, whom we’ll meet later on when he accompanies the British army against the Mad Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia (and incidentally becomes the first man to reach both sources of the Nile). Burton, pioneer of the route into the region of the Great Lakes, had been used and usurped.

We know that Speke placed an abnormally low value on his own life. And this could certainly pass for courage. He had, then, a predisposition to self-harm. The question is, was he also suggestible?

When Burton was in Buenos Aires in 1868 he met Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, then a young Foreign Office attaché. Blunt and Burton spent a lot of time together and one day Burton offered to hypnotise the younger man. Blunt wrote, ‘His expression as he gazed into my eyes was nothing less than atrocious. If I had submitted to his gaze for any length of time – and he held me by my thumbs – I have no doubt he would have succeeded in dominating me. But my will is also strong, and once I had met the eyes of a wild beast . . . I broke away, and would have no more.’

Speke, however, was already close to breaking point. We know that he stormed out of the RGS meeting in the morning saying, ‘I cannot stand this’, meaning that the anticipation and tension had certainly not been helped by Burton glaring at him. Isabel Burton reported that Speke’s face, as he looked at Burton, was ‘full of sorrow, of yearning, of perplexity. Then it turned to stone.’ As if imploring him by body language, if not in words, to drop his war against this deeply rattled Nile discoverer. Burton did not, of course, look away. Instead, his ‘basilisk stare’ drilled into the weaker man’s countenance. Did Burton hypnotise him? Did he somehow implant a suggestion that exploded later while Speke was carrying the means of self-destruction, a shotgun primed and loaded?

Firemen in New York City are four times less likely to commit suicide than policemen in the same urban area. One suggestion, brutally simple, is they are denied the means. Cops have guns with them all the time, firemen don’t. The means are right there at your side – and in the small hours, in times of depression, a single flip decision could result in suicide. Speke had the means. He was certainly depressed. A poor public speaker with much ridiculed geographical skills, he wasn’t looking forward to a drubbing by one of the finest minds in Britain. And add to that the certain knowledge that he had betrayed Burton, gone back on his word. This would, in public, be bound to come out. Speke was a prig, anxious that his honour be respected.

Burton often hypnotised his wife Isabel – it was something of a party piece. Had he hypnotised Speke during their long travels together? Almost certainly, though the key to hypnotism is that the hypnotised must want to be dominated – and this was not the case with Speke, until, perhaps, the very end. Was that look of submission enough for Burton to send the man into a self-destructive trance state? Was the sudden transformation to a stone-like expression the sign that the
suggestion had taken hold? Speke said very little after seeing Burton on his last fateful encounter; oddly enough, Burton’s first long poem was entitled
Stone Talk
, but this one did not.

This may sound overblown, but the later behaviour of Burton is rather curious. When he heard the news of Speke’s death he was visibly shaken. He gave an alternative speech on Dahomey and then asked to be excused. Isabel reported that he was grievously upset and kept repeating Speke’s name. This all suggests an element of guilt. Did he send, not just the hypnotic message that he wanted the other man to fail, to buckle, to give up, but rather, a highly specific psychic command to die? Was it a momentary lapse on Burton’s part, a death sentence sent, and, once sent, impossible to retract, however much Burton may have wanted to?

One can be absolutely sure that Burton had mastered the hypnotic death stare of the Yezidis, a sect of Kurdish origin whose religion is considered to be a mix of Zoroastrianism and Sufism, learnt while he was a subaltern in the Sindh. The death stare is designed to send a psychic shock deep into the unprotected psyche of the one stared at. Reputedly it can cause madness, delusions, paralysis, death. Only by imagining oneself imprisoned within an imaginary transparent pyramid can the death stare be repudiated. It is said to be the real origin of the evil eye, and there is certainly a connection between Egypt, gypsies and the Yezidi Peacock Angel Cult, as Burton outlined in his posthumous
The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam
.

After Speke had rushed from the assembly rooms in Bath where the great debate was going to take place, he travelled ten miles to a cousin’s farm where he intended to do some shooting to calm his nerves – perhaps not such a strange thing for a man who loved hunting and killing. Certainly target shooting can calm the nerves by its requirement for stillness. But this was to be a rough shoot.

His cousin was a hundred yards away when he heard the report of a gun and saw Speke fall as he climbed over a wall. Rushing to Speke, it was found that he had a large hole in his chest somewhere towards his armpit, not the obvious place for a suicide to aim at. Because a shotgun has such a long barrel you can’t in fact reach the trigger if the gun is pointing directly at your heart, but Speke was close. Most shotgun suicides are decidedly messier, with the suicide sticking both barrels in his or her mouth. To effect a heart shot one would need a string on the trigger or perhaps a hooked twig. Or perhaps the trigger
could be banged against a protruding rock in a wall one was climbing over.

Whatever the case, the Speke family would be unlikely to admit it was suicide. Even today families like to conceal suicide attempts, and it was far more frowned upon a century and a half ago. There is therefore the distinct possibility that Speke really did pull the trigger with a stick or bang the gun against a stone to set it off.

Yet Speke was not the killer. Certainly he was depressed. When in a depressed state, one does not take the usual precautions. Depressed drivers tend to ‘dare’ others on the road, drive without seat belts and overtake without sufficient caution. Speke was an expert shot. Burton remarked that Speke would never have pointed his gun at himself or others; shooting etiquette would have been drummed into him as a farmer’s son and an army officer. Anyone who is professionally around guns is very cautious – I have known ex-soldiers get very annoyed when a kid’s BB gun is pointed at them (by an adult), on the grounds that any association with ‘playing with guns’ is plain wrong. I think it highly unlikely that Speke, in his normal frame of mind, would ever have allowed himself to be shot. And even if depressed, I think his instincts about shooting would have overridden carelessness. However, I think his will had been broken by the death stare. Combined with his depressed state, had Speke become like the driver who overtakes on a blind corner because he really doesn’t care whether he lives or dies? Did Speke deliberately bang and drag his gun over the wall in a sloppy manner because he no longer cared and because he wanted to test his destiny?

The truth is harsher than this, I fear. The stare robbed Speke of his survival instinct, the thousand small decisions that keep us alive each day. He tripped the trigger on the wall and felt the impact of the left barrel full force in his chest, the shot ‘led in a direction upwards and towards the spine, passing through the lungs and dividing all the large vessels near the heart’.

When Sir Richard Burton, in rare moments of conversational honesty, admitted he had never killed a man, he was wrong. Speke was killed by a single glance.

22
•
It isn’t over until the fat ladies are measured

Out of pure love a crow brings his friend a rotting carcass
.
Egyptian proverb

Speke’s second trip with Grant had been like some kind of soap opera of exploration. Petherick, Samuel Baker and Baker’s wife Florence had walk-on parts, Burton was offstage just waiting for his call, and the journey, though epic and extraordinarily demanding, did not after all settle the question of the Nile’s source. This would only really occur piecemeal – as Stanley and the Bakers and others gradually filled in all the gaps, ultimately proving Speke right. But on his return with Grant Speke did not have the evidence he needed to convince everyone. What he did have were some salacious tales of measuring the women of the court of Rumanika, in the environs of Lake Victoria, who were, it must be said,
extremely
fat. So fat that they would crawl rather than walk.