In the early 1870s in what is now Zambia, David Livingstone, the greatest of all Victorian explorers, led several expeditions in search of the source of the Nile. At times, he could barely walk, ulcers having chewed through the “muscle, tendon and bone” of his feet. Riddled with malaria, plagued with piles and weakened by pneumonia, he had pulled out several of his rotting teeth using strong thread and a heavy pistol. He had been attacked by roasting heat, pouring rain, tick fever, hostile slavers and leeches “as close as smallpox”. By 1873, he had an excruciatingly painful blood clot in his intestine the size of a fist. In this extremity of suffering, he found time to appreciate the “sweet” voice of a tree frog, but it is another entry in his diary – of truly towering understatement – that most perfectly sums up the wry fortitude of men like Livingstone: “It is not all pleasure this exploration.”
The men (and occasionally women) who went in search of the headwaters of Africa’s longest river displayed superhuman resilience and courage, and the all-too-human frailties of vanity, cruelty and petty-mindedness. But in an age when the earth is Google-flat, its every corner accessible from an armchair, Tim Jeal’s book is a reminder of just how tough, uncompromising and bitchy those Nile adventurers were.
Explorers of the Nile is a brilliant, scholarly and at times almost unreadably vivid account of the two decades in the middle of the 19th century when the search for the Nile’s source in central Africa was at its height, told through the interlocking stories of Livingstone, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Grant, Samuel Baker and Henry Morton Stanley.
The explorers, with their elaborate facial hair, overweening confidence and almost boundless energy, came not to rule but to solve an ancient mystery that had intrigued geographers since the time of the pharaohs: where in the vast interior of Africa did the Nile rise, with enough volume to cross thousands of miles of desert and flood Egypt every year?
In February 1858, Burton and the man he forever referred to as his “subordinate” reached the shores of Lake Tanganyika after a journey of quite astonishing unpleasantness. Burton was so ill he had to be carried for the last 200 miles. Speke’s raging ophthalmia meant he could barely see the lake. Burton subsequently contracted ulcers on his tongue and could hardly speak. Meanwhile, a small black beetle flew into Speke’s ear and “began with exceeding vigour, like a rabbit at a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum”. He stuck a penknife into his ear, killed the beetle and wounded himself so badly that for months he was without half his hearing.
Deaf, blind, dumb and crippled, these two companions shared a level of hardship that ought to have forged a bond for life. But they detested each other. Burton was convinced that Lake Tanganyika must represent the Nile’s headwaters. Speke left him and journeyed on, more than 200 miles north, to find the waters known to the Arabs as Lake Ukerewe, which he would rename Lake Victoria. After calculating its height above sea level, he concluded that this, and not Burton’s lake, must be the source.
Speke was right, Burton wrong, but it was Burton who won fame, a knighthood and an enduring afterlife as the colourful, irrepressible “Ruffian Dick”. There was also something maniacal in Burton’s determination to destroy his former companion’s reputation. The day before the two men were due to debate their theories in public, Speke was killed during a shooting outing when he climbed over a wall and accidentally fired his shotgun into his side. The stage was clear for Burton, who lost no time rubbishing his opponent and declaring that he had committed suicide.
Jeal’s singular achievement is to rescue Speke from his unwarranted relegation to the second rank, not only establishing his credentials as a pioneering explorer but unearthing at the same time a subtle and attractive character who was far from a prude. He was happy to offer sex tips to African chiefs, and his love, with “overflowing heart”, for an 18-year-old Baganda woman named Méri is both profoundly moving and entirely at odds with the prevailing attitudes of his race and class.
Rehabilitating Speke’s reputation is Jeal’s main mission in “Explorers of the Nile,” but he performs another important rescue mission in giving due credit to the hundreds of Africans who made it possible for these white men to answer a question that was not, in African eyes, worth asking. (“It is only water,” one chief told Livingstone, baffled by all the fuss.)
When Livingstone finally died, his African porters carried his dried and salted body back to Zanzibar. That journey took five months. Ten of them died on the way. By the time the Royal Geographical Society finally got around to issuing a medal in recognition of their efforts, most of Livingstone’s African helpers had vanished back into the bush. It takes one kind of bravery to endure extreme discomfort and risk life for earthly, scientific or celestial glory, but quite another to do so for honour alone.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
EXPLORERS OF THE NILE
The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure
Tim Jeal
Yale University Press; 510 pages; $32.50
