Discovering the Nile's source and odd pairs
INTO AFRICA: THE EPIC ADVENTURES OF STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE
By Martin Dugard
Doubleday, $29.95, 289 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY HANS NICHOLS
It is the story of the Nile, a universal story of discovery, a story that's been told many times over many years. Martin Dugard's version, "Into Africa," still manages to captivate.
Today's explorers no longer seek to make a big world smaller. Instead, they make the infinitesimally small world of DNA and enzymes, infinitesimally larger. In the process our explorers seem to have lost much of their audience and many of their admirers. Instead of looking out, today we look within and while it's no less interesting, it's certainly less tangible. Mapping DNA is one thing; mapping the Nile is another. That's why it's such a joy to read Mr. Dugard's work: It recalls an age when our collective obsession was not with the vagaries of our own sexual mores, but with the discovery of wild, naked tribes in the heart of Africa.
Mr. Dugard begins his story in Bath, England, on Sept. 16, 1864, where Richard Francis Burton waited for his onetime travel companion some said, lover John Hanning Speke to arrive at the annual convention of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The two explorers were to finally confront each other six years after they parted over a bitter dispute about the source of the Nile, in what became known as "the Nile Duel."
Speke was convinced that the source of the Nile was an equatorial lake the size of Scotland, a lake whose shores he visited, naming it after his Queen Lake Victoria. Burton didn't doubt that the Nile flowed from Lake Victoria, but he contended that the true source was Lake Tanganyika, 150 miles further south. Speke never arrived to argue his case, having shot himself in the heart the previous day. Trying to calm his nerves after seeing Burton for the first time in six years, he took to the fields for some hunting. Suicide is the accepted verdict.
Speke was, of course, correct, though his claim wouldn't be proven until 1875.
At its core, this is a tale of outsized personalities, of explorers who were literally and figuratively too big for this globe. Mr. Dugard tells the story through them and he seems to all but introduce them to each other, as he does to his reader, with a prose that flows as smoothly as the Nile itself.
There is the indefatigable walker: David Livingstone himself, toothless and restless, bent on finding the source of the Nile with the same religious zeal that first brought him to Africa as a 27-year-old virgin a missionary devoted to God and ending the slave trade. His obsession with the Nile would force him to befriend and depend on the Arab slavers he despised. His heart would stay in Africa, buried by his porters upon his death, as his body returned to Britain for entombment at Westminster Abbey.
Then there is the mysterious and complicated Henry Morton Stanley, an immigrant from Wales who assumed an American identity. Looking for fame and fortune in Africa, he also had to please the eccentric and ambitious editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Lingering in the background is the president of the Royal Geographic Society, Sir Roderick Murchison, and a mischievous and duplicitous British consul in Zanzibar, John Kirk. But give Kirk some credit: When he was asked what impressed him about Livingstone, he said, "He didn't know what fear was."
Somewhere along the way, the search for the Nile became the search for Livingstone, as Britain longed to be assured that her famous explorer would once again emerge from the interior of Africa. The news that Livingstone was alive and of Stanley's triumph in rescuing him overshadowed the dispute about the Nile.
Whether or not Stanley uttered the famous line "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" when the explorers met is a matter of some debate. Stanley destroyed the relevant pages of his journal, but it is in keeping with Stanley's style, as the insecure Welsh bastard sought an appropriately stilted greeting for the revered Englishman. The line first appeared in print in the July 15, 1872 New York Herald.
In 1875, three years after returning with Livingstone's journals, Stanley was the first to circumnavigate Lake Victoria, thereby identifying it as the main source of the Nile. As news of Stanley's discovery of Livingstone trickled back to civilization, and when Stanley himself arrived in London, there was great doubt about the authenticity of his entire story. For starters, polite London society didn't want to believe Livingstone's journals, especially as he describes the raw beauty of the natives of Nyangew. Indeed, it has been documented that Livingstone fathered at least one African child, a son who was with his 60-year-old father at his death.
One of Livingstone's English sons eventually declared the journals authentic. Stanley's triumph was complete.
The backdrop of Mr. Dugard's tale is the political machinations between two powers: Britain on the decline; America, ascendant. Stanley was concerned that Livingstone would not respond well to his rescue by an American paper. Yet Livingstone wouldn't have any of that nonsense. Mr. Dugard writes: "Unlike all the other British he'd met, Livingstone certainly wouldn't take issue with Stanley's nationality."
As Livingstone himself noted: "Here, Americans and Englishmen are the same people. We speak the same language and have the same ideas."
Hans Nichols is a reporter for The Hill newspaper.
http://washingtontimes.com/books/20030712-104216-9581r.htm
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John Hanning Speke (1827 - 1864)
Born in Bideford in Devon, Speke was commissioned in the British Indian Army in 1844, where he served in the Punjab and travelled in the Himalayas and Tibet. In April 1855, as a member of Richard Burton's party attempting to explore Somaliland, he was severely wounded in an attack by the Somalis. Invalided home, Speke volunteered for the Crimea and served during the war with a regiment of Turks.
In December 1856 he accepted an invitation from Burton to join an expedition to search for the reported great lakes in east central Africa and, particularly, to try and find Lake Nyassa, said to be the origin of the Nile. They left Zanzibar in June 1857 and, after exploring the East African coast for six months to find the best route inland, became the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika in February 1858. During the return trip, Speke left Burton, who was unwell, and struck out northward alone. In July he found his lake, which he named in honour of Queen Victoria.
Speke's conclusion about the lake as a Nile source was rejected by Burton and was disputed by many in England. However, the Royal Geographical Society, which had sponsored the expedition, honoured Speke for his exploits and commissioned a second expedition in 1860 to resolve the dispute. Speke and Captain James Grant mapped a portion of Lake Victoria. In July 1862 Speke, unaccompanied by Grant, found the Nile's exit from the lake and named it Ripon Falls. The party then tried to follow the river's course, but an outbreak of tribal warfare required them to change their route.
On his return to England, Speke was greeted with enthusiasm and published Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863). Yet Burton, among others, remained unconvinced and, on the day he was to debate the subject publicly with Richard Burton, Speke was killed accidentally by his own gun while hunting. A granite obelisk to his memory was erected by public subscription in Kensington Gardens.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/speke_john_hanning.shtml
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 - 1890)
Burton was raised in France and Italy and his talent for languages meant that he was fluent in four languages and two dialects before he was twenty: he would eventually learn 25 languages and another 15 dialects.
Expelled from Oxford in 1842, he became an officer in the Bombay Native Infantry. Working in intelligence, he was asked to investigate homosexual brothels in Karachi; his explicit study resulted in their closure and also killed his army career. Now intent on exploration, in 1855 Burton planned an expedition with three others, including John Speke, to discover the source of the Nile. They intended to push across Somaliland, but were attacked and were forced to return to England.
The two returned to Africa in 1857-58, travelling inland from Zanzibar. It was a difficult trip; when they arrived at Lake Tanganyika, Speke was almost blind and Burton could hardly walk. Speke pushed on alone and discovered Lake Victoria, which he was convinced was the true source of the Nile. Burton disagreed with him, the two became badly estranged and, in September 1864, a debate between the two ended in tragedy when Speke was killed while hunting.
Burton's next move was to the Foreign Office, which appointed him consul in Fernando Po, a Spanish island off the coast of West Africa. During his three years there, he gathered enough material for five books that described tribal rituals - including ritual murder, cannibalism and sexual practices - in explicit detail.
He spent four unhappy years in Brazil before being appointed consul in Damascus. His initial success was undermined by Muslim intrigue and his Catholic wife's evangelising and he was dismissed in 1871. The next year he moved to Trieste, a place he eventually came to regard as home. He continued writing, covering subjects from Iceland to Ghana and translating Classical and Renaissance literature. What excited him most, however, was Eastern erotica. He translated and printed the Kama Sutra (1883) and The Perfumed Garden (1886) and published a complete edition of the Arabian Nights (1885 - 88), which still stands unchallenged. Knighted in 1886, Burton died in Trieste four years later.
www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/burton_sir_richard_francis.shtml
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