The Nile, flowing south to north through Egypt to the Mediterranean, is more than 4,000 miles long, by some measures the world’s longest river, though by others a few miles shorter than the Amazon River. Travelers from antiquity onward could trace it upriver as far as Khartoum in Sudan. There it splits into two feeder rivers: the Blue Nile, flowing from Lake Tana in Ethiopia and known to the West since the 17th century, and the White Nile, which dissipates into a vast and impenetrable swamp, the Sudd, that at least through the 19th century no one could figure out how to navigate. The only feasible way to figure out where the Nile began was to start on the eastern coast of Africa well south of the Sudd and move inland looking for lakes and smaller rivers flowing north. But in the early 19th century, the geography of that part of Africa, indeed of most of the continent south of the Sahara, was a complete blank for Westerners.
RiverOfTheGods_062822.jpgA new book by Candice Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic and the author of bestselling accounts of Theodore Roosevelt’s Amazon adventures and Winston Churchill’s youthful exploits during the Boer War, is thus a welcome introduction for new readers to the captivating story about the great river. Millard’s book lacks the eloquence and richness of detail of Alan Moorehead’s 1960 classic The White Nile — down to the graphic horrors of the Arab-run slave market in Zanzibar. But she makes it up with a clean narrative style bolstered by impressive research.
Some of the characters who fill older works, such as the famously lost missionary David Livingstone (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”), are disconcertingly almost absent from Millard’s narrative. Her story centers primarily on Richard Francis Burton, translator of the Kama Sutra, the Arabian Nights, and other libidinous Eastern classics, and on his companion and ultimate bitter rival John Hanning Speke. Dramatically mustachioed and saturninely handsome, Burton was a sometime British army officer in India and a career iconoclast — he had been expelled from the University of Oxford in 1842 — whose chief talents were for womanizing and languages — he mastered 36, including dialects. His first expedition to find the source of the Nile followed on the heels of an 1853 pilgrimage, amply publicized by himself, to Mecca disguised as a Muslim. It would have been death to him as an infidel had he been found out, but Burton gloried in his ability to carry off Islamic manners and Islamic dress, which he wore long after the pilgrimage ended. The rivalry between Burton and Speke devastated both their minds and ultimately destroyed Speke’s.
Millard adds two other remarkable characters. One is Sidi Mubarak Bombay (1820-1885), born on the border between present-day Tanzania and Mozambique and captured by Arab slavers to be sold into servitude in India until his emancipation following his owner’s death, whereupon he returned to East Africa and became the chief guide for Burton and Speke. Bombay was their Tenzing Norgay. His resourcefulness and diplomatic instincts kept them all alive through disease, near-starvation, village hostilities, and chronic underfunding. Then, in 1873, he walked across the continent of Africa from east to west, the first human being known to do so.
The other is Isabel Arundell Burton, Richard Burton’s wife. Isabel met her husband by chance in Boulogne in 1851 and was smitten. The two had to wait 10 years to marry, however, while he went off on his adventures in Africa and elsewhere and while she battled her mother, who objected to her pious Catholic daughter’s choice of an impious and impecunious mate. She spent her married life traveling with him, functioning as his amanuensis, and proving to be no mean writer herself with a series of published memoirs and travel journals.
In 1854, Richard Burton secured some funding from the Royal Geographical Society to sail from Aden — he was still in Arabia — to the port of Berbera and then trek through Somaliland with the hope of finding some clues to the Nile’s origins there. In Aden, he was introduced to Speke, then age 27, who had traveled from England begging to be part of Burton’s crew. Six years Burton’s junior, Speke, like Burton, had served in India, but he was otherwise different from Burton in every way: tall, blond, and blue-eyed and hailing from an aristocratic family in Somerset. Speke had no particular qualifications for the task, knowing neither Arabic nor any African languages, and he displayed little interest in local African ways. He also had a disturbingly high-strung temperament, confessing to another in the party that he had come to Africa “to be killed.” His main interests were hunting and shooting, and he annoyed and distressed Burton by repeatedly taking out his gun to bag whatever specimens of fauna crossed or flew over his path.
The Somaliland expedition was a disaster. The Somali tribes were notorious for their hostility to outsiders, and the team had scarcely gotten out of Berbera when it was viciously attacked during the night. One of the attackers drove a javelin into Burton’s face, impaling him from cheek to cheek and leaving him, when it was dislodged the next morning, with “a jagged vertical scar that ran the length of his cheek,” Millard writes. Speke was captured and tortured, but he was nothing if not brave, and he managed to punch one of his assailants with his bound fists and escape, pursued by dozens of Somalis hurling spears. Speke and Burton survived, but their supplies were gone, and a member of the expedition party had been killed in the attack. Speke began nurturing a gnawing resentment of Burton, especially after Burton appropriated his diary as an appendix for a book he wrote about the adventure, brutally editing the diary in the process.
On returning to England, both Burton and Speke served on military assignments in the Crimean War, but by 1856, after the war ended, they were back in East Africa together again on another expedition sponsored but inadequately funded by the Royal Geographical Society. Both Burton and Speke were sick with various fevers throughout the journey, and Speke went partially blind from ophthalmia. When the two finally became the first Europeans to stand on the shore of Lake Tanganyika nearly 900 miles from the coast, he could hardly see it.
Burton was convinced that Lake Tanganyika was the source of the White Nile, but his crew by now had no food, no money, and no trade goods left that might finance an effort to prove it — and besides, he was sick again, this time more or less chronically. Speke, meanwhile, had heard of another large lake, Nyanza, to the northeast of Lake Tanganyika. While Burton tried to recuperate in 1858, Speke renamed his new watery find Lake Victoria, after the queen. This was where the White Nile, and thus the Nile itself, began, Speke was certain, but he couldn’t prove that claim, either. The rivalry between the two flamed into open hatred.
By the time Burton got to London with his Tanganyika claim, Speke had already been touting his discoveries for weeks. He was a Johnny-come-lately whose moral reputation, already shaky, was now in tatters.
As a final blow, Speke secured a generous grant from the Royal Geographical Society to return to the Nyanza along with Bombay and James Augustus Grant, a self-effacing Indian army veteran who was happy to be second in command. At Nyanza’s north end, in today’s Uganda, they found what they had been looking for: a single outlet in the shape of an enormous waterfall whose torrents flowed in the direction of Egypt. Speke named it Ripon Falls, after George Robinson, the first marquess of Ripon, who had been president of the Royal Geographical Society when Speke set out in 1860. Speke did not completely prove his case. That would come only in the 1870s, when newspaperman Henry Morton Stanley, the man who found Livingstone and who was also guided by Bombay, thoroughly navigated the Central African waterways and found no alternative sources, including Lake Tanganyika.
On Sept. 16, 1864, Speke and Burton were scheduled to debate their theories about the Nile before the British Association in Bath. The morning of the day before, Sept. 15, Speke fled on seeing Burton and his wife in the lecture hall: “I cannot stand this any longer.” His destination was his uncle’s estate in Wiltshire, about 20 miles away. At about 2:30 p.m., he went shooting birds with his young cousin and the gamekeeper. A shot rang out, and a dying Speke was found next to a low stone wall. His death was probably accidental, but it might have been suicide. The hunt for the source of the Nile had reached its tragic end, leaving behind an incredible story of exploration.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
