FROM VICTORIA NYANZA TO ALEXANDRIA
On the 28th of July, 1862, Speke stood by the side of the Ripon Falls,
where the Victoria Nile leaves the great Nyanza at the head of Napoleon
Gulf. Grant had gone off with a portion of the expedition on the more
direct route to Unyoro. Speke had reached the Victoria Nile first of
all below its exit from the lake, and describes the scene as follows:--
“It was the very perfection of the effect aimed at in a highly
kept park, with a magnificent stream of from six to seven hundred
yards wide, dotted with islets and rocks,--the former occupied by
fishermen’s huts, the latter by birds and crocodiles basking in the
sun,--flowing between fine, high grassy banks, with rich trees and
plantains in the background, where herds of topi and hartebeest
could be seen grazing, while the hippopotami were snorting in the
water and bustards and guineafowl were rising at our feet.”
[Illustration: THE NILE AT THE ISAMBA RAPIDS (looking North).
Where Speke first struck it.]
Marching up the left bank of the Nile towards the lake, he thus
describes that river at the Isamba rapids:--
“The water ran deep between its banks, which were covered with fine
grass, soft cloudy acacia, and festoons of lilac convolvuli, whilst
here and there, where the land had slipped above the rapids,
bared spaces of red earth could be seen, like that of Devonshire;
there, too, the waters, impeded by a natural dam, seemed like a
huge mill pond, sullen and dark, in which two crocodiles, lying
about, were looking out for prey. From the high banks I looked down
upon a line of sloping wooded islets lying across the stream, which
divide its waters, and, by interrupting them, cause at once both
dam and rapids. The whole was more fairy-like, wild, and romantic
than--I must confess that my thoughts took that shape--anything I
ever saw outside of a theatre. It was exactly the sort of place,
in fact, where, bridged across from one side-slip to the other, on
a moonlight night, brigands would assemble to enact some dreadful
tragedy. Even the Wangwana (Zanzibaris) seemed spellbound at the
novel beauty of the sight, and no one thought of moving till hunger
warned us that night was setting in, and we had better look out for
lodgings.”
Speke describes the Ripon Falls, where the Nile leaves the lake, as by
far the most interesting sight he had ever seen in Africa. The falls
are stemmed by rocky islands and crowned by magnificent trees.[72]
“It was a sight that attracted one to it for hours,--the roar of
the waters, the thousands of passenger-fish, leaping at the falls
with all their might, the Basoga and Baganda fishermen coming
out in boats and taking post on all the rocks with rod and hook,
hippopotami and crocodiles lying sleepily on the water, the ferry
at work above the falls, and cattle driven down to drink at the
margin of the lake. The scene made, in all, with the pretty nature
of the country,--small hills, grassy-topped, with trees in the
folds, and gardens on the lower slopes,--as interesting a picture
as one could wish to see.”
This was Speke’s furthest point eastward in connection with Nile
discovery. He confesses in his book that he has missed much by not
going through Busoga to see the northeast corner of the lake. Had
he done so, he might have cleared up at the very beginning the most
disputed portion of that lake’s geography. At the northeast corner
of the Victoria Nyanza is a long and narrow gulf which we now term
Kavirondo Bay. This gulf figures on Speke’s map as a semi-independent
Lake Baringo. Stanley, in his circumnavigation, wholly overlooked it,
as its mouth is blocked by islands. Joseph Thompson read a quarter of
the riddle. One-half was guessed by Mr. C. W. Hobley, and the remaining
quarter was cleared up by an expedition under Commander Whitehouse.
[Illustration: RIPON FALLS, FROM BUGUNGA, WHERE SPEKE FIRST SAW THEM.]
These falls of the Nile were named after the Earl de Grey and Ripon,
then President of the Royal Geographical Society; and the gulf of
the Victoria Nyanza, from which the Nile issued, was called Napoleon
Channel after the then Emperor of the French. Speke and his party, with
their Baganda guides, got into canoes, and paddled some distance down
the Nile north of the Isamba rapids. But just as they were nearing Lake
Kioga (of whose existence Speke was ignorant) they passed an important
town on the left bank of the Nile which was an outpost of Unyoro,
under a semi-independent chief. Here the party was received with the
greatest hostility, and obliged to give up the river route. Speke
struck inland to the waters of the Luajali, which he wrongly believed
to be another outlet of the Victoria Nyanza, and shortly afterwards
met Grant, who was on his return journey from the capital of Unyoro.
After some hesitation they decided to join forces and march on Unyoro
overland. By this means they entirely lost count of the course of the
Victoria Nile for some distance, and of the existence of the great
lakes Kioga and Kwania. As they crossed the boundary line and entered
Unyoro, Speke writes:--
“This first march was a picture of all the country to its capital:
an interminable forest of small trees, bush, and tall grass, with
scanty villages, low huts, and dirty-looking people clad in skins;
the plantain, sweet potato, sesamum, and ulezi (millet) forming
the chief edibles, besides goats and fowls; whilst the cows, which
are reported to be numerous, were kept, as everywhere else where
pasture-lands are good, by the wandering, unsociable Wahuma, and
were seldom seen. No hills, except a few scattered cones, disturb
the level surface of the land, and no pretty views ever cheer
the eye. Uganda is now entirely left behind; we shall not see
its like again; for the further one leaves the equator, and the
rain-attracting influences of the Mountains of the Moon, vegetation
decreases proportionately with the distance.”
[Illustration: VIEW OF NAPOLEON GULF, FROM JINJA.]
Speke had sent on, many months in advance, his head-man, Baraka, to
await him in Unyoro, and possibly to convey letters to Petherick. But
for this action in all probability a peaceful entry into Unyoro would
have been refused, as the Baganda were much detested there for their
predatory raids. Kamurasi, King of Unyoro, was very nearly as big a
scoundrel and as inhospitable to strangers as his son Kabarega, who is
now residing in the Seychelles Islands. After innumerable difficulties
caused by the caprices of Mutesa and the jealousies subsisting between
the Baganda and Banyoro, and the fierce suspicions of Kamurasi, they
reached the capital of that monarch who considered himself to be the
legitimate emperor over all the lands once ruled by the Bahima race.
This capital was situated then on a peninsula between the Kafu River
and the Nile, on what is now the soil of Uganda. The Kafu River, which
is a broad, marshy stream rising not far from the Albert Nyanza, is the
present boundary between the two kingdoms. Speke wrongly believed it to
be another outlet of the Nile.
For nine days Speke and his companion were kept waiting before the
suspicious king could make up his mind to see them. From the 9th of
September to the 9th of November the whole expedition was detained
at the Court of this greedy tyrant. At his Court they heard of the
existence of a large lake, “Lutanzige,” to the west,[73] and asked
permission to go and see it. This was refused, and thus another
opportunity of adding an important piece of information to Nile
discovery was denied to Speke, who could have travelled to and from
the coast of Lake Albert in three weeks instead of wasting two months
at Kamurasi’s Court. However, during this long stay Speke managed to
send Bombay with some of Kamurasi’s men down the Nile and through
the Lango and Acholi countries to Petherick’s outpost. After Bombay’s
return with this cheering news, Speke was more than ever impatient to
get away. Kamurasi attempted to delay the departure under one pretext
or another, no doubt with the object of bleeding the expedition of more
and more gifts. At last, on the 9th of November, they descended the
Kafu River to its junction with the Nile, and found themselves on the
broad Nile, still lake-like in extent, owing to the vicinity of Lake
Kioga. In this manner, some travelling by canoe and some by land, they
reached the Karuma Falls, from which point they left the Nile, marching
across the marshy and then steppe-like countries of the Acholi, and
came first into touch with the influence of Egypt at Faloro, on the
borders of the Madi country. Here they met a Sudanese named Muhammad
Wad-el-Mek,--quite black, but dressed like an Egyptian and talking
Arabic. Muhammad was in command of some two hundred Sudanese, who,
by their association with Egypt, were known as Turks by the natives.
Muhammad Wad-el-Mek at first professed to be Petherick’s employé, and
then confessed that he was really the head-man of a Maltese trader
named De Bono. These were the men that Petherick had arranged with De
Bono were to come into touch with Speke’s expedition.
Here, however, they met with some disappointment. Instead of being
allowed to proceed directly to Gondokoro, Muhammad Wad-el-Mek sought
to detain them by alleging that no boats would be waiting for them
at Gondokoro at that season (December). The usual heart-breaking
delays took place. Speke decided from this point (Faloro) to send back
Kijwiga,--a fairly faithful Unyoro guide, who had been with him now,
one way and the other, about a year, having originally been sent to
greet him in Uganda. Meantime Muhammad, De Bono’s agent, went off to
the southward with his men to fight one African chief on behalf of
another so as to secure a large quantity of ivory.
Speke was shocked, during his stay in Unyoro, at the abominable way
in which the “Turks” treated the inoffensive Madi natives. At last,
on the 12th of January, 1863, Speke, disgusted and hopeless at the
delay, started ahead to a village called Panyoro. He was followed
up by Muhammad’s men, and they arrived at the Nile near the modern
station of Afuddu (close to the junction of the river Asua and the
Nile). At this place they found a tree with the letters M. I. inscribed
on its bark. This was the remains of an attempt on the part of the
Venetian traveller Miani to carve his name on a tree so as to give some
information to Speke, who had long been expected in this direction. At
this place there was another halt, which Speke and Grant employed in
killing game, and giving a great deal of the meat thus acquired to the
natives.
On the first of February they started again, Muhammad having procured
porters by the most arbitrary methods. They followed the Nile down to
the confluence of the Asua River. This stream Speke imagined to flow
out of what we now call Kavirondo Bay. It is strange that so great a
geographer should have had such elementary notions about hydrography.
He gives the Victoria Nyanza something like four principal outlets,
much as the Portuguese in earlier days provided lakes in the centre
of Africa which fed impartially the Congo, the Nile, and the Zambezi.
Crossing the Asua, they emerged along the Nile rapids until they
arrived at the verge of the Bari country. One serious attack was made
on them, but was met by the determined measures taken by Muhammad.
At last, on the 15th of February, 1863, they walked into Gondokoro.
Here their first inquiry was for Petherick. “A mysterious silence
ensued; we were informed that Mr. De Bono was the man we had to thank
for the assistance we had received in coming from Madi.” Hurrying down
through the ruins of the abandoned Austrian Mission to the bank of the
river, where a line of vessels was moored, the explorers suddenly saw
Mr. Samuel Baker marching towards them. “What joy this was I cannot
tell. We could not talk fast enough, so overwhelmed were we both to
meet again.”[74]
Mr. Samuel Baker had conceived the idea of going to meet Speke at the
head waters of the Nile. He and his wife (the present Lady Baker)
arrived at Khartum, and there received much information and assistance
from Petherick in the furtherance of their work. As to Petherick
himself, he arrived with his wife also a few days after Speke reached
Gondokoro. Speke seems to have been rather hard on this man. We know
that Petherick went up the river to Gondokoro in 1862, expecting to
get news of Speke, and not imagining that he could have lost something
like a year of travel by his delays in Unyamwezi, Uganda, and Unyoro.
Being unable to remain indefinitely at Gondokoro without news of the
travellers, he arranged with De Bono to send Muhammad and his men in
the direction of Unyoro to found a post where Speke might be awaited.
As we know, these orders were carried out. Petherick was naturally
obliged to think of his own means of livelihood, for he was an unpaid
consul. He therefore went on an ivory-trading expedition west of
the Mountain Nile, knowing, of course, that Baker would be awaiting
the travellers, and that runners from the direction of Gondokoro
would keep him advised as to their approach. He and his wife reached
Gondokoro only a few days after Speke had arrived there. Speke,
however, refused all assistance at their hands, and decided to return
to Khartum on Baker’s dahabiah. Speke’s adverse report on Petherick,
combined with the intrigues of the Turks, who disliked his opposition
to the slave-trade, practically ruined Petherick, as we have seen in a
previous chapter.
The journey of this wonderful expedition from Gondokoro down the Nile
(Speke mistaking the origin and course of its affluents as he went
along, so that his map in this respect is very incorrect) was broken
at Khartum, whence the Europeans and Negroes travelled across the
desert to Egypt. Of the hundred-odd porters who left Zanzibar with this
expedition in 1860, nineteen (including Bombay) reached Cairo with
Speke and Grant, the remainder having deserted, died, or been sent back
from various points. These survivors were generously treated by Speke,
who gave them an extra year’s pay as a gratuity, and orders for land
and marriage portions on their reaching Zanzibar. He also provided for
their free passage from Suez to Zanzibar via the Seychelles Islands.
Somehow or other they went on by mistake to Mauritius, where they were
treated most generously by the little colony. Thence they were sent in
safety to Zanzibar. From this point several of these men subsequently
journeyed with Stanley and other African explorers. Bombay, “Captain
of the Faithful,” died in 1886 (?), having been in receipt during the
last years of his life of a regular pension from the Royal Geographical
Society.
Speke and Grant returned to England in the spring of 1863. By December
in that year Speke had finished his great book, the “Discovery of the
Source of the Nile.” Speke, soon after his return, was received by the
present king. In the autumn of 1863 he was given an ovation in the
county of Somerset worthy of his achievements. “Punch” accorded him
a cartoon drawn by Tenniel, but the British government did _nothing_
for him, unless there can be attributed to its influence the paltry
satisfaction of granting to him through the Heralds College supporters
and an additional motto to his coat of arms. By this grant his family
is now entitled to add a hippopotamus and a crocodile as supporters to
their shield, a crocodile to their crest, the flowing Nile to their
coat of arms, and the additional motto, “Honor est a Nilo.”
[Illustration: THE LAST MAP ISSUED TO ILLUSTRATE SPEKE’S THEORIES,
1865.]
Meantime Burton had become a British consul on the West Coast of
Africa, and was returning to England in 1864. Speke had published
articles in “Blackwood” and a book which, as already related, made
uncomplimentary references to his former companion. The two great
travellers were invited to meet at the British Association at Bath in
1864 and discuss their different views as to the Nile sources; for
Burton, as a tit-for-tat, had published a work in collaboration with
Petherick, in which he sought to prove that Speke’s discovery of the
Victoria Nyanza was unimportant. Taking advantage of the traveller’s
admission that he had touched but seldom the shores of this great
lake, he denied its existence, and reduced it to a mere assemblage of
pools and swamps. Speke, before quitting Baker at Gondokoro, had told
him much of the Luta Nzige or Western Lake which had some connection
with the Nile, and Baker (as will be subsequently set forth) had
followed Speke’s indications with success, and discovered and named
the Albert Nyanza. His exaggeration of the length of this sheet of
water had convinced Burton that Speke was altogether mistaken, and
that he himself was wrong in having earlier stated that the Rusizi
River flowed into and not out of the north end of Tanganyika. (Neither
Speke nor Burton actually saw the Rusizi.) Burton therefore turned
the Rusizi into an effluent of Tanganyika, and made it a connection
between that lake and the Albert Nyanza. Had he had any glimmerings
of lakes Kivu, Albert Edward, and the Semliki, he would no doubt have
been still more certain of his hypothesis. As it was, Speke’s theories
have been shown subsequently to have been very near the whole truth.
The Victoria Nyanza is the main source of the Nile, though that river
finds another reservoir in the great swampy lakes of Kioga and Kwania
(which again receive much of the drainage of Mount Elgon), and a most
important contribution from the Albert Nyanza; for this last lake
is the receptacle of all the drainage of the Ruwenzori snow range.
At the time, however, Speke’s theory was not sufficiently supported
by evidence, and was certainly open to attack, the more so because
he had blundered by giving the Victoria Nyanza so many outlets. The
two great men were to meet and discuss their differences, and every
one knew that underneath a mere dispute on geographical theories lay
deep-seated bitterness of feeling. It was said that Speke, who hated
quarrelling, and perhaps felt some compunction as to the frankness of
his remarks concerning Burton, looked forward to this public meeting
with great dislike, the more so as he was a poor and unready public
speaker. But the intended conference was never to come off; on the
21st of September, 1864, Speke, whilst out partridge-shooting on his
father’s land at Jordans, near Ilminster, was scrambling over a stile
with his gun at full-cock. It was just one of those little imprudences
that even the wariest of African travellers commits when he returns to
civilisation. Both barrels of the gun were discharged into his body,
and he died within a few hours. The news was received by the British
Association at Bath just as the meeting was about to commence, and
as Burton was seated awaiting the arrival of his old comrade. This
terrible event hushed the difference between them. Burton’s wife, a
gifted woman, who sometimes wrote very good poetry, inscribed some very
beautiful lines to the memory of Speke.
[Illustration: SPEKE’S HANDWRITING.
(Letter to Laurence Oliphant.)]
We take leave here of one of the greatest of African explorers, the
second greatest only, if Stanley is to be accounted the first. Only a
man of extraordinary energy, determination, bravery, tact, and of iron
constitution could have struggled through the difficulties which beset
Speke on his route from Zanzibar to the Victoria Nyanza, and from the
Victoria Nyanza to the navigable Nile. The purport of the expedition
was wellnigh wrecked between Unyamwezi and the Victoria Nyanza; it
ran many risks from the caprices of Mutesa; several times Kamurasi
threatened it with failure in Unyoro; other dangers awaited it in the
Madi and Bari countries, but it finally resulted in affording us the
main solution of the Nile Quest. As the outcome of Speke’s journey,
the Victoria Nyanza was placed on the map with some approximate
correctness as to shape and area; the shape and size of Lake Albert
Nyanza were guessed at with extraordinary accuracy, and the course
of the White and Mountain Nile was foreshadowed with the same amount
of truth as in the case of the Albert Nyanza. The remarkable Hima
aristocracy of equatorial Africa and the barbaric court of Uganda were
revealed to the world. Speke broke the back of the Nile mystery, just
as Stanley did that of the Congo. It only remained henceforth to fill
up the minor details of the map.