December 1960
By 1856 there were steam-engines, gas lighting and chloroform, and most of the world had been discovered and mapped, but the centre of Africa and its inner mystery, the source of the Nile, remained inexhaustibly secret - any speculation upon either resting in a legend of the first century, when a Greek merchant name Diogenes landed on the east coast of Africa and made a twenty-five-day journey inland to arrive ‘in the vicinity of two great lakes and a snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources’. From this story Ptolemy produced his remarkable map, which was endlessly disputed but never absolutely discredited, as all subsequent expeditions launched upstream from the lower and known reaches of the Nile failed due to rapids, cataracts, swamp, tropical heat, fevers, hostile tribes and other local deterrents.
There were, however, persistent rumours of inland seas and mountains, and in 1856 Richard Burton and John Speke set out to discover these and to determine the source of the White Nile. (The lesser Blue Nile had been accounted for in the eighteenth century.) And that is when this most fascinating and admirable book begins. Mr. Moorehead deals only with the following forty-four years, but this short time is so packed with the exploits, adventures and incredible hardships of the tremendous and often clashing personalities involved, that if his book had been four times as long one would simply have dropped everything else for longer in order to finish it.
The conditions of exploration in the middle of the nineteenth century must here be taken into account: on the one hand expeditions were launched at great leisure - hampers of Fortnum’s best provisions, cases of wine and brandy, scientific books and sealing wax, camp beds, steel boats (in sections - everything had to be carried on the heads of hundreds of porters); on the other hand, these people walked - hundreds of hostile, tropical, fever-ridden miles - unless they were so ill that they had actually to be carried; malaria was a governing factor, and very little was known about it; quinine was used but the doses were guessed at and usually wrong; they were frequently cut off from the outside world for months or even years at a time, and they had to count on being betrayed or deserted by the greater part of their entourage.
Central Africa may seem the largest possible stage, but the characters making history upon it are of such heroic proportions - so much larger than what is commonly thought of as life - that they seem to crowd it. Only the strongest, most ruthlessly enduring could survive, and unfortunately, people of this kind seldom see eye to eye with each other for solitary and nerve-racking months on end. Speke and Burton ended their association at loggerheads, which culminated in Speke’s mysterious death in England from an elementary accident with his own gun: he was thirty-seven, and he had discovered and named the Ripon Falls, but he and Burton had not agreed and more exploration was necessary.
The next expedition was conducted by a most endearing pair called Baker; he, a Victorian gentleman whom Stanley describes as “a magnificent and sensible man”, and his much younger beautiful Hungarian wife, who, with heavy long skirts and long golden hair, accompanies her husband through two years of the most breath-taking and ghastly adventures, and of whom her husband (with possibly the most masterly understatement ever made) says: “She was not a screamer.”
Meanwhile, Livingstone had been sent on what was to be his last journey, and little or nothing had been heard of him for five years, with the result that a reporter on the New York Herald had been sent on the following simple assignment: ‘cover the opening of the Suez Canal, and proceed up the Nile, Go to Jerusalem, etc., the Crimea, etc., through Persia as far as India. After that you can start looking for Livingstone.’
Stanley - a man of iron resolution and boundless ambition - as we know, found Livingstone; the eight months’ march to this end merely whetted his appetite for African adventure, and it was his journeys which finally proved Speke’s discoveries, it was he who, after a marathon walk from the mouth of the Congo on the West Coast to Lake Albert, rescued the reluctant Emin Pasha - then Governor of Equatoria - a man whose career had been as strange as his own. (As Mr. Symons says: ‘We often say extremes meet when we mean mediocrities encounter’), but the Welsh orphan and the German doctor really were extremes …
In the north there is the tragic Gordon, whose unique capacities precipitated him into dealings with more and more of a world with which he has lost touch: Mr. Moorehead’s description of the final months of Gordon in Khartoum, the Mahdi encamped in the desert outside, and Wolsey plodding the 1,500 miles to rescue is one of the memorable accounts in this most excellent work, which being easily one of the best books of 1960 deserved better proof reading, and which repays reading with a better map than those provided.