The Blue Nile starts with a deceptive quietness, flowing low-banked, oily-smooth and brown between the tossing plumes of papyrus reeds as it leaves the wide waters of Lake Tana. A few miles on a rumble from round a bend heralds the first cataract; the river narrows, drops a few feet and suddenly the smooth waters are turned into a boiling chaos of foaming waves. For the next 470 miles to the Sudanese border the river cleaves its way into a deep-set valley that drives in a giant half-circle through the Ethiopian Highlands. Cataracts alternate with long stretches of smooth waters, whose every eddy holds its own family of crocodiles. The two-legged variety are probably the more dangerous, however, for it is a lawless region where almost every man carries a gun or spear and several parties descending the Blue Nile have been attacked by Shifta bands.
The combination of wild water and cataracts, crocodiles and bandits, make it one of the most exciting river challenges in the world. The story goes back to the early 1900s, when an American millionaire called W.N. McMillan attempted a descent in 1903 with three specially constructed steel boats. He launched them at the Shafartak bridge which carries the main road from Addis Ababa to Debre Markos and crosses the Blue Nile about a third of the way down, between Lake Tana and the Sudanese frontier. It is a convenient division, for some of the most precipitous rapids are above the bridge. McMillan did not get far, as the boats sank in the first cataract.
The river was then left well alone until after the Second World War, when a series of abortive, at times bizarre, attempts were made to descend it. On one occasion a young Austrian sculptor built himself a raft of petrol drums lashed to wooden planks, but did not get very far. In 1962 a group of Swiss canoeists started down from the Shafartak bridge and very nearly reached the Sudanese frontier, when they were attacked by Shifta bandits. Two of the team were killed but the rest managed to escape. In 1964 Arne Robin, a Swedish economist working for the United Nations, set out on his own from the Shafartak bridge and succeeded in canoeing all the way down to Khartoum in eight days. He was attacked by crocodiles, never lit a fire and only stopped when it was dark. Two years later he attempted the upper part of the river with a companion, Carl Gustav Forsmark, in a two-seater canoe. They managed only fifteen miles before being capsized in a whirlpool and very nearly lost their lives.
Then, in 1968, came the biggest and most highly organised venture so far. It was led by Captain John Blashford-Snell and was essentially an army expedition. On the stretch of river below the Shafartak road bridge, they used big flat-bottomed army assault boats powered by outboard motors, and on the river above they had four Avon Redshank rubber dinghies powered by paddle alone. I was closely involved, for I went out as the Daily Telegraph correspondent and photographer, accompanying them down most of the river. Four years later a very different party attempted a complete descent of the river, just four men in single-seater kayak canoes, led by Mike Jones, a twenty-year-old medical student. The stories of these two expeditions make an interesting contrast.
John Blashford-Snell is a big, well-fleshed man with a heavy jaw and close-clipped military moustache. He sports a sola topee, Sam Browne belt with holstered pistol, and always wears his badges of rank. He is perhaps a frustrated Victorian who would have been most happy in command of an expeditionary force venturing into darkest Africa but even today, as a comparatively junior officer, he has been extraordinarily successful in creating a series of ventures under his own autonomous command that bear a close resemblance to their nineteenth-century forbears. On the Blue Nile he had a team of fifty-six, supported by a military single-engined Beaver aircraft, army Land Rovers that had been specially flown out, a radio set up to make contact with headquarters in England, and a flotilla of boats.
The expedition was in the best tradition of African exploration, having aims that were both adventurous and scientific. During the first part of the trip the four big assault boats were going to ferry a band of zoologists, accompanied by an archaeologist, down the lower part of the river from the Shafartak road bridge. Once this had been achieved, a white water team was to attempt the upper part of the river in rubber dinghies. It was in the latter part of the expedition that the adventure really started. I, certainly, was more frightened and came closer to losing my life in a whole series of different ways than I have ever done in the mountains, before or since.
The white water team which set out from the source of the river at Lake Tana on 8 September 1968 numbered nine, in three Redshank dinghies named Faith, Hope and Charity. Leader of the group was Roger Chapman, a regular captain in the Green Howards. A quiet, serious and very thoughtful man who had done a certain amount of sea canoeing, he had very limited experience of white water – a lack we all had in common. We had had a few days’ practice on rivers in Wales, but these were mere trickles compared to the Blue Nile.
The heavily laden rubber dinghies behaved sluggishly in the smooth waters immediately below Lake Tana, but when we hit our first cataract, six miles down the river, they were like pieces of flotsam at the mercy of the waves. Even so, it was quite incredibly exhilarating. As walls of white water lunged above and around us, smashing into us with a solid force, there was no time for fear – just an intense excitement. It was like skiing, surfing and fast driving, all rolled into one – a roller-coaster ride down an avalanche of white water. On that first cataract Roger Chapman’s boat, the first down, capsized, thrown on its back by one of the big standing waves. There was very little skill in getting down the cataracts, our paddle power was so puny against the volume of the waters. It was a matter of luck which waves we hit.
That night we camped by the bank, just the nine of us, in an open meadow surrounded by low brush. Exhilarated by the day’s run, I felt a profound sense of contentment as we sat under an almost full moon, boiling pre-cooked rice and curried meat bar which we further seasoned with garlic and chillies. Lip to this point the trip had resembled a cross between a military operation and a Boy Scout jamboree, the adventure a carefully fostered illusion, but after that day on the river the adventure now seemed real enough. The following day, it was to become too real. My feelings at this point were very similar to those of Doug Scott when, on our 1975 Everest expedition, he had experienced the frustration of being a pawn in someone else’s game until he found himself fully involved with the core of the adventure – in his case being out in front, near the summit of Everest. On the Blue Nile this came for me from being part of a small group that now formed the spear point of the expedition’s effort to descend the river throughout its upper reaches.
I could even forget my irritation at Roger Chapman’s firm, almost maternal authority. His leadership was excellent, but it was that of the platoon commander with absolute authority, rather than the much more free and easy style to which I had become accustomed in mountaineering circles since leaving the army. I got on well with the other two crew members. Ian Macleod, a lean, slightly built Scot, was a corporal in the Special Air Service Regiment, Britain’s crack commando and counter-insurgency force. Although one of the most junior ranks on the expedition he had the quiet authority of experience and competence that everyone from John Blashford-Snell downwards respected. My other crew-mate was Chris Edwards, a young second-lieutenant from the Infantry; six foot seven inches tall, he played rugby for the army, was immensely powerful but also had a gentleness and breadth of imagination.
Next day we started by pushing the boats through an archipelago of tree-covered islands with spiky palms overhead and dank undergrowth blocking the streambed. It was midday before we reached the open channel where the current raced wide and shallow over a series of cataracts, each one more dangerous than the last. There was no chance of making a foot reconnaissance, for the banks were covered by dense scrub and tentacles of marsh. We had to press on and hope for the best. In one of the cataracts the crew of Hope were flipped out of their boat by a wave. Jim Masters, at forty the eldest member of the white water team, was dragged under water by the undertow and only got back to the surface by inflating his life jacket. As we paused on the bank to repair the bottoms of the boats, he sat very quiet and tense, slightly away from us. At that stage we could not conceive what he had experienced nor fully understand why he was so badly shaken.
Worried by Jim Masters’ narrow escape, we roped the boats down the next cataract from the bank, but this was a slow process and everyone became impatient. We could hardly see the next fall – it was just a shimmer of water in the distance, but we decided to take it. Roger Chapman went first and vanished from sight with a frightening suddenness. There was a long pause and then we saw the green mini-flare which was the signal for the next boat to follow. We let Hope go a few yards in front and followed immediately. They managed to get through without tipping up but were carried, barely in control, over several more cataracts before pulling into the bank.
We were less lucky: we could not see the fall until we were right on top of it. It was a shoot of foaming water, rather like a weir, leading down into the trough of a huge stopper wave – a standing wave caused by the force of water pouring over an obstacle and then rolling back on itself. The boat seemed to teeter for a second on the brink, then shot down. We were all shouting. It hit a rock, slewed round and the next moment I was underwater. I came to the surface, got a glimpse of the boat, bottomside up, and was then pulled under again. Instinctively I pulled the release of the gas cylinder for the life jacket, came to the surface, grabbed a gasp of breath and then went under. It was like being tumbled round in a huge washing machine. I had no sense of fear, just an instinctive determination to breathe when I could, but then came the realisation that I was probably going to drown. A gentle feeling of guilt at having betrayed my wife, Wendy, was replaced by one of curiosity – ‘What will it be like when I’m dead?’
With equal suddenness the water released me and I found myself being swept on to some rocks just below the fall. All three of us had narrow escapes. Ian Macleod somehow hung on to the upended boat and was swept down through some huge falls before managing to grab an overhanging branch on the bank and pull himself to safety. Chris Edwards was swept down on to the brink of another fall, and was only rescued with difficulty and considerable risk by another member of the team going out to him on the end of the line.
It took twenty-four hours for the full shock of our narrow escapes to hit me. Wendy and I had lost our first child by drowning only two years earlier and this compounded the horror. I was so badly shaken that I asked Roger Chapman to drop me from the white water team. Another member of the group also withdrew and Chris Edwards was so badly lacerated that there was now no question of his going on. Both Roger Chapman and John Blashford-Snell were faced with a major crisis. The day’s events had highlighted the very real dangers of the river and the inadequacy of the rubber boats in the rapids. Roger Chapman took off on foot to make a lightning reconnaissance of the river below the Tissisat Falls, where the rapids seemed even more dangerous, while the rest of us were left to work the boats down, close to the bank, to the head of the falls. The Tissisat Falls are as impressive as Niagara, plunging in a great curtain interspersed with forested islands over a sheer wall that bounds the side of a narrow gorge, opening into a wide valley below. A modern hydro-electric station lies just below the falls, and just below this is an old bridge, one of two built by the Portuguese in the eighteenth century.
Since we were short of manpower I had agreed to help bring down the boats and while edging them through narrow channels, often dragging them over waterlogged grass to avoid the worst of the falls, I began to recover my peace of mind. I could not help worrying over my decision to pull out, particularly as two other members of the team who were married had elected to carry on. When Roger returned from his recce, I asked to be reinstated in the white water team, but he had already found a replacement for me and, anyway, I suspect he was quite relieved to lose an argumentative and troublesome subordinate who used his power and independence as a representative of the press to get his own way.
Roger Chapman had now reduced his white water team to six, spread between two boats. As a result of his lightning recce, he had decided that a number of stretches of the river were too dangerous. They portaged the boats to a stretch of the river some miles below the Tissisat Falls, then paddled about twelve miles to a point where the banks closed into a narrow neck, through which the entire volume of the Blue Nile was squeezed, hurtling into a cauldron of bubbling effervescent water. Below this the river plunged into a sheer-sided gorge that stretched for six miles to the second Portuguese bridge below which things appeared to become a little easier. Roger Chapman, therefore, decided to send the boats down by themselves to be picked up by a party already in position at the Portuguese bridge, while the two crews walked round the top.
It is one of those tragic ironies that our SAS man, Ian Macleod, lost his life while taking what had seemed the safest course. We had nearly finished our march to the Portuguese bridge and had to cross the river Abaya; it was only thirty feet wide, but very deep and fast-flowing, opaque brown waters swirling past the sheer rocky banks in the bed of the gorge. Macleod went across second after tying on a safety line. He was so proficient in everything he did, we just assumed he was a strong swimmer, but before he was halfway it became obvious that he was in difficulties. The rope around his waist tended to pull him under and sweep him further downstream. Soon it was all he could do to keep his head above water. The others paid out the rope as he was swept along but in a matter of seconds they came to the end of it. If they held on, he would be pulled under; if they tried to pull him back the same would happen. Someone shouted, ‘Let go the rope!’ They did, and at the same time Roger Chapman, with considerable heroism, his boots still on, dived into the river to try to help Macleod. He managed to grab hold of him and towed him to the other side, reaching it just in time before the river plunged into the next cataract. But the rope tied round Ian’s waist now acted like an anchor and he was torn from Roger’s grasp and dragged under. We never saw him again and his body was never recovered.
John Blashford-Snell was waiting for us at the Portuguese bridge. The flotilla was now to be enlarged to three Redshanks and two inflatable army recce boats powered by outboard motors. Blashford-Snell was to assume command once more and I had elected to return to the river. Though still badly shaken, I could not possibly cover the story from the bank.
The water was never as bad as it had been above the Tissisat Falls, but it was like going down a liquid Cresta run, never sure what was round the next bend and barely able to stop. There was no more exhilaration, just a nagging fear and taut concentration as we spun the boats out of the way of boulders or edged round the worst of the waves. Now the river began to take on a new character hurrying in a solid smooth stream between sheer rock walls. It was at last possible to relax and marvel at the rock architecture around us. Slender towers jutted hundreds of feet out of the riverbed, while huge natural arches spanned its tributaries. We stopped that night in an idyllic campsite by the tree-covered banks of a side stream. The walls of the gorge towered 150 feet above us.
We were intrigued by two caves in the sheer cliff opposite, which had obviously been inhabited at one time. Next morning we succeeded in climbing to them from the boat and discovered a number of broken pots and old grain silos well covered in bat dung. We were all excited by the discovery as we packed up camp. I was drinking a cup of coffee when John ran into the camp and shouted, ‘Hurry up, it’s time we got out of here.’ At the same time, there was a sudden, high-pitched keening from above, followed by a volley of rifle fire. We were completely taken by surprise, finding it impossible to believe that people were actually trying to kill us.
My first reaction was that perhaps they just wanted to warn us off. John Blashford-Snell ran out with the loudhailer shouting, ‘Ternasterling, ternasterling,’ the conventional form of greeting, but one of the men on the cliff opposite replied by firing at him. I can remember running out myself, trying to wave to them, and then noticing a rifle pointing straight at me. While some of us tried appeasement others raced out from cover to load the boats. We were still arguing in the shelter of the trees about what we should do, but no one recommended firing back at this stage. One party wanted to make a break for it; the other, of which I was one, felt we should stay put and try to reason with our attackers, or call up support on the wireless. The deciding factor was a huge rock, the size of a kitchen table, that came hurling down from above.
‘Gentlemen, someone has got to make a decision,’ said John Blashford-Snell, in a remarkably cool voice. ‘When I say “go”, run for the boats.’
The next thing I remember is pushing out our boat through the shallows. Glancing up the whole sky seemed full of rocks; bullets spurted in the water around us. We were gathering speed in the main current when I suddenly felt a violent blow on my back and was hurled across the boat. I had been hit by a rock.
John Blashford-Snell had now got out his revolver and was taking potshots at our attackers, though the chances of hitting anyone with a pistol at a range of 150 feet, shooting upwards from a moving boat, must have been slight. It did, perhaps, cause them to duck, for it seems a miracle that not only were none of us hit but neither were the large targets presented by the boats. If an inflated side had been punctured it could have been serious.
Fortunately we travelled much faster on the river than they could possibly manage on the banks and as a result were soon out of range. That night we stopped on an island off the Gojjam shore. Just before dark a youngster swam the channel, chatted with us and no doubt had a good look at all our possessions. We were all nervous and, before going to bed, I made sure I had everything to hand, even contemplating keeping my boots on. Roger Chapman was standing sentry in the middle of the night. He had just walked out of the camp to check the boats and shone his torch casually at the water’s edge. The light picked out the head of someone swimming across from the other bank. Then he heard a rattle of stones and swung the torch on a group of men gathered on the water’s edge, spears clutched in their hands. He shouted out; one of them fired at him and suddenly it was bedlam.
I can remember waking to the shrill war-whoops of our attackers. I did not feel afraid, just keyed to a high pitch. I had been worried the previous night about the boats, which were pulled up on to the beach about 200 feet from our camp. If the bandits managed to release or capture these, we should have no chance of survival. Grabbing my pistol and my box of cameras and exposed film, I shouted, ‘For God’s sake get down to the boats,’ then started running, crouched, towards them. Roger Chapman heard me and did the same, while the others formed a rough line across the island, firing back at our attackers. It was a confusion of shouts and yells, of gun flashes and the arc of mini-flares which John Blashford-Snell, with great resource, was aiming at our attackers. I paused a couple of times, pointed my pistol at some of the gun flashes and fired. There was little chance of hitting anyone and suddenly I realised that only two bullets were left in the chamber and there were no spare rounds in my pocket. What on earth would I do if some of our attackers had sneaked up on the boats? I ran on down to them and was greatly relieved to find no one there.
Then, as suddenly as the noise had started, there was silence – just an occasional rustle from the bank showed that our attackers were still there. We packed up in the dark and withdrew to the boats. We stayed there for a couple of hours hoping to wait until dawn before descending the river, but at 3.30 in the morning a bugle blared, almost certainly heralding another attack. John Blashford-Snell was worried about our shortage of ammunition and gave the order to cast off.
In complete silence we drifted into the main stream – it was an eerie experience, for we were able to see only the sheen of water and the dark silhouette of the banks. Then we heard the thunder of a cataract ahead and tried to pull into the bank, but were helpless in the current. Suddenly, we were in white water; we climbed a huge wave, came down the other side and were through, but the other two boats were less lucky.
‘We seemed to stand on end,’ Roger Chapman told me afterwards. ‘I jammed my leg under the thwart and somehow managed to stay in the boat, but the other two were thrown out. I realised immediately that if I couldn’t grab them we should never find them in the dark. They came to the surface just alongside the boat, and I dragged them in.’
Meanwhile, the boat which had us in tow, was sinking; the air valve had developed a fault and the front compartment was completely deflated. They had no choice but to release us and we drifted away in the dark. It was a good half-mile before we managed to pull on to a sandbank in the middle of the river where we sat until dawn, feeling very lonely and vulnerable.
The drama never seemed to end. John Fletcher had damaged the propeller of his boat immediately after being thrown out in the cataract. As soon as they reached a sandbank he got out his tool kit to change propellers while the party waited for the dawn. A few minutes later he walked over to Roger Chapman.
‘A terrible thing’s happened. I’ve lost the nut holding the propeller,’ he whispered.
The outboard motor was essential for our escape and they tried fixing it with a bent nail, but that was no good. Then, as a last resort, they mixed some Araldite glue and stuck it back on the shaft, but the glue needed at least an hour to stick and by now it was beginning to get light.
John Blashford-Snell waited as long as he dared before giving the order to move. John Fletcher had tied a polythene bag round the propeller in an effort to keep the glue dry and the boats were pushed off and drifted down the river.
The only noise was the gurgling of the smooth, fast-flowing water. The wan light of the dawn coloured the fluted rocks and pinnacles on either side of the gorge a subtle brown. In contrast to the night’s violence it was unbelievably beautiful. As we swept down the river, it was all so peaceful and yet so full of lurking threats.
Later on that morning we met up with one of the big flat-bottomed assault boats that had driven up against the current to escort us down to the Shafartak bridge. Our adventures were nearly over and, that afternoon on 25 September, we pulled the boats up on to the shore just below the bridge. We had descended most of the upper reaches of the Blue Nile, though we had avoided two long sections of difficult cataracts.
The expedition had achieved a great deal, covering more of the river than any previous expedition and completing some useful zoological work. It had also proved more adventurous than any of us had anticipated. John Blashford-Snell had tried to foresee every possible eventuality, running the expedition like a military operation with the backup of support parties and the Beaver aircraft, but once on the waters of the upper river the backup could have been on another continent for all the help it could give. In some ways his approach was that of the leader of a large siege-style expedition in the Himalaya, with the security of fixed ropes and camps. His management was that of a military commander with a clear chain of command, with orders being given and obeyed. It undoubtedly worked well, both in the general running of the expedition and at the moments of crisis on the river itself. It could be argued, however, that the very size and ponderousness of the party created some of its own problems. In addition, the Redshanks proved totally inadequate for the task in hand. They were too easily capsized and also insufficiently manoeuvrable to pick their way down the rapids with any kind of control.
A very different style of expedition was to attempt the Blue Nile in 1972. I became involved indirectly, when a group of young white water canoeists came to a lecture I gave on our descent of the river in 1968. They wanted to canoe down the reaches of the river Inn, and hope that I would be able to gain them the support of the Daily Telegraph Magazine. I took to them immediately. They had a boyish enthusiasm yet, at the same time, seemed to know what they were talking about. Next day I watched them canoe down some small rapids in Yorkshire and was impressed by the way they handled their craft. Whereas we had been bits of flotsam at the mercy of the Blue Nile, they were like water animals or mermen, encased in the shells of their canoes, flitting in and out from one eddy to the next, choosing their course down a section of rapids, capsizing just for the hell of it, and then rolling back effortlessly into an upright position.
I persuaded the Telegraph Magazine editor to back them and spent an invigorating and at times inspiring week in Austria, photographing them as they shot the most terrifying rapids I had ever seen and the most difficult water any of them had ever attempted. Of the five who started down the river Inn, only two got all the way down to the end of the difficult section – Dave Allen, the oldest and most experienced of the five, and Mike Jones, the youngest. Mike was sixteen at the time, had just finished doing his GCEs at school and was treated by the rest of the team as the apprentice and tea boy; but they could not keep him down. He had an irrepressible quality and this combined with a powerful physique and complete lack of fear got him all the way down the river, when some of the others were forced out either through their boats sinking or a healthy sense of caution. This tremendous feat has not, and never could be, repeated, owing to the diversion of the river from these gorges.
After leaving school Mike decided to become a doctor, going to medical school in Birmingham; but he did not allow this to interfere with his canoeing. He was in Division 1 slalom racing, but though his canoeing was extremely powerful and completely fearless he lacked the precision to get into the British team. Essentially he was an adventurous canoeist. In 1971 he joined Chris Hawksworth, an outstanding Yorkshire canoeist, on another white water adventure, this time to canoe down the Grand Canyon. It was a big team numbering fifteen canoeists. As soon as this was over he began to look round for new challenges and was immediately attracted by the lure of the Blue Nile. He was now twenty, in the middle of an exacting degree course, and yet plunged into the organisation of a full-scale expedition with the same drive and enthusiasm that had taken him down the river Inn.
He was in his element, an extrovert, a born showman with immense self-confidence and boundless energy. He wanted a lightweight trip, both for the aesthetic reason that it would be more of an adventure and also for the practical one that it would cost less. He settled on a team of six. There were to be five canoeists, three of whom were top-class white water men who had been with him to the Grand Canyon, also Mick Hopkinson, another competitive slalom canoeist from Bradford who was making a name for himself on British and Continental white water rivers. Glen Greer, a less powerful canoeist and a friend of Mike’s at Birmingham University, was to be the one-man support team.
Mike flung the expedition together in six months, doing practically all the work himself, but with remarkable family support. Reg and Molly Jones, his parents, became deeply involved in Mike’s adventures, supplying encouragement and practical secretarial backup to his mercurial schemes. He was very much a one-man-band, conceiving an idea and then carrying it through with an explosive enthusiasm which made it very difficult for him to delegate jobs to others. But it was the very force of this drive, however exasperating it might have been to his team members, that overcame a whole series of hurdles which could have stopped a more meticulous and thoughtful planner.
First of all there were the problems of getting the canoes out to Ethiopia, obtaining permission to descend the river, buying firearms and pistols and finding some kind of transport in Ethiopia for the support party. He managed to get a Winston Churchill Fellowship which gave him both a cash base and an air of respectability. He also had the promise of a Land Rover from British Leyland but was unable to get clearance to drive overland into Ethiopia. He sought help from the Royal Air Force and in a letter to the Chief of Air Staff his response to their refusal is quite revealing:
‘I requested air transport out for five canoeists (one in the fleet Air Arm, one in the army and myself in the RAF (University of Birmingham Air Squadron) and, if possible, the Land Rover.
‘The application was turned down. The enormity of the task we are attempting, the generous support we have received from educational and charitable trusts and, above all, the fact that at twenty I should be mature enough and have the ability to set up an international expedition of this kind disgraces the RAF in their refusal, despite their vast resources, to help me explore this little-known area.
‘To quote from the letter received from the Winston Churchill Trust informing me of my successful application: “Sir Winston – war leader, historian, adventurer, soldier, painter, writer, politician and statesman, had no patience with formality or red tape; he believed in action.”
‘In emulating Sir Winston, I hope to see more of the action and less of the Red Tape.’
He received neither reply nor the flights he wanted, but this did not deter him and he managed to get some concessions from Egypt Air. At the same time as organising the expedition he was studying for his exams and organising a tour of the British Junior Canoe Team in Europe. Then, just three weeks before departure, he was confronted with a major crisis. The Services refused clearance to join the expedition for two of his canoeists, on the grounds that the venture was too dangerous and that the political situation in Ethiopia was uncertain. The latter reason seems curious, since an expedition of Sandhurst cadets were in Ethiopia at the same time as Mike Jones and his team. Then a third man also withdrew. The reasons he gave were pressures of business and his unhappiness with Mike Jones’s organisation. He had talked to John Blashford-Snell about the enterprise and felt that a stronger backup was needed.
But Mike was not going to be beaten; he chased around and found two substitutes. David Burkinshaw, a Rotherham schoolteacher who had canoed with Mike on the slalom circuit was, in fact, more highly placed in the ratings than either Mike or the only survivor from the original team Mick Hopkinson; and Steve Nash, an electronics engineer from Reading, who was in the British white water team and, at twenty-seven would be the oldest member of the expedition.
Mike set out for Ethiopia with all the gear on 24 July. The others were going to follow a fortnight later. Looking more like a mercenary than a Winston Churchill Fellow, he arrived at London Airport with two revolvers and a shotgun under his arm. He also had the four canoes and all the expedition gear, fourteen packages in all which Egypt Air had agreed to carry out free as accompanied luggage. He managed to get everything on the plane, surrendering the guns to the pilot for his safekeeping.
He had to change planes at Cairo and tried to persuade the pilot to carry the guns over to Customs, but the pilot wouldn’t touch them. By this time the rest of the passengers had already left the plane and were in the airport bus. Mike, feeling very much on his own, tucked the guns under his arm and walked out on to the tarmac; he had taken only a couple of steps when there was a yell and a guard came rushing up, gun pointed at Mike. Soon he was surrounded by excited guards, disarmed, beaten up and hauled off to a detention centre. He never discovered whether they thought he was a mercenary on the way to the wars or a potential hijacker, but it took him eight hours of hard talking before he had convinced them that he was a peaceable canoeist on the way to the Blue Nile.
His troubles were not over, for when they came to change planes, he discovered that the canoes would not fit into the cargo bay of the Comet which flew from Cairo to Addis Ababa. He had no choice, therefore, but to leave them behind at Cairo, hoping to have them sent on by some alternative means. On arrival at Addis, he found himself plunged into a lone struggle with Ethiopian bureaucracy to get all the gear through Customs. He managed to do this in the comparatively short time of two weeks; it had taken nearly two months for Blashford-Snell’s expedition to clear Customs. But the canoes were still sitting in Cairo Airport.
When the rest of the team flew out to join him, Steve Nash took the precaution of sealing his .38 into the bottom of the metal box containing one of the radios and, as a result, got it through undetected. They were just about to board the plane at Cairo, when Mick Hopkinson noticed the four canoes which Mike Jones had brought out, lying on the tarmac where they had been dumped a fortnight before. Hopkinson insisted on the plane delaying its departure and Steve Nash even tried to unscrew one of the pressurised windows of the plane, hoping to get the canoes in that way and then to lay them in the gangway. He was stopped, very forcibly, by the pilot. In the end they left Dave Burkinshaw in Cairo, while they flew to Addis. Eventually the canoes caught up with them, flown by Ethiopian Airlines.
It was nearly six weeks from the day Mike Jones had set out from Heathrow before they were ready at last to launch their boats in Lake Tana. Inevitably the delays had got on their nerves. Although the group had met each other in the canoe circuit, they did not know each other well. For all except Mike Jones this was their first expedition and even for him there was a vast difference between joining a group canoeing down the Grand Canyon and being in Ethiopia in charge of everything.
Mike Jones was in a hurry to get going. The rainy season lasts from June to September and it was now very nearly over. As soon as the flood level began to drop, the submerged rocks would begin to reappear and the risk of tearing out the bottoms of the canoes would be very much higher. Dave Burkinshaw and Steve Nash, on the other hand, were anxious to get everything soundly organised before committing themselves to the river. Dave had spent most of the night of their arrival at Bahardar, the small town on the banks of Lake Tana by the start of the Blue Nile, fastening into position the knee clamps which would help to jam him into his canoe, to enable him to paddle and – even more important – to roll effectively. He was worried about how well he would manage to fit these and whether the fibreglass had had time to set. Steve Nash was anxious to test all the wireless equipment and opted to stay out of the water on the first day to give himself time to do this.
They pushed the canoes into the water at the Bahardar bridge on the morning of 3 September. Glen Greer had decided to paddle Steve Nash’s boat that day, since the stretch down to the Tissisat Falls did not look too serious. Nash with the Land Rover, was going to meet them just above the falls that evening. At first everything went well. On the first big cataract, down which we had been swept out of control in 1968, they were able to pick their way. The waters were big and powerful but nothing like as difficult as some white water in Britain. Below the cataract, however, they ran into the same problems that we had encountered in 1968. Because of the number of different channels and heavily overgrown islands they were unable to inspect each cataract on foot, before going down. They had no choice but to take them blind. Mike Jones and Mick Hopkinson were out in front, taking one cataract at a time and then waiting for the others. Dave Burkinshaw and Glen Greer, less confident, were well behind. Greer was finding it particularly difficult, less at ease than the others in wild water, less adept at rolling back up once he had capsized.
The river was wide and shallow for long stretches, but then as they swept round a bend there was a roar of water; they could not see anything until they were on the very brink of the fall and completely committed. Jones, Hopkinson and Burkinshaw managed to shoot the fall, plunging down it to skirt a huge whirlpool, but Greer was sucked in, canoe and all, and vanished from sight. It seemed an age, though was probably less than a minute, before a paddle came to the surface well below the whirlpool, then the canoe itself, badly smashed, popped vertically from out of the water. And still there was no sign of Glen Greer. At last he surfaced, about 300 feet downstream, badly shaken.
He insisted on carrying on, even though he was capsized and forced to swim for it on several more occasions. At the end of the day, still five miles short of the Tissisat Falls, they pulled into the bank and struggled for half a mile through the undergrowth to the road, where Steve Nash eventually found them and took them back to the hotel.
Dave Burkinshaw was becoming more and more worried about the whole venture. He had managed the first section without too much difficulty but was very aware that they had been paddling unladen canoes. Below the Tissisat Falls the river plunges through a series of gorges for the next 200 miles. They would have to carry their food, sleeping bags, radios and guns with them, all of which would make the canoes heavy and difficult to manoeuvre through cataracts which were probably going to be faster and more dangerous than anything they had faced before. On top of that were the threats of crocodiles and the Shifta bandits. He wanted time to think and insisted on staying out of the river the next day to go down and look at the waters below the falls. Steve Nash also stayed out and Glen Greer had had enough of canoeing; his role was that of shore party.
The next morning Mike Jones and Mick Hopkinson returned to the river. In spite of its volume they were enjoying themselves. They made a good team, paddled at the same standard and had a similar attitude to risk. They picked their way through winding channels, past tree-clad islands, shot tumbling cataracts and saw their first crocodile – a dark shape in the murky brown water.
It was late afternoon before they reached the top of the Tissisat Falls, hauled the boats out of the river and carried them to the road. Mike wanted to return to the water at the Portuguese bridge below the hydro-electric station. Pleased with the day’s canoeing and full of optimism, they rejoined the team to face a crisis. Dave Burkinshaw had announced that he was not prepared to go any further since he was convinced that they would be unable to control heavily laden canoes in the rapids. Jones disagreed and a furious argument ensued, culminating in Burkinshaw stating that he was going to return home.
The following morning Jones, Hopkinson and Nash, watched by Burkinshaw, Greer and a large group of dignitaries, set out just below the Portuguese bridge. At this point the river races down in a series of furious rapids. Heavily laden, it was difficult to manoeuvre the canoes through the torrent and they had gone only 900 feet when Nash hit a rock, ripped the bottom out of his canoe and was forced to bail out. The other two pulled into the bank. It was obvious that they could never get down these waters heavily laden.
Jones decided that the only course they could take was to dump as much as possible and travel down really light, living off the land – or just going hungry. After all they should be able to reach the Shafartak road bridge in four days. Nash thought this ridiculous; the risks were altogether too great. Hopkinson was happy to go along with Jones, but kept out of the argument. In the end they arrived at a compromise Nash suggested that he and Burkinshaw should act as a bank party, carrying their canoes and all the supplies round the difficult stretch of river – which they knew to be about twenty miles – while Jones and Hopkinson, travelling light, tried to canoe it. They would meet up again at the second Portuguese bridge. It also had the advantage of bringing Dave Burkinshaw back into the expedition. He agreed to join Nash on the walk and to canoe the river from the second Portuguese bridge.
It was now 6 September. Mike Jones and Mick Hopkinson returned to the river with just their sleeping bags, a radio, a cine camera, a pistol each and a little food – a bar of Kendal Mint Cake, an oatmeal block and a Rowntree’s jelly. Both admitted to being scared, but were determined to complete the river. The canoes, although lighter than the previous day, were still unwieldy, fierce cataracts alternated with stretches of brown swirling waters which gave a feeling of unpredictable power. On the banks cultivated fields were interspersed with patches of forest and scrub. After twelve miles they reached a point where the huge volume of the Blue Nile was compressed into a rocky passage a bare five feet wide that led into a boiling cauldron. This was the place where the white water team of the previous expedition had pulled their rubber boats out of the river. Hopkinson and (ones did the same, but paid some men who were working in the fields to carry the canoes a short distance round the obstacle.
They returned to the river at the start of the long gorge contained by sheer walls, a hundred feet high, which we had avoided in 1968. It was the most committing stretch of water that Jones and Hopkinson had ever ventured on. There was no possibility of any reconnaissances of the cataracts from the bank; they could not escape from the river, for the racing waters had carved away the black volcanic rock of the gorge walls into a continuous overhanging lip. There were hardly any eddies for them to rest in; they had to keep going, weaving their way through the cataracts, trying to read the maze of foaming waves and tumbling water, cutting their way across the troughs of giant stoppers, skirting boiling whirlpools. They took turns in going out in front, never knowing what was going to face them round the next bend. Their necks ached from the continuous craning to see over the crests of waves; there was no release from the tension, no chance to relax. Mick Hopkinson admitted to being more frightened in this section than he has ever been before or since – they were so completely committed to a stretch of river they knew nothing about.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon; the tropical dusk was getting close when they noticed a slight bay on the right. There was some slack water and a steep watercourse cutting its way through the wall of the gorge. They swung into it, had a desperate struggle to heave the boats out of the water and then started to scramble up the boulder-strewn slope, canoes balanced precariously over their shoulders. Out in front, Mike Jones stumbled on a huge boulder which started rolling, bounding down towards Hopkinson coming up behind. He dived out of the way and just managed to avoid it.
Shaken, exhausted, they reached the top of the slope and found a thicket in which to get some shelter for the night. It started to rain, quickly soaking their clothes and sleeping bags, but they dared not light a fire for fear of attracting bandits. Munching Kendal Mint Cake and chewing through some jelly, they joked about the fact that it was Mike Jones’ twenty-first birthday, then tried to settle down for the night. They both slept lightly, shivering in wet sleeping bags, frightened by every rustle in the undergrowth. Mike woke up on one occasion to find himself holding his cocked and loaded pistol, finger on the trigger, pointed at Hopkinson’s head.
At last the dawn came. They could not bring themselves to put the canoes back into the gorge, particularly as the cataracts just ahead were even worse than those they had been through the previous day. Instead they decided to carry them for about a mile, round the top of the gorge, struggling through undergrowth, up and down over stream beds until the walls of the defile began to relent and they were able to return to the water. It was still very fast and threatening; they were both very tired and as a result both had narrow escapes.
Mick Hopkinson was in front as they came to the top of a fall. At first glance it did not look too bad, a shoot of brown water leading to swirling brown waters below. It was only when he was on the very brink that he realised that the water was thundering over a sheer drop of more than fifteen feet. As he plummeted down he stood on his footrest, leaning back against the canoe to reduce the impact when he hit the water below. Fortunately there were no rocks and he arrowed down into the middle of the pool of boiling water, completely submerged, and then shot out just beyond it, his close-fitting spray deck keeping the water out of the canoe, managed to skate past the top of the fall and find an easier way down, further across. A few hundred yards further on Jones was caught in a huge whirlpool; he was spun round and round, helpless in the vortex before several minutes of frantic paddling enabled him to escape.
They reached the second Portuguese bridge that same afternoon. There was no sign of their bank support party and so they set up camp a few hundred yards above the bridge. They were careful to hide the guns and their very obvious poverty was probably their best defence. What little money they had left had been spent in paying the local people to carry their canoes round the start of the gorge. In the next two days, while awaiting the arrival of the others, they bartered the few scanty articles of clothing they had with them for potatoes. In the afternoon of the second day Nash and Burkinshaw, with nine porters, reached the bridge. They were all exhausted, for they had had to walk about ninety miles of very steep and difficult going; the porters had become increasingly nervous as they got further away from home and at one point Nash had been forced to threaten them with his loaded revolver to stop them dropping the canoes and deserting.
Mike Jones could sense an almost immediate change of atmosphere amongst the rapidly growing crowd of local people, all of them armed with rifles, now that they saw the size of the team and the amount of gear they carried. It did not seem wise to hang around longer than was absolutely necessary and so that very afternoon they loaded the canoes and pulled out into the river.
It was now both wide and deep – comparatively easy canoeing, even when heavily laden. That day they paddled a few miles downstream and stopped for a big celebration tea, lighting a fire and gorging themselves to the full. They then set off once again, paddling until it was very nearly dark before slipping into a slight inlet and bedding down amongst the bushes without lighting a fire. In this way they hoped to avoid being discovered by the local people. Using this technique they managed to get down to the Shafartak bridge in four days. They were fired upon once by a group on the bank, but their progress was so swift and surreptitious that they avoided the trouble we had encountered in 1968.
Crocodiles, on the other hand, gave them some severe frights. We had been towed down the slower, more meandering section of the river by one of the big assault boats and, as a result, had hardly noticed the crocodiles. They, however, were paddling at about the same speed as a crocodile swims and, to a crocodile, a canoe must closely resemble a very large fish. They had heard tales of crocodiles biting canoes in half and, sitting in a fragile, fibreglass shell, you don’t feel like taking any chances when a fifteen-foot crocodile conies cruising through the water to take a look at you.
Dave Burkinshaw was some 300 feet in front of the others when he noticed the distinctive V-wave coming up fast behind him. He put on speed, hoping that he could out-paddle it, having heard that crocodiles lack stamina. After about 300 feet he was beginning to tire and he glanced round to see that the crocodile seemed to be gaining on him. By this time he was naturally very, very frightened. He turned for the bank and paddled flat out for it. He was, of course, fastened into the canoe by his spray cover and, to make himself even more secure, he had doubled up with a second one. This meant it was always quite a struggle to free himself from the canoe, but now – with the strength of desperation – he succeeded in tearing off the covers with one hand between racing strokes of the paddle, leaping out of the canoe in a single movement as it ran aground and in three bounds reached the foot of the thirteen-foot-high wall of the bank and climbed it.
The crocodile was more interested in the canoe and, as it drifted off, he followed it downstream. The others had seen Dave’s spring for the bank and followed as quickly as they could. Steve, who wore his pistol in a shoulder holster, was the only one with a gun readily available. With considerable courage, realising that he had to recover Dave’s canoe, he paddled right up to the crocodile and emptied the magazine of his revolver into it at point blank range. The crocodile sank from sight, so they could not be sure whether it had been killed or not.
From this point, every stretch of slack water had its resident crocodiles who came out to investigate the intruders. Jones and Hopkinson now kept their guns at the ready, but Burkinshaw was unarmed and had to content himself with a little pile of stones. They now kept close together, but had several more encounters and had used up most of their ammunition by the time they reached the Shafartak bridge.
They arrived there on 12 September, tired and very tense from twelve days of nerve-wracking canoeing, the threat of crocodiles and the danger of possible attack by local people. They had originally planned to go all the way to the Sudan, but now all of them, I suspect, were beginning to have second thoughts. They had to wait a day at the bridge, both for Glen Greer with the support Land Rover and also for a Reuter correspondent who had arranged to meet them there. It was a period of relaxation after tension; the bridge was somehow a natural bound to the venture and yet there was the pressure of their expressed intentions. Mike Jones, perhaps, felt obliged to urge them on, down past the bridge; after all, the expedition had been his concept. At first the other three were doubtful. Dave Burkinshaw had definitely had enough; Mick Hopkinson observed that they had very nearly run out of ammunition and that there would be even more crocodiles below the bridge than there had been above. It was not as if the river itself would provide a challenge – they knew they could manage the water. It was the threat of crocodiles and Shifta bandits and the fact that there was no road from the river once they had reached the border that deterred them now. They were not a closely knit team, had never been away on expeditions before and this, of course, was their first venture into really wild country. Steve Nash, after a night’s rest, came round to wanting to complete the journey, but by now Mike Jones had swung away from it, saying that there was no point in going on if they were not united. This, I suspect, was the crux of the problem and in the end they piled their canoes into the Land Rover and drove to Addis Ababa.
They may not have completed their objective, but they had descended more of the upper part of the Blue Nile than anyone else has succeeded doing to this day and, in so doing, had tackled some of the most dangerous white water that anyone has ever attempted.
Mike Jones went on to organise and lead an expedition which canoed down the Dudh Kosi, the glacier torrent that runs down from the Khumbu Glacier on Everest. Mick Hopkinson went with him. It was a slightly larger team than he had had on the Blue Nile and, although the waters in places were technically more difficult than those encountered on the Blue Nile, there were none of the extra risks of attacks by bandits or crocodiles. In addition, a bank support party was able to follow the river much of the way and Nepal today is becoming as much a holiday area as the European Alps. Nevertheless, this was a fine achievement which confirmed Mike Jones as the most outstanding white water expedition organiser in the world. In the course of the descent he saved the life of Mick Hopkinson, who had fallen out of his canoe, by towing him to the side through a serious of dangerous rapids.
He next went off to the Orinoco in South America and then, in 1978, with the bulk of the Dudh Kosi team, on the Braldu river running down from the Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan. Here he was drowned – once again going to the help of a member of his team who had fallen out of his canoe in a practice session. It was typical of Mike Jones that he did not think of his own safety in going to someone else’s assistance. He was still only twenty-six. His immense enthusiasm and drive, combined with his boldness and physical strength, would have taken him through many more adventures had Fate spared him.
Of the 1968 expedition, John Blashford-Snell went on to organise a series of even more ambitious projects, manhandling Range Rovers across the Darien Gap, the pathless jungle swamp that divides North America from the southern continent; descending the Zaire river with another large waterborne expedition of scientists and soldiers. He has also organised Operation Drake and Operation Raleigh, global projects to give youngsters a taste of field scientific work and adventure. In doing this he has given a large number of people a great deal of enjoyment and excitement and has made possible some useful scientific work.
There is a vast difference between the approach Mike Jones adopted and that of John Blashford-Snell on the Blue Nile. In climbing terms, it is the difference between the massive, carefully organised siege attempt on a mountain and a small party making an alpine-style ascent. It was ironic that the big, carefully organised party had a fatal casualty and, because of the very size and so somewhat ponderous descent down river, attracted two full-scale bandit attacks, while the comparatively unorganised, lightweight dash by canoeists who really understood white water, and were using suitable boats for the upper reaches of the river, got away unscathed. It is possible that audacity has a momentum that sometimes carries its own protection.