BURNHAM DISEMBARKED AT Mombasa, Kenya, on May 27, 1902. A new company, the East Africa Syndicate, had hired him to explore the British East Africa Protectorate (now Kenya) for minerals and desirable agricultural land. He agreed to organize four expeditions that would stake claims of 500 square miles each. In exchange he would get 20 percent of any profits from the claims, plus expenses and a hefty salary of £150 per month. His contract called for him to work “entirely at his own risk and peril.” This deal was sweeter than the one with the Wa Syndicate, since it put cash in his pocket every month no matter what he found.
Burnham considered the Protectorate another example of enlightened British imperialism. A few brave souls had endured hardship, famine, and bloodshed to plant civilization in a savage place. They had abolished slavery and made relative peace with the tribes. Few people, wrote Burnham, understood the adversities of pioneering, and far fewer had the guts for it. He was eager to explore the Protectorate’s unvisited regions. “This was an opportunity to weave another thread into the rich tapestry of white dominion in Africa.”
The first threads were woven in 1888 when Her Majesty’s government gave responsibility for East Africa to the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC), a chartered enterprise like Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. As in southern Africa, the charter was awarded to relieve the government of the financial burdens and political entanglements of administering another colony. But debts and quarrels soon dragged the company into bankruptcy. It dissolved in July 1895. The British government assumed responsibility and renamed the territory the East Africa Protectorate. To investors and speculators, that meant the colony was open for business, and the scramble began.
During the two years he spent there, Burnham hired between 500 and 1,000 native askaris and porters for his expeditions. He also recruited twenty tough, experienced white men: hunters, explorers, ex-soldiers, assayers, surveyors, mining engineers, and two gentleman adventurers. They came from Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. He chose them for their temperament and character as well, because he needed to trust them. The syndicate expected him to explore a vast region: north to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), south to German East Africa (now Tanzania), and west beyond Lake Victoria. To cover more territory more quickly, he sent off expeditions in different directions. “Anybody can stir up trouble with the natives,” wrote Burnham, “but judgment, self-control, and justice are essential qualities in a leader who is to enter alien lands and break a trail which the next white explorer can follow without risk of being robbed or attacked.” His rule was to aim for peace but be ready for conflict.
The toll of blood began before the expeditions even launched. First, the porters got bubonic plague and had to be quarantined. The horses and mules brought from Italy died beneath swarms of ticks. Leopards ate all the dogs. A crocodile ate one of the servants. Nevertheless, Burnham loved Nairobi and the abundant wildlife just beyond its borders: ostriches, hartebeests, thousands of zebras, countless gazelles. He wrote to Blanche that she would love it there and should come back with him on the next trip. He was bubbling with “lovely schemes”: a farm, a cattle ranch, a coal mine, a hunting safari on the savannah. As always he longed for her and sighed about the wanderlust that pushed him away.
In mid-June the expeditions were cleared to begin. Burnham traveled west. He spent twenty-five hours on a small steamer crossing Lake Victoria to Entebbe, arriving during the festivities to honor King Edward VII’s coronation. He left Entebbe on July 1 with twenty-five paddlers in three canoes, heading for the north coast of Lake Victoria and Kampala. He was chasing a rumor of coal.
That rumor, like most Burnham pursued in East Africa, was a chimera. During the first year, one of his exploratory teams found a sprinkling of gold on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, but nothing worth exploiting. No silver or diamonds. No copper. But in July of 1902 he heard of something just as good.
There are at least three versions of the story, two by Burnham. They sometimes overlap, sometimes contradict. In Taking Chances he wrote that in Zanzibar an explorer and scientist (identified in the rough draft as Sir John Willoughby, an old acquaintance from Rhodesia) told him of native reports about a lake in the Great Rift Valley made of “snow that did not melt in the sun.” A caravan sent by the sultan of Zanzibar had returned with some of this snow, which Willoughby had analyzed. It was almost pure carbonate of soda (also called soda ash and sodium carbonate). This valuable mineral was used in glass-making, dying, degreasing, water softening, and many other industrial processes.
In the Protectorate, Burnham heard similar rumors about a white lake somewhere near the border with German East Africa. But no one seemed to know the lake’s precise location or size. The rumors reminded Burnham of Western stories about lost mines—catnip for him. He put the lake on his list of possibilities. According to Taking Chances, two Australian prospectors named Duncan and Welsh happened into Burnham’s camp just before he left for Lake Victoria. (Typically, he misspells their names, which were Thomas Deacon and John Walsh). He hired them to search for the lost white lake. They prowled the southern end of the Great Rift Valley, where natives vaguely acknowledged the lake’s existence but refused to guide them there. Eventually the two prospectors tracked the spoor by following small white crystals that had spilled from the sultan’s caravan. At last they stood at the lake, as big and white as the tales described. They were exhausted and parched. The last leg had required a journey of seventy miles in searing heat without water. They turned around without exploring further, and eventually reported to Burnham.
He told a similar but less dramatic version to Blanche in late June 1902, and repeated it in his report to the syndicate in September 1903. “Last night an old Rhodesian prospector came to see me,” he wrote to Blanche. “He has found a great soda lake 50 miles from Nairobi, soda carb by the million tons. It may be possible to utilize it but can’t say. It is in a healthy country and a RR could be built to it for $100,000.” His report to the syndicate said that “prospectors” had told him about the lake. These contemporary versions are more trustworthy than the reminiscence in Taking Chances. The prospectors were no doubt Deacon and Walsh, both of whom registered claims on the lake at some point. Burnham certainly knew both men. Perhaps they found the lake in the dramatic way that Burnham described in Taking Chances, perhaps not.
A third version accuses Burnham and the East Africa Syndicate of falsely taking credit for discovering the lake after hearing about it from Deacon and Walsh, whose claims the syndicate bought out. But this doesn’t substantially contradict either of Burnham’s versions. He was always scrupulous about crediting others, and in Taking Chances he praised Deacon and Walsh for finding the soda lake after much hardship. Burnham also was always fair to the explorers and prospectors he hired, and paid them well. As a prospector himself, he understood Deacon and Walsh’s entitlement to an interest in the soda lake, whether they discovered it while on his payroll or not. It’s not surprising that, like most prospectors, they soon sold their interests and moved on.
In any case, it’s undisputed that Deacon and Walsh’s discovery stirred Burnham to set off for the lake in the summer of 1902. To avoid the baking heat of the Rift Valley, his team traveled mostly after sunset. One night they crested a ridge. “The brilliant moon shed a flood of light into a black basin of basalt,” wrote Burnham, “and in its depths glittered the snowy M’gardi, a great gleaming white gem cupped in Africa’s black palm.” The lake’s eerie beauty transfixed him. So did its potential profitability. “The long hidden treasure lay at last at my feet, more valuable than the richest gold reef in the world, for this wealth, unlike gold, continues in the making.”
Lake Magadi sat at the bottom of a deep desert basin similar to Death Valley. Warm springs continuously recharged the lake with liquefied soda. Intense heat evaporated the moisture, leaving a thick crust of soda that was constantly replenished. The lake was twenty miles long and two miles wide. John Blick returned the following year and sampled forty million tons of soda from a small portion of the lake. The mineral was nearly pure. At $15 dollars per ton, those forty million tons were worth about $600 million. Once again Burnham was certain he had found his bonanza. To tap it, the syndicate just needed to build sixty miles of railroad from Nairobi.
Burnham left East Africa in late August for London. Aside from the soda lake, he didn’t have much good news for the syndicate. He had started to believe that East Africa’s real wealth lay in its fertile highlands, where Europeans could farm and stay healthy. If he was right, the land itself, not the minerals hidden in it, would be the best investment. Good agricultural land always drew settlers. Before he left, he bought several thousand acres himself and hired a local planter to experiment with coffee, tea, cotton, Indian corn, castor beans, many European vegetables, and even his old nemesis, orange trees. Most of these experiments turned out well and helped to encourage future settlement.
In London the investors were displeased to see him back after only three months, but he had promised to join Blanche and the boys in Pasadena for a family visit. This domestic excuse didn’t appease the syndicate. They revised his contract to specify that his monthly salary would be paid only when he was in East Africa. Some of the Wa investors were unhappy as well, because the Ashanti claims weren’t yet proving out. He wasn’t worried. “We will make money out of it bye and bye,” he wrote to Blanche. On the positive side, the soda lake intrigued the syndicate, and they had been coming to conclusions similar to Burnham’s about buying land for agriculture. A number of the main directors wanted Burnham to peg a concession of 5,000 square miles, which the company would lease to fifty settler families.
He would be busy when he returned to East Africa, but first he was going home. On September 10 he left for a short visit to the United States and Pasadena.
In October, on the way back east, Burnham stopped at Salt Lake to learn about the processing of lake minerals. He also stopped at the White House for a long chat with Theodore Roosevelt, now president after the assassination of William McKinley the previous September. By Christmas he was back in East Africa, this time with Blanche and Bruce. Roderick remained at school in London. Burnham wanted Rod to end up at Sandhurst, Britain’s West Point, leading to a career in the British Army, an idea that dismayed Blanche. The plan reflected Burnham’s ongoing expectation of living outside the United States.
As he busied himself and his teams with expeditions into remote parts of the Protectorate, Blanche began adjusting to colonial life in Nairobi. They lived in a house with a large veranda on the syndicate’s forty-three-acre compound near town. Every resident (many lived in tents) had at least two armed guards at night, partly because of thieves but mostly because of animals from the surrounding plains—lions, rhinos, and especially the brazen hyenas.
The contrast between the place’s wild fringes and British conventionalities often entertained Blanche. She wrote to Burnham’s mother about watching two men in starched white shirt-fronts walk into a tent to dine. The British colonials dressed formally every night for dinner, and amused Blanche by insisting they would do so even if they were supping alone on the veldt. Such contrasts were everywhere—flower shows and rhinos, formal luncheons and painted natives.
One evening Blanche and Bruce were in a rickshaw on their way to dinner when they ran into a war party of Maasai en route to punish an enemy tribe. The warriors wore feather headdresses, and their bodies were slick with castor oil and red clay. They carried shields and their alarming spears, with blades four feet long. The rickshaw man excitedly launched them down a hill. He lost control, and as the rickshaw capsized, Blanche put her arm around Bruce’s head. The rough ground tore off a section of her skin. On top of that, she complained, “one of my prettiest muslin blouses ruined.”
She wrote home that they had been socializing a lot in the syndicate’s camp, receiving visitors, giving and attending dinner parties. “Rather swagger ones where we will all be in evening dress,” she wrote. “I am getting use out of my evening gowns. Danced through the chiffon ruffles of my lace dress the other evening but I can mend it.”
Like all colonials, she had plenty of servants. They were Muslims, since “missionaried” natives were spoiled. Her house servant was a forty-year-old Somali eunuch. He spoke English and dressed in pure white trousers and a long overshirt, accented with a wide sash of red or yellow, with a matching turban. Her Goanese cook was occasionally drunk by the end of dinner, sometimes earlier, but was too talented to let go.
Blanche took her turn hosting dinners, making do with a mix of silver, china, and enamel plates. When short of glasses, she drank out of Bruce’s little silver mug. Four natives served from side tables, two carried food from the kitchen, and two more washed dishes for reuse with the next course. She proudly described one of her menus in a letter: pre-dinner drinks (champagne and whiskey-and-soda, though she stuck to water), caviar on toast, soup, fried oysters, mutton cutlets with green peas, venison cutlets with mushrooms, roast venison, red currant jelly, potatoes, and cauliflower. For dessert, plum pudding and sherry sauce, then lemon cling peaches (“tinned but awfully good”), and finally fresh fruit, sweets, coffee, and cigarettes.
They were frequently reminded that starched shirt-fronts and multicourse dinners couldn’t turn this place into London. One night gunshots woke them. Burnham was outside with his revolver before Blanche got out of bed, but within a minute she was at the window with a rifle. It turned out to be some men chasing thieves. Everyone was on edge because of constant rumors of a Maasai uprising, and at a meeting the next day the camp discussed what to do in case of attack. They decided that all the whites would gather at the Burnhams’, and planned accordingly. “My bedroom looks like an arsenal,” noted Blanche. She added, “I do hope it is not our fate to be massacred.”
After four months of colonial conventionalities, swagger dinners, pests, and menacing rumors, Blanche was weary of life in Nairobi. “If Fred was not here I would not want to stay a single day,” she wrote. “It is not real pioneering yet we have many dangers and terrible society.” Her brother John Blick noticed the change in her. “She is really getting tired of this country,” he wrote to their sister Kate. “I don’t mean this country in particular, but of traveling around. She wants to settle down.”
But not quite yet. In late April, when Burnham left on an expedition to the soda lake, she and Bruce went to live at 7,000 feet in a big grass house in the lovely highlands sixty miles north of Nairobi. She took only the Goanese cook and two servants, some cots, and safari clothes (no gowns). Her spirits immediately improved. Their camp, at a place called Naivasha, was simple, the landscape beautiful, the conventionalities absent. Leopards occasionally prowled through camp, but they could learn to live with those. Burnham visited between expeditions.
He and his teams had been poking into every corner of the Protectorate. The conditions were always arduous and often dangerous. Depending on the terrain, porters carrying head-loads of fifty-five pounds could cover only six to fifteen miles per day. When possible, the expeditions lived off game, but the standard fare was rice, with some flour and sugar for the whites. Sometimes they had good Abyssinian coffee. Some of the syndicate’s investors had suggested that Burnham cut expenses by feeding the natives on cheap cornmeal, but he rejected the idea as a false economy. Rice ensured him of getting the best carriers. The expeditions were also physically draining and could be wrecked by poor nutrition. His porters repaid good treatment, he wrote, with patience and hard work.
Hazards were plentiful enough without worrying about unhealthy food. At the soda lake, a man was eaten by a lion. Another died from a snake bite. A man was seriously injured when a rhino tossed him. One night a sleeping man had his face torn off by a hyena. Two porters who strayed from the safari were killed and eaten by cannibals, despite the safe-passage Burnham had negotiated with the cannibals’ chief. Burnham felt that if he did nothing, the cannibals would declare open season on his men, but if he killed any natives in retaliation, the British government would likely boot the syndicate from the Protectorate. So he marched to the cannibals’ village and arrested the chief for breaking the agreement. He demanded recompense and called for a trial that afternoon.
The chief turned out to be the Clarence Darrow of cannibals. The criminal party, he argued, was Burnham, who had negligently let his porters wander off into the high grass, thereby placing themselves “on par with a bunch of bananas.” Therefore, reasoned the chief, he was the party who deserved compensation, since Burnham had not only broken the agreement, he had humiliated the chief with a false accusation. The chief graciously offered to forgive Burnham and reinstate the original agreement in return for one of Burnham’s rifles. Burnham, outwitted and amused, finessed this dilemma by offering to release the chief from arrest and to make him a member of an exalted secret society called the Order of the Buffalo, whose pricey initiation fee would be waived. Both sides were happy with the plea bargain.
The worst predators were tropical diseases. The expeditions passed through districts where sleeping sickness killed people so quickly that some corpses had bananas in their mouths. The vultures and hyenas could hardly move, gorged. For three days Burnham’s group never escaped the stench of death, and the disease also exacted its toll from Burnham’s men. So did blackwater fever. “Half my white men were wiped out within two years,” wrote Burnham in Taking Chances, “by fever, hardship, or accident—or invalided home, permanently disabled. About half my blacks succumbed to fevers and disasters of one kind or another.”
He didn’t mention that fever had rocked him as well. In July 1903 Blanche wrote to her parents that Fred was at Naivasha recovering, and was very thin. (He had weighed 143 pounds before leaving for East Africa.) She was sure, she continued, that after this and his experiences in West Africa “he will never go to the tropics again and I am so glad. He has made so many of these awful trips in his life and he cannot expect to keep it up forever and still keep his health. But it takes a hard jolt to make him realize it.”
While searching for minerals, Burnham studied the tribes he traveled through. He believed natives should be allowed to keep land and cattle and to maintain their social customs and laws, because that was the best way to keep peace. The three main tribes of East Africa’s interior were the Kikuyu, the Wakamba (or Kamba), and the Maasai. He recorded details about their weapons, temperaments, social structures, and amusements. He was especially intrigued by the most warlike of the three, the Maasai. “Many peculiar customs practiced by the Masai and neighboring tribes are of deep interest to the anthropologist and doubtless have meanings not comprehended by the white explorer passing through their country. I have read many flippant references to various practices of the natives, but it is my conviction that the observers did not understand their true significance.” He saw that two scourges had ravaged Maasai culture—rinderpest, which decimated their cattle-centered way of life, and white settlers, who forbade the tribe from raiding their neighbors and ended the tradition of military training for young men. As this disappeared, so did the tribe’s devotion to discipline and self-sacrifice. “The purity of their blood,” wrote Burnham, “can no longer be protected.”
Unlike many people of his era, Burnham formed his views about race from the saddle, not the armchair. He had a strong interest in native peoples and was a gifted observer of customs, social structures, military matters, and a tribe’s place within a larger landscape. But his perspective was often distorted because he viewed everything through the prisms of race and war.
Just as he never missed a chance to study native people, he never missed a chance to hunt big game. A family photo album from East Africa documents an array of trophies: hartebeest, warthog, sable antelope, giraffe, lion (“a ten footer”), black rhino (“almost a record horn”). Many of their heads ended up on the walls of Burnham’s homes. A chapter in Taking Chances describes his pursuit of “Jungle Elephants,” including what he calls the most dangerous animal in Africa, the “rogue” elephant. One of these creatures absorbed nine or ten high-grain bullets before it died. Its foot was sixty-one inches in circumference, and it was almost ten feet tall at the shoulder. From the tip of its trunk to its tail measured twenty-seven feet. Its tusks were six feet long and later decorated Burnham’s home, one of several such pairs. He shot another elephant in the head but lost it in the bush; it survived long enough to ambush and kill a passing Maasai and shatter the arm of another.
Such tales about African big-game hunting, once popular, may now seem repellent. In his later years Burnham too had second thoughts. Like Theodore Roosevelt and other early conservationists, he grew alarmed at the destruction he had once relished. Africa’s wildlife, he wrote, “is greater and more wonderful than that of all other continents combined,” and it thrived “until the ‘civilized’ white man with his vaunted intelligence came with bullets and a hundred other means of destruction, including traps and poison. In one generation he turned almost half of Africa into a lonely sunbaked wilderness.” He reviled hunters who went to East Africa to kill wild animals while also sidestepping danger, shooting high-powered rifles from vehicles and airplanes. “This mode of sport is, to my notion, about as thrilling as sitting on the pasture fence and slaying the pet cow.”
Burnham embodied the paradox of certain groups—pioneers, prospectors, ranchers, commercial fishermen—who love wilderness and wildlife to death while extracting everything they can from them, and then are surprised when the game or the grass or the clean water or the fish begin to disappear.
In late summer of 1903, Blanche and Bruce left Naivasha for a six-day safari with Burnham. Blanche relished this return to a strenuous outdoor life, but admitted to her parents that each day left her exhausted. Perhaps, at age forty-one, she was losing her enthusiasm for the rigors of camping on the veldt.
After the quiet loveliness of Naivasha, she certainly had little enthusiasm for resuming colonial life in Nairobi. She began making plans to return to England with Bruce. She was delighted when Fred agreed to go with them in late October. Burnham seemed to sense that his time in Africa was ending. In a letter to his mother dated October 8, 1903, he wrote what sounds like a farewell, not only to Africa but to a way of life:
It is with regret I leave this lovely camp with its lake and great mountains, its steaming old craters, solemn moss drooping forests. . . . I shall miss the roar of the leopards, the wail of the hyenas, and the soft calling notes of the bell bird. The nights are of such matchless splendor when the moon is full, and my wild naked Kikuyu sing a deep and lovely chant in keeping with the sounds that come from forest and plain. During the day the valley below is dotted with thousands of sheep and herds of cattle herded by [Maasai] who stand about in little groups like ebony. A soft lowing as continuous as the sound of running water comes constantly and pleasantly over the boma walls—such a sound and scene as must have touched the shepherds of old. The wildest and sweetest land I have ever seen. It is I fear passing from me forever. Sometimes I wish I had never learned to read or form any conception of duty, civilization, religion, for I would have been and am at heart a splendid savage, nothing more, and now I am to return to London—to swallowtails, the club, soft carpets, soft food, soft life, soft men and women.
Burnham probably expected his hiatus from Africa to be brief. It was, after all, the place he often insisted would be his permanent home. But he wouldn’t return for thirty years, and then as a tourist visiting old haunts. His African years had been filled with adventures, sorrows, violence, and triumphs, and had made him famous. “My boyhood dreams of Africa had all come true,” he wrote years later. “I realized this with a sense of accomplishment and joy, although it had streaked the heads of both my wife and myself with gray.”
Sonora, Mexico. (From Barnes’s Complete Geography by James Monteith, 1885.)
