Benchmark exploration of men who mapped Nile

From heroes to hypocrites, the 19th century explorers of the river Nile left a lasting legacy according to a wonderful new book, writes, Tim Severin.

Explorers of the Nile. Tim Jeal, Faber and Faber, £20

SUMMONED before a notoriously dangerous African tribal chief, the Victorian explorer Samuel Baker impressed him with his version of native finery.

Baker appeared resplendently attired in Highland kit — sporran, tartan kilt, and Glengarry bonnet. The chief, Kamrasi of Bunyoro, opted for a more muted costume — a fine mantle of black and white goatskins. Baker wrote of the chief’s spectacular domestic arrangements. He lorded over a huge bevy of wives. When his subjects approached him, they had to crawl on hands and knees and touch the ground with their foreheads. Baker omitted to mention that his own domestic arrangements were unorthodox. Despite her guise as a proper Victorian spouse, the woman with long blonde hair who accompanied him on the hideously gruelling trek to Bunyoro was not his wife. Baker had acquired her in a slave market in Ottoman Bulgaria, not by purchase, for he had been outbid by the local pasha, but by running off with her. He and ‘Flooey’, as he affectionately called her, were lovers.

Their relationship had a happy outcome. Baker feared that if he died in Bunyoro, Kamrasi would add Flooey to his harem. But both visitors to the rat-infested royal compound overcame fever, exhaustion, near-starvation and the blood-curdling behaviour of its volatile ruler and reached England alive. There they married. Baker received acclaim and a knighthood for helping to unravel the mystery of the sources of the Nile. Flooey became Lady Florence Baker, and chatelaine of a fine estate in Devon.

Queen Victoria was not amused and declined to receive Florence at court because she and Samuel had been “intimate” before marriage.

In writing this refreshing account of the 19th century explorers of the Nile, Tim Jeal set himself a monumental task. He says at the outset that he is embarking in the wake of a master of prose, Alan Moorhead, whose twin volumes, The White Nile and The Blue Nile, were bestsellers on the same subject in the 1960s. Since that time, much has been learned about the main protagonists — Baker, Burton, Grant, Speke, Stanley and Livingstone. Jeal adds a great deal of fascinating detail from his own research. Not only has he trawled the private papers of the travellers and their recent biographies, but he also went back and checked the manuscripts and drafts of the books they wrote about their journeys, looking for changes that were made before publication. The results can be revealing.

One thing that the Nile explorers had in common — besides their craving to locate the sources of the great river — was their almost pathological regard for their own images they projected to their public. Thus, Tim Jeal decides that Stanley almost certainly invented the famous greeting “Dr Livingstone, I presume” when he first met the missionary. The salutation does not appear in Stanley’s diary — suspiciously the relevant pages have been torn out — and Livingstone makes no mention of these words in his own journal. Stanley seems to have acted on the mistaken assumption that if he inserted this pompous phrase in his travelogue it would impress his British readership (Stanley was American). Instead they laughed at him.

A couple of noteworthy Irish references stand out, one admirable, the other so repugnant that one hopes it was a fantasy.

Surgeon Thomas Parke from Roscommon was a genuine hero. He accompanied Stanley on his grimly determined Relief Expedition that laboured up the Congo and then hacked its way through the Ituri forest to go to the rescue of Emin Pasha, a German-born Egyptian Governor reported to be stranded in Equatoria on the upper Nile. It turned out that Emin didn’t need rescuing after all. He and his men were in a better state than their “rescuers”, two-thirds of whom died on the endeavour. Several of the survivors owed their lives to the medical skill of Surgeon Parke. By contrast when Stanley got back to check on the Rear Column still stuck in the forests, he was told that the other Irish officer on his team had behaved abominably.

He was James Sligo Jameson of the whiskey family, an amateur ethnographer. It was claimed that Jameson had purchased an 11 year-old girl locally and handed her over to cannibals to be killed, cooked in a pot, and eaten so that Jameson could sketch what Jeal nicely terms “the whole grisly process”. Whether or not the report was true, it was just as well that Jameson died of fever before the allegation could be properly investigated.

Ulcers as big as dinner plates, sun stroke, piles, malnutrition, malaria — the list of afflictions suffered by the explorers makes it little wonder that pain and delirium sometimes drove them to behave no differently from the Africans of whom they could write so critically. Livingstone shot at hostile natives and took a stick to lazy servants. Speke and Grant railed against the evils of slavery, but turned a blind eye to the buying and selling of humans openly practiced by their camp followers who regarded it as a perk of their employment.

Everyone knew that the white men could scarcely move a mile without the cooperation of their African porters, guards and guides. Time and again the explorer marched inland from the coast, flying at the head of his column the blood red flag of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the greatest beneficiary from the trafficking in humans. Tim Jeal has made a superb fist of laying out all these contradictions and quirks. His opening essay on the motives for exploration is a model of clarity and good sense. He then writes fluently and perceptively about his main characters (Speke is his clear favourite) and he is aware that the occasional flash of humour offers relief from the many dark episodes of his tale. He mentions the occasion when Livingstone was washing his hair with soap and the onlookers thought that the suds were morsels of his brain floating away on the water. It is a nice counterpoint to the reaction of the young Scots missionary so inspired by reading Livingstone’s Missionary Travels about his Christian work that he joined Livingstone on his next venture in Africa.

Once there, however, the young man was so severely disillusioned that he hurled his copy of his hero’s self-righteous tome into the Zambezi.

Tim Jeal’s volume deserves no such treatment.

If there is one book about the search for the sources of the Nile to read and keep on the shelf, this is it.