CHAPTER XI

BURTON AND SPEKE

Nile exploration from the north had stopped in 1851 at the rapids south of Gondokoro. It was now felt that the problem should be attacked from other directions. In 1839 the British government had formally annexed Aden at the southwestern corner of Arabia as a coaling station for ships plying between Suez and India. Aden is opposite the Somali coast, and has been for many centuries the outpost of civilisation with which the Somali have traded. It was impossible to possess Aden long without desiring to become acquainted with the character of the African coast across the gulf, especially as Aden depended so much on Somaliland for its supplies of meat, grain, and fodder, and the ostrich feathers, ivory, and skins sold in the Aden bazaars. Aden was, and is still, under the government of India, and officers of the Indian army soon found their way across to Somaliland on authorised or unauthorised surveys. Among these was Lieutenant Cruttenden, who collected some new information about the sterile country beyond the coast. In 1854 a remarkable man came to Aden as an officer in the Indian garrison,--Lieutenant Richard Francis Burton, fresh from his wonderful journey as a pilgrim to Mecca. Burton induced the authorities to support him in a project for entering inner East Africa through Somaliland, and thus perhaps striking at the sources of the Nile. Another explorer in the bud, Lieutenant John Hanning Speke, reached Aden soon afterwards, and obtained permission to join Burton’s expedition.

Whilst waiting for a time thought to be favourable for travelling southwards into the Ogadein country, Burton went off alone on a remarkably plucky journey to the mysterious city of Harrar, to-day a frontier town of Abyssinia. Harrar, lying to the south of that Rift valley, which can be traced after a few interruptions from the Gulf of Tajurra right down into British and German East Africa, was a walled city inhabited by a Semitic people, or rather a people still retaining the use of a Semitic dialect akin to those of Abyssinia and South Arabia.

Speke did a good deal to increase our knowledge of the remarkable fauna of Somaliland, but the Burton-Speke expedition into that country got no great distance inland, and ended in disaster, owing to the suspicions of the Somali. The expedition was attacked close to the seashore at Berbera. One of the party, Lieutenant Stroyan, was killed. Speke was severely, and Burton slightly wounded. Speke is of opinion that much of this disaster was due to the mismanagement of Burton. He considers that if, when the expedition was first organised, instead of fussing about mysterious visits to Harrar and waiting for this thing and that thing, the whole expedition had started off boldly for the interior, the Somali would have had no time to cultivate suspicion, and would have opposed no resistance. It is quite conceivable that Speke was right, and that if the expedition had started with promptitude it might have reached the confines of Shoa or the Gala country in the direction of modern British East Africa. As it was, the attack on Burton’s expedition closed for some thirty years any attempt at penetrating the mysterious country of the Somali, with its remarkable mammalian fauna and its as yet unexplained ruins.[49]

[Illustration: A SWAHILI ARAB TRADER.]

Burton’s attention was now drawn to the stories of the Mombasa missionaries. With some difficulty he obtained from the Foreign Office, the East India Company, and the Royal Geographical Society funds to equip an expedition which should start from the Zanzibar coast in search of the great lake. As Speke had lost over five hundred pounds worth of private property in the disaster which fell on the Somali expedition, Burton invited him to join this new expedition as his lieutenant. Burton had been distracted for a time from this idea by the Crimean War, but when peace was declared, he obtained the sanction of the Geographical Society to his plans, and started with Speke for India to smooth the difficulties placed in his way by the Indian government. At the very end of 1856 the explorers reached Zanzibar. While the expedition was being organised at Zanzibar, Burton and Speke visited Pemba, Mombasa, and the mission station ten miles in the interior. Fired by the stories of the snow-mountains and the rumour of the great lake of Ukerewe,[50] Speke proposed that they should bring their expedition to Mombasa and start for the lake by way of Kilimanjaro. The Masai, however, were raiding the country right up to within ten miles of Mombasa, and in consequence Burton was afraid to take this route. The explorers visited the mountainous country of Usambara, which is close to the coast, and then returned to Zanzibar. The original instructions, however, of the Royal Geographical Society (which had found the bulk of the funds) had been: “The great object of the expedition is to penetrate inland, from Kilwa or some other place on the East Coast of Africa, and make the best of its way to the reputed Lake of Nyasa.” Burton found, however, that the Arabs of Kilwa were strongly opposed to white men penetrating the interior in that direction. He therefore decided to choose the line of least resistance at Bagamoyo, and go along the now beaten track of the Arabs to Ujiji. When Burton and Speke reached Unyamwezi (Kaze) at the close of 1857, they were received with much kindness and courtesy by the Zanzibar Arabs established there, especially by Sheikh Snay, who had been the first Arab to reach Uganda. Snay promptly cleared up the mystery of the missionaries’ great lake, telling the explorers that it was three different lakes (Nyasa, Tanganyika, and Victoria) rolled into one. The Arabs had also heard through the Banyoro rumours of European vessels travelling up the White Nile to the Bari country. Burton was continually prostrated with fever during this stay in Unyamwezi, so that the command of the expedition and the solution of its difficulties temporarily devolved on Speke. The main trouble, as on all these expeditions, was with the question of transport. It was very difficult to obtain porters to proceed in any direction north or west of Unyamwezi. At last they induced a number of their paid-off men who had accompanied them through the coast lands to rejoin and convey the loads as far as Ujiji. In that way Burton and Speke discovered Lake Tanganyika, and Speke thought (wrongly) that in the great tilted plateau which they ascended on the east, and from which they looked down on the beautiful blue waters of the lake, he had discovered the Mountains of the Moon.

After a somewhat half-hearted exploration of the northern portion of Tanganyika in an Arab dau, during which they heard and partially verified the fact that no river flowed out of Tanganyika on the north, but that the Rusizi flowed _into_ the lake[51] in that direction, they returned to Ujiji, and from this point made their way back to Kaze in Unyamwezi. Here Burton again became ill. Speke with some difficulty obtained from him permission to travel northwards in search of the Lake of Bukerebe. Burton yielded his consent reluctantly, and appears to have given but grudging assistance in the shape of men and guides. Full of energy, however, Speke gathered together a caravan, which crossed Unyamwezi and Usukuma, and on the 30th of July, 1858, he saw the Mwanza creek, one of the southernmost gulfs of the Victoria Nyanza. The extremity of this he named “Jordans Nullah.”[52] Travelling northwards along this creek, on August 3d (1858), early in the morning, Speke saw the open waters of a great lake with a sea horizon to the north. Much of the horizon was shut in by great and small islands, but Speke detected through their interstices the vast extent of open water which stretched to the north.

He realised to the full the wonder of his discovery, and the obvious probability that this mighty lake would prove to be the main headwaters of the White Nile. Even Speke, however, failed to appreciate then or subsequently the full extent of the Nyanza’s area. He only guessed its breadth at over one hundred miles, and its length from north to south at under two hundred. Speke inquired from the natives the name of this freshwater sea, and they replied “Nyanza,” which in varying forms such as Nyanja, Nyasa, Mwanza, Kianja, Luanza (according to prefix), is a widespread Bantu root for a large extent of water,--a river or a lake. To this term Speke added the name of Victoria after the Queen of England. The following extract from his book, “What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile,” gives his first impressions of the great lake:--

“The caravan, after quitting Isamiro, began winding up a long but gradually inclined hill [which, as it bears no native name, I shall call Somerset] until it reached its summit, when the vast expanse of the pale blue waters of the Nyanza burst suddenly upon my gaze. It was early morning. The distant sea-line of the north horizon was defined in the calm atmosphere between the north and the west points of the compass; but even this did not afford me any idea of the breadth of the lake, as an archipelago of islands, each consisting of a single hill, rising to a height two hundred or three hundred feet above the water, intersected the line of vision to the left; while on the right the western horn of the Ukerewe Island cut off any further view of its distant waters to the eastward of north. A sheet of water--an elbow of the sea, however, at the base of the low range on which I stood--extended far away to the eastward, to where, in the dim horizon, a hummock-like elevation of the mainland marked what I understood to be the south and east angle of the lake. The important islands of Ukerewe and Mzita, distant about twenty or thirty miles, formed the visible north shore of this firth. The name of the former of these islands was familiar to us as that by which this long-sought lake was usually known. It is reported by the natives to be of no great extent, and though of no considerable elevation, I could discover several spurs stretching down to the water’s edge from its central ridge of hills. The other island, Mzita, is of greater elevation, of a hog-backed shape, but being more distant its physical features were not so distinctly visible.

“In consequence of the northern islands of the Bengal Archipelago before-mentioned obstructing the view, the western shore of the lake could not be defined: a series of low hill-tops extended in this direction as far as the eye could reach; while below me, at no great distance, was the _débouchure_ of the creek which enters the lake from the south, and along the banks of which my last three days’ journey had led me. This view was one which even in a well-known and explored country would have arrested the traveller by its peaceful beauty. The islands, each swelling in a gentle slope to a rounded summit, clothed with wood between the rugged, angular, closely-cropping rocks of granite, seemed mirrored in the calm surface of the lake, on which I here and there detected a small black speck,--the tiny canoe of some Muanza fisherman. On the gently shelving plain below me blue smoke curled among the trees, which here and there partially concealed villages and hamlets, their brown thatched roofs contrasting with the emerald-green of the beautiful aloes, the coral flower-branches of which cluster in such profusion round the cottages, and form alleys and hedgerows about the villages as ornamental as any garden shrub in England. But the pleasure of the mere view vanished in the presence of those more intense and exciting emotions which are called up by the consideration of the commercial and geographical importance of the prospect before me.

“I no longer felt any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation, and the object of so many explorers. The Arabs’ tale was proved to the letter. This is a far more extensive lake than the Tanganyika; ‘so broad that you could not see across it, and so long that nobody knew its length.’ I had now the pleasure of perceiving that a map I had constructed on Arab testimony, and sent home to the Royal Geographical Society before leaving Unyanyembe, was so substantially correct in its general outlines I had nothing whatever to alter. Further, as I drew that map after proving their first statements about the Tanganyika, which were made before my going there, I have every reason to feel confident of their veracity relative to their travels north through Karagwe, and to Kibuga in Uganda.”

[Illustration: SKETCH MAP BY BURTON AND SPEKE, 1858.

From the Original in the possession of the Royal Geographical Society.]

Unable to delay longer in his exploration of the southern shores of the Victoria Nyanza, as he had promised to rejoin Burton by a certain date, Speke returned to Kaze in Unyanyembe, to find his companion vexed at the great discovery which he had made. Speke did not pursue the argument as to the Victoria Nyanza being the main source of the Nile. The two men journeyed together on more or less bad terms to Zanzibar, where Burton remained to wind up the affairs of the expedition, Speke returning direct to England. Here the wonderful news he brought prompted the Royal Geographical Society to gather together the funds for a fresh expedition, which was to enable Speke to make good his discovery of the lake, and to prove to the satisfaction of the scientific world that this sheet of water was the ultimate source of the White Nile.