CHAPTER XV

SAMUEL BAKER AND THE ALBERT NYANZA

Samuel White Baker was born in London on the 8th June, 1821, and was the second and eventually eldest son of Mr. Samuel Baker, a city merchant, who possessed large properties and sugar plantations in Jamaica and Mauritius. Samuel Baker, the elder, at one time maintained a small fleet of sailing vessels. He also became one of the first Directors of the Great Western Railway. His family and grandfather were mainly settled at Bristol, and were much connected with the navy in the eighteenth century. Further back still the Bakers were members of Parliament and Court officials. They came originally from London, then became a Kentish family, then moved to Dorsetshire, then to Bristol, and finally back again to London. Samuel Baker, the younger, was a typical English boy. His biographer, Mr. Douglas Murray, describes him as having been “of the Saxon type; a noble-looking boy, of very fair complexion, light hair, and fearless blue eyes.” He was “enterprising, mischievous, for ever getting into scrapes, and leading others into them; but he was never known to tell a lie or do a mean thing.” His career was very nearly brought to a premature close when he was twelve years old by an attempt to make fireworks. He ignited a small heap of gunpowder on the kitchen table, and caused a terrible explosion, which blew him to the far end of the room and burnt his arm severely.

He hated school, and received most of his education from a private tutor and by a residence at Frankfurt in Germany. His father attempted to put him in his London office; and this work, though excessively irksome, was endured for a time, as he had early fallen in love with the daughter of a Gloucestershire rector, whom he married when he was only twenty-two. Soon after his marriage he went out to Mauritius with his wife, to attempt the management of his father’s estates in that island. But he was restless and dissatisfied with this career; moreover, his three children, born in three years, all died. He therefore started for Ceylon, to which island he was attracted by the stories of big-game shooting. His interest was excited in the splendid mountain region of the interior of Ceylon, which presents considerable areas for European occupations between six thousand and eight thousand feet in altitude. Here for nine years he worked at founding an English settlement of planters, which exists to this day in a flourishing condition, some of the land-owners being members of the Baker family. But his wife, who bore him many children, suffered greatly in health. In 1855 he returned to England, and wrote a book on Ceylon. At the end of that year his wife died, and Baker, after leaving his young children to be brought up in England, started for Constantinople, which he reached at the close of the Crimean War. His idea was to travel in Circassia, and see what advance in that direction Russia was making towards India; but he spent several years in a rather objectless fashion, shooting, fishing, and exploring in Asia Minor and Turkey in Europe.

In 1859 he settled down as Manager-General of a British-made railway from the Danube to the Black Sea. Whilst this railway was being made he met in Hungary the lady who became his second wife.[75] The railway was completed in 1860, and Baker once more became restless. Big-game shooting in Asia Minor--splendid as it seems to have been at that period, when he could shoot as many bears, boars, wolves, red deer, and roe deer as he wished--did not content him; his thoughts turned towards Africa and the Nile. He arrived at Cairo with Mrs. Baker in 1861, with the idea of travelling up the Nile to meet Speke and Grant coming from Zanzibar via the Victoria Nyanza.

[Illustration:

_Photo by Maull & Fox._]

SAMUEL BAKER, 1865.]

But Baker resolved, before attempting anything so difficult as the exploration of the White Nile above Gondokoro, to learn something of African travel and Sudanese Arabic. He therefore left the main Nile at Berber and ascended the Atbara River, the last affluent which the Nile receives on its way to the Mediterranean;[76] the first running river encountered by the traveller ascending the Nile that can be said to flow through tropical Africa,--the Africa with the typical Ethiopian fauna and flora.

“After a scorching march of about twenty miles we arrived at the junction of the Atbara River with the Nile [writes Baker]; throughout the route the barren sand stretched to the horizon on the left, while on the right, within a mile of the Nile, the soil was sufficiently rich to support a certain amount of vegetation, chiefly dwarf mimosas and the _Asclepia gigantea_.... The Atbara has a curious appearance; in no part was it less than four hundred yards in width, while in many places this breadth was much exceeded. The banks were from twenty-five to thirty feet deep: these had evidently been overflowed during floods, but at the present time the river was dead, not only partially dry, but so glaring was the sandy bed that the reflection of the sun was almost unbearable. Great numbers of the _Dum_ palm (_Hyphæne thebaica_) grew upon the banks.... The only shade there is afforded by the evergreen Dum palms.... Many pools were of considerable size and great depth. In flood time a tremendous torrent sweeps down the course of the Atbara, and the sudden bends of the river are hollowed out by the force of the stream to a depth of twenty or thirty feet below the level of the bed. Accordingly, these hollows become reservoirs of water when the river is otherwise exhausted.... These pools are full of life, huge fish, crocodiles of immense size, turtles, and occasionally hippopotami.... The animals of the desert gazelles, hyaenas, and wild asses--are compelled to resort to these crowded drinking places.... Innumerable doves, varying in species, throng the trees and seek the shelter of the Dum palms; thousands of sand grouse arrive morning and evening to drink and to depart.”

In the pools of the Atbara Baker for the first time shot hippopotamuses. He also started fishing with a rod and line, and on one occasion caught an enormous “turtle.”[77]

At the end of June they were nearly suffocated with the heat and dust of the Sudan summer, but they were to experience the effects of the melting of Abyssinian snows and of the descent of the tropical rains on that African Switzerland. On the 24th of June Baker was lying half asleep on his bed by the margin of the river when he fancied he heard a rumbling sound like distant thunder. This roar increased in volume till it awoke his Arabs, who rushed into the camp shouting, “The river! The river!”

“We were up in an instant, and my interpreter in a state of intense confusion exclaimed that the river was coming down, and that the supposed distant thunder was the roar of approaching water.... Many of the people were sleeping on the clean sand of the river’s bed, and were only just in time to reach the top of the steep bank before the water was on them in the darkness.... The river had arrived ‘like a thief in the night.’ When morning broke I stood upon the banks of a noble river, the wonder of the desert! Yesterday there was a barren sheet of glaring sand with a fringe of withered bush and trees upon its borders.... No bush could boast of a leaf, no tree could throw a shade: crisp gum crackled upon the stems of the mimosas.... In one night there was a mysterious change.... An army of water was hastening to the wasted river, which had become a magnificent stream some five hundred yards in width and fifteen to twenty feet in depth. Bamboos and reeds with trash of all kinds were hurried along the muddy waters.... I realised what had occurred: the rains were falling and the snows were melting in Abyssinia. These were the main source of the Nile floods.”

Baker left the Atbara in a land of wild asses and gazelles, and travelled to Kassala,--a fortress of the eastern Sudan since rendered famous by the struggle for its possession between Dervishes and Italians. Kassala is situated on the right bank of the river Mareb, which rises close to the Red Sea on the northern slopes of the Abyssinian plateau. The Mareb has every intention of reaching the Nile, or rather the Atbara, and no doubt did so in past epochs; but at the present time northwards of Kassala it loses itself in the desert.

“There was an extraordinary change [writes Baker] in the appearance of the river between Gozerajup and this spot. There was no longer the vast sandy desert with the river flowing through its sterile course on a level with the surface of the country, but after traversing an apparently perfect flat of forty-five miles of rich alluvial soil, we suddenly arrived upon the edge of a deep valley, between five and six miles wide, at the bottom of which, about two hundred feet below the general level of the country, flowed the river Atbara. On the opposite side of the valley, the same vast table-lands continued to the western horizon.

“We commenced the descent towards the river; the valley was a succession of gullies and ravines, of landslips and watercourses; the entire hollow of miles in width had evidently been the work of the river. How many ages had the rains and the stream been at work to scoop out from the flat tableland this deep and broad valley? Here was the giant labourer that had shovelled the rich loam upon the delta of lower Egypt! Upon these vast flats of fertile soil there can be no drainage except through soakage. The deep valley is therefore the receptacle not only for the water that oozes from its sides, but subterranean channels bursting as land-springs from all parts of the walls of the valley, wash down the more soluble portions of the earth, and continually waste away the soil. Landslips occur during the rainy season; streams of rich mud pour down the valley’s slopes, and as the river flows beneath in a swollen torrent, the friable banks topple down into the stream and dissolve. The Atbara becomes the thickness of pea-soup, as its muddy waters steadily perform the duty they have fulfilled from age to age. Thus was the great river at work upon our arrival on its banks at the bottom of the valley. The Arab name, ‘Bahr-al-Aswad’ (black river), was well bestowed. It was the black mother of Egypt, still carrying to her offspring the nourishment that had formed the Delta.

“At this point of interest the journey had commenced; the deserts were passed, all was fertility and life; wherever the sources of the Nile might be, the Atbara was the parent of Egypt! This was my first impression, to be proved hereafter.”

Baker gives a fine description of the splendid type of Arab who is still found in the regions of the Atbara:--

“He was the most magnificent specimen of an Arab that I have ever seen. Although upwards of eighty years of age, he was as erect as a lance, and did not appear more than between fifty and sixty; he was of Herculean stature, about six feet three inches high, with immensely broad shoulders and chest, a remarkably arched nose; eyes like an eagle, beneath large, shaggy, but perfectly white eyebrows; a snow-white beard of great thickness descended below the middle of his breast. He wore a white turban, and a white cashmere abbai or long robe, from the throat to the ankles. As a desert patriarch he was superb, the very perfection of all that the imagination could paint, if we would personify Abraham at the head of his people.”

This fine old Sheikh brought ten of his sons, most of them as tall as himself. He seems to have been the father of many children,--a fortunate circumstance for the country, though no doubt nearly all of his stalwart descendants were extirpated in the miserable wars following on the Mahdi’s revolt.

Baker ascended the Atbara to its upper waters, where it is known as the Settit (higher up still as the Takaze). Here he had magnificent hunting of big game amongst the Hamran Arabs, whose extraordinary prowess with the sword he describes most vividly. They would follow up elephants and hamstring them with a single blow of their long weapons, which were like those of the Crusaders. (As a matter of fact, the generality of the Hamran swords were manufactured at Sollingen in Germany.) In this land Baker saw innumerable giraffes, and most of the big antelopes of Central Africa, including Kudu and Oryx. The country about the Upper Atbara below the Abyssinian highlands was exactly like an English park, though the trees were mainly acacias. Here and there was a gigantic baobab. In the waters of the river was found the now well-known Lung-fish, the _Protopterus_.

From the upper waters of the Atbara and its many tributaries Baker, skirting the western terraces of Abyssinia, reached the river Rahad,--an Egyptian affluent of the Blue Nile which flows nearly parallel to the river Dinder. These two streams rise on the western flanks of the Abyssinian tableland, and enter the Blue Nile about one hundred miles southeast of Khartum. On his way down this river Baker, in the country of Galabat, met two German lay missionaries proceeding to Abyssinia in spite of the objection expressed to their presence by King Theodore. “One of these preachers was a blacksmith, whose iron constitution had entirely given way, and the little strength that remained he exhausted in endless quotations of texts from the Bible, which he considered applicable to every trifling event or expression.”

In June, 1862, the Bakers reached Khartum. After a long stay at the Pethericks’ house, Baker decided, as already related, to go in search of Speke. His wife, the present Lady Baker, accompanied him. As already related, she was a Hungarian lady of great beauty, and possessed of extraordinary courage. Her fame as “_the_ Lady” (Es-sitt) still lingers among the Nile Negroes.

It has already been shown that Baker succeeded in being the first European to greet Speke and Grant. He received from these travellers the legacy to complete their task of ascertaining definitely the existence of the western Nile lake (Albert), of which Speke had heard under the name of Luta Nzige. On the 26th of March, 1863, the Bakers left Gondokoro on this errand.

Muhammad Wad-al-Mek, De Bono’s agent, and all the other Nubian Nile traders, did their very utmost to prevent Baker returning along Speke’s route through the Bari country. They incited his Khartum men to mutiny. Baker, being unable to obtain porters, owing to the excessive hostility of the slave-traders, employed the camels he had brought with him from Khartum for his transport. As the slave-traders had threatened, if he followed in their footsteps, to raise the natives about him, he determined to reach the back country of Lotuka first, and therefore deliberately strewed some of his goods in the way so as to delay the slave-traders, who stopped to pick them up. He was outdone at his own game, for a large caravan of “Turks” reached the Elliria country nearly as soon as he did. The leader of this expedition was one Ibrahim. Mrs. Baker resolved to see what could be done by a direct appeal to whatever the man might possess of generosity. The Bakers threatened that if he did them harm he would probably be hung at Khartum, while if he assisted them to see this lake, they would see he was well rewarded. The result was that a truce was patched up between the slave-traders and Baker’s small expedition. Nevertheless, a mutiny happened among Baker’s camel-men in the vicinity of Lotuka. Some of these men ran away and joined a slave-trading party, which, however, was massacred by the Lotuka. Henceforth Baker’s few men stuck to him faithfully, in terror of what might happen to them from his evil eye.

Baker journeyed southward through the splendid Lotuka country,--a land of which we know even now scarcely more than he told us forty years ago. The Lotuka people are a splendid race of Negroids, with a good deal more Gala blood in their veins than is the case with the Masai, to whom they are closely allied in language, but who dwell very much farther to the east and south. Since the days of Baker’s adventure some of the Lotuka have become Muhammadans, and they are no longer completely nude in consequence. Their country is a very mountainous one, and on the whole well watered. It will probably play a considerable part in the future of the Uganda Protectorate. Working steadily south through the Madi and Acholi countries, the Bakers forded the Asua, the great southeastern tributary of the Mountain Nile. Here nearly all their porters deserted, and as their camels had died in the Madi country, they were obliged to abandon all loads which were not absolutely necessary,--such as ammunition, and presents for Kamurasi.

[Illustration: A NATIVE OF UNYORO.]

At length they arrived at the Karuma Falls on the Victoria Nile, and entered Unyoro. Their first reception in Unyoro was hostile, because Muhammad Wad-al-Mek had preceded them, and had made the worst impression by his treatment of the Banyoro. At first Baker desired to follow the Nile down stream till it entered the Albert Nyanza, but the Banyoro would not allow him to do anything of the kind, or to make any journey off the main road along the Victoria Nile to Kamurasi’s capital. Contrary to their anticipations, Kamurasi received the Bakers well; and this was the more fortunate, as Mr. Baker was very nearly dead with fever. But Kamurasi soon showed his evil nature. He refused to allow Baker to proceed due west to the Albert Nyanza, declaring that lake was distant a six months’ journey. Ibrahim, the slave and ivory trader, had purchased all the goods he required, and had left Unyoro. All Baker’s porters, except thirteen, had deserted. Finding, however, there was nothing more to be got out of Baker, Kamurasi relented, accepted a double-barrelled gun, and sent off the explorer and his wife with two guides and an escort of three hundred men. This escort, however, was soon sent back, owing to their unruly behaviour. Somehow or other, with such porters as could be procured from village to village, they managed, in the teeth of fearful misfortunes, to reach the Albert Nyanza at a place called Mbakovia, on the southeast coast. On this journey Mrs. Baker nearly died from sunstroke, and Baker himself was frightfully ill. But on the 16th of March, 1864, they had discovered a great lake “with a boundless sea-horizon to the southwards,” which they named the Albert Nyanza.

At the time of Baker’s visit no doubt (though he does not say so) there was a good deal of mist about this lake,--a common feature. The mist and the clouds seem to have prevented the travellers from getting any glimpse of the mass of the Ruwenzori snow-range which lay not many miles distant from them to the south. They also believed (though they were then a day’s journey from the end of the lake) that there was a boundless sea-horizon to the south. Their misapprehension of the geography of this lake has often caused surprise; but apart from a natural tendency to exaggerate the importance of their own particular lake, in looking to the southward they were looking up the broad valley of the Semliki, which was undoubtedly at one time--at any rate for a distance of some fifty miles--a southern extension of the Albert Nyanza. This valley was bordered on either side by cliff-like mountains--plateau edges--continued northwards along the coasts of the Albert Lake. To the west of Lake Albert the plateau tilts westwards towards the Congo basin. Baker called the western cliffs and the foothills of Ruwenzori the Blue Mountains,--a name they might very well continue to bear, as there is no native designation for these heights, which separate so abruptly and by only a few miles the basin of the Congo from the basin of the Nile.

After a short stay at Mbakovia, the Bakers got into canoes and coasted along the Albert Nyanza to Magungo, where the lake is entered by the Victoria Nile. They ascended the Victoria Nile and discovered the Murchison Falls, “where the river drops in one leap one hundred and twenty feet into a deep basin, the edge of which literally swarms with crocodiles.” On their overland journey in the direction of the Karuma Falls, their porters again deserted, and for two months they were stranded, almost at death’s door, living with difficulty on wild herbs and mouldy flour; occasionally, but rarely, obtaining fowls from the natives. Once more they came within the persecution of Kamurasi, who pestered Baker for his assistance in a war he was carrying on against his relation, Fowuka. Whilst Baker was hesitating, the Nile was crossed by one of De Bono’s caravans of ivory-traders, who had entered into an alliance with Fowuka. They were just about to attack Kamurasi’s army (and with their one hundred and fifty guns would have easily defeated it) when Baker planted the British flag in Kamurasi’s camp, and warned De Bono’s soldiers that the Unyoro king was now under British protection. Overawed by Baker’s threats, the ivory-traders withdrew to the north side of the Nile. The only return that he received from Kamurasi for this service was that the latter placed every obstacle in his way to prevent his leaving Unyoro. At the same time Mutesa of Uganda, having heard of a white man’s arrival in Unyoro, and imagining that Kamurasi was stopping his further journey to Uganda, sent a large army to ravage Unyoro. Kamurasi fled to some islands in the Nile, and left Baker to shift for himself, without provisions or beasts of burden, at the Karuma Falls. From this point he managed to send messages to Ibrahim, the slave and ivory trader, and the latter came to his assistance. With the aid of Ibrahim, the Bakers, who had lost everything except guns and ammunition, eventually managed to return to Gondokoro, though they were nearly killed on the way by the Bari tribe, which had risen against the slave-raiders. At Gondokoro their troubles were not ended, for the sudd had begun to form, and obstructed the passage of the White Nile. Plague also had broken out in Khartum. But the travellers fought through all obstacles, any one of which might have wrecked an expedition conducted by less intrepid people, and reached Khartum in May, 1865. Here they remained two months to recuperate, and during this time they managed to secure the banishment of one of the slave-traders who had incited the mutiny of their men at Gondokoro in 1863.

From Khartum they travelled to Berber down the Nile, and then started on camels to cross the desert to Suakin. They reached England in the autumn of 1865. By this time perhaps African exploration had become more interesting to the British government, for Baker received for his discoveries a well-earned knighthood,--a distinction which might very well have been accorded to Speke or to Grant. As a matter of fact, the only reward given to the last-named traveller was a C.B., which was awarded, not for his marvellous “Walk across Africa,” but for the inconspicuous services which he rendered some years later in connection with the Abyssinian War.

As the result of the Speke and Baker explorations, so far as published maps were concerned, our knowledge of the Nile basin in 1865 was as follows: The shape and area of the Victoria Nyanza were roughly indicated, together with the outlet of the Victoria Nile at the Ripon Falls. The course of the Victoria Nile was mapped (with a good many blanks) from the Ripon Falls to the north end of Lake Albert Nyanza. Baker was able to show that there was a widening of the Victoria Nile opposite the eastern frontier of Unyoro, but it was some years later before this widening was discovered to consist of two large lakes (Kioga and Kwania). Baker had given an extremely exaggerated size to the Albert Nyanza. Speke, on the other hand, had sketched this lake with remarkable accuracy merely from hearsay. The course of the Nile from the north end of Lake Albert to its junction with the Asua River was quite unexplored. The rest of the course of the Mountain Nile was mapped as far as its junction with the Bahr-al-Ghazal, but very little was known about one of its branches, the Giraffe River. No further researches beyond those made by the Turks had taken place on the Sobat River.

As for Sir Samuel Baker, we take leave of him here as one of the great explorers of the Nile. He returned to the regions of the great lakes in 1869, having been appointed for four years in charge of an expedition to subdue and annex to the Egyptian Empire the equatorial regions of the Nile basin. This object involved him in incessant fighting in Unyoro, with the slave-traders between Unyoro and Gondokoro, and with the Bari. Some of these conflicts were forced on him; others, it is to be feared, he precipitated by his determination to enlarge the territories of the Egyptian Sudan. His time would seem to have been passed mainly in warfare with one enemy or another, or in laying very solidly the foundations of a civilised administration. His stay in Equatoria resulted in but little addition to our knowledge of the Nile and its affluents. A good many of his efforts for the welfare of the country were thwarted by the Egyptian Governor-General at Khartum, and after his departure, in 1873, some of his worst enemies among the slave-traders were reinstated. This much must always be recorded to the credit of Sir Samuel Baker’s work on the Upper Nile: he inspired universal respect among the fair-dealing natives; he, first of all, broke the back of the immense slave-trading industry which had sprung up on the Mountain Nile, in Unyoro, and in the Acholi countries; throughout these regions the natives can remember but one great and good administrator before the present régime, and that is Sir Samuel Baker. “Gordoom” Pasha is but a name, and represents little to their minds; Emin they only remembered as an enthusiastic naturalist, who did but little to check the rapine and wrong-doing of his Sudanese soldiers; but “Baker Basha” is, in the remembrance of the old people, the one heroic White man they have known: terrible in battle, scrupulously just, at all times kind and jovial in demeanour amongst friends; a born ruler over a savage people.