He speaks his Mind about the Nile.
Richard's speech alluded to the following. I take it from his private, not his published writings:—
"I have five main objections to Jack's theory about the Nile:—
"1. There is a difference of levels in the upper and in the lower part of the so-called lake. This point is important only when taken in connection with the following:—
"2. The native report that the Mwerango river rises from the hills in the centre of the so-called lake.
"3. The general belief that there is a road through the so-called lake.
"4. The fact that the southern part of the so-called lake floods the country for thirteen miles, whereas the low and marshy northern shore is not inundated.
"5. The phenomena that the so-called lake swells during the dry period of the Nile, and vice versâ.
"It would of course have been far more congenial to my feelings to have met Jack upon the platform, and to have argued out this affair, openly, before the Association of Science. I went down fairly to seek this contest on September 13th, 1864. The first day was devoted to other subjects, and the second day our grand exposition of our separate views was to come off, and the rooms of the Section E were crowded to suffocation.
"All the great people were with the Council, I alone was uninvited; so I remained on the platform with my wife, notes in hand, longing for the fray, but when they filed in twenty minutes later, the melancholy announcement was made of his death. I had seen him between one and three p.m., and at four p.m. he was a corpse! I was so shocked, so pained, I could not speak, and remained so for a long while. His death sealed my lips, but I am not bound to bury my opinions in his grave; and when I at last dared to speak, I addressed a public already horribly prejudiced by the partisans of Jack, who know nothing about chivalry, and have spoken of me in terms which I never used towards my dead friend. In short, all my achievements were ignored and forgotten. Everybody is mentioned with honour, but the Pioneer of discovery in these wild regions is carefully ignored. I am now about to leave Europe for some years, and I cannot allow errors which are generally received, to remain as they are, but I do not stand forth as an enemy of the departed. No man better than I, can appreciate the noble qualities of energy, courage, and perseverance which he so eminently possessed, who knew him for so many years, who travelled with him as a brother, till the unfortunate rivalry respecting the Nile sources arose like a ghost between us, and was fanned to a flame by the enmity and ambition of so-called friends. I do not wish to depreciate the services of Jack, nor Captain Grant—they brought us back a new three hundred and fifty geographical miles; but as to the Nile sources, I consider the problem wholly unsolved. Jack and Captain Grant seemed to forget that the more my expedition did, the better for them, as well as for me. The result of Jack's expedition is a blank space on the maps, covering nearly twenty-nine thousand miles and containing possibly half a dozen waters. Had Jack and Captain Grant really seen—which they did not—three sides of the Nyanza, they would have left unexplored fifty thousand square geographical miles, a space somewhat larger than England and Wales.
"Knowing Jack as I do, I cannot understand why he sent Captain Grant, without valid apparent reason, on July 19th, 1862, to the head-quarters of King Kamrasi of Unyoro, right away from the Lakes, unless Jack was determined alone to do the work, and to have no one to contradict him. The Westminster Review remarks of that: 'Grant will have little to regret, and Burton will be more than revenged should Tanganyika, and not the Nyanza, prove to be the head of the Nile.'
"From Alexandria Jack telegraphed in April, 1863, to the F.O. these big words:—'Inform Sir Roderick Murchison that all is well, that we are in latitude 14° 30' upon the Nile, and that the Nile is settled.' The startling assertion caused a prodigious sensation at the main meeting, May 11th, 1863. Jack was fêted in Egypt by his Highness the Khedive and by his Majesty of Piedmont, and was presented with a medal bearing the gratifying inscription, 'Honor est a Nilo.' At Southampton he was received by the civic authorities and sundry supporters, including Colonel Rigby of Zanzibar, who, for purely private reasons, had supported Jack against me. On June 22nd, 1863, Jack received an ovation in the shape of a special meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, when the windows were broken in by the eager crowd. By-and-by people began to cool their enthusiasm. Despite all that Jack had done to me, I was the first to give flattering opinions of the exploration, until the personal account Jack gave, told me how little had been done. It was something to have passed over three hundred and fifty untrodden miles, but it would take a great deal more than that to settle the Nile problem. Jack tried to crush all expressions of thought. A welcome to Jack was put forth in 1863 by Blackwood's Magazine, a periodical from which, for reasons best known to myself, I never expected, nor wanted to receive justice. The author of 'The Welcome,' who sought advertisement, wrote: 'We were the first to satisfy ourselves with Captain Speke's geographical views.'
"In January, 1864, Jack's book appeared, 'The Discovery of the Sources of the Nile.' It sold like wildfire at first, and then suddenly dropped, like the stick of the firework. Then Messrs. Blackwood brought out 'What led to the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile,' and people were saying that 'non-discovery would be the fitting term;' and the second stick fell from the rocket. I understood then the danger to which I had exposed myself by not travelling alone, when I perceived that a lake, seen only for twenty miles, at the southern edge, was prolonged by mere guesswork to two hundred and forty miles to the north—enough to stultify the whole Expedition. Had we met at Bath, the discussion which must have resulted would have brought forth a searching scrutiny upon both our Expeditions, and mine would have been found to have been a genuine article; as it is, I am obliged to remain dumb upon many points upon which, if Jack had been alive, I should certainly have spoken. After so long a silence upon the subject, I am justified in drawing public attention as to what was effected by my Expedition, in which I was not only unaided, but I may say hindered. I went into the country ignorant of it, its language, trade, manners, and customs, preceded only by a French naval officer, who was murdered almost directly he landed. My friend Hamerton, the Consul at Zanzibar, was dying. Without money, or support, or influence, lacking in the necessaries of life, I led the most disorderly caravan that ever man could gather together, into the heart of Eastern Africa, and discovered the Tanganyika and the Nyanza Lakes. I brought home sufficient information to smooth the path of all who chose to follow me. They had but to read 'The Lake Regions of Central Africa' (2 vols., 1860), and the whole of Vol. XXXIII. of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (Clowes and Sons, 1860), to know all about it. Dr. Beke called mine emphatically 'a memorable expedition;' but, except for a few esteemed friends, my work has been ignored and forgotten. My labours rendered the road easy for Jack and Captain Grant. I opened the line to Englishmen, and they had but to follow me.
"I bring no charge against Jack of asserting what he does not believe. In his Taunton speech he declared that, 'as the real discoverer, he had in 1857 hit the Nile on the head, and in 1863 drove it down to the Mediterranean,' and he believed these words as firmly and as unreasoningly as he did in his Victoria Nyanza Lake or his 'Mountains of the Moon.' His peculiar habit of long brooding over thoughts and memories, secreting them until some sudden impulse brought them forth, may explain this great improbability. He could not grasp a fact; hence his partial eclipse of the moon on the 5th and 6th of January, 1863, which did not occur. A 'luxurious village' was a mass of dirty huts, a 'king of kings' is a petty chief, a 'splendid port' is a display of savagery. The French of those parts are barbarians, with little more knowledge than their neighbours.
"Captain Grant also has never acknowledged the vast benefits which the second Expedition derived from mine. I therefore mean to produce a small volume, called 'The Nile Basin,'[2] in which I shall distinctly deny that any 'misleading, by my instructions from the Royal Geographical Society as to the position of the White Nile,' left me unconscious of the vast importance of ascertaining the Rusizi river's direction. The fact is Jack was deaf and almost blind, I was paralytic, we were both helpless, and I may add penniless; we did our best to reach it, and we failed.
"I must also again allude to Jack's 'Mountains of the Moon.' He published a sketch-map in Blackwood's Magazine, September and October, 1859, which showed a huge range estimated to rise six or eight thousand feet high. At first the segment of a circle, it gradually shaped itself into a colt's foot, and effectually cut off all access from the Tanganyika to the Nile; then he owns in his book, p. 263, to having built up these mountains on solely geographical reasonings, deriving from the same source the Nile, the Congo, and the Zambesi. Now, Captain Grant afterwards said that the mountains were the work of the engraver, and that Jack was amused by them; but if he had looked into the map-room of the Royal Geographical Society, he would have found Jack's own map, showing the lunar horseshoe in all its hideousness. Now, in the map done by Stanford, the Mountains of the Moon are placed in the northern extremity of the Lake Tanganyika; but in his own map, published in his journal, he altered their position, and inserted them round the western north-sides of the more northern Lake Rusizi, which was manifestly a widening of the river; and again he said, p. 324, 'It was a pity I did not change the course I gave to the Maraungu river, i.e. making it an effluent, and not an influent; I forgot my lesson, and omitted to do so;' and when he inquires of the natives whether this river runs into or out of the lake, he says, 'Because they all say it runs into the lake, I am quite convinced that it runs out of the lake,' which, to say the least of it, is an extraordinary train of reasoning.
"Mr. Macqueen, an old and scientific geographer, was told by an Arab who had been to Unyamwezi, 'It is well known by all the people there, that the river which goes through Egypt takes its source and origin from the Lake Tanganyika.' Dr. Beke, an old and scientific traveller, quotes De Barros: 'The Nile has its origin in a great lake, the Tanganyika, and after traversing many miles northwards, it enters a very large lake which lies under the equator.' This would, I believe, be the Bahr el Ghazal, or the Luta Nzigé. With regard to the levels, the Tanganyika is allowed but 1844 feet, but during our exploration the state of our vision would, I am sure, explain a greater difference than the fraction of a degree. At Conduci, a harbour on the East African coast, a common wooden bath instrument boiled at 2˙14° Fahr.: this would give a difference of about 1000 feet. The Nyanza was made 3550 feet high by my expedition, that of Jack raised it to 3745 feet.
"Mr. Macqueen, F.R.G.S., author of the 'Geographical Survey of Africa,' wrote a very able review on Jack's expedition with Captain Grant, and I shall reprint it in the 'Nile Basin' from the Morning Advertiser. In it he speaks in unmeasured terms about the cruelty of the manner in which he crushed Consul Petherick with his ill-temper, vanity, and jealousy, having used him in his own service all he could. Petherick wrote: 'To add insult to injury, flesh and blood cannot bear it, and, whilst not wishing to depreciate the labours of others, I am determined to maintain my own;' and Mrs. Petherick wrote an account of Jack's dining with them. They had a tremendously large ham, which they had brought from England, cooked. They were to wait with boats, well armed and provisioned, until Jack should appear at Gondokoro. They waited long beyond their time, they spent their money, they lost their health, they sacrificed their own trade, and Jack, having helped himself to what he wanted, treated them de haut en bas. Mrs. Petherick writes: 'We always meant to open this ham when we met Speke. During dinner I endeavoured to prevail on Speke to accept our aid, but he drawlingly replied, "I do not wish to recognize the 'succour-dodge.'"' She adds, 'The rest of the conversation I am not well enough to repeat. I grow heartsick thinking of it after all our toil. Never mind, his heartlessness will recoil upon him yet. I soon left the table, and would never dine with them again.'
"But when Jack got home, and was in the full fling of his triumph, his unfounded charges influenced the Government, who had employed Petherick to convey assistance and advice to Jack, whose flippant conduct caused this man and his wife to be thrown overboard without pity, his private fortune wasted, his character as a merchant and a public servant blasted, being also deprived of his Consulship. Mr. Macqueen, in his paper, said that Speke left England on a great and noble enterprise. He was patronised and supported by the British Government, by the Royal Geographical Society, and the good wish and sanguine hopes of the public. He says it is incredible that any man, but especially a man who had gone a thousand miles to see the position of the outlet of the Nile supposed to be in that spot, should have remained five months within eight miles of it, without hearing or seeing something certain about the great object of his search, or have found some means to see it. He says, 'All that he brought back was the sacrifice and ruin of zealous associates, first Burton, then Petherick, Grant treated as a cipher, and a mass of intelligence, if such it can be called, so muddled and confused that we do not believe he understands it himself. We regret the miserable termination which the second great African exploration has had; we lament the time that has been lost, and the money that has been spent; but the only person to blame for its poor results is Captain Speke himself.'"
The following five maps, brought up to 1867, are inserted with the kind permission of the Royal Geographical Society, whose property they are.
