The discovery of the water which he called Victoria Nyanza formed, I have said, the point whence our paths diverged. He was convinced that he had found ‘the Nile Source,’ and he was determined to work out that problem in the position which he thought himself best fitted to hold, that of leader. Arrived at Zanzibar, he fell into bad hands, and being, like most ambitious men, very apt to consider himself neglected and ill-treated until crowned by success, he was easily made sore upon the point of merits not duly recognized. He showed a nervous hurry to hasten home, although we found upon the Island that our leave had been prolonged by the Bombay Government. Reaching Aden, we were housed for a few days by my old and tried friend, the late Dr Steinhaeuser, who repeatedly warned me that all was not right. On Monday, April 18th, arrived H. M.’s ship Furious, Captain Sherard Osborne, carrying the late Lord Elgin and his secretary, the supposed author of the review in Blackwood. We were kindly invited to take passage on board: my companion’s sick certificate was en règle, whilst mine was not, and he left Aden in such haste that he did not take leave of his host. Still we were, to all appearance, friends.
Before parting with me, Capt. Speke voluntarily promised, when reaching England, to visit his family in the country, and to await my arrival, that we might appear together before the Royal Geographical Society. But on board the Furious he was exposed to the worst influences, and he was persuaded to act in a manner which his own moral sense must have afterwards strongly condemned, if indeed it ever pardoned it. From Cairo he wrote me a long letter, reiterating his engagement, and urging me to take all the time and rest that broken health required. Yet, hardly had he reached London before he appeared at Whitehall Place to give his own views of important points still under discussion. Those were the days when the Society in question could not afford to lack its annual lion, whose roar was chiefly to please the ladies and to push the institution. Despite the palpable injustice thus done to the organizer and leader of the expedition, Capt. Speke was officially directed—‘much against his own inclination,’ he declared—to lecture in Burlington House. The President ‘seized the enlightened view that such a discovery should not be lost to the glory of England,’ and came at once to the conclusion, ‘Speke, we must send you there again.’ Finally, a council assembled to ascertain what were the projects of the volunteer leader, and what assistance he would require, in order to ‘make good his discovery by connecting the Lake with the Nile.’ They ended their labours by recommending the most liberal preparations—a remarkable contrast to those of the first expedition.[[76]]
I reached London on May 21st, and found that everything had been done for, or rather against, me. My companion now stood forth in his true colours, an angry rival. He had doubtless been taught that the expedition had owed to him all its success: he had learned to feel aggrieved, and the usual mental alchemy permuted to an offence every friendly effort which I had made in his favour. No one is so unforgiving, I need hardly say, as the man who injures another. A college friend (Alfred B. Richards) thus correctly defined my position, ‘Burton, shaken to the backbone by fever, disgusted, desponding, and left behind both in the spirit and in the flesh, was, in racing parlance, “nowhere.”’
Presently appeared two papers in Blackwood’s Magazine (Sept.-Oct., 1859), which opened a broad breach between my late companion and myself. They contained futilities which all readers could detect. A horseshoe, or Chancellor’s wig, some 6000 feet high and 180 miles in depth, was prolonged beyond the equator and gravely named ‘Mountains of the Moon.’ The Nyanza water, driven some 120 miles further north than when originally laid down from Arab information, stultified one of the most important parts of our labours. Nor did I see why my companion should proceed to apply without consultation such names as ‘Speke Channel’ and ‘Burton Point’ to features which we had explored together.
It was no ‘petty point of explorer’s etiquette,’ as some reviewer generously put the case, which made me resent the premature publication of Capt. Speke’s papers: though the many-headed may think little of such matters, a man who has risked his life for a great discovery cannot sit tamely to see it nullified. My views also about retaining native nomenclature have ever been fixed, and of the strongest: I still hold, with the late venerable Mr Macqueen, ‘Nothing can be so absurd as to impose English names on any part, but especially upon places in the remote interior parts of Africa. This is, we believe, done by no other nation. What nonsense it is calling a part of Lake Nyanza the Bengal Archipelago; a stagnant puddle, with water in it only during the rains, or where the lake overflows, the Jordans, a name never heard of in geography’ (The Nile Basin, pp. 109, 110).
Such a breach once made is easily widened. My companion wrote and spoke to mutual acquaintances in petulant and provoking terms, which rendered even recognition impossible. They justified me, I then thought, in publishing the Lake Regions of Central Africa, where, smarting under injury, my story was told. After the lapse of a decade, when a man of sense can sit in judgment upon his younger self, it is evident to me that much might have been omitted, and that more might have been modified, yet I find nothing in it unfair, unreasonable, or in any way unfaithful. Many opined that the more dignified proceeding would have been to ignore the injuries done to me. But the example of my old commander, Sir Charles Napier (the soldier), taught me in early life how unwise it is to let public sentence be passed by default, and that even delay in disputing unqualified assertions may in some cases be fraught with lasting evil.
Capt. Speke succeeded, as the world knows, in organizing a second expedition upon the plan of the first: it lasted between Sept. 25, 1860, and April, 1863, when he telegram’d to Alexandria, ‘The Nile is settled.’ I would in no way depreciate the solid services rendered to geography by him and by his gallant and amiable companion, Capt. Grant. They brought in an absolute gain of some 350 geographical miles between S. lat. 3° and N. lat. 3°, an equatorial belt, vaguely known only by Arab report and concerning which, with the hardest labour, I could collect only the heads of information. But they left unsolved the moot question of the Nile sources, and indeed it soon became the opinion of scientific Europe that during the two and a half years, ending with April, 1863, the Nile Basin had been invested with an amount of fable unknown to the days of Ptolemy.
Presently after Capt. Speke’s triumphant return appeared the volumes upon the ‘Discovery of the Source of the Nile,’ and upon ‘What led to the Discovery.’ His brilliant march led me to express, despite all the differences which had sprung up between us, the most favourable opinion of his leadership, and indirect messages passed between us suggesting the possibility of a better understanding. Again, however, either old fancied injuries still rankled in his heart or he could not forgive the man he had injured—odisse quem læseris—or, which is most probable, the malignant tongues of ‘friends’ urged him on to a renewal of hostilities, and the way to reconciliation was for ever barred. This was the more unhappy as he had greatly improved under the influence of a noble ambition justly satisfied, and all his friends were agreed that success had drawn out the best points of his character.
The volumes did much to injure Capt. Speke’s reputation as a traveller. It would be vain to comment upon the extreme looseness of the geography: one instance suffices, the ‘great backwater Luta Nzige.’ The anthropology and ethnology are marvellous: what can be said of his identifying the Watuta with the Zulu, and the Zangian Wahuma with the ‘Semi-Shem-Hamitic’ race of Æthiopia or with the Gallas, the most Semitic of the N. East African tribes? What can we make of ‘our poor elder brother Ham?’ What can ruddy King David have had to do with the black Chief Rumanika? The explanation is that the author’s mind, incurious about small matters, could not grasp, and did not see the importance of grasping, a fact, and his vagueness of thought necessarily extended to his language. Else how account for his ‘partial eclipse of the moon happens on the fifth and sixth of January, 1863’ (Journal p. 243)? if and be a misprint for or, why had he not consulted the newest almanac? Nor did he know the use of words. A mass of foul huts is ‘a village built on the most luxurious principles,’ and a petty chief is a ‘King of kings;’ whilst a ‘splendid court’ means a display of mere savagery, and the ‘French of those parts’ are barbarians somewhat livelier than their neighbours. ‘Nelson’s Monument at Charing Cross’ is a specimen of what we may expect from Central Africa.
Not less curious is the awkward, scatter of Scriptural quotations and allusions that floats upon the surface of his volumes. It looks as though some friend had assured the author that his work would not ‘go down’ without a little of what is popularly called ‘hashed Bible;’ and that the result had been the recommendation of missionary establishments at the Nile sources. I am assured, however, that before the end of his life Capt. Speke had greatly changed his previous opinions. When travelling with me he used to ignore ‘overruling Providence or a future state’ in a style whose unstudied conviction somewhat surprised me.