I always thought exploring Africa was a question of man (that's European man) versus impenetrable jungle, wild animals, snakes, crocodiles, tropical diseases, starvation, etc, but it never occurred to me that, apart from the natives and slave traders, the most dangerous obstacles might be fellow explorers.
So full marks to Tim Jeal for setting the record straight with meticulous backgrounding of the individuals involved, and meeting the twin criteria of accurate scholarship and compelling storytelling.
Before getting down to the nitty gritty of Explorers of the Nile, it should be explained that the subjects of Jeal's book are looking for the river's source far beyond the junction with the Blue Nile.
Obviously, since Egyptians had been sailing up and down the Nile for several thousand years, the question had been on folks' minds. Such notables as Herodotus, ancient Greece's most famous historian (497BC), had visited Egypt and found the locals thought its source lay towards the west; while about AD140 Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer and geographer, using information from a Greek trader, had stated that a 25-day march inland would bring the traveller to "the snowy range of mountains fom whence the Nile draws its twin sources". Since these mountains were in the southern hemisphere, no-one believed the story.
As Jeal reveals, if these morsels of information seem irrelevant to readers, not so mid-19th-century explorers, as Britain's most famous explorer of Africa, medical doctor and missionary David Livingstone, also believed the Nile's source lay to the west.
Since my knowledge of Dr Livingstone went no further than Henry Morton Stanley's immortal, "Dr Livingstone I presume?
" line, the next 450 pages were a thrilling learning curve as various expeditions were mounted and the personalities involved put to the ultimate glory-or-death quest.
So after a brief flip through Livingstone's expeditions of 1866 and 1870, Jeal tracks back to 1855 and the first concentrated effort to "be first" (as far as geographical knowledge was concerned) with the Royal Geographical Society's unlikely pairing of swarthy Lieutenant Richard Francis Burton, linguist extraordinaire, flamboyant, egotistical, and just as much at home wearing Arab clothing as English, and fresh-faced, blue-eyed Lieutenant John Henning Speke, circumspect and reserved.
After a disastrous dry run in Somalia, where Burton leaves Speke to fight his way through a mob of murderous Somalis, the scene is set for a personality clash extraordinaire.
It's this battle for control between the partners that adds to the drama and richness of the storytelling. For while dealing with local tribespeople and armed Arab slave traders is always fraught, dealing with each other, as their pack animals and porters die around them, makes mesmerising reading.
My only complaint is that I would have preferred to have larger maps.
Otherwise, Jeal rounds out the geographical information with the social and political implications of European presence in the region as the first steps towards colonisation of East Africa are taken with missionaries arriving, and slavery abolished as Muslim influences wane.
So who finds the source of the Nile, as expedition follows expedition?
You could look it up on the net, or you could enjoy one of the finest adventure stories ever written, with colour plates, reproductions of drawings made by the explorers (no cameras then) with all sources named, acknowledgements and a bibliography. But the quest is really a side-show to the main event: man against man in the race to achieve fame and glory, and be immortalised, as all winners are.
- Ian Williams is a Dunedin writer and composer.
No comments:
Post a Comment