Explorers of the Nile, Tim Jeal

Explorers of the Nile, Tim Jeal

I remember the tales of the great African explorers from my youth.  I knew that Stanley had said “Livingston, I presume.”  Of course we do not know if he did, but that is what he claimed and it has become a part of our vernacular (even though it made Stanley a laughing stock in England).  Stanley and Livingston were the epitome of the explorer, but to be honest I knew very little of the “dark continent” that they explored looking for the Nile.  I did not know how populated it was with not only the indigenous people, but also the Arabs that carried on the slave trade for the markets of the Portuguese and the Turks and many other places where human life had a value that was measured in a price tage.

Livingstone was appalled by this and thought he could get England to outlaw it – he failed.  He was much loved by many Africans and almost worshipped by Stanley who pretended to be American but in fact was an orphan from Wales.  Both were good men, much better than the Germans, Belgians, and many of their countrymen.  Livingstone was almost considered a saint, but perhaps the family he left in England, that he seldom saw, and gave so little might question that.

There is Burton and Speke, two very different partners who were forced together by circumstance and separated by Burton’s jealousy.  Speke did much more than Burton, who was, in fact, carried for the majority of his expedition on a stretcher because of his disease.  Then Burton resents the fact that Speke was the one who actually discovered the source.  For all his life Burton tried to discredit Speke who died shortly after returning to England and was, therefore ,  unable to speak up against the growing skepticism that his books and discovery suffered.  Burton became one more unjustly knighted person – one Livingston disliked because of his mistreatment of Africans.

The hardships of disease, the need to sometimes spend months in unofficial house arrest within native villages before getting permission to move on, and the violence engendered by the cruelty and violence of the slave trade made this trips much more than exploratory hikes.

The list of names includes Baker and Grant and not too many more.  It really is a small band that brought back the knowledge of the Nile and inadvertently led to the colonization of the continent. 

The book is hard to put down.  I recommend it highly.  It concludes with the affairs of modern Africa that were the direct results of this exploration of the 1800’s.   The books illustrations really helped, but I found that I needed to have a map of Africa and the Nile to refer to as I read.

This paragraph is a good summary:

“Of the principal European actors in the Nile search, only David Livingstone died in Africa.  But Samuel and Florence Baker came as close to death as is possible without actually dying, thanks to pressing on across swampy, mosquito-infested country having exhausted their quinine.  On one occasion Stanley entered the tunnel of light now popularly associated with near-death experiences.  Richard Burton suffered so severely from malaria that he was unable to walk for the best part of a year; Speke endured an agonizing illness with symptoms like acute hydrophobia, as well as bouts of fever, temporary blindness and a permanent loss of hearing in one ear.  For nine months, Grant was immobilized by tropical leg ulcers, and Farquhar and Shaw, Stanley’s two companions on the Livingstone search, died from complications of malaria.  The Pocock brothers and Frederick Barker, on Stanley’s second journey, died respectively from smallpox, drowning and malaria.”  And it goes on.