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  Every day, Speke reported, two or three women would be selected for death and would be dragged away for execution without explanation. Henry VIII of England was a saint by comparison.

  When Speke and Grant eventually escaped from the clutches of the third of the Bantu kings, Kamrasi of Bunyoro, they were exhausted and so missed the chance of visiting another great lake (later to be named Lake Albert by explorer Samuel Baker).

  In 1863, after three years of toil and illness, they made it to Gondokoro where they were met by Baker on whose boat they travelled to Khartoum.

  Back in London both men, but especially Speke, were met by a tumultuous welcome and received many honours. Various geographers and Speke’s erstwhile travel companion, Burton, published erudite arguments questioning Speke’s ‘discoveries’, and soon both the media and the RGS, and also the public, divided into two camps, those who believed Speke’s theories and others who supported Burton.

  A year after his return, Speke was invited to meet Burton at a public debate in Bath about ‘The Nile Question’. Halfway through the debate, Speke said, ‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ and left the room. The next morning, with the main hall full and Burton on the stage, Speke failed to appear.

  After a while it was announced that the previous afternoon Speke had joined his cousin on a shoot near Bath and, climbing over a wall, had shot himself. Whether accidentally or not was never ascertained.

  Until his own death, Burton continued to criticize and question all Speke’s claims that he had discovered the source of the Nile.

  Burton and Speke’s contemporary Samuel Baker, whose Nile-based work brought him fame as great as theirs, did his best, while exploring, to put a stop to the horrors of slavery.

  The middle of the nineteenth century was the height of British imperial power. The list of its acquisitions, almost all in Samuel Baker’s lifetime, is astonishing. Britain by force and treaty acquired Singapore in 1819, Malacca in 1824, Hong Kong in 1842, Natal in 1843, Lower Burma in 1852 and Lagos in 1861, and had claimed sovereignty over Australia and New Zealand by 1840. The American President James Monroe famously warned Europeans not to meddle in his country’s affairs in 1823, but the British already had Canada.

  Baker was still at school in 1837 when Victoria became Queen of England and its empire, the greatest in history. God was an Englishman, according to the cynics of the day, and by the 1860s when Baker’s fame was in the making, a popular parody of a well-known hymn was:

  Onward, Christian soldiers

  On to heathen lands

  Prayer books in your pockets

  Rifles in your hands

  Baker’s chosen colony, where he set up a farming business, was Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which, once operating successfully, bored him. In 1855, the year before Burton and Speke set out to find the Nile’s source, Baker was into hunting in a big way, including the shooting of rogue Ceylonese elephants. In one of his early books – he was to become a prolific author – he noted that elephants were proficient swimmers and when floating, even when dead, they remained so high in the water that six men could ride on them as though on a raft. Some years later in Africa he noted that many Zulu drums used leather cut from elephants’ ears. And he wore khaki as camouflage when hunting long before it was introduced in the British Army.

  Back in Europe in 1855 his wife died of typhus, leaving him with four young children whose care he entrusted to a succession of nannies. While travelling in Hungary, by then aged thirty-five, Baker attended a slave auction and bid successfully for a seventeen-year-old Hungarian girl whose parents had died and, by bad luck, had ended up being sold. On return with her to London, Baker found society, and indeed his own family, to be disapproving of his new ‘wife’.

  After trying various ‘jobs’ in Europe, Baker wrote to his sister in 1860, ‘My magnetic needle directs me to Central Africa.’ He applied to the Royal Geographical Society for a place on the planned Zambezi expedition of the Scottish missionary Dr Livingstone, but he was turned down. So in 1861 he and ex-slave Florrie, with whom he was by then living as man and wife, travelled, without any official endorsement by the establishment, on their own project to locate the source of the Nile, or at least to find and ‘save’ the then-missing Speke and Grant expedition.

  From Aswan they crossed the desert with guides and sixteen camels. The great heat made Florrie ill and they rested a while in Berbera. They noted (as we did one hundred and seven years later) that the Nile water was ‘undrinkable’. Baker also recorded his fascination with the way that Arab women squatted, naked under their robes, over jars of burning incense to ensure that their nether regions smelled pleasant.

  Baker’s various travel books seldom mention his children. By the time of his first Nile journey he had not seen his eldest daughter, who was thirteen years old, for six years. Florrie, childless, was horrified to note that many Europeans living in Khartoum married young slave girls whose vaginas had been partially sewn up to ensure chastity prior to their sale. On arrival in Khartoum the Bakers were put up at the consulate. The Consul himself, a Welshman named Petherick, had headed south to try and locate Speke and Grant.

  After an unpleasant voyage through the Sudd, the Bakers reached Gondokoro (Juba) in early 1862 but of Petherick, Speke and Grant they found no trace. So they made camp in the sweltering heat and depressing humidity, both suffering from malaria, during which Baker somehow put down a mutiny by his own party. Two weeks later, Speke and Grant duly appeared – three years after their last known sighting by the outside world. This meeting was rather like that, a few years later, of Livingstone and Stanley. When Petherick (and his wife!) turned up at Gondokoro, after their own troubles with the locals, Speke was not only ungrateful for their attempts to locate him but, subsequently and vengefully, ruined Petherick’s reputation.

  He was, on the other hand, very friendly to the Bakers, and when Baker asked him, now that he, Speke, had apparently discovered the source of the Nile, what might be left for him and Florrie to usefully look for, he was as helpful as possible. Why not, he suggested, search for Lake N’zigi? This lake was reported by Arab traders to exist to the west of Lake Victoria, and the Nile might well run through it. Speke and Grant had not been able to check its existence.

  Baker gave his boat to Speke and Grant, who left for Khartoum, as did the Pethericks. As soon as they had gone Baker had to put down a second mutiny, which he did through sheer force of character.

  Arab slavers then became the only possible support for the Bakers to progress over the next dreadful year before they reached the Victorian Nile in Kamrasi’s kingdom. En route they had suffered every form of hardship and constant bouts of fever. ‘White ants and rats, robbers and smallpox are my companions and neighbours,’ Baker commented mournfully in his diary. Florrie very nearly died on the journey from Kamrasi’s lands to Buganda, but through sheer determination and against all odds, they made it to Lake N’zigi.

  After such a discovery (as I was later to learn to my cost in Oman) it is sensible to stake your claim before somebody else does, and the Bakers, elated by their find, were keen to get back to Gondokoro and announce the discovery of their lake to the world.

  Much later, with hindsight, they would probably regret that they did not visit the southern end of Lake N’zigi, which would have made them realize that it was a good deal smaller than they thought, and certainly it was tiny when compared with Speke’s Lake Victoria.

  As it was, they did not entirely give in to the urge to rush homewards because Baker, by calculating the elevation of N’zigi compared with that of Lake Victoria, knew that there must be a waterfall delivering the waters of the Victoria Nile into his lake.

  Some thirty-five miles up the river flowing into the N’zigi at its north-eastern end, he came to the waterfall which he described as ‘a grand stream . . . pent up in a narrow gorge scarcely 50 yards in width; roaring furiously through the rock-bound pass . . . [plunging] in one leap of about 120 feet perpendicular into a dark abyss below . . .
the greatest waterfall of the Nile . . . ’ He named it the Murchison Falls after the President of the Royal Geographical Society.

  With the help of Kamrasi’s warriors, the Bakers made it back to Gondokoro by Christmas 1864, almost two years after they had left that hellhole.

  A nightmare voyage followed to Khartoum where they stayed until June 1865, avoiding the plague which killed thousands in the city.

  Back at last in London, Baker officially married Florrie. In 1866 he was knighted. He wrote books, even a novel, became a proper father to his long-forsaken daughters, and it took at least three years of post-Nile recovery before boredom set in and he then took the job of Governor-General of the Equatorial Nile Basin, paid for by Khedive Ismail of Egypt whose ambition was to rule all of Sudan. He also announced his desire to abolish slavery in his entire kingdom. (This was a touch cynical since he, personally, retained many hundreds of slaves of both sexes.)

  Baker saw his new job as, first and foremost, the suppression of slavery down the Sudanese Nile and then the annexation of the Nile Basin to Egypt. Since Ismail remained in faraway Cairo, Baker Pasha became the sole power in Sudan with his chief assistant, as ever, his loyal wife Florrie. He was now in charge of half a million square miles of Africa.

  On arrival in Khartoum he found that the acting Governor-General there had just despatched eleven steamers up the Nile on a slave-taking mission, which was, of course, encouraging the very activity that Baker was tasked to stamp out.

  Baker was to find that, because he was determined to abolish slavery down his stretch of the Nile belonging to the Sudan, he was thwarted at every turn by the Arab slavers who would, he knew, have otherwise been his best supporters in subjugating the hostile tribes to his (and thus the Khedive’s) authority. As it was, he had to make do with an army of mostly ex-convict Egyptians and, considerably better material in his opinion, semi-trained Sudanese soldiers. From the ranks of the latter he recruited a crack squad of loyal men as his personal guard.

  This army crept up the river in three groups, two in sailboats and steamers, including the Bakers, the third overland with oxen and camels to haul prefab steamers in sections for use above the cataracts.

  The Sudd levels were high that year and the floating islands of hyacinth and papyrus were chaotic. Florrie wrote of unbearable mosquitoes and the river alive with snakes, crocodiles and hippos (which snorted all night). Men sickened daily in the grinding heat. At Sobat he released his first convoy of 150 slaves and married some off to his soldiers in a two-way voluntary manner. He was later to write about these ex-slaves’ feistiness in asserting female rights long before the London suffragettes were to do so.

  By early 1872, with a year of his contract as Pasha still to go, Baker’s active force had shrunk through death, disease or desertion from sixteen hundred to five hundred but, as intractable as ever, he set out to extend the Khedive’s authority further south than Gondokoro. He established garrisons at Fatiko, Unguro and as far south as Masindi. Wherever he and his main force happened to be, slavery disappeared and ‘Egypt ruled’, but once he moved elsewhere the slavers returned like quicksilver.

  Kamrasi died, but his son Kabba Rega put together an army of five thousand warriors and attacked the Bakers in their Masindi outpost. Through sheer bravado and superior discipline, they survived, burnt down Kabba Rega’s village and retreated to their compound.

  When a further attack was narrowly survived and knowing it would take too long to call for reinforcements from Khartoum, the Bakers and their entire garrison conducted a hair-raising retreat overland to Fatiko under constant attack by Kabba Rega’s spearmen. Ten of Baker’s group were killed, but the others survived against remarkable odds. Over the next few months, eventually with reinforcements from Khartoum, Baker extended his garrisons and rescued many thousands of slaves. When his contract was ended, he and Florence said a sad goodbye to their many loyal African friends and, in Cairo, he received the highest awards from the Khedive. His legacy, as he saw it, was that the slave trade in all Sudanese Equatoria was ended and Egypt’s authority was now extended to the Equator. He was of course wrong, but he had certainly done his best. Back in London, the media lauded the Bakers who took over the halo of Livingstone as the greatest of anti-slavery crusaders. His successor, the evangelical General Charles Gordon, was not a Nile explorer but, thanks to Baker, he had a navigable river to use on his own sallies to the south of Khartoum.

  On returning to England, the Bakers ‘retired’ to Devon, but each year, until Samuel died at home of a heart attack in 1893, they travelled around the world, sometimes hunted and saw old friends. Baker’s last words were to his wife, using her nickname, ‘Flooey, how can I leave you?’ She died twenty-three years later. Theirs was, to my mind, the greatest of all stories of true love.

  In the pantheon of famous Nile explorers, the name of Dr David Livingstone is decidedly more famous than that of Baker, Burton, Speke or Grant.

  Livingstone, born in 1913 in Scotland to a poor family, was a devout Christian throughout his life. He first worked in a local cotton mill, then studied medicine and became a doctor then a missionary. Aged twenty-seven he sailed to Cape Town as a fully fledged member of the London Missionary Society. He headed north to find a suitable place for his mission and home, and his early adventures, including being mauled by a lion, involved successfully locating both Lake Ngama (1849) and the Zambezi River. North of the Zambezi he veered west above the Kalahari and blazed a route to the Atlantic coast at Luanda.

  This first remarkable journey involved a 1,500-mile struggle against the threats of great heat, jungle, disease, hunger and tribes who loved to kill strangers. Despite fever and exhaustion, Livingstone and his loyal group of porters then retraced their footsteps to the Zambezi and decided to follow its course. In doing so he located the great waterfall that he named after Queen Victoria. Reaching the coast at Quelimane in 1856, he sailed back to Britain and international fame, being the first man to have crossed the entire African continent from west to east.

  He returned soon afterwards on a British government-sponsored Zambezi expedition to find a route along that river using steamboats and, his own venture, to set up a Christian mission. Both missions failed and his wife died in 1862, but Livingstone had nonetheless gained a wealth of scientific and geographical information by the time the Foreign Office recalled him in 1864.

  That same year the claimed Nile-source discoveries of Speke were undermined by the general belief that, in September, he had shot himself as a tacit admission that his claims were false. That, together with the ongoing bitter controversies of Burton, Grant, Petherick and others, was causing great embarrassment to the RGS who, hoping to resolve the Nile puzzle beyond all doubt, sent the redoubtable, if ageing, Livingstone back into hell. He went willingly, for he had his own theories about the Nile’s source which were based on the ancient comments of the likes of Herodotus, not on the modern claims of Burton, Speke and co. And above all, he wished to end the horrors of the slave trade and to introduce Christianity to the tribes.

  Between 1866 and 1871, following his own deluded theories as to the geography of the Nile, he fought his way, with sickness and tribal hostility always against him, to the lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika. To advance at all he was often forced to accept help from Arab and Swahili slavers, the very devils he was out to defeat. In 1871 he finally decided against any further collusion with them when, to the west of Lake Tanganyika, he witnessed a massacre by slavers of hundreds of natives, mostly women and children, along the banks of the Lualaba River. He retreated to Ujiji on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, where the famous incident of his ‘rescue’ by the Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley occurred. This was as a result of worldwide interest in and concern for Livingstone’s fate. The RGS had sent relief expeditions, but Stanley, sponsored by a New York newspaper, found him first.

  The two men spent the next three months together in a further search for river outlets from the lake. When Stanley departed, Livingstone went w
est back to the Lualaba River, but soon discovered that it flowed west into the Congo and might not be a Nile source. He died when, travelling in swamp country, he was stricken by fever in 1873. His body was taken by his loyal porters to Zanzibar and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. He never founded a mission nor converted more than a handful of souls. Some say he converted nobody! Nor did he finally solve the Nile controversy. But he did help to end slavery in Africa, and in twenty-first-century Zambia and Zimbabwe where European names of towns and features have been Africanized, the name of Livingstone has not.

  In 2005, a year after Ginny died, I married Louise and in November of that year we were invited to join an expedition to recreate the last few days of Livingstone’s 1855 journey down the Zambezi to the edge of Victoria Falls.

  Planned by Simon Wilde, a white African with a guest lodge further down the Zambezi, the expedition aimed to celebrate, to the very day and date, the Scottish missionary’s arrival at Mosi-oa-Tunya (Smoke-that-Thunders) which he renamed Victoria Falls.

  One of the team, Russell Gammon, was a local safari guide and historian, and the paddlers of our mokoros (dugout log canoes) were Zambian rivermen, Lemmy Nyambe, Victor Sikushaba and Saad Mweembe.

  Our first night was spent in a thunderstorm at a camping ground on the banks of the Zambezi 120 miles upriver of the Falls. Simon apologized in advance for the weather we were likely to experience. It was unfortunate, he said, that Livingstone had done his journey in mid-November ‘when the hot dry season reaches its scorching crescendo and the first big storms of the rainy season arrive’.

  We were given some advice by Russell, our guide: ‘Do not trail any limbs in the water. Approach the water after dark with great caution. Crocs are natural predators that hunt from an ambush at the water’s edge. If a croc comes for you, which is unlikely, you’ll have heard stories about jamming an arm down its throat to make it let go, but if it’s a big croc in deep water, you’re basically buggered.’