A source of bitter rivalry: Burton and Speke fall out over the Nile

For the 19th-century English adventurer, author, ethnographer, pornographer and all-round maverick Richard Burton, one of life’s happiest moments was ‘the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands’. There would of course be difficulties; but happiness derives from the prospect of overcoming great challenges and in the process achieving fame and perhaps even fortune. By contrast, what delights the reader most is when a traveller, somewhere deep in those unknown lands, faces overwhelming obstacles. What possible interest is there in hearing that they went, they saw and they returned?

Few journeys involved more hardship than the one Burton contemplated in the spring of 1855. Aged 34, he had already travelled widely, served in India with the East India Company’s army and in the Crimean War, made the hajj to Mecca and visited Egypt. He had also published five books, including one on falconry and another on bayonet exercises. Though he came from a well-off family and had studied at Oxford, he was a individualist, known as ‘ruffian Dick’. But it wouldn’t be until the summer of 1857 that he finally embarked on the greatest of his distant journeys. Assisted by a junior officer, John Hanning Speke, and native guides, porters and guards, he intended to walk inland from the East African shore to answer the greatest geographical puzzle of the time: where did the Nile, the world’s longest river, rise?

Alongside the joy of departure, there were great anxieties about the challenges and dangers ahead, and with good reason. Two years earlier, after both Englishmen had landed in Berbera – in present-day Somaliland – they had been severely wounded in an attack during which a large amount of their equipment and stores had been looted.