Every day in Kensington Gardens I jog round the bleak granite obelisk inscribed IN MEMORY OF SPEKE. VICTORIA NYANZA AND THE NILE 1864, which my family calls ‘Speke’s Spike’.
That river is known to me a bit: I have stood on the glaciers of Ruwenzori at 16,000 feet, which feed it via Lake Albert. I was the first (with two others) to descend for 100 miles the water of the Blue Nile from its Ethiopian source. I have waded the Sudd with Anuak guerrillas.
Tim Jeal’s gripping book pulls the whole astonishing story together. Many a red-blooded Spectator reader will relish it, and buy it, since it’s as intricate and unexpected as the source of the river itself.
All main players were British, all exemplars of grit, resourcefulness and courage on a heroic scale, each emerging in vibrant contrast: the obsessive doyen and medical missionary from Lanarkshire; the brilliant linguist and traveller-spectacular; the gentleman adventurer lured by the unknown; the Welsh foundling, reared in a workhouse, starting out as a newspaperman; and the lofty grandee who’d bought his orphaned lover and companion in a Turkish auction. To wit: David Livingstone, Richard Burton, John (Jack) Speke, Henry Moreton Stanley and Samuel Baker. They sought a common prize, and shared a common rivalry.
For to be the first to reveal that source to the world of Queen Victoria would be the equivalent today of being the first to set foot on Mars. From Herodotus onwards many had failed. The unerring contribution of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile — joining the White just south of Khartoum — to the annual flooding of lower Egypt was beginning to be suspected. But the great mystery of the provenance of the White lay locked up in unknown equatorial Africa.
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