Free Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure by Tim Jeal Page A

J. O. Udal’s The Nile in Darkness: A Flawed Unity 18631899 (2005).
Commandant Jean-Baptiste Marchand, from an oil painting in the Musée de l’Armée, Paris.
Sir Harold MacMichael, Britain’s top civil servant in Sudan 1926-33.

PART I
    SOLVING THE MYSTERY
     

NINE
    As Refulgent as the Sun
     
    During Speke’s six-week march to Buganda, as he came closer to the Nyanza, he and his men had to wade chest deep across a succession of swampy valleys where the water’s surface was only broken by large termite mounds, each topped with its own euphorbia candelabra tree. Towards the end of January, for the first time on this journey, he caught a glimpse of the glittering Nyanza from a place called Ukara; but neither on this occasion, nor when he came closer still on 7 February, did he choose to visit the lakeside itself to check whether the water seemed to be continuous. Certainly, he was restricted by the orders of his royal escort, but this lack of scientific thoroughness would come to haunt him later. Possibly he took it for granted that the lake was one immense inland sea because everyone he met said that it was. 1
    In late January, after sending messengers to the kabaka to learn his wishes, Maula – who, unknown to the explorer, was Mutesa’s chief spy and torturer – told Speke that it would be ten days or more before they would be able to continue their journey and in the meantime he meant to visit friends. While he was gone, local villagers subjected Speke to two days and nights of ‘drumming, singing, screaming, yelling and dancing’. In their own eyes, they were frightening away the devil – aka the ghostly-looking white man – though Speke gave no indication that he made the connection. After several days of this hubbub, he was delighted to receive an unexpected visit from N’yamgundu, the brother of the dowager queen of Buganda. This nobleman promised to return at sunrise to escort him and his followers to Mutesa’s palace.
    When N’yamgundu failed to turn up early next morning, Speke ordered Bombay to strike his tent and begin the march. Bombayobjected on the excellent grounds that without N’yamgundu, they had nobody to guide them. Frustrated and disappointed, Speke shouted: ‘Never mind; obey my orders and strike the tent.’ When Bombay refused, Speke pulled it down over his head. ‘On this,’ wrote Speke, ‘Bombay flew into a passion, abusing the men who were helping me, as there were fires and powder boxes under the tent.’ But Speke was beyond reason. Recalling all the insults, delays, untruths, disloyalties, thefts and losses he had endured without venting his fury, Speke’s self-control finally cracked. ‘If I choose to blow-up my property,’ he roared, ‘that is my look-out; and if you don’t do your duty I will blow you up also.’ Bombay still refused to obey him, so Speke delivered three sharp punches to his head. Bombay squared up as if about to fight back, but changed his mind and did not lay a finger on his attacker. Showing amazing self-restraint, he simply declared that he would no longer serve him as caravan leader. When Speke offered Bombay’s job to Nasib, the older of his two indispensable interpreters, he declined it. Instead, in Speke’s words, ‘the good old man made Bombay give in’.
    Speke later rationalised the bludgeoning he had administered by saying that he could not have ‘degraded’ Bombay by allowing an inferior officer to strike him for disobeying a direct order from his leader. But really, Speke had behaved outrageously and knew it – especially since he respected Bombay more than any other man in his employ. ‘It was the first and last time I had ever occasion to lose my dignity by striking a blow with my own hands.’ 2 It is some mitigation of the offence that virtually every other European explorer of Africa handed out thrashings from time to time in order to preserve a semblance of discipline – even Dr Livingstone. The endless vexations of African