CHAPTER XIV. Geography and East Africa

GEOGRAPHY AND EAST AFRICA

Burton and Speke—Speke and Grant—Death of Speke—Livingstone and Stanley—Geographical incidents

The travels of the successive explorers of Eastern Africa who started from the Zanzibar Coast were watched by geographers with the keenest interest. I was in one way or another somewhat closely connected with the principal actors, and may therefore speak about them with propriety. The information that first drew general attention to this part of Africa was the startling announcement that a snow-topped mountain, Kilimandjaro, had been seen from a distance by the missionaries Krapf and Rebmann on their journeys from Mombas, where they were stationed. Their information was fiercely criticised. It was disbelieved wholly by some, and only partially credited by many others. In addition to this, the missionaries had transmitted reports of a vast Central African lake, based on the collated testimonies of many native travellers. Mr. Erhardt communicated a memoir on this lake to the Royal Geographical Society, and I, who had most to do with their then newly established Proceedings, had it with its accompanying map inserted in one of its early numbers. The map was an amazing production and very hypothetical, but the data from which it was constructed made it clear that an exploration of those regions would be a highly promising undertaking. I myself had been strongly urged to investigate the neighbourhood of Kilimandjaro, but felt insufficiently restored to health to undertake the task. An expedition was at length set on foot in 1856 under the command of Captain Burton (1821-1890), with J. H. Speke (1827-1864) as second, for which I myself drafted the instructions. It accomplished great things, namely, the discovery of the two lakes, Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza, but at the painful cost of a serious breach of friendship between its leaders. Burton was a man of eccentric genius and tastes, orientalised in character and thoroughly Bohemian. He was a born linguist, and ever busy in collecting minute information as to manners and habits. Speke, on the other hand, was a thorough Briton, conventional, solid, and resolute. Two such characters were naturally unsympathetic. On reaching Tanganyika, Burton became seriously ill and temporarily unfitted for travel; his eyes, too, were badly inflamed and gave him great trouble. Principally owing to Burton’s restless spirit of inquiry, the existence and position of the lake now known as the Victoria Nyanza had been ascertained. Burton was unable to go to it; therefore Speke went as his deputy, and so came upon what was suspected by him, and has proved afterwards to be a headwater of the Nile. Of course Speke got the credit, for without him the lake would not have then been reached, but the disappointment to Burton at being superseded in solving the problem of ages by discovering the source of the Nile was very bitter and very natural. Burton brought back, as purely his own work, a most elaborate account of all the tribes he had met by the way, the close accuracy of which has been testified to by succeeding travellers. Only one of his numerous notebooks came under my own careful examination, as already mentioned, and I was astonished at its minuteness. I may mention the occasion, which was this.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel were considering the propriety of establishing a mission station at Zanzibar, and desired fuller information about the island than they possessed. In the end they invited me to give a lecture, to which I consented, after talking with Burton, who had been asked and refused, but who very kindly offered me the full use of his original notebook written when in Zanzibar. An elaborate account which he had based on it for publication had been lost. I had no first-hand information about the place, but had known Erhardt and others who knew it well, so was able to compile a respectable description, which was published in the Mission Field, June 1, 1861. The notes made by Burton were written in a fine clear hand and most elaborate in detail. He told me that he often used a board with parallel wires, such as are made for the use of the blind, to write notes, unseen, in the night-time.

The next expedition was under Captain Speke, with whom Captain Grant (1827-1892) was associated. They were to take up the quest at the point on the Victoria Nyanza where Speke had reached it, and to travel onwards. This was done, and I may say that the attachment of Grant to Speke was most remarkable for its loyalty and intensity. They were fine manly fellows, and I can see them now in my mind’s eye, as they came to take a final leave, when I knocked two nails into the side of a cupboard as they stood side by side with their backs to it, to mark their respective heights and as a memento of them when away. As is well known, they followed the Nile, not however without a break, from the Lake into Egypt. This break, and the hypothetical placement of the “Mountains of the Moon,” whose position Speke saw reason to modify in a second map, gave an opening to criticism of which bitter use was made. Coming down the Nile, Speke and Grant met Captain, afterwards Sir Samuel, Baker (1821-1893) and his large party going up it, and were able to give him timely and valuable information. I do not speak more of Sir Samuel’s magnificent work, because it did not fall closely within my own ken, but will conclude what has to be said about Burton and Speke.

In the year 1864 the British Association met at Bath, at which Burton was to read a paper severely criticising Speke’s work. Speke was staying in the neighbourhood with a shooting party, and was invited to take part in the discussion. It is the custom that on each morning, a little before the President and Committee of the several Sections of the British Association take their seats, they meet in a separate room to discuss matters that require immediate settlement, and to select the papers that are to be read on the following day. On the present occasion this business had been finished, and Sir James Alexander was urging that the Council of the Association should be requested by the Committee to bring Captain Speke’s services to the notice of Government and to ask for their appropriate recognition, when a messenger brought a letter for the President, Sir Roderick Murchison. He motioned to the Secretary, who was seated at his left hand, to read it, while he, the President, continued to attend to Sir James. The countenance of the Secretary clearly showed that the letter contained serious news. Sir James Alexander went on speaking, the letter was in the meantime circulated and read by each in turn, including Captain Burton, who sat opposite to me, and I got it the last, or almost the last of all before the President. It was to say that Speke had accidentally shot himself dead, by drawing his gun after him while getting over a hedge.

Burton had many great and endearing qualities, with others of which perhaps the most curious was his pleasure in dressing himself, so to speak, in wolf’s clothing, in order to give an idea that he was worse than he really was. I attended his funeral at the Roman Catholic Cemetery near Sheen. It had been arranged by his widow, Lady Burton, a devoted Catholic, and was crowded with her Catholic friends. I did not see more than three geographers among them, of whom Lord Northbrook, a former President of the Society, was one. From pure isolation, we two kept together the whole time. There were none of Burton’s old associates. It was a ceremony quite alien to anything that I could conceive him to care for.

Anyhow, I was glad to be instrumental in procuring a Government Pension of £300 a year for Lady Burton, and in this way. At a meeting of the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, the then President, said that private information had reached him (of which he mentioned some details) that Government would be disposed to grant a pension to Lady Burton if a good case could be made out relating to Burton’s services to science, and if the Council of the Society were to back it. Would any one undertake to carry this through? No one answered, so he addressed himself to me personally, asking if I would. I expressed a cordial desire to help, but feeling at the moment too ignorant of the views of competent authorities concerning Burton’s linguistic knowledge (on which much emphasis had been laid), and of much else that might with advantage be advanced in his favour, was unable to answer off-hand, but willingly undertook to inquire and report. This I did, asking the opinions of many, with the result that Burton’s knowledge of vernacular Arabic and other languages was considered to be unequalled, but not his classical knowledge of them, and that it was better to rest his claims on his wide discursiveness rather than on any one specified performance. I followed this advice, and my Report formed the basis of the proposed application, which in due course gained its end. My own acquaintance with Lady Burton was slight, and my memories of her husband refer chiefly to his unmarried days.

Several of us subscribed to have a public memorial of Speke, and obtained a plot in Kensington Gardens to place it. It now stands in the form of an obelisk, by the side of the broad gravel walk leading northwards from the Albert Memorial. There was much difficulty in selecting an inscription which should not arouse criticism, for there were still those who maintained with Burton that Speke had not discovered the true source of the Nile. Lord Houghton solved the difficulty by simplifying the proposed legend to “Victoria Nyanza and the Nile,” which words the obelisk now bears.

Speke, Burton, Grant, Baker, Livingstone, and Stanley are all gone; I wish it could be arranged to make a joint and interesting memorial of our great African explorers in the plot where Speke’s obelisk now stands in neglected solitariness. It would not require more than two or three extra yards on either side, parallel to the Grand Walk, and the same in depth, to give room for this, and to allow of the growth of a few hardy plants suggestive of tropical vegetation, with pathways between them. England has done so very much for African geography that she ought to bring the fact home to the national conscience. When Burton died, and again when Stanley died, I made the suggestion that a memorial should be erected by the side of that of Speke, or that appropriate inscriptions should be added, but I heard on good authority that it would be most distasteful to the representatives of both Speke and Grant to do so. Many long years have since passed, and it may be hoped that hard feelings will soften in time and permit what many like myself would consider a laudable and pious act.

I have mentioned the names of Livingstone and Stanley, and here again I have something to say. The popular opinion has been that Livingstone was left to his fate without adequate care on the part of his countrymen to succour him, and that he was rescued owing to the zeal of the proprietor of an American newspaper and the hardihood of his employee, Mr., afterwards Sir Henry, Stanley.

I was on the Council of the Royal Geographical Society during all the time in question, and can testify to our extreme desire to help Livingstone, but in his later years he had become difficult to meddle with. He had a brusque resentment against anything that might be construed into patronage, feeling, as I understood, that he had been over-much “exploited” by his admirers. There was great fear among those in the Council who knew him better than I did, that he might be annoyed at any attempt to relieve him, and would resent it yet more bitterly than Emin Bey subsequently resented Stanley’s compulsory relief. Again, there was no reason to suppose Livingstone to be in serious want. He was thoroughly accustomed to natives of the widely dispersed Bantu race, among whom he probably then was. He travelled without a large party or other encumbrance, so that the favour of even a single chief, such as he might reasonably expect to gain, would amply suffice for his wants. Besides this, he had not cared to write, and there was no knowing where a man like him might be, who had already walked right across Africa and back again. So whenever the question was discussed formally, or otherwise, it seemed better to defer action till some intelligence of his wishes and whereabouts had been received. In the meantime, acting upon his own data and reasonings, the proprietor of the New York Herald sent the expedition, whose progress is described in Stanley’s book, and which ended so successfully for Livingstone. One wishes that the whole thing could have been effected with less secrecy in the beginning, and less ostentation and comparison of Americans and English to the prejudice of the latter.

When the box of native make that contained Livingstone’s remains was brought to England by Cameron, it was deposited in the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society, and a most pathetic sight it was. Many wished to be present at its opening, but Sir Bartle Frere, then the President, determined that no opportunity should be given for journalistic description, and refusing to himself the painful gratification of witnessing it, limited the spectators to very few. Sir William Fergusson, the great operator, was deputed to dissect the arm-bone at the place where the lion had broken it, as means of identification. I forget who were the others. They included some members of Livingstone’s family, and Mr. Webb of Newstead Abbey, a great sportsman and friend of Livingstone, familiar with the locality of the injured bone. I think these were all.

The pathos of Livingstone’s interment in Westminster Abbey was painfully marred by the use of a conventional coffin and other funeral upholstery. Had he been buried in the box rudely made by natives, that had conveyed his remains from the far interior to the Coast and told its own tale, the ceremony would have been incomparably more touching.

I should have an ungrateful task if I had to speak at length of Stanley’s travels down the Congo. His journey was first described at Brighton at a large meeting of the Geographical Section of the British Association, of which I was the President. The ex-Emperor and Empress of the French were among the audience. So much mystery had been preserved beforehand about it that none of us had a conception of what was coming, which is quite contrary to usual procedure. Mr. Stanley had other interests than geography. He was essentially a journalist aiming at producing sensational articles, and it was feared from the newspaper letters he had already written that he might utilise the opportunity in ways inappropriate to the British Association. However, the meeting went off without more misadventure than a single interference on my part, but under some tension. I will not enter further into this.

It is highly necessary to the credit of a Society that its Council should, as a rule, and always when there is any misgiving, exact that the papers about to be read should be referred to experts and favourably reported on. The Society gives a pulpit, as it were, to the speaker, and in its turn has a right to exact precautions that these advantages should not be abused. I cannot understand to this day how that strange individual, Rougemont, obtained permission to read his fantastic, perhaps half-hallucinatory paper about the coral reefs and treasures in Australia before the British Association. Putting every other improbability for the moment to one side, the “Art-of-Travel” impossibilities in his story, as in the construction of his raft, would have made me scrutinise with a very wary eye all the rest that he said.

I may mention a ludicrous but discreditable incident at a meeting of the Geographical Section of the British Association, which the timely reference of a paper before it was allowed to be read might perhaps have prevented. It was in Cambridge in 1862. Sir Roderick Murchison had been nominated as President of the Section, but fell ill just before the meeting, and I was nominated and elected in his stead. Mr. W., a Fellow of King’s College, had been entrusted with the MSS of a recently deceased Oriental Professor, including a memoir on the inscription upon a stone near Aberdeen. It was well known to antiquarians, and had long puzzled them; the Professor declared it to be Phenician. The title of the Geographical Section then included the already obsolete words “and Philology,” so it was technically correct that the paper should be read there. Mr. W. called on me, most desirous, as he said, for the honour of the Association that a paper by so distinguished a University Professor should be read before it. I demurred, saying that it was doubtful whether a single member of the Committee knew a word of Phenician, or were able to discuss its merits. In reply to the question whether that language was really sufficiently well understood to justify a translation, he assured me it was, and mentioned two great works in German, of which I knew nothing, in proof. I still hesitated, but said that if the Committee should agree to accept the communication, I would offer no objection, and they did agree, under the spell of Mr. W.’s eloquence; so the paper was accepted.

When I took the chair the next day, the zeal of Mr. W. was conspicuous in the diagrams he had hung round the walls like a frieze. Each diagram contained a representation of one of the 35 or so characters. Below it was its Hebrew equivalent, and below all was a free translation, in which I noted there were more words than there were letters in the original, and my misgivings grew. The paper proved to be long and tedious, as papers on antiquarian subjects often are, and the audience melted away. At length the reporters could stand it no longer, and most fortunately left also. The audience was then reduced to a mere handful of persons, and when the paper was finished Mr. C. rose, who was a recognised authority on Greek manuscripts, and said that he had no pretensions in respect to a knowledge of Phenician, but as a mere question of resemblance it struck him that the characters (which he pointed out) seemed to him less like the alleged Hebrew equivalents than to the letters forming the Greek word ALEXANDROS. There was no doubt he was right, and the small audience tittered. In the meantime the Secretary, a well-known antiquarian, became more and more excited, and jumped up as soon as Mr. C. had sat down, and exclaimed, “Phenician!” (Contemptuous grunt.) “Greek!” (Another different and equally contemptuous grunt.) “Can you not read ‘HIC JACET’?” and I must say his reading seemed to me the least forced of the three. I think all of us felt utterly ashamed. Had the reporters been present, the fun that could have been made by the newspapers out of the incident would have been a disaster to the credit of the Association. The Reports of that meeting in the Journal of the Association have been so toned down that no one would suspect from reading them what really took place.

My connection with the Royal Geographical Society was a long one, and I served for many years on its Council, but the time came when my deafness was an insuperable bar to utility. On Sir Clement Markham becoming President, he very kindly offered me the vacant post of Trusteeship, which carries with it a permanent place on the Council, and is not practically a burden; but I was compelled to decline, and have taken no direct part in furthering its interests since that time, but have confined my work to other pursuits.

I had a hand in many actions of the Society. In its earlier years there was good cause of complaint as to the method in which the Society was being worked. Mr. Spottiswoode and myself were the Joint Hon. Secretaries, and the necessary reform was only brought about by our simultaneous resignation on the ground that our urgent remonstrances were shelved by the then President. It was agreed between us that, to save appearances, Spottiswoode should continue to act for a short time longer, being earnestly requested to do so.

In due course a new Assistant Secretary was appointed, and after some failures to secure a man capable of worthily filling that important post, we had the good fortune to find and appoint Mr. H. W. Bates (1825-1892). He was remarkably well informed on geographical matters, had been a considerable traveller in companionship with Alfred Russell Wallace in South America, and was one of the first to show that the mimicry of insects was developed as a means of protection. I look back with the greatest pleasure to my long and close association with Mr. Bates in the work of the Royal Geographical Society. His death was a great loss and a great blow to many friends. He and another friend only just dead were exceptionally slow in finding the exact word they wished to use. Yet both of them, in despite of slowness of utterance, succeeded in giving an exact notion of their views in a briefer time than any one else I can think of. Their sentences were a standing lesson to avoid superfluity of words when making explanations.

One new and successful attempt that I set on foot was the intervention of the Royal Geographical Society in geographical education. I began with public schools, having talked the matter well over with W. F. Farrar, then a master at Harrow. He thought the idea quite feasible. Then I had much help from the Hon. G. Brodrick, and encouragement from my brother-in-law, George Butler, then Headmaster of Liverpool College, who shared the belief of Dr. Arnold in the value of geography, if properly taught. That was by no means the general view, which was rather that geography lent itself to cram more easily than any other subject, and that it was hardly possible to set real problems in it, that should compel thought.

The upshot of all was, that the Royal Geographical Society offered an annual gold medal to be competed for by boys belonging to a considerable number of invited schools—in fact to all of the public schools properly so called. The examiners for the medal were annually appointed by the Society. The medal in the first year was won by the present Provost of Glasgow University, Dr. Donald Macalister; that in the second by George Grey Butler, son of my brother-in-law, and for many years Chief Examiner of the Education Office. The medals were continued for some years, but they were said to do incidental harm by tempting the masters of schools of the second rank to divert their best scholars to geography in order to gain éclat for the school, thereby interfering with their career in the more generally recognised and bread-winning studies of ordinary education.

The medals were therefore discontinued, and the efforts of the Society were directed to the Universities. I helped in this at first, but Mr. Brodrick and Mr. Douglas Freshfield and others took the matter more thoroughly in hand. After a little while, Mr. MacKinder, now Head of the Department of Economics of the University of London, applied for and gained the post of “Reader” in Geography in the University of Oxford, and he rapidly improved the quality of geographical teaching. General, afterwards Sir Richard Strachey, then President of the Royal Geographical Society, inaugurated the introduction of geography into the University of Cambridge by four lectures. I believe the subject has now gained a firm footing in both Universities. To say the least of it, a thorough knowledge of classical lands, such as can be conveyed by first-rate maps, models, and diagrams, must be helpful to classical students.