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By Root 1270 0

a form of indirect rule that would become a model for elsewhere in the empire. Most significantly, the British realized that India was too important for its government to be left in the hands of a commercial company, however grand. From now on, India would fall under the Crown. This made Canning the first man to become viceroy of India. The old poetry-writing emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, direct descendant of Genghis Khan, was taken under cavalry escort from Delhi on a bullock cart, and eventually exiled to a prison in Burma where he died. At four in the afternoon of 7 November 1862, Captain Nelson Davies watched as his body was lowered into an unmarked grave inside the prison compound. Captain Davies reported to London that, after a speedy interment, turf was laid on the grave and a bamboo fence erected at some distance, so that ‘by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests’.

Chapter Five

‘We had scarcely breakfasted before he announced to me the startling fact that he had discovered the sources of the White Nile’

Richard Burton, 1860

In June 1774 a Scotsman arrived in London telling astonishing tales. His appearance was quite astonishing, too – 6 feet 4, with a shock of red hair and a very bad temper. His body bore the evidence of captivity and of long wandering in the mountains; he had parasitic worms in his leg, malaria and dysentery. He was also said to have survived an elephant charge. The desert had affected his breathing, so that his lungs were reported to ‘heave like an organ-bellows’. Sometimes, when he was especially animated in conversation, his nose would begin to bleed.

He had been, he said, in a country called Abyssinia where he had braved lions and crocodiles, met holy men who ‘had neither ate nor drank for twenty years’ and witnessed remarkable things – banquets in which meat was carved from live cows tethered to a table, and raucous orgies in which there was ‘no coyness, no delays, no need of appointments or retirement to gratify their wishes’. Most importantly, he had stood in a patch of swamp and raised half a coconut shell to propose three toasts, first to King George III, then to the girl he (wrongly) believed to be waiting for him at home, and finally to Catherine the Great, to celebrate something amazing. For James Bruce claimed to have become the first European to have travelled to the source of the most celebrated river in the world.

If this was true, Bruce had settled a question which had baffled learning since long before Ptolemy. (As it turned out, it was not true – he was nowhere near the source of the White Nile, and the place he was celebrating – which was not even the place where the Blue Nile began – had anyway been ‘discovered’ by a Portuguese priest many years previously.) Bruce was fêted in London and elected a fellow of the Royal Society, even though the Society’s president considered him a ‘brute’. But not everyone quite believed him. Dr Johnson, who had appointed himself an expert on Abyssinia, thought Bruce ‘not a distinct relater’ and soon came to doubt whether he had been to that country at all. Many of the public agreed. The author of the fantastical Adventures of Baron Munchausen dedicated one of his volumes to Bruce, saying they might be useful to him on his next journey. None of this mockery made Bruce – who retired back to Scotland – a particularly happy man. He had a right to be angry, for much of what he claimed to have seen was confirmed by later travellers. Most of all, while he might not have put the source of the Nile on the map, he had lodged the search for it in the public mind. James Bruce was a man ahead of his time. Within twenty-odd years of his arrival in London, the British began to develop an almost insatiable curiosity to know more about what lay beyond their little island. This appetite for knowledge of the world expressed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment. But it was more. In the person of the individual explorer