Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [52]
Inscribed on brown wooden boards just inside the front doors of the imposing redbrick headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore, London, are the names of the winners of the Society’s Gold Medal. The roll-call includes missionaries like David Livingstone, Arctic adventurers like James Clark Ross, big-game hunters like Frederick Courtney Selous, mystics like Francis Younghusband and archaeologists like Gertrude Bell, as well as Edward Eyre, who walked across much of Australia, Joseph Thomson, who once convinced menacing Masai warriors that he was superhuman by removing his false teeth and brewing up a fizzing froth of Eno’s fruit salts, and Lady Franklin, who repeatedly sponsored expeditions to discover the remains of her husband who had perished trying to find the North-West Passage. The modern RGS likes to proclaim its credentials as a research institute. But it is an unmistakably imperial creation, its headquarters acquired by Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, in the days when its membership included dukes, earls, baronets and knights, together with hundreds of naval and military officers. The men and women who won the endorsement of this bemedalled body sallied forth full of ambition and returned as newspaper heroes, best-selling authors, highly paid lecturers, hymned in the music halls and courted by portrait-painters. The commercially minded could make a fortune from advertising endorsements. (Henry Morton Stanley, for example, appeared in advertisements for Bovril, Keble’s pies, Edgington tents and ‘Victor Vaissier’s CONGO SOAP’.)
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most ambitious geographical challenge of the age was that which had animated James Bruce – the search for the source of the Nile. Early Victorian maps show a roughly accurate understanding of the coastline of Africa, with a little detail of the interior of the continent coloured in the north and south but most of the rest left as a vast expanse of white nothingness – there were rumours that much of what lay beyond the coast was only desert. Like the United States’ ambition to land a man on the moon in the latter half of the twentieth century, the attraction of discovering the source of the most famous river in the world was irresistible to an empire in its pomp. There was the incidental benefit that planting the Union flag at the head of the Nile would prevent some other European power from doing so.
The two men chosen for the task were Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, a partnership which ended in sensational bitterness. It goes without saying that both were immensely brave. Each was also a tremendous egotist. There – save for the fact that they had both been officers in the Indian army – the similarities end. ‘As the prime minister of an Eastern despot, he would have been splendid,’ was Lord Salisbury’s verdict on Burton, and there was certainly no one like him in British public life. He belonged to that breed of Englishmen who believe that ‘Little islands are all large prisons’ and in the course of his lifetime became intimately familiar with places from Peru to Syria, from west Africa to the Rocky Mountains. His father had plans for him to become a clergyman, which would have been a very bad idea indeed, and Burton dropped out of Oxford to join the Indian army, determined to ‘be shot at for sixpence a day’. As well as his considerable mental talents – he developed a system which enabled him to learn a new language within a month, and mastered forty languages and dialects during his lifetime – Burton was hard as nails. Convinced that you could learn nothing of a culture without immersing yourself in it, he became