Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [56]
Speke appeared the more worn of the two: he was excessively lean, but in reality he was in good tough condition; he had walked the whole way from Zanzibar, never having once ridden during that wearisome march. Grant was in honourable rags; his bare knees projecting through the remnants of trousers that were an exhibition of rough industry in tailor’s work. He was looking tired and feverish, but both men had a fire in the eye, that showed the spirit that had led them through.
As soon as he was able to do so, Speke cabled London: ‘The Nile is settled.’
But the Nile was not entirely ‘settled’. Speke had neither circumnavigated the lake nor given the river a comprehensive survey. Burton, for one, still nursed a grievance and clung to the possibility that Lake Tanganyika might be the source. The missionary and explorer David Livingstone was also sceptical. To settle the matter once and for all, a meeting was arranged for September 1864 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It was to be held in Bath, where Burton and Speke would present their arguments to an audience of geographers and scientists. But there was to be one final chapter in this extraordinary story. As the audience gathered on the morning of what had come to be known as ‘The Nile Duel’, a note was passed around. When the contents of the note were read to Burton, he staggered and sank into a chair, with the words, ‘By God, he’s killed himself!’
Whether Speke took his own life or was the victim of an extraordinarily timed accident will never be known. The day before the debate the two men had been in the same room, but cut each other dead, with Speke said to have left the room exclaiming, ‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ He had then gone off to his uncle’s nearby estate to shoot partridges. At about 4 p.m., his companions saw the explorer standing on top of a low wall. They heard a shot and saw him fall. When they reached him they found an awful wound to his chest. It looked as though he had clambered over the wall and then tried to pull his loaded gun – which had no safety catch – up after him. By the time they managed to get a doctor to him, Speke was dead. An inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.
These epics of nineteenth-century exploration gave the expansion of empire a clear focus. They were fantastical tales of wild landscapes, weird animals, extreme hardship and utterly different cultures, and their heroes men whose steely fortitude seemed to express a national purpose. Many of the protagonists of these epics also had a talent for self-promotion. Newspaper editors recognized that there were few things their growing readership would enjoy more with their breakfast marmalade than news of battles against the odds and they soon began the modern habit of sponsoring expeditions and paying small fortunes for first-hand accounts written by the explorers themselves. (The practice extended to wars as well, with correspondents like G. W. Steevens regaling readers of the Daily Mail with accounts of the glorious thrill of imperial battles – ‘the only complete holiday ever invented’* – in places like Sudan and South Africa.)
The readership of newspapers was growing fast and as a journalistic proposition the explorer was irresistible. He braved danger and endured extreme hardship in thrilling contrast to the ordered calm of the suburban terrace. He could, like David Livingstone, be driven by hatred of the slave trade, or like Joseph Thomson – dead at thirty-seven – he could be so enigmatic as to declare, ‘I am not an empire-builder. I am not a missionary. I am not truly