Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [57]
Does any of this matter now, other than as a ripping yarn? The waterfalls which tumbled out of Lake Victoria, through which Speke intended to offer the Marquess of Ripon immortality by naming them Ripon Falls, largely disappeared when a dam was built in the 1950s. If the name of Speke is known at all, it is more likely to be as a deprived area of Liverpool, once home to the Bryant and May match factory and the Triumph sports-car plant, both long-gone British brands. Richard Burton has his splendid tomb in a Mortlake cemetery in the shape of an Arab tent, but mention the name and you are likely to have to explain that you’re not talking about the Welsh actor twice married to the actress Elizabeth Taylor. The accounts these explorers wrote of their journeys are underpinned by a now offensive tone of utterly superior certainty: the white man knows best. But it is impossible to read them without being struck by their delight in the exuberant strangeness of the people, animals and plants they encountered. As for the act of discovery, the planting of a flag changed no physical reality. Terra Incognita was only land unknown to European cartographers, Newfoundland had merely been found by people who just hadn’t happened to know it existed. Not a single characteristic of the lake which Speke had reached was altered by his calling it Victoria, any more than naming the highest mountain on earth Everest after a one-time surveyor general of India changed its height by an inch.
But the proliferation of British place names on maps gave an illusion that the world was being remade. At some primitive level the stories of discovery have nurtured a sense of British endeavour, of the solitary individual against the world, eccentric, outnumbered, bloody-minded and convinced he’s right, a sick and shrunken nation’s determination to hold its place in the world. It is perhaps most keenly demonstrated in the cases of those explorers who died executing their missions – Mungo Park and his sole remaining British companion throwing themselves into the River Niger and drowning, Captain Cook bludgeoned and stabbed to death on a beach in Hawaii, Sir John Franklin and his men perishing in the snow and ice, or the last glimpse of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine as they toiled towards the summit of Everest. There was something about these deaths which was taken to express the spirit of Britain. They seemed to be tableaux of self-sacrifice in the pursuit not of commercial gain but of human endeavour. It did not matter if the mission had failed – in some ways that made the impression more potent. Perhaps the acme came with the last message left by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, exhausted, hungry, frost-bitten and snow-blind in his Antarctic tent in 1912. ‘For God’s sake look after our people …’ ‘Our people’ was more than the valiant, frozen band on the Ross Ice Shelf.*
By the turn of the twentieth century it had become easy for the British to feel special. The 1851 Great Exhibition had not only celebrated home-grown enterprise but had seemed to demonstrate the readiness of other nations to bring their tribute offerings. When the exhibition’s Crystal Palace closed its doors, it had made enough profit for an expanse of Kensington to be turned over to the building of ‘Albertopolis’ on which stood the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, Imperial College, the Royal Albert Hall, the Science Museum and the Royal Colleges of Art and Music, demonstrating individually and collectively the nation’s eminence. When Victoria was redesignated as empress of India in 1876, her subjects basked in a little of the reflected glory. But if they wanted to feel they really were masters of all creation, they just took themselves off for an afternoon at the London Zoo. Here, as the century wore on, the growing numbers of strange animals testified to Britain’s increasing domination