Sir Richard Francis Burton
This book is another in a long line of narratives stretching across multiple forms of media that tells the story of how two British explorers started out on an expedition to locate the source of the Nile working cooperatively, but ended up becoming the source of each other’s ruination. By the time the Royal Geographic Society had commissioned the expedition, Burton was already famous and infamous as an intrepid explorer, a scandalous translator of foreign texts, and just generally being a flamboyant and dangerous character. At the height of his fame, he was a kind of weird combination of a bookish James Bond and depraved Indiana Jones.
John Hanning Speke
By contrast, John Hanning Speke was the very model of a modern Victorian soldier boy fighting for empire, the queen, and all things British, what-what. Where Burton was almost impossibly complex and Byronic, Speke was the living embodiment of the 19th century driver for British domination of the world. The most controversial thing about him was his stubborn belief in the insane white supremacy theory related to separation of the races that traced back to the biblical flood and Noah’s three sons. Well, that is to say, his inventive rationale for a racist foundation justifying British imperialism was the only controversial thing about Speke until he arrived back in England one day with the news that he’d discovered a lake he christened Victoria (of course) and had discovered the source of the Nile himself while Burton remained behind, too weak from sickness to be able to make the difficult journey.
Sidi Mubarak Bombay
The story of the clash between Burton and Speke has been told often and in most of them the search for the source of the Nile is a two-person drama. This version rectifies an oversight too long ignored as it reveals that, aside from variously significant supporting players operating on the fringes of the dramatic conflict, this has actually been a three-character tale all along. The third player in the drama has suffered in the telling as a result of being neither white nor British. He was, however, the essential guide for not just both Speke and Burton, but many other British expeditions into Africa. In fact, Bombay was the leader of the caravan that eventually resulted in the historic moment when Henry Morton Stanley expressed arguably the most famous greeting between two strangers in history, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
