Sitting on a thin carpet in his tiny, rented room in Suez, Egypt, in 1854, Richard Francis Burton calmly watched as five men cast critical eyes over his meager belongings…He knew that if they discovered the truth, that he was not Shaykh Abdullah, an Afghan-born Indian doctor and devout, lifelong Muslim but a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant in the army of the British East India Company, not only would his elaborately planned expedition be in grave danger, but so would his life.
It would only be a century later that the name Richard Burton conjured up images of Elizabeth Taylor, absurdly oversized diamond rings, Shakespearean theater, and the question of who could possibly fear Virginia Woolf. In his own lifetime, the first famous person named Richard Burton was every bit as much the pop culture celebrity that his movie star namesake would come to be. Sir Richard Francis Burton is definitely part of the conversation on the subject of the romantic real-life adventurer of the Victorian Era. As this opening introduction from Chapter One suggests, Burton was, in his own way, a combination of James Bond and Indiana Jones with additional elements of Sherlock Holmes and his creator Arthur Conan Doyle tossed in for good measure.
At twenty-seven years of age, Speke was not only six years Burton’s junior, he was his opposite in almost every way. Thin and fine-boned, blond and blue-eyed, he had been born into British aristocracy and raised in a Georgian mansion in Somerset, built on land that his family had owned for centuries. Puritanical and prim, he prided himself on his discipline, saving his money and his leave so that he could go on hunting trips while harshly judging his fellow officers for, in his mind, squandering theirs.
The other central figure in this dramatic tale is John Hanning Speke. While the general observation of his relative position to Burton is undoubtedly accurate, it is important to remember that “almost every way” part of the opposition. In character and personality, Speke will never be compared to Bond, Indy or Sherlock, but this book is about two actively engaged explorers unafraid to face the unknown in a dogged pursuit of a goal. He is credited with being the first European to make it to Lake Victoria. One particularly notorious legacy of Speke is his insistence that the Tutsi community in Rwanda were descended from a “superior” Europe race. This widely misappropriated myth would eventually have direct ties to the infamous genocide which took place in Rwanda.
The most famous early conjecturer about the source of the Nile was the legendary Egyptian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer Ptolemy. Relying largely on reports from a Greek trader named Diogenes, who had traveled twenty-five days inland from the eastern coast of Africa, Ptolemy placed the source of the Nile in two large lakes that flowed out of a snow-topped mountain range Diogenes had named the Mountains of the Moon.
Just in case it hasn’t been figured out yet, the subject of this book is the race by explorers to discover the source of the Nile River. The big question for many readers—if not most—is not so much the who, how, and when as it is the why. Why is discovering the source of a mighty river so important that people have been willing to die in the effort? That, unfortunately, is a difficult question to answer. Obviously, by the time that Burton and Speke came along, part of the appeal of discovery was simply the glory of doing what nobody had for so incredibly long. The rest of the answer mostly has to do with agricultural power, but it gets complicated, so reading the book is strongly suggested, but a key element of the tale is the revelation to many younger readers that once upon a time one had to actually to do things that required effort and resulted significant consequences in order to become world famous.
