Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure by Tim Jeal (review)

Tim Jeal’s latest book is an ambitious survey of British efforts to solve the greatest geographical mystery of the Victorian age. It follows a series of authoritative biographies of David Livingstone, Robert Baden-Powell, and, most recently, Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley and Livingstone again make appearances here, but the largest section of this account is devoted to re-establishing another explorer’s position as the key player in the search for the source of the Nile: the English army officer John Hanning Speke. This engrossing narrative comes with all the trappings of mid-Victorian melodrama, from indefatigable heroes, treacherous villains, and daring escapes to remarkably frequent costume changes: Samuel Baker attempts to wow the native “chiefs” by donning “a full dress Highland suit with all the accessories,” while Stanley slips out of rags and into immaculate white linen before he meets Livingstone (237).

Demonstrating his skills as a historical biographer in the first two-thirds of the book, Jeal offers a skillfully interwoven narrative of the major British expeditions to Central and East Africa from 1856 to 1878. The role of indigenous populations in both assisting and resisting British explorers is acknowledged here, and although African porters, guides, and translators are always supporting players, Jeal is quick to point out that British explorers fared best when they put down their dusty copies of Herodotus and Pliny and listened to what locals had to say about African geography. Most of these stories have been told many times by biographers and popular historians, and Jeal deliberately pitches this volume as a much-needed update of Alan Moorehead’s popular historical romp The White Nile (1960). While Jeal’s study isn’t quite the page-turner that Moorehead’s book was—he’s too reverential of his subjects for that—he has managed to produce a rare hybrid: an entertaining popular history that will also be a useful introduction for students and researchers. Jeal’s generous footnotes and large appendix of archival manuscript sources are particularly helpful, and his work will be read with interest (though not without dissent) by scholars of imperial history, travel writing, and Victorian popular culture.

Jeal specialises in challenging popular assumptions about Victorian explorers: the missionary Livingstone wasn’t the saint his early hagiographers would have us believe; the mendacious journalist Stanley wasn’t as nasty and violent as his enemies suggested. Jeal’s current task is to convince us that Speke was not quite as dull as his eclipsing in the popular imagination by the likes of Richard Burton, Livingstone, and Stanley suggests. Jeal convincingly establishes Speke’s discovery of the Ukerewe Nyanza (renamed Lake Victoria) in 1858 and his subsequent detection of an outlet of the Nile (the Ripon Falls) at the northern edge of the lake in 1862 as the key achievements in settling the fraught question of the Nile’s sources. However, in order to establish Speke’s reputation, Jeal finds it necessary to cast Burton—Speke’s employer, companion, and eventual rival—as an out-and-out villain. Burton’s machinations, and the backstabbing internal politics of the Royal Geographical Society, with its bevy of port-swilling antiquaries and pipe-smoking “armchair geographers,” are rendered in fascinating detail here (192). Yet Jeal struggles to present Speke as a personality worthy of centre stage. Rather it’s Burton, brooding Byronically on the edge of Jeal’s narrative, who is continually stealing the show from the gauche and Pooterish Speke. Jeal adds a dash of excitement to Speke’s otherwise unremarkable character by restoring excised passages from the explorer’s private journals describing his relationship with Méri, a young African girl presented to Speke as a wife by the Queen Mother of Buganda. By his own account, Speke harboured an unrequited passion for this native teenager. However, the romance plot is...