John Hanning Speke
John Hanning Speke | |
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explorer |
Captain John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864) was an English explorer and officer in the
Speke is also known for propounding the
Life
Speke was born on 4 May 1827 at
In 1854 he made his first voyage to
Search for the Nile source 1856–1859
In 1856, Speke and Burton went to
Speke's travels to Lake Victoria
They had also heard of a second lake to the north-east, and in May 1858, they decided to explore it on the way back to the coast. But Burton was too weak to make the trip and thus stayed in base camp when the main caravan halted again at Kazeh. Speke went on a 47-day side trip that was 452 miles up and down in which he took 34 men with Bombay and Mabruki as his captains
From the beginning, the relationship of Speke and Burton was one of opposites; Burton considered Speke inferior linguistically and a less experienced traveller in remote regions (which was partially true), but Burton himself appears to have been jealous and far less able to relate to the safari caravan to keep the expedition motivated and moving (a vital factor as they were completely dependent on their safari crew). While Speke enjoyed hunting and thus provided the caravan with meat, Burton was not much interested in such pursuits. Burton was appointed the head of the expedition and considered Speke the second in command, although the pair seemed to have shared the hardships and labours of the journey pretty much evenly. Once it became clear that Speke might have found the source of the Nile the relationship deteriorated further. Why Burton did not journey back to Lake Victoria with Speke to make a better reconnaissance of the Lake after Speke returned to base camp in Kazeh is unclear. Burton was incapacitated and had to be carried by bearers but this had been true for a great deal of the trip.[6]
While Speke and Burton were instrumental in bringing the source of the Nile to the wider world and were the first to record and map this section of Africa, the efforts and labours of
Return to England and debate over the source of the Nile
On 26 September 1858 the return journey from
Now further disagreements developed; Burton maintained that they had promised each other in Aden not to make public announcements till they both were back in England and Burton accused Speke of a breach of promise for publicly claiming that the source of the Nile was found on their trip. Burton now turned against the theory that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile (and now said the river flowing out of the north side of Lake Tanganyika was the source) and thus also reversed himself from the position he took in the letter to Norton Shaw. In that same letter to Shaw, Burton had also stated that Speke would present his findings to the RGS, as he was prevented from traveling because of poor health and would be in England a short time after Speke.[6]: 105–111 Jeal concludes that Burton's claim of a promise from Speke not to go to the RGS was improbable. The jealousies and accusations between the two men got ever greater, further inflamed by their respective circles of friends and people who stood to gain from the feud such as book publishers and newspapers. Burton was still extremely weak, and once he appeared in front of a committee of the RGS he was not able to make a convincing case for his leading a second expedition to settle the outstanding matters about the Nile. The rift widened, and perhaps became irreversible, when Speke was chosen to lead a subsequent expedition instead of Burton.[10] The two presented joint papers concerning the expedition to the Royal Geographical Society on 13 June 1859.[11]
Second journey to the source of the Nile, 1860-1861
Together with James Augustus Grant, Speke left Portsmouth on 27 April 1860 and departed from Zanzibar in October 1860. The expedition approached the lake from the south west but Grant was often sick and was not able to travel with Speke much of the time. As during the first trip, in this period of history, Arab slave traders had created an atmosphere of great distrust towards any foreigners entering central Africa, and most tribes either fled or fought when encountering them as they assumed all outsiders to be potential slavers. Lacking a great deal of guns and soldiers, the only thing the expedition could do was make peace offerings to locals, and both men were severely delayed and their supplies depleted by demands for gifts and passage fees by smaller local chieftains. After numerous months of delays Speke reached Lake Victoria on 28 July 1862, and then travelled on the west side around Lake Victoria but only seeing it from time to time; but on the north side of the lake, Speke found the Nile flowing out of it and discovered the Ripon Falls.[6]
Local Church Missionary Society records indicate that Speke fathered a daughter whilst staying at the court of Muteesa I the Kabaka (or King) of Buganda. Whilst staying at the court Speke was given two girls aged about 12 and 18 from the entourage of the Queen Mother. Speke appears to have had sexual relations with both of them, before handing over the youngest (whom he named 'Kahala') to another man.[12] Speke fell in love with the elder girl, 'Meri', according to his diaries (which were redacted when they were published as books later).[6] While Meri proved loyal to Speke and fulfilled her task at being a "wife" to him as commanded by the Queen Mother, Speke was distressed because he thought she had no love or deep attachment to him. He "divorced her on the spot" in April 1862 after she defied his orders regarding the sacrifice of a goat.[12] Whilst Meri visited Speke several times after this incident, the couple did not reconcile. Speke claimed to have tried to arrange a better relationship for Meri with another man, without success it seems.[6]
Finally, given permission by Muteesa in June 1862 to leave, Speke then travelled down the Nile now reunited with Grant. Because of travel restrictions placed by the local chieftains, slave raiding parties, tribal wars and the difficulty of the terrain, Speke was not able to map the entire flow of the Nile from Lake Victoria north. Why he did not make more efforts to do so is not clear, but the enormous hardships of the journey must have played a large role. By January 1863 Speke and Grant reached Gondokoro in Southern Sudan, where he met Samuel Baker and his "wife". (Her name was Florence von Sass and she had been rescued by Baker from a slave market in Vidin during a hunting trip in Bulgaria.) Speke had expected to meet John Petherick and his wife Katherine at Gondokoro, as they had been sent by the RGS south along the Nile to meet Speke and Grant.[6] However the Pethericks were not there but on a side expedition to trade ivory, as they had run out of funds for their expedition. This caused some hard feelings between Petherick and Speke, and Baker played into this so he could assume a greater role as an explorer and co-discoverer of the Nile. Speke, via Baker's ship, then continued to Khartoum from which he sent a celebrated telegram to London: "The Nile is settled."[13]
Speke's expedition did not resolve the issue, however. Burton claimed that because Speke had not followed the Nile from the place it flowed out of Lake Victoria to Gondokoro, he could not be sure they were the same river.[14]
Baker and Florence, meanwhile, stayed in Gondokoro and tried to settle the flow of the river from there to Lake Victoria by traveling south. They eventually, after tremendous hardships, such as being wracked by fevers and held up by rulers for months on end, found
Return to London and third expedition
Speke and Grant now returned to England, where they arrived in June 1863 and were welcomed as genuine heroes. This did not last long in Speke's case however; disputes with Burton, who was relentless in his criticisms and a very compelling public speaker and gifted writer, left Speke's discoveries in less than an ideal light. Speke had also committed to write a book for John Blackwood which he found hard and time-consuming as he was not naturally a gifted writer. He failed to give a good and full report to the RGS for many months and thus in effect was not defending his positions of discovery. In addition Speke had a public dispute with the Pethericks who had by and large acted according to their RGS instructions but Speke had felt they had not. All this led Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, to start disliking Speke and a third expedition, led by Speke, was becoming less likely as it would have to be funded by the people Speke was now not on good terms with. It appears that just as Burton had overplayed his hand after the first trip Speke now did the same. Now the RGS asked that a public debate should be held between Speke and Burton to try and settle the Nile.[6]
Death
A debate was planned between Speke and Burton before the geographical section of the British Association in Bath on 16 September 1864,[16] but Speke had died the previous afternoon from a possibly self-inflicted gunshot wound while shooting at Neston Park in Wiltshire.[17] A contemporary account of the events surrounding his death appeared in The Times:[18]
At about 2.30 p.m. on the same day [15 September 1864] Speke set out from his uncle's house in company with his cousin, George Fuller, and a gamekeeper, Daniel Davis, for an afternoon's shooting in Neston Park. He fired both barrels in the course of the afternoon and about 4 p.m. Davis was marking birds for the two guns who were about 60 yards apart. Speke was seen to climb onto a stone wall about 2 feet high: for the moment he was without his gun. A few seconds later there was a report and when George Fuller rushed up Speke's gun was found behind the wall in the field into which Speke had jumped. The right barrel was at half-cock: only the left barrel was discharged. Speke who was bleeding seriously was sensible for a few minutes and said feebly, "Don't move me." George Fuller went for assistance leaving Davis to attend him; but Speke survived for only about 15 minutes, and when Mr. Snow, surgeon of Box, arrived he was already dead. There was a single wound in his left side such as would be made by a cartridge if the muzzle of the gun—a Lancaster breech-loader without a safety guard—were close to the body; the charge had passed upwards through the lungs dividing all the large blood vessels over the heart, though missing the heart itself.[citation needed]
An inquest concluded that the death was accidental, a conclusion supported by his only biographer Alexander Maitland, though the idea of suicide has appealed to some.[19] Bearing in mind, however, that the fatal wound was just below Speke's armpit, suicide seems most unlikely. Burton, however, could not set aside his own strong dislike of Speke and was vocal in spreading the idea of a suicide, claiming that Speke feared the debate.[6] Speke was buried in St Andrew's Church, Dowlish Wake in Somerset, five miles away from the ancestral home of the Speke family.[10]
Source of the Nile is settled, 1874–1877
In 1874–1877, Henry Stanley mounted a new expedition and took a boat along the entire shore of Lake Victoria; he established that Lake Tanganyika and the Nile were not connected in any way, and he explored the headwaters of Lake Edward. It was now proven that Speke had been right all along, and that the Nile flowed from Lake Victoria via Ripon Falls and Murchison Falls to Lake Albert and from there to Gondokoro.
According to other theories, the source of the White Nile, even after centuries of exploration, remains in dispute. The most remote source that is indisputably a source for the White Nile is the Kagera River, which was discovered by German explorer Oscar Baumann, and geographically determined in 1937 by Burkhart Waldecker;[20] however, the Kagera has tributaries that are in contention for the farthest source of the White Nile.
Scientific works
- Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. Blackwood and Sons. 1863.
Much of Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile is a description of the physical features of Africa's races, in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures."[21] Living alongside the locals, Speke claimed to have found a "superior race" of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of the natives" due to their "fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssinia" –; that is, Ethiopia.[21][22] This "race" comprised many tribes, including the Watusi (Tutsi). Speke described their physical appearances as having retained – despite the hair-curling and skin-darkening effects of intermarriage – "a high stamp of Asiatic feature, of which a marked characteristic is a bridged instead of bridgeless nose".[21]
Legacy
Eponyms
Two species of African reptiles are named in his honour: Speke's hinge-back tortoise, Kinixys spekii; and Speke's sand lizard, Heliobolus spekii.[23] Three species of African mammals are named in his honour: the sitatunga, Tragelaphus spekii; Speke's gazelle, Gazella spekei; and Speke's pectinator, Pectinator spekei.[24] Some streets and Avenues in South Africa and Zimbabwe were named after him.
Film
- The BBC miniseries The Search for the Nile (1971) tells the story of the Nile expeditions during the second half of the 19th century in a detailed way.
- The film Mountains of the Moon (1990), starring Scottish actor Iain Glen as Speke, related the story of the Burton-Speke controversy, portrayed as having been unjustifiably incited by Speke's publisher to stimulate book sales.[25]
Fiction
William Boyd presents a portrait of Speke in a fictional reimagining of the search for the source of the Nile in his 2022 novel, The Romantic.
References
- ^ Pirie-Gordon, H., ed. (1937). "Speke of Jordans". Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry (15th ed.). London. p. 2104.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Rogers, W.H. (1938). Buckland Brewer. p. 53.
- ^ "John Hanning Speke (1827 - 1864)". BBC - History - Historic Figures. 2014. Retrieved 17 July 2018.
- ^ "No. 21867". The London Gazette. 1 April 1856. p. 1231.
- .
- ^ ISBN 978-0-571-27777-3.
- ^ Moorehead, Alan (1960). The White Nile. London: Hamish Hamilton. pp. 16–17.
- S2CID 257817700.
- ^ Kollmann, Karl Paul (1899). The Victoria Nyanza. The Land, the Races and their Customs, with Specimens of Some of the Dialects. Translated by Henry Arthur Nesbitt. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
- ^ a b Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. .
- JSTOR 1799169.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-674-07497-2.
- ^ Galton, Sir Francis; Spottiswoode, William; Markham, Sir Clements Robert, eds. (1863). "Twelfth Meeting, Monday Evening, 11 May 1869". Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London. 7 (3). London: Royal Geographical Society: 108–110.
- JSTOR 1799295.
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/42346. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ISBN 978-0-9544941-6-2.
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26101. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ Thomas, H. B. (1949). "The Death of Speke in 1864 (The Uganda Journal, Vol. 13)". burtoniana.org. Retrieved 26 October 2022.
- ISBN 9780752458144.
- .
- ^ ISBN 978-0-312-24335-7.
- ^ Redmond, Sean (September 1997). "Speke's Journal, reviewed". The Journal of African Travel-Writing (3): 87–91. Retrieved 17 July 2018.
- ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5("Speke", p. 249).
- ISBN 978-0-8018-9304-9. ("Speke's Gazelle" and "Speke's Pectinator", p. 505; "Sitatunga", p. 565.).
- ^ Garrett, Greg (March 1997). "Relocating Burton: Public and Private Writings on Africa". The Journal of African Travel-Writing (2): 70–79. Retrieved 17 July 2018.
Further reading
- Burton, Richard Francis (1872). "Captain Speke". Zanzibar. London: John Murray.
- Grant, James Augustus (1864). A Walk Across Africa: Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal. London: W. Blackwood and sons.
- Harrison, William (1984). Burton and Speke. W.H. Allen. ISBN 978-0-491-03092-2.
- Lloyd, Clare (1985). The Travelling Naturalists. Croom Helm. ISBN 978-0-7099-1658-1. — Includes Charles Waterton, John Hanning Speke, Henry Seebohm and Mary Kingsley.
- Maitland, Alexander (1971). Speke. Constable. ISBN 9780094574304. (the only full-length biography).
- Millard, Candice (2022). River Of The Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (Hardback). New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385543101.
- ISBN 978-0-394-71445-5.
- Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2014). "Cartographical Quandaries: the Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton's and Speke's Search for the Source of the Nile". History in Africa. 35: 455–479. S2CID 162871275.
- Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2009). "Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856-59". Victorian Studies. 51 (1): 103–137. S2CID 129895714.
External links
- Works by John Hanning Speke at Project Gutenberg
- The Discovery Of The Source Of The Nile by John Hanning Speke
- First Footsteps in East Africa by Richard Francis Burton
- Works by or about John Hanning Speke at Internet Archive
- Works by John Hanning Speke at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Selected Bibliography of Works by John Hanning Speke.
- Burtoniana.org has facsimiles of all of Speke's books, pamphlets and journal articles freely available online, as well as his (corrected) DNB entry, obituary and inquest report from The Times, and several portraits and photographs, together with material on his companion James Grant and the complete works of his former friend, Richard Francis Burton.
- Ibis Jubilee Supplement 1908