When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan's army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. The day before they were to publicly debate, Speke shot himself. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke's great envy. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it.
When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton's opposite in temperament and beliefs.įrom the start the two men clashed, Speke chafing under Burton's command and Burton disapproving of Speke's ignorance of the people whose lands through which they traveled. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist.
He spoke twenty-nine languages, was a decorated soldier, and literally wrote the book on sword-fighting techniques for the British Army. Burton was already famous for being the first non-Muslim to travel to Mecca, disguised as an Arab chieftain. Two British men - Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke - were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe - and extend their colonial empires. In the 19th century, the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone set off a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. Pharaonic and Roman attempts to find it were stymied by a giant labyrinthine swamp, and subsequent expeditions got no further. Its fertile floodplain allowed for rise to the great civilization of ancient Egypt, but for millennia the location of its headwaters was shrouded in mystery. The Nile River is the longest in the world. From the New York Times bestselling author of RIVER OF DOUBT and DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC, the stirring story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time, and its complicated legacy
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