“In the nineteenth century,” Candice Millard writes in this pleasant book, “explorers were scattered across the globe, clutching their compasses and sextants as they sought to fill in maps and solve geographical mysteries from Africa to Australia, Asia to Antarctica.” The source of the Nile was the most glittering prize, and this saga tells how the first white men found it, squabbling like toddlers even as they hacked through thorn bush.
The Nile is the world’s longest river, its basin more than two and a half million kilometres square, which is one-tenth of the African continent. The longest branch, the White Nile, named for the light-grey silt that imparts a milky hue, meets the darker Blue Nile near Khartoum. Millard’s story begins in 1854 when the Court of Directors of the East India Company allowed its young Devon-born lieutenant Richard Burton to set out in search of the river’s hallowed source. Burton joined forces with 27-year-old John Hanning Speke, “born into British aristocracy” and also a lieutenant, in his case in the 46th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry. A third man makes up the trinity at the heart of Millard’s volume: Yao former slave, turned guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay. (The Yao are a Bantu-speaking people of East Africa.)
Millard reveals how the expedition failed, and how the next one, which set out in 1857, succeeded at least in part. Here in these pages are the fearful logistics, the dwindling supplies, the debilitating fever and the scent of six thousand camels swaying into Berbera market freighted with frankincense, saffron and feathers.
The author has written three previous books of propulsive non-fiction, and they have all, like this one, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. And why not? She has produced an enjoyable, well-written story and kept a firm hand on the narrative drive. There is nothing new – Tim Jeal, for instance, covered this ground in three outstanding books. But the best stories of this kind – Cook, Mallory, Scott and the other frozen beards – must be retold for each generation. A country gets its history that way. That said, the insistence on adjectives to flog every point will annoy those who care about writing. In one paragraph alone (the first), misery is abject, victory crushing, sun scorching, bodies battered and families starving.
The travellers’ suffering is immense. A javelin impales Burton from cheek to cheek, like a lepidopterist. A beetle crawls all the way down Speke’s ear canal causing infected boils to rise like a volcanic chain to his shoulder. Bombay alone holds his nerve amidst the horror, even when Speke duffs him up for not folding a tent nicely. Bombay was, Burton recorded, “the gem of the party”.