He embarked on a perilous journey to explore the Great Lakes of Africa and unravelled the mystery of the Nile's origin.
In the final part of our mini-series, we are going to talk about Henry Morton Stanley and his quest to find the origin of the River Nile.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our mini-series on the quest to find the origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:29] As a reminder, in part one we learned first about why finding the source of the Nile was of such interest, and secondly about the amazing story of Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
[00:00:43] In part two, we learned about the attempt by Dr David Livingstone to locate the source of the Nile, how he was lost to the outside world for many years, and the interesting way in which he was greeted when he was finally found.
[00:00:58] And in today’s episode, the final episode, we will conclude our story with the tale of the Welsh-American explorer, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:01:07] OK then, the voyage of Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:01:13] As a quick recap of the story, in 1858 Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke had had an almighty disagreement over the true source of the Nile.
[00:01:26] After travelling inland from Zanzibar in search of a great lake that could be the mysterious source of this great river, the pair had found two lakes, but disagreed on which one led to the Nile.
[00:01:41] Richard Burton maintained that it was Lake Tanganyika, John Hanning Speke that it was Lake Victoria.
[00:01:50] The disagreement ended with the ultimately death of Speke, and Burton’s claim that Speke had shot himself in order to save himself from the embarrassment of having to admit that he was wrong.
[00:02:04] And 8 years later, a Scottish doctor and missionary by the name of David Livingstone had set out to try to find the answer for himself.
[00:02:15] But, he had got lost on the way, or rather, he disappeared for several years and was famously found by a Welsh-American explorer by the name of Henry Morton Stanley, and was greeted, reportedly, with the immortal line, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
[00:02:35] Dr Livingstone died in 1873, having left behind some important discoveries about the geography of southern Africa, but nobody had definitive proof about what the source really was.
[00:02:50] Stanley had gone back to the United States, and found the fame and glory that he had always hoped for.
[00:02:58] As a reminder, Stanley had been abandoned by his mother, thrown into a workhouse at the age of 5, and had escaped to the United States at the age of 18.
[00:03:10] He was a nobody. Or rather, he had been a nobody until he published his account of finding Dr Livingstone, aptly titled “How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveries in Central Africa”.
[00:03:25] This unlikely success, against all the odds, gave him the credibility to persuade his backers to support him financially on another mission.
[00:03:37] In 1874, backed by the New York Herald and The Daily Telegraph, he set out on another expedition. Its objective was to complete the exploration of the Great Lakes of Africa and to, once and for all, find the source of the river Nile.
[00:03:57] This mission was equal, if not greater, to both of the previous ones.
[00:04:04] Like the previous ones, the expedition started in Zanzibar, on the east coast, but this one would be much longer; it would involve travelling over 11,000 kilometres.
[00:04:17] And let’s remember, the land part of this would have been done on foot, because cows and horses would've been killed by the disease-carrying Tsetse fly. So they would have walked, and porters would have had to carry everything.
[00:04:35] Stanley recruited a troop of a reported 224 porters and servants, and they headed west.
[00:04:44] The first task was to accurately circumnavigate the great lakes, to go all the way around them and map any rivers.
[00:04:53] And that’s exactly what they did.
[00:04:56] Stanley went all the way around Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, before getting to Lake Tanganyika.
[00:05:03] Stanley observed that Lake Victoria had one large outflow, the river that Speke had observed several years before.
[00:05:12] This was most probably the source of the Nile, he thought, but there was still one more possibility.
[00:05:20] He had learned from the man he had rescued, Dr. Livingstone, that Lake Tanganyika also had a large river that flowed north, out from its west side.
[00:05:32] Livingstone had tried to follow its path, but hadn’t been able to make the progress he had hoped for.
[00:05:39] Stanley realised that if he was going to solve the mystery of the origin of the river Nile, the answer lay in this river, the Lualaba River.
[00:05:50] It looked like it could lead to the Nile.
[00:05:54] When it leaves the west side of Lake Tanganyika, it goes west for a little bit and then heads north, over 1,200 kilometres north to be precise. It looked like, with a bit of a bend to the right, it was heading straight for Egypt, that it was the Nile.
[00:06:13] Stanley needed to follow the river and see where it ended up.
[00:06:19] He would be heading into virgin territory, from the European perspective at least; no other European explorer had gone all the way down the river.
[00:06:28] Even the Arab slave traders had reportedly been put off by stories of man-eating cannibals, so where the river led was a mystery to outsiders.
[00:06:40] And this was far from the only issue.
[00:06:44] When you go down a river the current might be on your side, but this comes with its own problems.
[00:06:51] Specifically, waterfalls and white water rapids, which are impossible to go down safely on a boat.
[00:06:59] Every time the expedition came across these obstacles, they would have to quickly steer to the river bank before it was too late, take the boats out of the water and attempt to find a safe way around.
[00:07:12] In many cases, they didn’t, and members of the party were swept away with the rushing water and drowned.
[00:07:21] And those who didn’t die in the river, died from sunstroke, malaria, and a miscellany of other gruesome illnesses.
[00:07:30] In total, of the 228 initial members of the party, only 111 survived. More than half died on the journey.
[00:07:41] Indeed, Henry Morton Stanley was the only surviving European.
[00:07:46] Despite the hardship and huge loss of human life, the plan worked.
[00:07:53] After going more than 1,000 kilometres to the north, the Lualaba river snaked westwards, eventually merging into the Congo river, which flows out into the Atlantic Ocean, nowhere near the Nile.
[00:08:08] Stanley had his answer, and now it was clear that John Speke had been right.
[00:08:15] All other possibilities had been eliminated.
[00:08:18] The origin of the river Nile was indeed Lake Victoria, as Speke had correctly identified.
[00:08:25] At last, Stanley had managed to solve the puzzle that had stumped explorers for centuries.
[00:08:32] He discovered that the source of the White Nile was not Lake Tanganyika as Burton had claimed, nor was it a separate, undiscovered lake.
[00:08:41] Instead, it was Lake Victoria.
[00:08:44] Now, we must finish this episode with three things.
[00:08:48] First a little bit of an addendum, a final chapter, of the story of Henry Morton Stanley, as any glory he gained through the discovery of the Nile would be tarnished with what happened next.
[00:09:03] He would go on to be hired by King Leopold II as the Belgian king’s agent in Congo.
[00:09:11] Now you may know about the atrocities of King Leopold II already or you might remember them from episode number 289.
[00:09:20] To clarify, there is no evidence that Stanley knew what the bloodthirsty Belgian king had in mind, and as soon as he discovered his employer’s cruel plans for the Congo, he protested and condemned the plans before leaving his post.
[00:09:37] But still, his name has forever been tarnished by his involvement in King Leopold II’s atrocities, and his achievements in terms of the discovery of the Nile can’t really be mentioned without some acknowledgement of what came afterwards.
[00:09:54] Now, as a penultimate point to finish off the episode, and this mini-series, I want to leave you with some reflections on the different characters who tried to solve the question of the origin of the Nile.
[00:10:08] They might all have been British men of the Victorian Era, and it's easy to put them all into the same bucket, perhaps even painting them as heartless colonial imperial invaders.
[00:10:21] On one level, yes they were. These were all men who travelled from a small cold island in northern Europe to supposedly “discover” a continent and claim it as their own.
[00:10:35] But the truth is that painting them all with the same brush is to greatly simplify things, as these men were very, very different characters.
[00:10:45] From part one we had Sir Richard Burton, in some respects a classic Victorian explorer. Fluent in over 20 languages, charismatic, highly cultured and genuinely interested in the people and cultures that he met.
[00:11:00] But he never quite fitted in back in Britain, he would be accused of being a colonial racist, and he was very jealous of Stanley’s discovery, and ultimate proof that he had been wrong all along about Lake Tanganyika.
[00:11:15] And we also had Burton’s nemesis, John Hanning Speke, a man who was probably a more accomplished explorer, but whose motivations were more selfish.
[00:11:27] What’s more, he too couldn’t take criticism and ended up dying in mysterious circumstances.
[00:11:34] Both Burton and Speke, by the way, were wealthy, upper class Englishmen.
[00:11:40] Then in part two we had Dr David Livingstone, a Scotsman, not an Englishman.
[00:11:46] He was very different from the previous two, as he had not been born to a wealthy family, he worked his way “up”, and his entire reason for setting foot in Africa and then dedicating his life to the continent was a moral one, to spread Christianity and then to do everything he could to stop the Arab slave trade. He was far from the caricature of an imperial Victorian explorer.
[00:12:12] And in part three, or in fact also making a very important appearance in part two, we had the subject of today’s episode, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:12:23] Again, he was not English, he was Welsh by birth, and would only go on to become an American citizen in his 40s. And he wasn’t really even an explorer; he was a journalist initially, and his first mission was primarily a journalistic one. And he came from the most lowly background possible; a life as a workhouse boy, right on the bottom rung of Victorian society.
[00:12:53] And in terms of his motivation, it was two-fold.
[00:12:57] First, in his mission to find Livingstone, it was fame and fortune, it was a way of putting his childhood poverty behind him, of achieving the unthinkable, locating the world’s most famous disappeared explorer.
[00:13:12] And afterwards, why did he go back on this hugely dangerous mission, why did he return to Africa to continue the search for the source of the Nile?
[00:13:23] Well, it was principally to continue the work of the man he had come to consider as a father figure, Dr David Livingstone. Livingstone had made it his life’s work to find the source of the Nile, but had died before it could be completed.
[00:13:40] Stanley felt that he had a duty to complete this mission, even if the probability of dying in the process was incredibly high.
[00:13:49] But, he did it. And the irony is that, even though he was the least of an “explorer”, at least by training, he was by far the most accomplished explorer of them all.
[00:14:03] He circumnavigated Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, he went all the way down the river Lualaba, and ultimately it was this young Welshman who had been abandoned by his parents, it was he who managed to answer a question that has preoccupied people literally for thousands of years, the question of the true source of the river Nile.
[00:14:25] But, in one final plot twist, if you remember back to part one of this mini-series, Ptolemy had written that the true source of the Nile was the “mountains of the moon”, a long belt of mountains that stretched all the way across Africa, and were indeed thought to exist even until the early 19th century.
[00:14:47] According to some geographers, the ultimate source of the Nile is not Lake Victoria, as Speke had claimed and as Stanley had “proved”.
[00:14:58] Instead, it’s a mountain range called the Rwenzori mountains, which are just to the west of Lake Victoria.
[00:15:06] These snow capped mountains have a variety of different glaciers, whose melting ice leads to a collection of small rivers, some of which lead to Lake Victoria, which leads to, well, you’ve guessed it, the river Nile.
[00:15:21] So, the Rwenzori mountains are, in all probability, the mountains of the moon.
[00:15:28] In this twist of fate, and after all the expeditions we’ve learned about, from Burton and Speke to Livingstone to Stanley, perhaps old 1st century Ptolemy was right all along.
[00:15:42] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Quest To Find The Origin of The River Nile.
[00:15:48] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:15:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode and of this mini-series more generally.
[00:15:57] Were these men imperial invaders, geographical pioneers, or somewhere in between?
[00:16:04] What other stories of exploration would you like to hear about?
[00:16:08] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:16:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:16:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our mini-series on the quest to find the origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:29] As a reminder, in part one we learned first about why finding the source of the Nile was of such interest, and secondly about the amazing story of Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
[00:00:43] In part two, we learned about the attempt by Dr David Livingstone to locate the source of the Nile, how he was lost to the outside world for many years, and the interesting way in which he was greeted when he was finally found.
[00:00:58] And in today’s episode, the final episode, we will conclude our story with the tale of the Welsh-American explorer, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:01:07] OK then, the voyage of Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:01:13] As a quick recap of the story, in 1858 Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke had had an almighty disagreement over the true source of the Nile.
[00:01:26] After travelling inland from Zanzibar in search of a great lake that could be the mysterious source of this great river, the pair had found two lakes, but disagreed on which one led to the Nile.
[00:01:41] Richard Burton maintained that it was Lake Tanganyika, John Hanning Speke that it was Lake Victoria.
[00:01:50] The disagreement ended with the ultimately death of Speke, and Burton’s claim that Speke had shot himself in order to save himself from the embarrassment of having to admit that he was wrong.
[00:02:04] And 8 years later, a Scottish doctor and missionary by the name of David Livingstone had set out to try to find the answer for himself.
[00:02:15] But, he had got lost on the way, or rather, he disappeared for several years and was famously found by a Welsh-American explorer by the name of Henry Morton Stanley, and was greeted, reportedly, with the immortal line, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
[00:02:35] Dr Livingstone died in 1873, having left behind some important discoveries about the geography of southern Africa, but nobody had definitive proof about what the source really was.
[00:02:50] Stanley had gone back to the United States, and found the fame and glory that he had always hoped for.
[00:02:58] As a reminder, Stanley had been abandoned by his mother, thrown into a workhouse at the age of 5, and had escaped to the United States at the age of 18.
[00:03:10] He was a nobody. Or rather, he had been a nobody until he published his account of finding Dr Livingstone, aptly titled “How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveries in Central Africa”.
[00:03:25] This unlikely success, against all the odds, gave him the credibility to persuade his backers to support him financially on another mission.
[00:03:37] In 1874, backed by the New York Herald and The Daily Telegraph, he set out on another expedition. Its objective was to complete the exploration of the Great Lakes of Africa and to, once and for all, find the source of the river Nile.
[00:03:57] This mission was equal, if not greater, to both of the previous ones.
[00:04:04] Like the previous ones, the expedition started in Zanzibar, on the east coast, but this one would be much longer; it would involve travelling over 11,000 kilometres.
[00:04:17] And let’s remember, the land part of this would have been done on foot, because cows and horses would've been killed by the disease-carrying Tsetse fly. So they would have walked, and porters would have had to carry everything.
[00:04:35] Stanley recruited a troop of a reported 224 porters and servants, and they headed west.
[00:04:44] The first task was to accurately circumnavigate the great lakes, to go all the way around them and map any rivers.
[00:04:53] And that’s exactly what they did.
[00:04:56] Stanley went all the way around Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, before getting to Lake Tanganyika.
[00:05:03] Stanley observed that Lake Victoria had one large outflow, the river that Speke had observed several years before.
[00:05:12] This was most probably the source of the Nile, he thought, but there was still one more possibility.
[00:05:20] He had learned from the man he had rescued, Dr. Livingstone, that Lake Tanganyika also had a large river that flowed north, out from its west side.
[00:05:32] Livingstone had tried to follow its path, but hadn’t been able to make the progress he had hoped for.
[00:05:39] Stanley realised that if he was going to solve the mystery of the origin of the river Nile, the answer lay in this river, the Lualaba River.
[00:05:50] It looked like it could lead to the Nile.
[00:05:54] When it leaves the west side of Lake Tanganyika, it goes west for a little bit and then heads north, over 1,200 kilometres north to be precise. It looked like, with a bit of a bend to the right, it was heading straight for Egypt, that it was the Nile.
[00:06:13] Stanley needed to follow the river and see where it ended up.
[00:06:19] He would be heading into virgin territory, from the European perspective at least; no other European explorer had gone all the way down the river.
[00:06:28] Even the Arab slave traders had reportedly been put off by stories of man-eating cannibals, so where the river led was a mystery to outsiders.
[00:06:40] And this was far from the only issue.
[00:06:44] When you go down a river the current might be on your side, but this comes with its own problems.
[00:06:51] Specifically, waterfalls and white water rapids, which are impossible to go down safely on a boat.
[00:06:59] Every time the expedition came across these obstacles, they would have to quickly steer to the river bank before it was too late, take the boats out of the water and attempt to find a safe way around.
[00:07:12] In many cases, they didn’t, and members of the party were swept away with the rushing water and drowned.
[00:07:21] And those who didn’t die in the river, died from sunstroke, malaria, and a miscellany of other gruesome illnesses.
[00:07:30] In total, of the 228 initial members of the party, only 111 survived. More than half died on the journey.
[00:07:41] Indeed, Henry Morton Stanley was the only surviving European.
[00:07:46] Despite the hardship and huge loss of human life, the plan worked.
[00:07:53] After going more than 1,000 kilometres to the north, the Lualaba river snaked westwards, eventually merging into the Congo river, which flows out into the Atlantic Ocean, nowhere near the Nile.
[00:08:08] Stanley had his answer, and now it was clear that John Speke had been right.
[00:08:15] All other possibilities had been eliminated.
[00:08:18] The origin of the river Nile was indeed Lake Victoria, as Speke had correctly identified.
[00:08:25] At last, Stanley had managed to solve the puzzle that had stumped explorers for centuries.
[00:08:32] He discovered that the source of the White Nile was not Lake Tanganyika as Burton had claimed, nor was it a separate, undiscovered lake.
[00:08:41] Instead, it was Lake Victoria.
[00:08:44] Now, we must finish this episode with three things.
[00:08:48] First a little bit of an addendum, a final chapter, of the story of Henry Morton Stanley, as any glory he gained through the discovery of the Nile would be tarnished with what happened next.
[00:09:03] He would go on to be hired by King Leopold II as the Belgian king’s agent in Congo.
[00:09:11] Now you may know about the atrocities of King Leopold II already or you might remember them from episode number 289.
[00:09:20] To clarify, there is no evidence that Stanley knew what the bloodthirsty Belgian king had in mind, and as soon as he discovered his employer’s cruel plans for the Congo, he protested and condemned the plans before leaving his post.
[00:09:37] But still, his name has forever been tarnished by his involvement in King Leopold II’s atrocities, and his achievements in terms of the discovery of the Nile can’t really be mentioned without some acknowledgement of what came afterwards.
[00:09:54] Now, as a penultimate point to finish off the episode, and this mini-series, I want to leave you with some reflections on the different characters who tried to solve the question of the origin of the Nile.
[00:10:08] They might all have been British men of the Victorian Era, and it's easy to put them all into the same bucket, perhaps even painting them as heartless colonial imperial invaders.
[00:10:21] On one level, yes they were. These were all men who travelled from a small cold island in northern Europe to supposedly “discover” a continent and claim it as their own.
[00:10:35] But the truth is that painting them all with the same brush is to greatly simplify things, as these men were very, very different characters.
[00:10:45] From part one we had Sir Richard Burton, in some respects a classic Victorian explorer. Fluent in over 20 languages, charismatic, highly cultured and genuinely interested in the people and cultures that he met.
[00:11:00] But he never quite fitted in back in Britain, he would be accused of being a colonial racist, and he was very jealous of Stanley’s discovery, and ultimate proof that he had been wrong all along about Lake Tanganyika.
[00:11:15] And we also had Burton’s nemesis, John Hanning Speke, a man who was probably a more accomplished explorer, but whose motivations were more selfish.
[00:11:27] What’s more, he too couldn’t take criticism and ended up dying in mysterious circumstances.
[00:11:34] Both Burton and Speke, by the way, were wealthy, upper class Englishmen.
[00:11:40] Then in part two we had Dr David Livingstone, a Scotsman, not an Englishman.
[00:11:46] He was very different from the previous two, as he had not been born to a wealthy family, he worked his way “up”, and his entire reason for setting foot in Africa and then dedicating his life to the continent was a moral one, to spread Christianity and then to do everything he could to stop the Arab slave trade. He was far from the caricature of an imperial Victorian explorer.
[00:12:12] And in part three, or in fact also making a very important appearance in part two, we had the subject of today’s episode, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:12:23] Again, he was not English, he was Welsh by birth, and would only go on to become an American citizen in his 40s. And he wasn’t really even an explorer; he was a journalist initially, and his first mission was primarily a journalistic one. And he came from the most lowly background possible; a life as a workhouse boy, right on the bottom rung of Victorian society.
[00:12:53] And in terms of his motivation, it was two-fold.
[00:12:57] First, in his mission to find Livingstone, it was fame and fortune, it was a way of putting his childhood poverty behind him, of achieving the unthinkable, locating the world’s most famous disappeared explorer.
[00:13:12] And afterwards, why did he go back on this hugely dangerous mission, why did he return to Africa to continue the search for the source of the Nile?
[00:13:23] Well, it was principally to continue the work of the man he had come to consider as a father figure, Dr David Livingstone. Livingstone had made it his life’s work to find the source of the Nile, but had died before it could be completed.
[00:13:40] Stanley felt that he had a duty to complete this mission, even if the probability of dying in the process was incredibly high.
[00:13:49] But, he did it. And the irony is that, even though he was the least of an “explorer”, at least by training, he was by far the most accomplished explorer of them all.
[00:14:03] He circumnavigated Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, he went all the way down the river Lualaba, and ultimately it was this young Welshman who had been abandoned by his parents, it was he who managed to answer a question that has preoccupied people literally for thousands of years, the question of the true source of the river Nile.
[00:14:25] But, in one final plot twist, if you remember back to part one of this mini-series, Ptolemy had written that the true source of the Nile was the “mountains of the moon”, a long belt of mountains that stretched all the way across Africa, and were indeed thought to exist even until the early 19th century.
[00:14:47] According to some geographers, the ultimate source of the Nile is not Lake Victoria, as Speke had claimed and as Stanley had “proved”.
[00:14:58] Instead, it’s a mountain range called the Rwenzori mountains, which are just to the west of Lake Victoria.
[00:15:06] These snow capped mountains have a variety of different glaciers, whose melting ice leads to a collection of small rivers, some of which lead to Lake Victoria, which leads to, well, you’ve guessed it, the river Nile.
[00:15:21] So, the Rwenzori mountains are, in all probability, the mountains of the moon.
[00:15:28] In this twist of fate, and after all the expeditions we’ve learned about, from Burton and Speke to Livingstone to Stanley, perhaps old 1st century Ptolemy was right all along.
[00:15:42] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Quest To Find The Origin of The River Nile.
[00:15:48] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:15:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode and of this mini-series more generally.
[00:15:57] Were these men imperial invaders, geographical pioneers, or somewhere in between?
[00:16:04] What other stories of exploration would you like to hear about?
[00:16:08] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:16:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:16:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our mini-series on the quest to find the origin of the river Nile.
[00:00:29] As a reminder, in part one we learned first about why finding the source of the Nile was of such interest, and secondly about the amazing story of Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
[00:00:43] In part two, we learned about the attempt by Dr David Livingstone to locate the source of the Nile, how he was lost to the outside world for many years, and the interesting way in which he was greeted when he was finally found.
[00:00:58] And in today’s episode, the final episode, we will conclude our story with the tale of the Welsh-American explorer, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:01:07] OK then, the voyage of Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:01:13] As a quick recap of the story, in 1858 Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke had had an almighty disagreement over the true source of the Nile.
[00:01:26] After travelling inland from Zanzibar in search of a great lake that could be the mysterious source of this great river, the pair had found two lakes, but disagreed on which one led to the Nile.
[00:01:41] Richard Burton maintained that it was Lake Tanganyika, John Hanning Speke that it was Lake Victoria.
[00:01:50] The disagreement ended with the ultimately death of Speke, and Burton’s claim that Speke had shot himself in order to save himself from the embarrassment of having to admit that he was wrong.
[00:02:04] And 8 years later, a Scottish doctor and missionary by the name of David Livingstone had set out to try to find the answer for himself.
[00:02:15] But, he had got lost on the way, or rather, he disappeared for several years and was famously found by a Welsh-American explorer by the name of Henry Morton Stanley, and was greeted, reportedly, with the immortal line, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
[00:02:35] Dr Livingstone died in 1873, having left behind some important discoveries about the geography of southern Africa, but nobody had definitive proof about what the source really was.
[00:02:50] Stanley had gone back to the United States, and found the fame and glory that he had always hoped for.
[00:02:58] As a reminder, Stanley had been abandoned by his mother, thrown into a workhouse at the age of 5, and had escaped to the United States at the age of 18.
[00:03:10] He was a nobody. Or rather, he had been a nobody until he published his account of finding Dr Livingstone, aptly titled “How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveries in Central Africa”.
[00:03:25] This unlikely success, against all the odds, gave him the credibility to persuade his backers to support him financially on another mission.
[00:03:37] In 1874, backed by the New York Herald and The Daily Telegraph, he set out on another expedition. Its objective was to complete the exploration of the Great Lakes of Africa and to, once and for all, find the source of the river Nile.
[00:03:57] This mission was equal, if not greater, to both of the previous ones.
[00:04:04] Like the previous ones, the expedition started in Zanzibar, on the east coast, but this one would be much longer; it would involve travelling over 11,000 kilometres.
[00:04:17] And let’s remember, the land part of this would have been done on foot, because cows and horses would've been killed by the disease-carrying Tsetse fly. So they would have walked, and porters would have had to carry everything.
[00:04:35] Stanley recruited a troop of a reported 224 porters and servants, and they headed west.
[00:04:44] The first task was to accurately circumnavigate the great lakes, to go all the way around them and map any rivers.
[00:04:53] And that’s exactly what they did.
[00:04:56] Stanley went all the way around Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, before getting to Lake Tanganyika.
[00:05:03] Stanley observed that Lake Victoria had one large outflow, the river that Speke had observed several years before.
[00:05:12] This was most probably the source of the Nile, he thought, but there was still one more possibility.
[00:05:20] He had learned from the man he had rescued, Dr. Livingstone, that Lake Tanganyika also had a large river that flowed north, out from its west side.
[00:05:32] Livingstone had tried to follow its path, but hadn’t been able to make the progress he had hoped for.
[00:05:39] Stanley realised that if he was going to solve the mystery of the origin of the river Nile, the answer lay in this river, the Lualaba River.
[00:05:50] It looked like it could lead to the Nile.
[00:05:54] When it leaves the west side of Lake Tanganyika, it goes west for a little bit and then heads north, over 1,200 kilometres north to be precise. It looked like, with a bit of a bend to the right, it was heading straight for Egypt, that it was the Nile.
[00:06:13] Stanley needed to follow the river and see where it ended up.
[00:06:19] He would be heading into virgin territory, from the European perspective at least; no other European explorer had gone all the way down the river.
[00:06:28] Even the Arab slave traders had reportedly been put off by stories of man-eating cannibals, so where the river led was a mystery to outsiders.
[00:06:40] And this was far from the only issue.
[00:06:44] When you go down a river the current might be on your side, but this comes with its own problems.
[00:06:51] Specifically, waterfalls and white water rapids, which are impossible to go down safely on a boat.
[00:06:59] Every time the expedition came across these obstacles, they would have to quickly steer to the river bank before it was too late, take the boats out of the water and attempt to find a safe way around.
[00:07:12] In many cases, they didn’t, and members of the party were swept away with the rushing water and drowned.
[00:07:21] And those who didn’t die in the river, died from sunstroke, malaria, and a miscellany of other gruesome illnesses.
[00:07:30] In total, of the 228 initial members of the party, only 111 survived. More than half died on the journey.
[00:07:41] Indeed, Henry Morton Stanley was the only surviving European.
[00:07:46] Despite the hardship and huge loss of human life, the plan worked.
[00:07:53] After going more than 1,000 kilometres to the north, the Lualaba river snaked westwards, eventually merging into the Congo river, which flows out into the Atlantic Ocean, nowhere near the Nile.
[00:08:08] Stanley had his answer, and now it was clear that John Speke had been right.
[00:08:15] All other possibilities had been eliminated.
[00:08:18] The origin of the river Nile was indeed Lake Victoria, as Speke had correctly identified.
[00:08:25] At last, Stanley had managed to solve the puzzle that had stumped explorers for centuries.
[00:08:32] He discovered that the source of the White Nile was not Lake Tanganyika as Burton had claimed, nor was it a separate, undiscovered lake.
[00:08:41] Instead, it was Lake Victoria.
[00:08:44] Now, we must finish this episode with three things.
[00:08:48] First a little bit of an addendum, a final chapter, of the story of Henry Morton Stanley, as any glory he gained through the discovery of the Nile would be tarnished with what happened next.
[00:09:03] He would go on to be hired by King Leopold II as the Belgian king’s agent in Congo.
[00:09:11] Now you may know about the atrocities of King Leopold II already or you might remember them from episode number 289.
[00:09:20] To clarify, there is no evidence that Stanley knew what the bloodthirsty Belgian king had in mind, and as soon as he discovered his employer’s cruel plans for the Congo, he protested and condemned the plans before leaving his post.
[00:09:37] But still, his name has forever been tarnished by his involvement in King Leopold II’s atrocities, and his achievements in terms of the discovery of the Nile can’t really be mentioned without some acknowledgement of what came afterwards.
[00:09:54] Now, as a penultimate point to finish off the episode, and this mini-series, I want to leave you with some reflections on the different characters who tried to solve the question of the origin of the Nile.
[00:10:08] They might all have been British men of the Victorian Era, and it's easy to put them all into the same bucket, perhaps even painting them as heartless colonial imperial invaders.
[00:10:21] On one level, yes they were. These were all men who travelled from a small cold island in northern Europe to supposedly “discover” a continent and claim it as their own.
[00:10:35] But the truth is that painting them all with the same brush is to greatly simplify things, as these men were very, very different characters.
[00:10:45] From part one we had Sir Richard Burton, in some respects a classic Victorian explorer. Fluent in over 20 languages, charismatic, highly cultured and genuinely interested in the people and cultures that he met.
[00:11:00] But he never quite fitted in back in Britain, he would be accused of being a colonial racist, and he was very jealous of Stanley’s discovery, and ultimate proof that he had been wrong all along about Lake Tanganyika.
[00:11:15] And we also had Burton’s nemesis, John Hanning Speke, a man who was probably a more accomplished explorer, but whose motivations were more selfish.
[00:11:27] What’s more, he too couldn’t take criticism and ended up dying in mysterious circumstances.
[00:11:34] Both Burton and Speke, by the way, were wealthy, upper class Englishmen.
[00:11:40] Then in part two we had Dr David Livingstone, a Scotsman, not an Englishman.
[00:11:46] He was very different from the previous two, as he had not been born to a wealthy family, he worked his way “up”, and his entire reason for setting foot in Africa and then dedicating his life to the continent was a moral one, to spread Christianity and then to do everything he could to stop the Arab slave trade. He was far from the caricature of an imperial Victorian explorer.
[00:12:12] And in part three, or in fact also making a very important appearance in part two, we had the subject of today’s episode, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:12:23] Again, he was not English, he was Welsh by birth, and would only go on to become an American citizen in his 40s. And he wasn’t really even an explorer; he was a journalist initially, and his first mission was primarily a journalistic one. And he came from the most lowly background possible; a life as a workhouse boy, right on the bottom rung of Victorian society.
[00:12:53] And in terms of his motivation, it was two-fold.
[00:12:57] First, in his mission to find Livingstone, it was fame and fortune, it was a way of putting his childhood poverty behind him, of achieving the unthinkable, locating the world’s most famous disappeared explorer.
[00:13:12] And afterwards, why did he go back on this hugely dangerous mission, why did he return to Africa to continue the search for the source of the Nile?
[00:13:23] Well, it was principally to continue the work of the man he had come to consider as a father figure, Dr David Livingstone. Livingstone had made it his life’s work to find the source of the Nile, but had died before it could be completed.
[00:13:40] Stanley felt that he had a duty to complete this mission, even if the probability of dying in the process was incredibly high.
[00:13:49] But, he did it. And the irony is that, even though he was the least of an “explorer”, at least by training, he was by far the most accomplished explorer of them all.
[00:14:03] He circumnavigated Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, he went all the way down the river Lualaba, and ultimately it was this young Welshman who had been abandoned by his parents, it was he who managed to answer a question that has preoccupied people literally for thousands of years, the question of the true source of the river Nile.
[00:14:25] But, in one final plot twist, if you remember back to part one of this mini-series, Ptolemy had written that the true source of the Nile was the “mountains of the moon”, a long belt of mountains that stretched all the way across Africa, and were indeed thought to exist even until the early 19th century.
[00:14:47] According to some geographers, the ultimate source of the Nile is not Lake Victoria, as Speke had claimed and as Stanley had “proved”.
[00:14:58] Instead, it’s a mountain range called the Rwenzori mountains, which are just to the west of Lake Victoria.
[00:15:06] These snow capped mountains have a variety of different glaciers, whose melting ice leads to a collection of small rivers, some of which lead to Lake Victoria, which leads to, well, you’ve guessed it, the river Nile.
[00:15:21] So, the Rwenzori mountains are, in all probability, the mountains of the moon.
[00:15:28] In this twist of fate, and after all the expeditions we’ve learned about, from Burton and Speke to Livingstone to Stanley, perhaps old 1st century Ptolemy was right all along.
[00:15:42] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Quest To Find The Origin of The River Nile.
[00:15:48] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:15:52] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode and of this mini-series more generally.
[00:15:57] Were these men imperial invaders, geographical pioneers, or somewhere in between?
[00:16:04] What other stories of exploration would you like to hear about?
[00:16:08] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:16:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:16:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
