A dedicated explorer, formidable linguist, a prolific author and translator, Captain Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) is perhaps the most notorious of all those to have attempted to find the source of the Nile.
Burton made two attempts to find the source of the Nile. The first in 1855, which came to an abrupt end just outside of Berbera where his camp (which included Speke) was attacked. Supported by the Royal Geographical Society the Foreign Office, and the East India Company, which gave Burton two years’ leave on full pay, his second expedition departed Zanzibar in December, 1856.
The crux of the expedition occurred at Tabora in May, 1858. Having discovered Lake Tanganyika (which he believed to be the source), Burton was fighting a lingering illness and decided to concentrate on his ethnographic studies while recuperating. Speke preferred to continue and they agreed that he would travel north. This was a fateful decision as it would lead to the discovery of Lake Victoria. With Burton opting to recuperate at Aden, Speke returned to England in advance and promised not to reveal the expedition’s discovery until Burton joined him.
On arriving in England in May 1859, Burton was incensed to find that not only had Speke failed to keep his promise, but had taken the lion’s share of the credit for the expedition as a whole, and had already received sponsorship for another expedition to satisfy the Nile question.
Of Speke, Burton wrote in his account of the expedition: “During the exploration he acted in a subordinate capacity; and as may be imagined amongst a party of Arabs, Baloch, and Africans, whose languages he ignored, he was unfit for any other but a subordinate capacity. Can I think fee otherwise than indignant, when I find that, after preceding me from Aden to England, with the spontaneous offer, on his part, of not appearing before the Society that originated the Expedition until my return, he had lost no time in taking measures to secure for himself the right of working the field which I had opened, and from that day he has paced himself en evidence as the primum mobile of an Expedition, in which he signed himself ‘surveyor,’—cujus pars minima fuit?”
Burton, R.F., The Lake Regions of Central Africa (London, 1860), p.ix.
