River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile.

By Candice Millard

Doubleday   368 pp.

By Jim Swearingen

European explorers have, in recent decades, stood accused of a long list of sins, including human trafficking, animal cruelty, cultural appropriation, and general colonialism. To be sure, the great explorers brought with them ethnocentric ideologies, savage weaponry, mortal diseases, and tragic schemes for commercial exploitation. There were, however, at the time of their expeditions already long-established trade routes, traveled by Africans and Arabs alike. The complicated history of cruelty in Africa predates the European colonialists who exacerbated it.

Reducing the European explorers to the worst of the West’s sins overlooks the spirit of discovery that drove them, their hunger to find out what they did not know, and their desire to see things that no one (in their world) had ever seen before. In London, the Royal Geographic Society’s (RGS) impressive collection of maps, mottled with large swaths of uncharted territory, goaded such men into inhospitable jungles, deserts, mountain ranges, polar caps, as well as unknown cultures, peoples, and languages that would expand Europe’s understanding of the world and the people in it.

When a highly skilled historian relates not just the accomplishments of such men, but the psychology driving their perilous deeds, the reader is in for an adventure. Candice Millard, author of three such histories already, has just written a fourth, River of the Gods, an account of two RGS expeditions in 1855 and 1860 to find the source of the Nile River. The book recounts the trials and calamities of explorers Richard Burton and Jonathan Speke along with their principal African guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay–likely the greatest African explorer of them all. Bombay, himself a former African slave captured by Arabs and sold to an Indian, proved the intrepid leader, able to keep the expeditions manned, fed, and progressing toward the elusive source of the famed River of the Pharaohs.

While these men faced external threats from brigands and slave-traders, as well as cholera, typhoid, and starvation, the most pernicious danger was the jealous rivalry between their two British leaders. Burton, one of those restless, discontented souls insatiably thirsty for knowledge, drove himself mercilessly while making enemies of those less determined. He had already completed a host of daring accomplishments soldiering in India and the Crimea, traveling to Mecca disguised as a Muslim, and exploring Somaililand for the RGS, before commanding the 1855 Nile expedition.

A striking figure whose looks inspired Bram Stoker’s actual description of Count Dracula, Burton was a student of languages and cultures, falconry and fencing, as well as human sexuality. His skepticism of religion and English customs brought him few friends. He enjoyed flouting Victorian squeamishness and his cast of public associations included a pair of noted pornographers. Burton would go on after his Nile expedition to translate the unexpurgated One Thousand and One Nights, as well as the Kama Sutra.

Millard’s depiction of Speke, whose name should have eclipsed Burton’s for establishing Lake Nyanza (Victoria) as the source of the Nile, reveals a peevish amateur, unsuited to command and unwilling to cease impugning the accomplishments of his rivals. While Burton smoothed his path to becoming a principal in the world of British exploration, Speke repaid his patron’s favors with back-handed sabotage and public fits of pique. Worse than his own self-promotion, Speke’s espousal of the Hamitic Myth, which branded the African race descendants of Noah’s banished son Ham–and thereby deserving of every racial brutality–tainted his interactions with the entire continent. Millard reminds us of the historical impact of this lethal fairy tale.

The Society would come to regret the choice of Speke as commander of the second expedition in 1860. He proved a sloppy cartographer and a worse writer, too undisciplined to provide the exacting scientific evidence required of his mission. And the dramatic resolution of the infamous feud with Burton rivals any fictional denouement for melodrama and finality.

Apart from Millard’s meticulous research and suspenseful prose, she brings an enormous enthusiasm for the narrow escapes and daring-dos of human history, the impulse to act decisively in the face of death. Her books explore extraordinary men who shared the same restless curiosity and stomach for hardship long before ease and consumerism slaked mankind’s thirst for discovery. In these times of serious economic, geopolitical, and medical challenges, her book offers readers a special kind of escapism – to intense obstacles of an entirely different kind