Anne's Terrible Good Nature (Collection)/The Gardens and the Nile

Kensington Gardens, close to Lancaster Gate, there rises from the grass beside the path leading direct to "Physical Energy" a column of red granite, bearing the words "In Memory of Speke. Victoria Nyanza and the Nile. 1864." Anyone curious enough to stand for a while near this column and listen to the nurses and children who pass would hear some strange suggestions as to why the column is there, and who or what Speke was; but for the most part the answer to the question is: "I don't know," or, "How should I know?" or, "Inquire of your pa"; or, by the more daring, "Speke was a great man."

"Yes, but what kind of a great man? What did he do?"

"Do? Oh! [airily] he did great things. That's why he has a monument—monuments are put up only to great men."

"Yes, nurse, but do tell me what Speke did?"

"That I shan't now. I might have done if you hadn't worried me so. But I'll tell you what he didn't do: he didn't ask questions all day long. No great man ever did."

That evening, perhaps, just before bed-time, the same question will be repeated at home.

"Father, who is Speke?"

"Speke?"

"Yes, there's a monument in the Gardens in memory of Speke."



"A very unsuitable inscription, I think. Bad advice. Little boys—yes, and little girls too—should be seen and not heard. I would rather it said 'In honour of not speaking.'" (This father, you see, was one of the funny fathers who think that children want only to laugh.)

"No, father, not ."

"Oh, Speke!—yes, of course, well, Speke—Speke was a great man,"

"Nurse said that, father. But what did he do?"

"Do? Oh, he was a great, great Englishman! A very noble life. That's why he has a monument. Monuments, you know, are raised only to the great. You have seen the Albert Memorial, and the statue of the Duke of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner?"

"Yes, father, but do tell me what Speke did?"

"Speke—my dear child, do you know what the time is? It's twenty to eight. You ought to have been upstairs for ten minutes. Good-night. Sleep well."

The result is that for several years the children of Bayswater and Kensington have had to invent stories of Speke for themselves. They know in a vague way that he was a traveller, because of the other words on the monument; but that is all. They don't know whether he was young or old; whether he travelled in 1864, or died in 1864. Some of them, the smaller ones, connecting Victoria Nyanza in some way with Queen Victoria, think of Speke as something to do with Kensington Gardens—perhaps he was the head gardener, they think, or the man who planted the trees. To others the word Nile on the column suggests thoughts of Moses in the bulrushes, and Pharaoh and the Israelites.

Meanwhile, who was Speke?

I will tell you.

John Hanning Speke was born on May 4, 1827, at Jordans, near Ilchester, in Somersetshire. That was the year when it was first observed that Englishmen walked with their hands in their pockets. Speke's father was a captain in the 14th Dragoons, and the son was brought up to be a soldier too; and in 1844, when he was seventeen, he entered the army, and went to the Punjab in India, where he fought in several battles and became a lieutenant. Any time he could get from active service he spent in exploring the Himalayas and in hunting wild beasts and looking for rare plants and fossils.

In 1854, when his ten years in India were over, he went to Africa in order to carry out his pet scheme of exploring the centre of that Continent, which was then almost unknown. Before, however, he could get to work properly the Crimean War broke out, and he at once volunteered for service there and fought very gallantly; and then, in 1856, he really began again upon Africa in earnest, in company with another intrepid traveller. Sir Richard Burton, the wonderful man who made the pilgrimage to Mecca disguised so cleverly as a Mohamedan that he was not discovered. Had he been he would have been killed at once.

The particular ambition of Burton and Speke was to trace the river Nile back to its source in the mysterious heart of the Mountains of the Moon.

Has it ever occurred to you that every river has a source—that every river begins somewhere, in a tiny spring? Few forms of exploration are more interesting than to trace a stream back to its first drop. The Thames, for example, begins in the Cotswold Hills—the merest little trickle. All running water, you know, sooner or later reaches the sea. That little trickle in the Cotswolds will in time glide past Henley and Hampton Court and Westminster Bridge, and past the Tower, and help to bear up the thousands of vessels in the Port of London, and at last will run out into the sea at Gravesend. Some day perhaps you will walk up the banks of the Upper Thames until you come to the Cotswold spring.

But of course a river, although we speak of its having one source, has others too. Many streams run into the Thames, and each of these has also its source. There is one, indeed, close to Speke's monument—the Westbourne, which gives its name to Westbourne Grove, where Whiteley's is. The West Bourne, like all the little London rivers, now runs underground, but it used to be open a hundred and more years ago. The West Bourne rises near the Finchley Road Station, and has many adventures before it reaches the Thames and the sea. It runs, I have been told, under the Bayswater Road into the Serpentine. At the bottom of the Serpentine it comes out again in a waterfall, where the rabbits are, and again runs underground to the King's garden at the back of Buckingham Palace, where it reappears as a beautiful lake. Then it dives under the Palace and comes up again as the water in St. James's Park, where all the interesting water-fowl live and have nests on an island—the ducks and gulls and cormorants and penguins. Then, once more, it disappears, this time under the Horse Guards and Whitehall, and comes out into the Thames. Not a bad career for a little bit of a stream rising at Hampstead, is it?

To explore that stream would be fairly easy, and it is not difficult to explore the Thames. But in order to realize quite what Speke did you must think for a moment of what it means to travel in unexplored countries. There are no maps: you have no notion what is before you; the natives may be suspicious of you and make war at once, or they may at first pretend to be friendly and then suddenly attempt a massacre; fever is always on your track; wild beasts may be in such numbers as to be a continual danger. It is a great thing to dare all these known and unknown perils just to do—what? To make a fortune? No. To add a country to England's possessions? No. But just to gain a little more knowledge of geography; just to add one more fact to the world's sum.

Illness came to both explorers, and they endured very severe privations, and at last Burton had to give up and allow Speke to go on alone. They parted at Kazé on July 9, 1858, just fifty years ago, Speke setting out with thirty-five native followers and supplies for six weeks. On August 3 he discovered a gigantic lake, to which he gave the name Victoria Nyanza—Victoria after his Queen, and Nyanza meaning a piece of water.

You should now get your atlas and look for the Nile and Kazé and the vast lake, where, as Speke then thought, and as is now known, the river Nile begins its course of three thousand four hundred miles, which does not end until, after passing through Khartoum, and Dongola, and Wady Haifa, and Assouan, and Thebes, and Ghizeh, and Cairo, it glides into the sea by the many mouths of its delta at Rosetta and Damietta and Alexandria.

Speke then returned to England, to tell his countrymen all about his discovery, and in i860 he set out for Africa again, and began a series of very tedious and harassing marches from Zanzibar through Uganda to reach Victoria Nyanza once more, and explore it thoroughly. Illness again interrupted him, and the native kings were not wholly friendly, but at last, on July 28, 1862, he came to the head of the lake where the water that becomes the Nile tumbles over the edge of a cataract. This cataract he named Ripon Falls.

Speke telegraphed his news to England directly he reached a civilized town, so that when he himself landed at Southampton, in 1863, he was received as a hero, and honours were showered upon him, and he was the most famous traveller of his own or almost any other day.

Not every one, however (including Burton), was satisfied that the Nile really began at Ripon Falls, and books were written by Burton and others in support of rival theories. Speke, who naturally believed himself to be right, arranged to meet some of these other geographers in a public discussion at Bath, in September, 1864; but on the very morning of that day, as he was out partridge-shooting, he accidentally shot himself and died at the early age of thirty-seven.

Isn't that a wretched way for a man to die after braving all the perils of unknown Africa?

And now, whenever you see the Speke monument again you will think of that great inland sea in Africa called Victoria Nyanza, and the Nile tumbling out of it and beginning its wonderful journey to the Mediterranean.