with his name. He need not care for them now. His achievement is an all-sufficient answer to any question of his qualifications from any quarter; and perhaps it is not too much to hope that Captain Burton himself, as he sits in his verandah at Fernando Po, and reads the next batch of English newspapers that reaches him, will feel more pleasure than pain, like a generous man, at the account of what Speke has done. He will see how the case stands; and if sorry that he did not appreciate his comrade better, he will rejoice that the mistake has done no lasting harm. The feat is achieved; the man is justified; and there should be no exception to the world’s rejoicing.
Captain Speke had a comrade in his turn—Captain Grant,—also an Indian officer: and while they were making for the equator from the south, a brave and accomplished party were hoping to meet them there from the north. Mr. and Mrs. Petherick had gone up the White Nile, past the limit of vision; and they were bent on achieving the great discovery before they reappeared. We all talked bravely about them, as we always do when bold explorers go forth; and we could truthfully say that they had far better chances of safety and success than any of their predecessors had had, from Mr. Petherick’s previous residence at Khartoum, his habit of intercourse with the natives, and the exploratory journeys he had already made: yet we could not be surprised when the news came that the party had been robbed, and Mr. and Mrs. Petherick drowned in the Nile. Their relatives wore mourning for them: and it is probable that we all felt very nearly hopeless about Speke and Grant, who had the dangers of the Pethericks to go through, besides all those that lay behind.
They were coming on, however. In a few months, or less, we shall hear the whole story, in full detail, from themselves; so I need say but little of it here, beyond stating the great fact that Captains Speke and Grant have followed the whole course of the White (the real) Nile from the lake it issues from, except that, in one case where it makes a great loop, they went straight across the land it encloses. There is no uncertainty arising out of this. They learned^ from the natives the story of its course between the two points at which they stood; and the discovery is complete. This does not mean that they saw or calculated all the contributions to the great stream which was flowing on from their feet to the Mediterranean. A future time will show how many rivers flow out of the two great lakes, and as many others as there may be. It is enough for the present that we know how the Nile is what it is. There are mountains—a group, not a range—to collect tropical rains. There are lakes, long and broad, but apparently shallow, which receive the waters, but cannot contain them, after the rainy season, and which must therefore overflow; and that overflow makes the Nile, with its punctual inundation.
The imagery of the scene is unlike what the imagination of men has conceived for all the past ages during which the human mind has been bent in that direction. Two degrees south of the equator, from the middle of the northern shore of a vast lake issues the stream, about 150 yards wide, first leaping down a fall of twelve feet, and then off and away for Egypt,—making further falls, or courses of rapids (a descent of 1000 feet, in the circuit which the travellers did not follow), and then on and on, through fertile plains, where the cattle are as innumerable as on the Pampas of South America; and through rank vegetation, where the elephants make paths for themselves to drink of old Nile. Instead of a group of old gods on a mountain, sitting by a spring-head, and blessing it as they send it forth on its course of 2000 miles, the travellers found tribes of men, more astonished at the sight of white faces than the white-faced men were with anything they found at the source of the mystery they were solving. Some of the black nations about those lakes were found more intelligent, and some less. We shall hear all about them by and by.
Meantime, few of us, I believe, will have much sympathy with writers or speakers whose first inquiry was about the use of this discovery. It may or may not be true that there is a prospect of a considerable trade all the way up the river to the equator, and beyond it. That may be all very well when we have become accustomed to the thought that the last great secret of our planet (of its surface at least) is told to our generation. For nearly two centuries it has seemed strange and unnatural that we should have learned so many secrets of the heavens,—should have actually ascertained how the solar system is what it is, and does what it does, and that there should be anything on the earth’s surface hidden from us that we desire to know. That anomaly is at an end: and we do not want to think of commercial or other advantages on the same day with such a fact.
Next comes the human interest of the story. Can anything be conceived more exhilarating than the meeting at Gondokoro, which will stand in English, and in other than English history? The Pethericks were not drowned in the Nile, but ready on its banks to meet the countrymen who were descending in their glory from the high regions of the equator. Another fine fellow was there too,—another generous rival in the work of discovery, Mr. Baker—Samuel Baker, whose name already stands high, and is likely to stand higher, among African explorers.
Speke might well say that he was never so happy in his life. Mr. Petherick handed him a letter from his London patrons, announcing praise and reward for former feats: and Mr. Baker supplied him and Captain Grant with stores and money, to set them well forward on their way home. From that meeting, high up in the tropics, our minds glance into the English homes of these brave men and women, at the moment when Captain Speke’s father, down in Somersetshire, heard of his safety, and his certainty of renown; and when the Pethericks’ relatives threw off their mourning; and Mr. Baker’s friends were told of what he had done, and what thanks the Geographical Society at once voted him. But we have no business on that private ground.
The Indian Government is as sympathetic as