River of the Gods

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy—from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

“A lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by [Richard Burton and John Speke] to solve the geographic riddle of their era.” —The New York Times Book Review

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was  a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe – and extend their colonial empires.

Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs.

From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke’s great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate,Speke shot himself.

Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.

In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.New York Times Bestseller • A Best Book of the Year: WASHINGTON POST, NPR, GOODREADS, BOOKPAGE, Audible  • One of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction • One of Smithsonian’s 10 best History Books of 2022 •

“River of the Gods is a lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by [Richard Burton and John Speke] to solve the geographic riddle of their era. . . Candice Millard has earned her legions of admirers. She is a graceful writer and a careful researcher, and she knows how to navigate a tangled tale.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Millard’s research and very readable storytelling are admirable. . . Ultimately, the identity of the person who first discovered the source of the White Nile may be a trivial matter. Ms. Millard conscientiously investigates the issue, of course, but River of the Gods is compelling because she does justice to the psyches and behavior of Burton and Speke—keenly flawed but enthralling, sometimes marvelous people.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Millard recounts all of these travails with a fluid grace that wears its learning lightly.”
—The Washington Post

“Millard . . . introduces a cast of characters and succeeds in making each of them unforgettable. . . . Millard excels at describing it all, balancing narrative flow with abundant details that give a vast landscape its weight and power, clarify complicated people and arduous journeys, and add those who have gone largely unseen to the historical stage.”
—Book Page 

“Meticulous research and suspenseful prose”
—The National Book Review

“Millard exhibits admirable skill in crafting narratives of uncommon drama and detail … A first-rate tale of 19th-century exploration that rivals the best of the polar exploits.”
—Air Mail

“When it comes to narrative nonfiction, she’s the best… I  love her books. She has this way of finding a really fresh way of telling an old story.”
—Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile

“Millard is an outstanding narrative historian, with the gift of breathing new life into long-forgotten stories, but what she does best is communicate to the reader the horrid details of suffering.”
—Bookreporter

“Bestseller Millard (Hero of the Empire) recounts one of the greatest 19th-century British colonial explorations in this fascinating history. In 1854, the Royal Geographical Society chose Richard Francis Burton to lead an expedition to locate the source of the White Nile, the longest branch of the Nile River. After one member of his original team died before the journey, Burton hired Lt. John Hanning Speke of the Bengal Native Infantry, an avid hunter and member of the British aristocracy. Tensions between the two strong-willed men quickly surfaced, but Burton was more fortunate in his hiring of Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a formerly enslaved East African, as head gun carrier. While Burton recuperated from an illness, Speke and Bombay reached Lake Nyanza (also known as Lake Victoria), which Speke claimed as the Nile’s source. Burton maintained that Speke had failed to settle the question, but before the two men could publicly debate the issue in 1864, Speke died in a hunting accident. Subsequent explorations, in which Bombay took part, proved Speke’s theory. Millard’s lushly detailed adventure story keeps a steady eye on the racial power dynamics involved in this imperialist endeavor and brilliantly illuminates the characters of Burton, Speke, and Bombay. Readers will be riveted. Illus.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Millard, the former National Geographic journalist who took readers down an uncharted tributary of the Amazon with Teddy Roosevelt in River of Doubt, now turns her attention to the exploration of Africa’s Nile River. Europe became obsessed with ancient Egypt in the 19th century following the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Britain’s Royal Geographic Society resolved to locate the headwaters of the Nile, aiming to land an expedition on the east coast of Africa and explore inland, amid rumors of a lake region in the central part of the continent. Enter Captain Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, two men with different temperaments and interests, who had already crossed paths during an ill-fated expedition in Somaliland along with their trusted guide Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was formerly enslaved. Millard sets the stage for their bitter rivalry after they return from their harrowing East African expedition in 1859 and Speke announces he has found the source of the Nile, naming it Lake Victoria.
VERDICT It’s been nearly six years since popular Millard published Hero of the Empire, and eager fans and armchair travelers will gladly sign up for this enthralling and heartbreaking adventure.”
—Library Journal (starred)

“The lure of uncharted territory.
The Rosetta Stone—discovered by French soldiers in 1799, seized by a British envoy, and deciphered 23 years later—set off an obsessive interest in Egypt, including by the newly established Royal Geographical Society, to find the headwaters of the Nile. Bestselling author Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic, offers a tense, vibrant history of several dramatic expeditions across East Africa that finally resulted in a successful discovery. Drawing on archival sources and her own multiple trips to Africa following the explorers’ paths, Millard creates a palpable sense of the daunting task undertaken by three ambitious men: the magnetic, impulsive, and often combative Richard Burton; John Hanning Speke, an aristocratic infantry lieutenant and passionate hunter whose initial interest in East Africa was largely for the animals he could kill; and their devoted and resourceful native guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay a former enslaved person whose intimate knowledge of tribes and terrain proved to be indispensable. Guides like Bombay, Millard argues persuasively, formed the indisputable backbone of British exploration. After abortive starts, the expedition left Zanzibar on June 27, 1857. The explorers and their team, woefully underfunded, faced innumerable hardships: scorching heat, drenching storms, near starvation, massive desertions, and threats from “large, powerful, and politically complex” East African kingdoms. Illness and injury dogged them, as they suffered from typhoid, smallpox, infected wounds, and bone-shattering fevers. Speke suffered near blindness from ophthalmia, and he became deaf in one ear after a beetle burrowed into his ear canal. For nearly a year, Burton lay paralyzed. Although they became the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika, they could not proceed together to Lake Nyanza, which Speke insisted was the Nile’s source. Back in London, Speke cruelly denounced Burton’s leadership, securing funding for his own expedition. Although Burton died poor and angry, his legacy, unlike Speke’s, has endured.
An engrossing, sharply drawn adventure tale.
—Kirkus Review (starred)CANDICE MILLARD is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic, and Hero of the Empire. She lives in Kansas City, Kansas, with her husband and three children.Chapter One

A Blaze of Light

Sitting on a thin carpet in his tiny, rented room in Suez, Egypt, in 1854, Richard Francis Burton calmly watched as five men cast critical eyes over his meager belongings. The men, whom he had just met on the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, “looked at my clothes, overhauled my medicine chest, and criticised my pistols,” Burton wrote. “They sneered at my copper-cased watch.” He knew that if they discovered the truth, that he was not Shaykh Abdullah, an Afghan-born Indian doctor and devout, lifelong Muslim but a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant in the army of the British East India Company, not only would his elaborately planned expedition be in grave danger, but so would his life. Burton, however, was not worried. Even when his new friends found his sextant, the most indispensable, and obviously Western, scientific instrument in his possession, he did not think that he had anything to fear. “This,” he later wrote, “was a mistake.”

Burton’s goal was to do something that no other Englishman had ever done, and that few had either the ability or audacity to do: enter Mecca disguised as a Muslim. It was an undertaking that simultaneously acknowledged what was most sacred to the Muslim faith and dismissed the right to protect it, making it irresistible to Burton, who studied every religion and respected none. The birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, Mecca is the holiest site in Islam and, as such, forbidden to non-Muslims. Burton knew that, “to pass through the Moslem’s Holy Land, you must either be a born believer, or have become one,” but he had never even considered performing the Hajj as a convert. “Men do not willingly give information to a ‘new Moslem,’ especially a Frank [European]: they suspect his conversion to be feigned or forced, look upon him as a spy, and let him see as little of life as possible,” he wrote. “I would have given up the dear project rather than purchase a doubtful and partial success at such a price.” An Oxford dropout, self-taught scholar, compulsive explorer, and extraordinarily skilled polyglot, Burton wanted unfettered access to every holy site he reached, the trust of every man he met, and the answer to every ancient mystery he encountered—nothing less, he wrote, than to see and understand “Moslem inner life.” He also wanted to return to England alive.

By disguising himself as a Muslim, Burton was risking the righteous wrath of those for whom the Hajj was the most sacred of religious rites. Although “neither the Koran nor the Sultan enjoins the killing of Hebrew or Christian intruders,” he knew, “in the event of a pilgrim declaring himself to be an infidel, the authorities would be powerless to protect him.” A single error could cost him his life. “A blunder, a hasty action, a misjudged word, a prayer or bow, not strictly the right shibboleth,” he wrote, “and my bones would have whitened the desert sand.”

Burton’s plan, moreover, required crossing the Rubʿ al-Khali—“Empty Quarter”—the world’s largest continuous desert and, in his words, a “huge white blot” on nineteenth-century maps. So ambitious was the expedition that it had captured the attention of the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Impey Murchison. For Murchison, who had helped to found the Society nearly a quarter of a century earlier, this was exactly the kind of exploration that the Society had been created to encourage. He “honored me,” Burton wrote, “by warmly supporting . . . ​my application for three years’ leave of absence on special duty.” The East India Company, a 250-year-old private corporation with armies of its own, had argued that the journey was too dangerous and that Burton, who had made more enemies than friends during his years in the military, should be given no more than a one-year furlough. The Royal Geographical Society stood by its promise to help finance the expedition. For a challenge of this magnitude, Murchison believed, Burton was “singularly well-qualified.”

Although the members of the Royal Geographical Society were impressed by Burton’s achievements, most had reservations about this unusual young man who seemed to be British in name only. Burton had been born in Devon, on the English Channel, but he had spent far less time in his homeland than he had roaming the rest of the world. It was a pattern that had begun early in life, when his father, Joseph Netterville Burton, a retired lieutenant colonel in the British Army, moved his family to France before Richard’s first birthday. Over the next eighteen years, he moved thirteen more times, briefly settling in towns from Blois to Lyons, Marseilles to Pau, Pisa to Siena, Florence, Rome, and Naples. By the time he was an adult, Burton, along with his younger siblings, Maria and Edward, felt less like a citizen of the world than a man without a country. “In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society,” he wrote, “nor did society understand us.”

Not only did Burton not feel British, he had often been told, and never in an admiring way, that neither did he look particularly British. No one who met him ever forgot his face. Bram Stoker, who would go on to write Dracula, was shaken by his first encounter with Burton. “The man riveted my attention,” Stoker later wrote. “He was dark, and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. . . . I never saw anyone like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!” Burton’s friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, wrote that he had “the jaw of a devil and the brow of a god,” and described his eyes as having “a look of unspeakable horror.” Burton’s black eyes, which he had inherited from his English-Irish father, seemed to mesmerize everyone he met. Friends, enemies, and acquaintances described them variously as magnetic, imperious, aggressive, burning, even terrible, and compared them to every dangerous wild animal they could think of, from a panther to a “stinging serpent.” Equally striking were his thick black hair, his deep, resonant voice, and even his teeth, which may have inspired literature’s most iconic vampire. Stoker would never forget watching, enthralled, as Burton spoke, his upper lip rising menacingly. “His canine tooth showed its full length,” he wrote, “like the gleam of a dagger.”

Burton had grown up fighting, from street brawls to school skirmishes to violent encounters with enraged tutors. Although his father had dragged his children from one European town to another, he wanted for them a British education, which began at a grim boarding school in Richmond. All that Burton remembered learning at the school, which he described as “the ‘Blacking-shop’ of Charles Dickens,” was “a certain facility in using our fists, and a general development of ruffianism. I was in one perpetual scene of fights; at one time I had thirty-two affairs of honor to settle.” When he and Edward were finally sent back to Boulogne, after an attack of measles killed several boys and shut down the school, they scandalized everyone on their ship by joyously celebrating the fact that they were leaving England at last. “We shrieked, we whooped, we danced for joy. We shook our fists at the white cliffs, and loudly hoped we should never see them again,” he wrote. “We hurrah’d for France, and hooted for England; ‘The Land on which the Sun ne’er sets—nor rises.’ ”

Burton’s father taught him chess, but most of what he learned came from a succession of alternately terrifying and terrified tutors. No matter the subject, the tutors were given permission to beat their pupils, until the pupils were old enough to beat them back. In later years, Burton would express his sorrow for the incalculable harm done by “that unwise saying of the wise man, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ ” As a teenager, he fought back. The poor, nervous musician Burton’s parents hired to teach him violin—“nerves without flesh, hung on wires,” as Burton would later contemptuously describe him, “all hair and no brain”—finally quit after his student broke a violin over his head.

The only childhood teacher Burton respected was his fencing master, a former soldier who had only one thumb, having lost the other in battle. Richard and his brother threw themselves into fencing with such wild enthusiasm that their studies nearly ended in tragedy. “We soon learned not to neglect the mask,” Richard wrote. “I passed my foil down Edward’s throat, and nearly destroyed his uvula, which caused me a good deal of sorrow.” The lessons, however, not only paid off but eventually produced one of the most skilled swordsmen in Europe. Burton earned the coveted French title Maître d’Armes; perfected two sword strokes, the une-deux and the manchette—an upward slashing movement that disabled an opponent, often sparing his life; and wrote both The Book of the Sword and A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise, which the British Army published the same year he left for Mecca. Fencing, he would later say, “was the great solace of my life.”

As Burton grew into a young man, he also developed another all-consuming, lifelong interest, one that would make him even less welcome in polite society: sex. What began as love affairs with beautiful women from Italy to India quickly transformed into something more enquiring and erotic, and far less acceptable in Victorian England. As a young officer in Sindh, now a province in southeastern Pakistan, he famously investigated the homosexual brothels, writing a report for his commander that he claimed later hindered his career. His ethnological writings, which in the end would range from Asia to Africa to North America, focused not only on the dress, religion, and familial structures of his subjects, but on their sexual practices. His readers would be shocked by open and detailed discussions of polygamy and polyandry, pederasty and prostitution. Burton, however, had little time for British priggishness and no interest in what he referred to as “innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue and not of the heart.”

Although Burton’s nomadic childhood and scandalous interests left him feeling cut off from his country and distrusted by his countrymen, he did learn one striking thing about himself along the way: He was, in the words of one of his flabbergasted tutors, “a man who could learn a language running.” In the end, he would speak more than twenty-five different languages, along with at least another dozen dialects. To some extent, his gift for languages was a product of natural ability and early training. “I was intended for that wretched being, the infant phenomenon,” he explained, “and so began Latin at three and Greek at four.” It was his fascination with other cultures, however, and his methodical mind that made him one of the world’s most gifted linguists. He had worked out a system early on that allowed him to learn most languages in two months, and he never seemed to understand why others found it so hard. “I never worked more than a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness,” he wrote. “After learning some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy book-work (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read over my pencillings at least once a day. . . . The neck of the language was now broken and progress was rapid.”

After engineering his own expulsion from Oxford, where he had been ridiculed, ignored, and bored, Burton had joined the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, a regiment within the East India Company. Realizing that one of the fastest ways to rise through the ranks was to become an interpreter, he learned twelve languages in seven years. He had begun studying Hindustani immediately upon arriving in India and six months later easily passed first among the many gifted linguists taking the exam. Over the following years, one after another, he steadily added languages to his long list: Gujarati, Marathi, Armenian, Persian, Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Sanskrit, Arabic, Telugu, and Turkish, rarely placing second to even his most talented rivals.

So caught up did Burton become in his passion for languages, that he often forgot that not everyone shared his outsized enthusiasm. In his book Falconry in the Valley of the Indus—one of five books he wrote between 1851 and 1853—he used so many different Indian dialects that he was openly mocked in a British review. “Were it not that the author is so proud of his knowledge of oriental tongues that he thinks it desirable to display the said knowledge by a constant admixture of Indianee words with his narrative, this would be a most agreeable addition both to the Zoology and Falconry of the East,” the reviewer admonished him. “We find his affectation all but insufferable, and devoutly wish that he were confined to the use of plain English for the remaining term of his natural life.” Burton, however, was not to be shamed or dissuaded from his obsession. “For many years I have been employed in studying the Scindian literature and language,” he wrote in reply. “You will . . . ​find it is the language of a country as large as England.” He even wrote a letter to The Bombay Times openly criticizing the language examination process within the East India Company and claiming that, for a serious student, it was not particularly challenging. “The task may appear a formidable one: we can assure him that the appearance is much more tremendous than the reality,” he wrote. “Any man of moderate abilities can, with careful, though not hard, study, qualify himself to pass the examination we have described in one year.”

Such shrugging dismissal of the notoriously difficult and competitive exams was maddening for Burton’s fellow officers, who struggled for years to learn the languages. One man in particular bristled at such casual arrogance, and would come to justify Burton’s assertion that “linguists are a dangerous race.” Christopher Palmer Rigby was considered one of the most distinguished linguists in the East India Company. At twenty years of age he had passed the language exams for both Hindustani and Marathi, adding Canarese, Persian, and Arabic before his thirtieth birthday. In 1840, while in Aden, he not only learned Somali but wrote An Outline of the Somali Language and Vocabulary, which Burton admired and used extensively when studying the language himself. When Rigby sat for his examination in Gujarati, he had been widely expected to receive the highest score. To everyone’s shock, however, not least of all Rigby’s, he had lost that honor to Richard Burton.

Many years later, Rigby would find himself in a position to prove to Burton that linguists were not only dangerous, they had long memories. Burton would not sit for the exam in Arabic, a language that he knew so well he referred to it as “my native tongue,” until 1855. Soon after taking the test, he would leave the country, assuming that he had easily passed.US

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