Although Burton died poor and angry, his legacy, unlike Speke’s, has endured.Īn engrossing, sharply drawn adventure tale.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters.
Back in London, Speke cruelly denounced Burton’s leadership, securing funding for his own expedition. 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. Speke suffered near blindness from ophthalmia, and he became deaf in one ear after a beetle burrowed into his ear canal. Illness and injury dogged them, as they suffered from typhoid, smallpox, infected wounds, and bone-shattering fevers. 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. After abortive starts, the expedition left Zanzibar on June 27, 1857.
Guides like Bombay, Millard argues persuasively, formed the indisputable backbone of British exploration. 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. 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.
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.
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