Five Weeks in a Balloon. Jules Verne
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and hardship. He arrives in Kouka, Bornu’s lakeside capital. Three weeks later on April 14, he finally makes it to the town of Ngornu, 12½ months after leaving Tripoli.
We find him setting out again with Overweg on March 29, 1851, bound for the kingdom of Adamawa south of the lake; from there he gets as far as the town of Yola, a little below latitude 9° north. Which is the southernmost point reached by this bold explorer.
During the month of August, he goes back to Kouka, from there consecutively travels through Mandara, Bagirmi, and Kanem, then reaches his easternmost position, the town of Másena, located at longitude 17° 20′ west.*
On November 25, 1852, after the death of his last-remaining companion Overweg, Barth pushes into the west, visits Sokoto, crosses the Niger, and finally arrives in Timbuktu, where he’s forced to sit out eight long months of misery, mistreatment, and humiliation by the sheik. But the presence of a Christian in town can no longer be tolerated; Fula tribesmen threaten to lay siege to the place. So the doctor clears out on March 17, 1854, takes refuge at the border where he stays for thirty-three days in a state of utter destitution, gets back to Kano in November, reenters Kouka, and from there goes home by Denham’s route after a four-month layover; the doctor sights Tripoli again near the end of August 1855, and reenters London on September 6 without a single companion left.
And that’s the story of Barth’s bold journey.3
Dr. Fergusson was careful to note that he had halted in latitude 4° north and longitude 17° west.
Now let’s see what Lieutenants Burton and Speke accomplished in east Africa.
The different expeditions that ascended the Nile were never able to reach that river’s mystifying source. According to a report by the German doctor Ferdinand Werne, an expedition undertaken in 1840, under the auspices of Mehemet Ali, called a halt in Gondokoro between the 4th and 5th northern parallels.
In 1855 Brun-Rollet, a Frenchman from Savoy, was named consul of Sardinia in east Sudan, replacing Vaudey, who died by violence; disguised as a merchant named Yacoub, who dealt in gum and ivory, he set out from Khartoum, got to Belenia beyond the 4th degree, and returned in poor health to Khartoum, where he died in 1857.
Nor could anybody else approach the river’s unattainable upper reaches—not Dr. Peney, head of the Egyptian medical service, who rode a small steamer one degree beyond Gondokoro and returned to die of exhaustion in Khartoum … not the Venetian Miani, who worked his way around the waterfalls located below Gondokoro and got to the 2nd parallel … not the Maltese trader Andrea Debono, who took his expedition even farther up the Nile.
In 1859 Monsieur Guillaume Lejean, entrusted with a mission by the French government, made his way to Khartoum via the Red Sea and boated up the Nile with twenty-one crewmen and twenty soldiers; but he couldn’t get past Gondokoro and ran tremendous risks among Negroes who were in open revolt.4 An expedition headed by Monsieur Escayrac de Lauture likewise tried to reach the notorious headwaters.
But this baleful objective has always stymied travelers; in the past Nero’s emissaries got to latitude 9°; so in the eighteen centuries since, explorers have progressed only five or six degrees farther, a gain of just 300 to 360 statute miles.
Several travelers tried to reach the Nile’s headwaters by using Africa’s east coast as their starting point.
Over the years 1768–1772, the Scot James Bruce set out from the Ethiopian port of Massawa, crossed Tigray, visited the ruins of Aksum, viewed the Nile’s source where it wasn’t, and accomplished nothing of consequence.
In 1844 the Anglican missionary Dr. Krapf set up a colony in Mombasa on the coast of Zanj, discovering, along with Rev. Rebmann, two mountains 300 miles from that coast; they were Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, which Messrs. Heuglin and Thornton have just scaled in part.
In 1845 the Frenchman Maizan went ashore by himself in Bagamoyo opposite Zanzibar, then traveled to Deje-la-Mhora, where a chieftain had him brutally tortured and put to death.
In the month of August 1859, a young traveler from Hamburg, Roscher, set out with a caravan of Arab merchants, got to Lake Malawi, and there was murdered in his sleep.
Finally in 1857 Lieutenants Burton and Speke, both officers in the Bengal army, were sent by London’s Royal Geographical Society to explore Africa’s great lakes; on June 17 they exited Zanzibar and pushed due west.
After four months of unheard-of suffering, their baggage being looted and their carriers beaten senseless, they arrived in Kazeh,5 a central meeting place for traders and caravans; they were right in the Land of the Moon; there they gathered valuable documentation of the country’s customs, government, religion, fauna, and flora; then they headed for the first of the great lakes, Tanganyika, located between latitudes 3° and 8° south; they reached it on February 14, 1858, and visited the various tribes along its shores, most of them cannibals.
They retraced their steps on May 26 and reentered Kazeh on June 20. There, an exhausted Burton lay ill for several months; during this time Speke went more than 300 miles north to Lake Victoria,6 which he sighted on August 3; but he saw only its lower reaches in latitude 2° 30′.
He got back to Kazeh on August 25 and with Burton resumed the route to Zanzibar, where they arrived the following year during the month of March. Then these two bold explorers returned to England, after which the Paris Geographical Society awarded them its annual prize.
Dr. Fergusson was careful to observe that they hadn’t cleared either latitude 2° south or longitude 29° east.
So the challenge was to tie Dr. Barth’s exploring to Burton and Speke’s; this meant crossing an expanse of country covering more than twelve degrees.
* Calculated from the meridian occupied by England’s Greenwich Observatory.
chapter 5
Kennedy’s dreams—articles and pronouns in the plural—innuendos from Dick—jaunt over the map of Africa—what lies between two legs of a pair of compasses—current expeditions—Speke and Grant—Krapf, Decken, Heuglin.
Dr. Fergusson pressed energetically ahead with the preparations for his departure; he personally supervised the manufacture of his lighter-than-air vehicle, in line with certain modifications he was keeping strictly to himself.
For a good while he had been intently studying the Arabic language and various Mandingo dialects;1 thanks to his polyglot inclinations, he was progressing rapidly.
Meanwhile his friend the hunter dogged his footsteps; probably he was afraid the doctor might take off without saying anything; he kept after him on this topic with his most persuasive arguments—which didn’t persuade Samuel Fergusson—and poured his heart out in touching appeals—which left the doctor thoroughly unmoved. Dick felt him slipping through his fingers.
The poor Scot was honestly to be pitied; he no longer looked at a blue sky without dark forebodings; while he slept he had a queasy sensation of swaying to and fro, and every night he felt he was tumbling down from some boundless height.
We should add that during these dreadful nightmares, he fell out of bed once or twice. His first order of business was to show Fergusson the severe contusions his cranium had acquired.
“And,” he added in a neighborly spirit, “I was only three feet up! No more than that! And look at this bump! Think what this means!”
This doleful innuendo failed to pluck the doctor’s heartstrings.
“We won’t fall out of the sky,” he said.
“But what if we finally do?”
“We won’t.”
That was that, and there wasn’t a thing Kennedy could say back.
What