LAKE VICTORI A. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. In spite of our Danish disgraces, and diplomatic defeats, and Jamaica Committees, and the thousand and one meannesses perpetrated by a generation deeply tainted with the worship of the "almighty dollar," the name of England is safe from contempt while she is still capable of producing men like those from whose diaries this narrative is compiled. While other countries are not unfruitful in the heroes of science, and France can boast of her Du Chaillu, her Maizan, her Jules Gerard-Germany of her Vogel, her Barth, her Von der DeckenAmerica of her Kane,-England still stands pre-eminent in the number of self-devoted men who have carried the double cross of her standard, like the leading-star of religion and civilisation, into the most inhospitable regions of the earth. To mention names is invidious, because many will be omitted which deserve to be specified; and yet it is impossible to think of African discovery without dwelling on the great name of Livingstone, the high priest and probably the martyr at once of faith and science; and with Α 2 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. out mentioning Speke and Grant's bold follower in the same regions, Sir Samuel Baker, who has enriched our maps by placing his great lake, called after " Albert the Good," by the side of that which Speke named after his beloved Sovereign — a happy combination, significative not of ambitious rivalry, but of harmonious union in a noble purpose. And the thought of African discovery suggests the valuable additions which have been made to knowledge by our Asiatic and American explorers, and by the pioneers of colonisation in the terrible deserts of Australia, amongst whom must not be forgotten the valiant Eyre, who has added to his fame as a discoverer that peculiar merit for which ancient Rome would have decreed her most honourable crown-the merit of having saved the lives of citizens. Though we may perhaps no longer possess the eyes to see heroism, it is a comfort to know that it still flourishes in our midst, if with little hope of adequate recognition; and that a soil where such salt is still found, is a long way off from utter moral putrefaction. Such are the class of men to whom England must always look for her leaders if her national existence or supremacy is imperilled by the bloated military establishments of other nations; men who have won victories of a higher character than those on the battle-field-victories over material nature and human ignorance-victories which have done great good and no harm to their kind, and where the lives of the victors have often been the only sacrifices, but won by an amount of personal courage, strategical skill, patience, perseverance, and fortitude, such as the greatest campaigns ever fought have scarcely demanded. It is more becoming to praise the dead than the living, and we may safely say that Speke was the beau idéal of a discoverer. In attempting to give, in a succinct form, the African experiences embodied in his notes and those. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 3 of Captain Grant, it is necessary to confess that one great charm must be inevitably lost in the aroma of personal character that breathes from his own memoirs in numberless little touches and traits and anecdotes, which it would be impossible to reproduce in a limited space. Even Speke's weaknesses are evidences of the kind of power that was eminently suited to his task. When, for instance, he confesses that he rather likes than otherwise those Somali ruffians who pierced his body with eleven wounds, because they were always in high spirits and loved "a jolly row," some grave people might shake their heads, and wonder how a man of ten years' Indian service could still have preserved that thoughtless sympathy with exuberant life which is more appropriate to an Eton or Harrow boy; but it was just such a sympathy that enabled him to bear up against that depression of spirits which must be produced by long and exclusive contact with a race who combine the most violent passions and worst vices of adults with the mental constitution of children, and so saved him from utter despair in barbarian human nature. The worries he was subject to in his relations with the great black urchins who surrounded him were perhaps the greatest trial of his patience in his marvellous journeys, and could only be in a measure appreciated by those philanthropic gentlemen who have attempted to teach in a "ragged school." Even the most. faithful of his men, such as Bombay and Baraka, gave Speke a world of trouble on the marches. The Wanguana or freedmen whom he took with him from Zanzibar were tolerably favourable specimens, yet he had to manage them like children, chiefly by humouring, tempered with a little fatherly severity. They used to say to him, when caught in some fault, "You ought to forgive and forget; for are you not a big man who should be above harbour |