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Shakespeare and the Explorers

… they take the flow o’th’ Nile

By certain scales i’th’ pyramid. They know

By th’ height, the lowness, or the mean if dearth

Or foison follow. The higher Nilus swells,

The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman

Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,

And shortly comes to harvest.

Antony and Cleopatra (II.vii.17–23)

Although the world was beginning to open up during Shakespeare’s lifetime, with Jesuit missions to the Far East and growing settlements in the Americas, he lived in an age in which the Mediterranean still merited its name as ‘the middle sea’, the place in the centre of the world. Around this great inland sea all places of importance were arranged – notably excluding the backwater island which Shakespeare never left – and through it man’s greatest voyages had taken place. The classical geographer Pliny, still a respected authority in the Renaissance, declared that while men of the south were born burnt by the sun, and those of the north had frosty complexions, the blended climate of the middle lands made for fertile soils and minds. Only there, he contends, do the people have proper governments, while ‘the outermost people … have never obeyed the central people, for they are detached and solitary, in keeping with the savagery of Nature that oppresses them’.1 About half Shakespeare’s plays are set in his native Islands; the rest, with the important exception of that strange beast Hamlet, arrange themselves around the Med. Its waters were so thick with history and myth that Odysseus’ ten-year cruise from Asia Minor to the Greek Islands remained the archetypal sea voyage even long after Shakespeare’s contemporaries had circumnavigated the globe through far more treacherous waters. And into this central body of water flowed the most famous and strangest of rivers, the Nile.

Every year, at the end of summer, the waters of the Nile rose above its banks and flooded the plains of northern Egypt, a potent symbol of the unexplained and irresistible force of nature. ‘My grief’, says Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the sight of his raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia, ‘was at the height before thou cam’st / And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds’ (III.i.70–71). The destructive power of the Nile, however, was matched by its near-magical fertility. As the annual flood subsided, the river left behind water and silt rich enough for agriculture to flourish in the middle of a desert land. The power of the Nile mud to make things grow was held in such high regard that naturalists from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe believed it capable of spontaneously generating animal life, though (as was fitting for a river whose source lay deep in an unknown continent) the ‘fire / That quickens Nilus’ slime’ (Antony and Cleopatra, I.iii.67–9) could only produce monstrous serpents and crocodiles.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, much of the mythical aura had evaporated from the Nilotic delta. If the British biologist Thomas Huxley would soon suggest that all life did ultimately have its beginnings in the primordial slime, few believed any longer in life regularly emerging from the inanimate. Egypt had been invaded by Napoleon and had then fallen (as he had) under the growing British sphere of influence; its ancient artefacts were fast becoming familiar exotics in the museums of Europe. (By the end of the century, Sigmund Freud would plumb the middle-class European mind from a consulting room bursting with Egyptiana, including a mummy’s mask that he liked to stroke.) The Egyptian floodplains had been given over to the industrial-scale production of cotton and fledgling tourism was starting to be seen in Cairo and on the river. Much of the continent from which the Nile flowed, however, was still completely unexplored, and the undiscovered source of the great river remained a tantalizing symbol of the stubborn resistance of parts of the world to the increasingly bullish European powers. Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, blended the languages of intellectual and financial speculation when he declared (in his presidential address of 1852) that there was ‘no exploration in Africa to which greater value would be attached’ than establishing the source of the Nile, and that the men who achieved it would be ‘justly considered among the greatest benefactors of this age of geographical science’.2

Though Vasco da Gama had pioneered the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope as early as the 1490s, European travel into the interior had not greatly progressed by 1800, and settlement was very thin and almost entirely restricted to the coast. Africa had, for a long time, been an extremely unattractive prospect to the white traveller: its landscape, its illnesses, and the extremes of its climate were death both to the unwitting European traveller and to the pack animals on which he was wholly reliant; and even if the central African environment had not proven quite so resistant, the interior of the continent offered few obvious prizes to adventurers, apparently having none of the great mercantile empires of the East Indies, nor the bottomless mines and rolling grasslands of the Americas. That Africa became suddenly and immensely attractive to Europeans and Americans in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of a number of factors which were closely related. The Industrial Revolution had both created new markets and reaped great wealth from them. Industrial philanthropy paid in large measure for the scientific and evangelical expeditions that made their way into Africa, and these expeditions saw the lack of ‘civilization’ in the continent as an opportunity rather than a deterrent. Africa would provide both souls for religious instruction and challenges to be overcome by the unstoppable leviathan of Western Knowledge. In the event, and not unpredictably, the altruism of these philanthropists was lucrative beyond imagining. Despite the fact that these ventures were thought of by contemporaries as foolishly benign, often being criticized for throwing good money after bad, they nevertheless produced raw materials which made new fortunes. Rubber, harvested from trees in the central African forest, was transformed by the discovery of vulcanization into an indispensable commodity; eastern Africa was found to be perfect for cultivating sisal (for rope fibre) and pyrethrum (for industrial pesticides). And if at the beginning of the century European governments were largely indifferent – even hostile – to the idea of colonies in Africa, by the end they were convinced of the vital strategic importance of not letting anyone else get there first. For Britain, the Nile would form the backbone of a British Africa which stretched from Egypt through Sudan to East Africa and Nyasaland, then down through Rhodesia to the Cape.3

East Africa, filled in with largely fanciful detail, on the 1564 Gastaldi map. (From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries)

Henry Morton Stanley pictured consulting one such existing map on a cartographic expedition. (© Corbis)

The expedition which finally succeeded in locating the source of the Nile left the coast of modern-day Tanzania in 1857 and was led by Captain Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not yet forty, but he was already the Victorian traveller par excellence; most notably, he had undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca – the Hajj – with a shaven head and in disguise, and his account of the feat had made him celebrated for both his daring and his phenomenal linguistic skills.4 In later life Burton would lead further expeditions throughout Africa and the Americas, while also finding time to translate the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra as well as writing learned treatises on Etruscan history, medieval literature and fencing. Even a bibliophile like Burton, however, could not afford to take much reading with him when heading into the African interior. The tsetse fly reliably killed off horses and pack-mules before they were a hundred miles inland, and the brigades of native porters also dwindled with terrifying speed as the journeys progressed. Some of them deserted early on while the coast was still in reach, undeterred by the loss of pay and the threat of execution by the expedition leader as he (often hysterical with fever and fear) struggled desperately to hold on to the remainder of his men. The rest of the native contingent was decimated by disease, starvation and punitive raids from the tribes whose land they were crossing. Available porterage was reserved, then, for ammunition, medicine and materials for trade with the locals, primarily American calico (called merikani) and copper wire, which was sold en route to tribes who wore it decoratively.

Burton did, however, find a little space for one or two volumes:

The few books – Shakespeare, Euclid – which composed my scanty library, we read together again and again …5

The volume of Shakespeare Burton took with him is lost, most likely destroyed in a warehouse fire which burned many of his possessions in 1861. (His edition of the Sonnets, which does survive in the Huntington Library in California, amusingly contains pencil corrections to Shakespeare’s lines where Burton felt he could do better.6) But the extensive quotation from the works in the expeditionary account he published on his return suggests how intimately he knew them and how constantly he read them on that expedition. The Lake Regions of Central Africa was, like most of these narratives, written at great speed on the steamer voyage home in order to avoid being beaten to the punch by competing accounts from fellow expedition members, and Burton seems to have followed his (also lost) expedition diary closely in writing it, taking the Shakespeare-heavy description of the interior direct from the diary pages where he reflected on each day’s events and reading.*

The competing account of the expedition, in this instance, was to come from the other European who accompanied him, John Hanning Speke, with whom Burton read Shakespeare intensively and repeatedly as the pair crossed the savannah scrubland. Their pages were undoubtedly marked, as mine were as I read my own Complete Works travelling through East Africa in their tracks, by sweat from the daytime and at night by winged insects drawn to the lamplight and trapped between the pages as they turned. There would have been periods, especially when their travel on foot was impeded by heavy rains which turned the dry land to bog, when reading would have been a welcome distraction from the frustrations of enforced indolence. It was important for expedition leaders to be close – they were, after all, heavily dependent on one another during long periods of malarial delirium – and their reading of Shakespeare seems to have been a central part of this: they read (as Burton says) ‘together’, and the way Burton quotes odd lines suggests this meant reading plays side by side and not simply passing the book back and forth to declaim famous speeches.

As the mention of Shakespeare alongside Euclid’s geometrical treatise (the Elements) suggests, however, Burton had no room for books which were not useful as well as beautiful, and Shakespeare’s lines are repeatedly called into service in The Lake Regions to provide English equivalents to local phrases and customs. In one instance, a Kinyamwezi saying (‘he sits in hut hatching egg’) is ‘their proverbial phrase to express one more eloquent – “Home keeping youths have ever homely wits”’.7 The line is taken from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a not entirely successful comedy about friendship and betrayal that is thought to be one of Shakespeare’s earliest works. The frequency with which this play crops up in Burton’s Lake Regions is rather surprising, given how minor a work it is usually thought to be. This might be explained in part by the fact that it was printed as the second play after The Tempest in Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 and in almost every edition after that until the twentieth century; one is tempted to think that the Two Gentlemen was the beneficiary of many determined attempts to read the Works from cover to cover that foundered in the early pages.

Shakespeare’s story of the noble Valentine betrayed by his treacherous friend Proteus seems, however, to have struck a deeper chord after the friendship turned sour, in large part because Speke had the unforgivable good fortune to discover the major source of the Nile – which he named Lake Victoria Nyanza – on a side expedition of his own. Burton may well in that moment have recalled Valentine’s raw words at the betrayal of Proteus:

I must never trust thee more,

But count the world a stranger for thy sake!

The private wound is deepest. […]

(V.iv.70–72)

In the first volley of a spat that was to continue for many years, Burton attempted in the Lake Regions to discredit Speke by rather ungenerously arguing that his discovery had been down to luck and not skill. In this he compares him not to The Two Gentlemen of Verona’s treacherous fair-weather friend Proteus, but (even more gallingly) to a maidservant in the play:

The fortunate discoverer’s conviction was strong; his reasons were weak – were of the category alluded to by the damsel Lucetta, when justifying her penchant in favour of the ‘lovely gentleman’ Sir Proteus:

I have no other but a woman’s reason.

I think him so because I think him so.8

The pettiness of Burton’s sentiment might almost distract us from the exquisite strangeness of the whole situation: that a man ravaged by physical hardship and fever, surrounded by danger in an inhospitable land, racked by wounded pride and doubtless the feeling that he was both betraying his friend and being betrayed by him, should reach angrily for lines written for Elizabethan Londoners several hundred years earlier.

During the months I spent preparing for my first research trip to East Africa, I made my way through dozens of expeditionary accounts by Burton and those who came after him, looking for the books that they took with them on these jaunts out into the unknown. Reading about Burton’s strong attachment to his Shakespeare, even when isolated in ways scarcely imaginable to modern minds, stirred my own memories of reading in remote places. I trace the beginning of my true devotion to literature to a volume of Auden’s poetry given to me to read while in the Jiddat al-Harasis desert in Oman (though that properly belongs to another story). But the accounts of bush camps by Burton and others also cast new light on my own childhood, much of which was spent on safari in eastern Africa. I was born into a family of conservationists – my literary work is something of an anomaly, and a confusing one for them – so I spent most school holidays with my parents in areas chosen for their remoteness. These were, of course, entirely less dangerous affairs than the Victorian expeditions: convoys of Land Rovers, tented camps often with generators and two-way radios, and usually no more than a few hours from something recognizable as a road. What had not changed, however, since the time of those early adventurers, was the curious blend of luxury and primitiveness which characterized these travels. Even in the days of Land Rovers food supplies sometimes ran low, and among my clearest childhood memories is a scene of Samburu warriors in northern Kenya bringing to our camp the goat for which my father had bargained, its square and staring eyes as it bled out into a lip in its throat. Nothing was wasted, down to a coin-purse from the scrotum, and the goat meat was later fire-roasted by a cook as the adults had cocktails at sundown.

This blend of the primitive and the decadent seemed unremarkable to me at the time – simply part of how things were done – and it was only later that I became aware that many in Europe and America escape into nature with the conscious design of depriving themselves of life’s comforts. An early twentieth-century traveller, the self-styled backwoodsman Theodore Roosevelt, complained repeatedly about the self-indulgence he encountered during his two-year hunting safari in Kenya, which he gave himself as a present on his retirement as US President in 1909:

At Kapiti plains our tents, our accommodation generally, seemed almost too comfortable for men who knew camp life only on the Great Plains, in the Rockies, and in the North Woods. My tent had a fly, which was to protect it from the great heat; there was a little rear extension in which I bathed – a hot bath, never a cold bath, is almost a tropic necessity; … Then, I had two tent-boys to see after my belongings, and to wait at table as well as in the tent. … The provisions were those usually included in an African hunting or exploring trip, save that, in memory of my days in the West, I included in each provision box a few cans of Boston baked beans, California peaches, and tomatoes.9

The fine living which so disappointed Roosevelt would come to seem rather tame in comparison to the hedonism of later settlers, who added the fashionable sins of narcotics and promiscuity to these gastronomic indulgences; but it was certainly not entirely new either. While the porters held out, Burton’s readings of Shakespeare would have been considerably enlivened by the bottle of port he insisted on drinking each day in the belief that it would stave off fever. Something of Burton’s belief remained in my youth in the settler habit of drinking endless gins and tonic purportedly for the quinine in the Indian tonic water. But even as the medical justifications fell away, it remained customary for some of the trappings of safari life to be, if anything, more luxurious than they would be at home, even if the good wine had to be drunk from tin mugs.

These habits of indulgence also extended to art. For Burton it was Shakespeare; for Denys Finch-Hatton, the hunter whose relationship with Baroness Blixen was made famous in her memoir Out of Africa, it was the Greek poets and a gramophone that supposedly fascinated the houseboys on Blixen’s farm:

It was a curious thing that Kamante should stick, in his preference, with much devotion to the Adagio of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C Major; the first time that he asked me for it he had some difficulty in describing it, so as to make clear to me which tune it was that he wanted.10

Roosevelt may have considered his expedition to be a pattern of self-denial – though many struggled to agree, given that he bagged thousands of trophies from 269 species, some from the cowcatcher of his own private train – but he had less stringent standards when it came to cultural cargo. For his two-year hunt he commissioned a fifty-five-volume ‘pigskin library’; this was a veritable ark of Western culture to be carried into the wilderness, though Roosevelt (in his characteristic disregard for the proprieties of polite society) brashly mixed the undisputed classics of the Western canon with lighter fare from soon-forgotten authors. When the selection of books for the library, which are now kept at Harvard, occasioned a public debate with Harvard’s then president, C. W. Eliot, on Roosevelt’s return, Roosevelt quickly conceded that much of the selection was merely a matter of personal taste. The inclusion of three volumes of Shakespeare, however, caused no controversy; as Roosevelt suggested, there were only ‘four books so pre-eminent – the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante – that I suppose there would be a general consensus of opinion among the cultivated men of all nationalities in putting them foremost’.11 For Roosevelt, as for the guests on the long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, the need for Shakespeare was taken for granted when links with civilization were broken.

A souvenir print showing Roosevelt on his African adventure. (Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-36551)

Despite the fact that the library weighed sixty pounds and that it required a porter all of its own, Roosevelt insisted (as Burton had) on the practical nature of the volumes:

They were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with me, either in my saddle-bag or in the cartridge-bag which one of my gun-bearers carried to hold odds and ends. Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle-bag looks.12

There is a curious sense in Roosevelt’s African Game Trails that these refined products of European literary culture somehow belong among the ‘blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes’, that reading them in the most inhospitable climes demonstrated both that the works’ seeming delicacy was illusory, and that the reader’s poetic soul was immune to the lures of barbarism.

As one quickly comes to realize in reading the accounts of explorers, naturalists, hunters and opportunists travelling the African wilderness, Roosevelt was following a tradition which had become firmly established between Burton’s time and his; the only unusual thing about the President’s actions was that he took so many books, whereas most travellers in the African interior publicly affirmed that they took Shakespeare as their only literary reading. Compiling an inventory of his own expeditionary supplies in 1886, Walter Montague Kerr protests at the meagreness of the baggage which accompanied him overland from South Africa to the Lakes, noting that his

baggage … would have made a poor show beside the enormous stores carried by some expeditions to the interior of the dark continent … I also had some books – a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas.13

Once again, a volume of Shakespeare is found nestled in among technical manuals, and after a while it does not seem out of place. It becomes, in effect, a cultural tool as necessary for survival as any of the cartographer’s manuals. Another traveller in the interior, Thomas Heazle Parke, writing from a sickbed just west of Albert Nyanza (in modern-day Congo), mentions that he is ‘filling up [his] time reading Shakespeare and Allingbone’s Quotations. The former, with the Bible, and Whittaker’s large edition, are the best books for Africa when transport is limited.’14 The printing of Shakespeare, like the Bible, in dense double columns on thin paper allowed for a great deal of powerful language to be squeezed into a small space. It is easy to forget, however, that Shakespeare’s works were made portable because they were thought to be indispensable, and not the other way around. Roosevelt captured this perfectly when he said that his three volumes of Shakespeare were ‘the literary equivalent of a soldier’s ration – “the largest amount of sustenance in the smallest possible space”’.15

A riposte of sorts is delivered to this gung-ho world of expeditionary Shakespeares by one of the few female explorers to find a place in these overwhelmingly masculine ranks. Gertrude Emily Benham, who at the same time that Roosevelt was careening through East Africa on a private train was becoming the first woman to ascend Kilimanjaro (and who would later walk across the continent from east to west), similarly recorded the ‘few books’ that she took with her on this expedition and others: ‘Besides the Bible and a pocket Shakespeare, I have Lorna Doone and Kipling’s Kim.’ Unlike her male counterparts, however, Benham professed never to have carried firearms on her expeditions, nor to have shot any game; she traded her own knitting for local produce as she went, and testifies that she found all the locals she encountered pleasant and welcoming. Her Shakespeare, it bears mentioning, was not holstered in pig leather as Roosevelt’s was; the cloth covers of her own making, she says, were enough to keep them safe during her travels on every continent.16

The nuances of these (male) travellers’ attachment to Shakespeare starts to become clearer in another passage where Parke, who served as medical officer on the celebrated Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886–9, writes before setting out about how he came by the Works that he took with him:

A former patient of mine presented me with a copy of Shakespeare, as a parting gift and remembrancer on my journey. I cordially appreciated the kind attention, and, now that I am about to penetrate the undiscovered country, from whose bourn so few white travellers have safely returned, I trust the perusal of the pages of the immortal dramatist will help me to while away many a weary hour.17

Though Parke is clearly trying to be witty, he cannot prevent his anxiety about the expedition from showing through, and the passage is riddled with worries about mortality. Africa here becomes the underworld, which in Hamlet’s description is ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’, and there is a sense in which the works, written by an ‘immortal dramatist’ and given as a talisman-like ‘remembrancer’, gives Parke hopes of returning from the underworld, like the Golden Bough which allowed Aeneas to visit his wife in Hades and return to the land of the living. This fear is captured succinctly in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the madness of the colonist-run-amok Mr Kurtz is attributed (in part) to his lack of books:

How can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude – utter solitude without a policeman – by the way of silence – utter silence, where no warning voice of kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course, you may be too much of a fool to go wrong – too dull even to know that you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness.18

Kurtz’s famous final words – ‘The horror! The horror!’ – gesture to exactly what Shakespeare was supposed to conjure away: the chaos, depravity and existential nihilism that lay just at the doorstep of Victorian confidence.

Parke may well have returned from his expedition with an even greater belief in Shakespearean magic than he had when he left, given that he survived relatively unscathed an expedition which shocked the world with revelations of barbarity unusual even for ventures of this type. The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had departed in great fanfare to save a German national named Eduard Schnitzer, unremarkable before his life in Africa, who had set himself up as a petty king in the Sudan. Now named ‘Emin Pasha’, Schnitzer soon became embroiled in warfare with religious fanatics and ending up a hostage to his own subjects; he is the first upstart settler-king in this story, but he certainly will not be the last. The expedition quickly ran into trouble, however, and split into a vanguard scouting party (led by Henry Morton Stanley and Thomas Heazle Parke) and a rear column, in which the bulk of the Europeans remained with a small group of Zanzibari porters. Though they succeeded in building a makeshift fort, the rear column were constantly assailed by poison arrow attacks, and the maize they tried to grow was incessantly trampled over by elephants, reducing them to near-starvation only relieved by dire expedients including donkey tongues and grass. Their long wait inside their fort did, however, leave the rear column plenty of time for reading, and they had dutifully brought with them the Works, which by this point were almost issued as standard.* William G. Stairs, one of the Europeans in the rear column, dryly remarks in a diary entry on Monday, 29 October 1888, that ‘if we stay here much longer we shall all be great authorities on Shakespeare & Tennyson’.19 Though most of the Europeans did survive to tell the tale, the expedition became a scandal on its return to Europe, when it emerged that one of the officers in the rear column had beaten a man to death for the presumption of defending his wife from rape, and another had paid to watch a young girl being ritually eaten.

Although not all of the exploratory expeditions were quite so despicable, those who read Shakespeare in the course of them were often drawn towards the darker reaches of the works. The Shakespearean magic that lies buried in Parke’s description comes out into the open in many of these stories, which multiplied as the tradition became established. Arthur H. Neumann, in his Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa, recounts the following episode:

Lesiat [his Ndorobo tracker] had for long been bothering me to give him a charm to increase his power in this pursuit [i.e. the hunting of elephants]. My assurances that I had no such occult powers merely made him the more importunate. He regarded my objections as a refusal to help him, and a proof of unfriendliness to him. When I was about to leave he became more pressing, promised to keep ivory for me against my return, as an acknowledgement, should I consent, and assumed a hurt air at what he regarded as my unkind obstinacy. Squareface interceded for him, explaining to me that the Swahili always accede to such requests, the most approved charm being a verse of the Koran, written in Arabic on a slip of paper. Not wishing to appear unfeeling, and seeing that no harm could come of it at all events, it occurred to me that a line or two of Shakespeare would probably be quite as effective. Bearing in mind that the Ndorobo hunter owes his success – when he has any – mainly to the powerful poison with which his weapon is smeared, if he can only manage to introduce it, in the proper manner, into the animal’s economy, it struck me that the following quotation would be appropriate; and I accordingly wrote it on a slip of paper, illustrating it with a little sketch of an elephant:–

I bought an unction of a mountebank

So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,

Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,

Collected from all simples that have virtue

Under the moon, can save the thing from death

That is but scratched withal; I’ll touch my point

With this contagion, that, if I gall him slightly,

It may be death.20

Neumann never mentions that he had a volume of Shakespeare with him, and though he gives the impression that he is able to pluck the perfect quotation from Hamlet out of thin air, it seems more likely that he had the works on hand for consultation than that he had these lines, which are rather unmemorable as far as Hamlet goes, by heart. Neumann is, like Parke, trying to be wittily xenophobic: the suggestion that ‘a line or two of Shakespeare would probably be quite as effective’ is intended to undermine the conjuring powers of the Koran, to show that Shakespeare’s stage poetry has as much power as these supposedly holy words. But, just as in Parke’s story, it is hard to escape the feeling that the belief in Shakespearean magic was not entirely ironic. It is a very dull reader who does not end this passage by wondering whether or not the charm worked, and it is tellingly frustrating that we never learn the outcome of Lesiat’s next hunt.

The greatest Shakespeare expeditionary stories of all, however, come from Henry Morton Stanley, the man who had led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. In Stanley’s defence it should be mentioned that all of the atrocities recorded on that expedition took place while he was away from the main party leading a scouting mission, though Stanley did not manage to keep his hands entirely clean during his long and extraordinary career. The man who would become ‘Africa’s Most Famous Explorer’ was born out of wedlock as plain John Rowlands, and spent much of his youth in a Welsh workhouse; Rowlands invented ‘Henry Morton Stanley’ during his early manhood in the United States, where he lived in New Orleans and fought in the American Civil War (on both sides).21 This new identity came complete with a fantastically rich and loving family, and Stanley never gave it up even long after the truth became common knowledge in the Victorian rumour mill. He rose to prominence as a result of his 1871–2 expedition, which found the celebrated missionary David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika after contact with him had been lost for more than a year, though there are doubts now that his famously nonchalant greeting (‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’) was actually spoken and not cooked up later to add charm to the story. Stanley found, however, that his celebrity was a mixed blessing. He was never forgiven by the members of the Royal Geographical Society for his vulgarity in undertaking the Livingstone rescue on a newspaper’s dime and (more gallingly, one suspects) for having beaten the Royal Geographical Society at their own game. And though Stanley escaped much of the public opprobrium visited on other members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, his reputation has been indelibly tarnished by his late-life association with Leopold II of Belgium’s Association Internationale Africaine, an organization typical in its muddling of philanthropy with exploitation but extraordinary in the level of the atrocities it committed – atrocities to which attention was drawn back in Europe by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899). Having pioneered a route up the Congo from the west coast of Africa for the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Stanley would later put his expertise at Leopold’s disposal and set in motion the execrable history of the Belgian Congo.

One of Stanley’s main tasks was to negotiate with local chieftains treaties of mutual understanding that would allow Leopold’s Association to plant trading stations on their lands (and, perhaps more importantly, to prevent the French from doing the same). These stations would set a precedent for the regions being within the Belgian ‘sphere of influence’, a type of de facto power which Belgium and other powers later asserted as de jure political control using spurious legal logic and adding many forged treaties to those actually signed in Africa. Stanley was not above using literary magic to get these treaties signed, as he did on one occasion in the late 1880s. A local chief, Ngaliema, furious that Stanley had made agreements which undercut his power, approached Stanley’s camp with a view to scaring him off; but Stanley, forewarned of the attack, sat calmly in his tent porch with a gong, all the while placidly ‘reading the complete works of Shakespeare’. The chief was unnerved by Stanley’s calm demeanour, and demanded that Stanley strike the gong, undeterred by Stanley’s warnings that this was a dangerous request. Stanley finally obliged; at the sound of the gong, a multitude of armed men leapt out from where they had been hiding, convincing Ngaliema of Stanley’s sorcery.22

Stanley’s little stage trick not only featured a volume of Shakespeare, but also has the feel of being borrowed from it, drawing both on the foliage-camouflaged army which brings Birnam Wood to Dunsinane to defeat Macbeth and on the ‘strange and solemn music’ through which the wizard Prospero controls both spirits and his adversaries in The Tempest. (Birnam Wood, as we shall see, later made its way into the folklore of the region.) If Stanley was taking his cue from Shakespeare, this would not have been the first time. An expedition which Stanley led in 1877 to see if the Lualaba River might have a claim to be the most southerly source of the Nile ended in a nightmarish descent of the Congo when the Lualaba drained into that river instead. From Loanda on the west coast of Africa Stanley sent a report to his employers at the New York Herald of an incident that had happened in the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo:

Loanda, West Coast of Africa

Sept 5, 1877

… A terrible crime in the eyes of many natives below the confluence of the Kwango and the Congo was taking notes. Six or seven tribes confederated together one day to destroy us, because I was ‘bad, very bad.’ I had been seen making medicine on paper – writing. Such a thing had never been heard of by the oldest inhabitant. It, therefore, must be witchcraft, and witchcraft must be punished with death. The white chief must instantly deliver his notebook (his medicine) to be burned, or there would be war on the instant.

My notebook was too valuable; it had cost too many lives and sacrifices to be consumed at the caprice of savages. What was to be done? I had a small volume of Shakespeare, Chandos edition. It had been read and reread a dozen times, it had crossed Africa, it had been my solace many a tedious hour, but it must be sacrificed. It was delivered, exposed to the view of the savage warriors. ‘Is it this you want?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is this the medicine that you are afraid of?’ ‘Yes, burn it, burn it. It is bad, very bad; burn it.’

‘Oh, my Shakespeare,’ I said, ‘farewell!’ and poor Shakespeare was burnt. What a change took place in the faces of those angry, sullen natives! For a time it was like another jubilee. The country was saved; their women and little ones would not be visited by calamity. ‘Ah, the white chief was so good, the embodiment of goodness, the best of all men.’23

Stanley certainly succeeds in reproducing the conventions which were by then becoming established: here is the small but well-thumbed volume of Shakespeare, here is the ‘caprice of savages’ and their slightly ungrammatical language, here are the serious-joking words about the magic Shakespearean totem – it is ‘medicine’, it must be ‘sacrificed’. Stanley repeated a condensed version of the story in his book of the expedition, Through the Dark Continent, in which he elaborates on his feelings at the moment of sacrifice:

We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial companion, which during many weary hours of night had assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flames, heaping the brush-fuel over it with ceremonious care.24

This account figures Shakespeare, the Man who is also Word, becoming Christ-like as he enters the inferno, guiltless but enough to sate the devils.

Stanley in later life, here with the members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Stanley is seated in the centre with Emin Pasha to his left, and Dr Parke is seated second from left. (Photo by De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images)

The sting in the tail of Stanley’s story is that, like so much else in his life, it was a fabrication. As the modern editor of his Herald despatches notes, the account of this episode in his expedition diary has Stanley handing over no more to satisfy the furious natives than a sheet of paper upon which he had scribbled; this detail was subsequently revised for the newspaper account.25 Stanley’s instincts as a storyteller, as well as his finely honed sense of what he needed to do to fit in, told him that the mythic balance of the tale required the sacrificial victim to be Shakespeare. And the story itself is eerily reminiscent of the episode in Shakespeare’s Tempest in which the savage Caliban plots to overthrow the magician Prospero with a band of drunken accomplices:

CALIBAN:

Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him

I’th’ afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him,

Having first seized his books; or with a log

Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,

Or cut his weasand with thy knife. Remember

First to possess his books, for without them

He’s but a sot as I am, nor hath not

One spirit to command – they all do hate him

As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.

The Tempest (III.ii.81–9)

It seems that Stanley and the other early travellers arrived in Africa expecting to find superstitious and violent natives who demanded that they burn their ‘magic’ books, for this image of the ‘savage’ had resided at the heart of English culture for centuries.

We are unlikely ever to be able to sort the truth of these accounts from the fantasies derived from the books that the explorers carried with them. Yet the truth of these stories is very much secondary to the purpose Stanley and others evidently expected them to serve. Instead of being straightforward accounts of what had happened in Africa, these stories form a kind of argument for how the ‘Dark Continent’ and its peoples should be understood. If Shakespeare is the universal genius of man, and his worth is evident to all humans, then those who do not appreciate him are, by extrapolation, in some sense not human. This insidious logic was nothing new; indeed, much the same tactic had been employed in Shakespeare’s time to suggest that the inhabitants of the New World could not be human because they broke the deeply embedded European taboo of cannibalism.26 Shakespeare’s characters are themselves not immune to these chains of reasoning: it is constantly asked in The Tempest whether Caliban, whose name has not moved far from ‘Cannibal’, is fully human or not, and it is clear that the answer to this question will determine how he is treated by the European colonizers. When Prospero and Miranda call him a ‘slave’, they are not simply describing Caliban’s status as a captive but accusing him of a moral impoverishment which justifies the removal of his freedom and his rights. He was (Prospero claims) treated ‘with human kindness’, and Miranda ‘took pains to make [him] speak’; and yet despite his aptitude for language, his ungrateful assumption that he was their equal (and could thus look on Miranda with desire) proved that their ‘human kindness’ – that quality of empathy which is both the mark of the human and only granted to other humans – was misplaced.

But thy vile race,

Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures

Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

Deservedly confined into this rock,

Who hadst deserved more than a prison.

The Tempest (I.ii.357–61)

Caliban, according to this argument, should look upon his enslavement as an act of mercy, after his criminal lust for the colonizer’s daughter had earned him a worse fate. His savage hate of books – which Stanley echoed in his account of the Dark Continent – was an inescapable counterpart to this same unredeemable incivility.

This was, it must be said, a depressing place to start my quest to understand Shakespeare’s universal appeal – with that very universalism being used as a tool to exclude from the bounds of the human. But though attempts to define what it is to be human have often been used in this way – to lever one group of people apart from the rest and deprive them of the right to be human – this does not characterize all thinking on the subject. It doesn’t, in fact, even characterize all thinking on the subject in The Tempest. Indeed, Caliban’s second appearance in the play (II.ii) sets about parodying and upending the righteous judgements earlier levelled against him by Prospero and Miranda. The castaway Trinculo, coming upon a Caliban who is pretending to be dead, engages in an extended forensic analysis of the creature at his feet.

What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish. Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legged like a man, and his fins like arms. Warm, o’my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.

The Tempest (II.ii.24–34)

Trinculo’s speech moves from lampooning the kind of judgement that decides on the essence of a thing by a few trivial external features (Caliban is a fish because he smells like a fish, he is dead because he is lying down) to turning the judgement back upon Shakespeare’s audience. Trinculo’s daydream – in which he takes Caliban to England to exhibit him to paying crowds – is, of course, a direct reflection of The Tempest’s audience, who themselves have paid to see this ‘spectacle’ of Caliban. It is clear that exotic peoples are made ‘monsters’ in England because there’s money to be made from it – indeed, the word ‘monster’ means ‘something to be shown to a spectator’ – and this was as true in Stanley’s day as in Shakespeare’s. But it’s also clear that it is the leering crowd that is in danger of losing its humanity in this bargain: in paying to see the ‘strange beast’ of a showman’s exhibit ‘When they will not give a doit [a small coin] to relieve a lame beggar’, they reveal the loss of charity, of that ‘human kindness’ that makes them ‘human kind’. Throughout the play, as the presumption that the European spectator is the arbiter of humanity ebbs away, we are given hints of qualities which Caliban does exhibit, qualities Renaissance thought toyed with as central to human nature – laughter, the love of wine, a sense of the political, and the ability to appreciate natural beauty and music – and which are increasingly attractive versions of humanity when set against the duplicity of the European settlers.27

So even if Shakespeare had been introduced to Africa by the explorers as a token of difference, as a demonstration that the Dark Continent could not absorb his genius, that didn’t mean that everyone would be content to treat him in that way. Readers, in my experience, are unruly things, whose cooperation should not be counted on. I had generated a list of leads, of half-known stories and rumours, which gave reason to hope that Shakespeare’s career in East Africa would be a lot richer and more varied than this, and that he would soon be prised from the hands of his cultural guardians and turned over to real encounters with Africa and its peoples. With this in mind, I packed my copy of the Works in the leather shooting bag I’ve always used as a satchel – a habit of which Roosevelt would doubtless have approved – and set off to follow in the tracks of Burton, Stanley and the tribe of readers that sprang up in their wake.

* The few other writers whom Burton occasionally uses to flesh out his description of Africa – Marlowe, Byron – give us a sense of the rather macho flavour of his Shakespeare.

* Amusingly enough, the German expedition, purportedly also mounted to rescue Emin Pasha (though in reality using this as a cover to extend German influence in Uganda through secret negotiations with the Kabaka), was also suffering infinite delays, time which the expedition leader spent reading the works of Shakespeare and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, borrowed from the English mission in Kampala. See Carl Peters, New Light on Dark Africa: Being the Narrative of the German Emin Pasha Expedition (trans. H. W. Dulken, Ward, Lock, 1891), p. 429.