Customer Reviews

Gunbearer: The Journal of S.M. Mumbai (Pt. 2)

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Richard Francis Burton organized, led, and meticulously documented the first successful expedition to discover the source of the River Nile. But it was his younger colleague, John Hanning Speke, who continued without Burton to actually find the source: Lake Victoria, which Speke named after the British Queen. After trekking most of the way on the journey, Richard Burton had grown either too incapacitated or disinclined, or both, to proceed beyond Lake Tanganyika. So while Burton has been widely credited and esteemed in connection with the discovery, Jan Merlin's "Gunbearer Part Two" book sets out to raise recognition and prominence of John Speke, portraying a grueling ordeal in a second expedition that Speke led, in order to prove Lake Victoria was the true Nile source and in defiance of Burton's skepticism and opposition.

The events and people in this book are powerfully portrayed, with much grit of African terrain and peoples (both natives and Anglo interlopers), and I felt like I was there every step of the way in that bygone time. The multitude of characters and African names and dialects and pageantry are mind boggling and awe inspiring, and I found myself wishing for maps in most chapters so I could see and follow geographic details. In this regard, maps shown on two Internet sites -- one at Grolier and the other at thefullwiki -- give at least some overall bearings that can somewhat enhance the reading. And more detailed maps of the expedition would be even better.

On the other hand, grappling with just a verbal onslaught of places, movements, colors, life forms, scents, exotic and barbaric conduct from many cultures and behaviors -- and all through it seeing gunbearer S.M. Mumbai's loyalty and worship of his brave and sometimes callous and cruel "Spikka sahib" -- makes the reading experience all the more mysterious, poetic, rich-textured, and overwhelming. And Merlin's rendering of Mumbai and Speke's treatment of the gunbearer rather recall Kipling's "Gunga Din."

Did Jack Speke simply get careless with a cocked shotgun while scaling a wall? Merlin leaves it to the reader to ponder, omitting the formal investigation and conclusions.

While not exhaustively telling the principal machinations and convolutions of the Burton-Speke rivalry -- at least from the time of Speke's second expedition to properly survey Lake Victoria to the time of his death -- Jan Merlin passionately champions the greatness and posterity of John Hanning Speke and his gunbearer, Sidi Mubarak Mumbai.