Probably the best argument to defend the Spanishness of Cristóbal Colón is his death: in absolute poverty and in the midst of a dispute with the Courts of Castile to have them recognize the rights that Queen Isabella had given him. And the most Spanish thing of all: convinced that he had not reached any unknown place in the West, but, only, Asia. For the discoverer of America, America did not exist. Then we are surprised that in the United States the Italians have made Columbus their hallmark.
What a difference when comparing Columbus - or other Spaniards - with the British explorers who explored Africa! The first character in this series, Bruce "the Ethiopian" dedicated himself to meticulously erasing from History the memory of the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Páez, who had discovered the sources of the Blue Nile a century and a half before him. Páez barely achieved a certain restitution of his place in History 394 years after his death, when in 2016 the Spanish journalist Javier Reverte dedicated his book 'God, the devil, and the adventure' to him.
The Scottish adventurer who 'discovered' the Nile... manipulating the story of the Spanish who achieved it a century and a half earlier
In the case of the White Nile, which is longer, as it starts in Uganda, the fight was formidable. Possibly because both were English. Neither was going to let the other have their way. And the best part is that neither of them knew what they were talking about. Richard Francis Burton said the river began at Lake Tanganyika. John Hanning Speke claimed it started about 1,500 kilometers further north, at Lake Victoria.
Speke won, but by sheer luck. Anyway, he didn't live to tell the tale. Just as he was about to participate in a public debate with his rival, he shot himself. The official explanation was a hunting accident. Burton, and many others, suspected suicide. Speke was almost deaf after his travels in Africa, especially when a beetle got into his ear while he slept and he pierced his eardrum with a needle trying to kill it. Unlike his rival, he did not speak any of the languages of Africa, including Arabic. And, more importantly, his only basis for claiming that it was the Nile river he had seen flowing from Lake Victoria, in what is now Uganda, was "because I say so". Which is predictable in someone whom his contemporaries defined as "a man with an abnormally large reserve of self-esteem, who always maintained that what he had done in any circumstance was not only the best, but that no living man would have been able to surpass it".
Burton's argument was, more or less, the same as Speke's, with the picturesque detail that Lake Tanganyika does not drain, meaning that there was no river to call "Nile". But Burton spoke more than twenty languages, he is the epitome of an adventurer raised to the nth power (truly, what he traveled in his life is difficult to imagine even today), he knew Africa, was a highly prestigious polyglot translator, had celebrity status, and possessed vast culture.
Not in vain, Jorge Luis Borges mentions him in what may be his most famous story, The Aleph, as the discoverer of another Aleph (that is, a magical point where the entire Universe is perceived), in a mosque in Cairo, whose "faithful know very well that the universe is in one of the stone columns surrounding the central courtyard".
We have, therefore, two great egos. Burton, the most attractive nowadays, was also the most controversial in his time. On an expedition in Somalia, a spear pierced his mouth, pulling out several teeth and leaving a huge scar on his face. In all subsequent photographs and paintings, he wanted to be portrayed from that side. He enjoyed provoking and scandalizing. When Bram Stoker, the author of 'Dracula', described him as "dark, strong, ruthless". The poet Arthur Symons said that what caught attention about Burton was "his animalism, his air of repressed ferocity, a diabolical fascination".
They had reasons for it. The explorer was a sadist who recounted during his time as British consul in Dahomey - what is now Benin - that upon his arrival, the natives "crucified a man in my honor... and after that, nothing!". Burton, who described - albeit in Latin, to escape Victorian morality - how to carry out female genital mutilation, how to sew a woman's vagina, and how to tear it afterwards so that the man would (in his view) experience more pleasure, felt an obsessive attraction to the darkest part of the human being, which led him, in West Africa, to eat meat and drink human blood from skulls of people sacrificed in ritual ceremonies.
Speke was not like that. An example: he was also with Burton in Somalia, where he was captured and escaped in more than heroic circumstances after having part of the tendons in his legs cut. But, unlike Burton, he never boasted about his wounds. Not in vain, Burton studied at Oxford, but enlisted in the Indian Army to live adventures, while Speke became a soldier because, under the laws of primogeniture, his older brother was going to inherit the family estate.
The two characters entered East Africa in June 1857 from the island of Zanzibar, in what is now Tanzania, although then it was culturally closer to Oman and the Persian Gulf than to the interior of the continent to which it belongs. Their journey followed a route that Arab slave traders, who carried caravans of captives to the clove plantations on the coast, to Oman, and to the Persian Gulf, had just opened through what is now the Nyerere National Park, one of the largest in the world.
The journey was a disaster from the start. The two Europeans made most of the journey in palanquins, suffering one tropical disease after another. This is how they reached Lake Tanganyika, the second deepest in the world, after Baikal in Russia, with a depth of 1,470 meters where, in the absence of signs of the Nile, they decided to return to Zanzibar while they were still alive.
By that point, they deeply hated each other. So when Speke said he wanted to explore the northern region while Burton recovered from a malaria outbreak, he gave him the go-ahead, mainly to get rid of him. This is how the explorer unexpectedly entered a flat region, with few trees and plenty of water, which would probably correspond to what is now Ruaha National Park. And he reached Lake Victoria. Speke did not wait for Burton. He went to Zanzibar on his own, announced that he had discovered the source of the river, and left for London. A second expedition, this time with full support, confirmed that a river flowed from there. Whether it was the Nile or not didn't matter. To Speke, it was. And that's how History was written.