African library 1: Sir Samuel Baker

An elephant hunt from Sir Samuel Baker's The Albert Nyanza

One of the things that keeps me focussed on a wargaming project is reading books about the subject.  Of course, the problem for me is that reading a book on a particular subject often then makes me want to start a wargaming project!  So I am going to write the occasional post about my Darkest Africa library, which is not that extensive, but provides enough source material to keep me occupied with potential projects.

I will start with Sir Samuel and Florence Baker as the two were, in every sense, inseperable.   I wrote about them in the blog previously so have nothing to add here about their lives.  I have three books relating to them.

The first one I read is Pat Shipman's To the Heart of the Nile (2004).  This is a wonderful introduction to the story of the Bakers and gives Florence a much greater part than is usual in accounts of their activities.  It is, however,  rather peculiarly full of invented dialogue between them which doesn't damage the narrative drive of the book but does impact on its credibility.  Still, very enjoyable and it contains a good number of (small) illustrations.

Lovers on the Nile (1980) by Richard Hall tells the same tale but in a more economical and spare manner.  I can't help feeling that the titles of the two books should be swapped to better reflect their contents!  It has eight pages of illustrations in the centre.

My third book is Baker's The Albert Nyanza Great Basin of the Nile and Exploration of the Nile sources (1866).  Based on his diaries it is a fascinating insight into the experience of a Victorian explorer cut off from all but his own (and his redoubtable wife's) devices.  My copy is the 1913 edition and, somehow, these older books add to the sense of adventure when reading them!  This book also contains many illustrations of engravings based on Baker's own sketches.

Music to paint by: Mountains of the Moon soundtrack by Michael Small

I like to (have to!) paint to music and prefer to have something vaguely appropriate playing in the background. I'm having a bit of an Africa phase at present and so have been struggling to find enough relevant music.

I had a few pieces, the Zulu soundtrack of course (with the addition of the extra pieces from the Silva Screen version-I am nothing if not a completist!) and Out of Africa both by John Barry, but neither are particularly African sounding.

Some of the incidental music from Hatari, by Henri Mancini and some of Laurence Rosenthal's music for one of the Young Indiana Jones episodes was much better.

I also have some genuine Zulu music and other African chants but, rather like bagpipe music, there is only so much of it you can listen to at a time!

I was delighted, therefore, after a long search, to find a copy of the Mountains of the Moon soundtrack on the internet from a UK seller (rather than one of those dodgy bulk sellers from the US you find on Amazon). Mountains of the Moon is the ultimate Darkest Africa film and I am sure Mark Copplestone knows it well!





The film itself is based on William Harrison's superb (although somewhat controversial) novel Burton and Speke (1982) which is, rather surprisingly, currently out of print. The novel is based itself on Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke's accounts of their attempts to discover the source of the Nile. Harrison, (who also wrote the original short story and the subsequent screenplay for the film Rollerball) himself co-wrote the screenplay with director Bob Rafelson, for whom it was a very personal project.

Its not Zanzibar but this is what it must have looked like at the time

I actually didn't see the film until after I had started buying the Foundry figures and reading some of the original accounts of African exploration. I was amazed at how well the film visualised these accounts.

Burton and Speke's prototypical explorers camp. Watch out for Somali tribesmen!

 

For the soundtrack to his film Rafelson turned to a composer he had used before; New York born Michael Small. Small had scored two steamy Rafelson thrillers; The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and Black Widow (1987). I remember taking a girlfriend to the former as a first date and it certainly had the desired effect on her; with a lot of the credit going to Small's sensuous music!

Sidi Bombay (with rather better teeth than the original)

Small was born in 1939 the son of an actor who instilled a love for musical theatre in him. Whilst Small learnt the piano and started to write for student reviews he actually studied English at Harvard and didn't study music formally until after university.

Classic Darkest Africa expedition with required baggage elements

After some TV work Small scored his first feature film in 1969 his breakthrough coming with the score for the Jane Fonda film Klute (1971). He then wrote the soundtracks for a number of well-known films including: Comes a Horseman (1978), Marathon Man (1976) and The Stepford Wives (1975). He also provided music to some of the worst films ever resulting in the situation where his scores were very much the best thing in them. In this illustrious category comes Jaws: the Revenge (1987) and Wagons East (1994).

Masai!

 

Smalls score for Mountains of the Mood mixes some memorable sweeping themes, urgent action cues and ethnic music which draws on some recordings made by David Fanshawe. It really is the perfect music to listen to when painting Darkest Africa figures and I have already based up John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton to work on when I get back to the UK.

Its a shame Mark Copplestone never did any Arabs on camels

The film itself is a must see if you haven't already. Filmed in Kenya, rather than the original locations (which are now in Tanzania), if it doesn't make you want to buy loads of Foundry Darkest Africa figures nothing will!

Sidi Bombay

" The source of the Nile is that way!"

Here is my Foundry Sidi Bombay figure, which I finished just before Christmas.

Sidi (or Seedy) Mubarak was born in about 1820 and was a member of the Yao tribe (who now live in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania). At the age of 12 he was captured by Arab slavers and sold to a wealthy Arab merchant in Zanzibar. When the merchant moved to Bombay, Sidi went with him. He was freed in his early thirties when his master died, adopted the surname “Bombay” and returned to Africa. He joined the Sultan of Zanzibar’s army and was posted to Chokwe garrison. It was here that Burton and Speke, setting out on their expedition in 1857, hired Sidi and five other soldiers to protect the group.

Burton had originally appointed a half caste Arab, Said Bin Salim, as head bearer of the expedition but fired him when he discovered he was stealing form the expedition. He replaced him with Sidi Bombay. Burton later said he “worked on principal and worked like a horse..an active servant and an honest man” and we was “the gem of the group” (of bearers).

Sidi (seated) with bearers.

He was a powerful man with sharpened incisors but he spoke Swahili and also Hindustani so he was the only person, other than Burton, that Speke could converse with. He acted as Speke’s gun bearer, lugging two heavy guns with him at all times. Bombay proved to be a tough and resilient figure who became a key member of the expedition although he could be temperamental and his appetite for food became legendary. Speke, in particular, came to rely on him and hired him for his subsequent expedition with Grant where they continued the search for sources of the Nile from 1860 until 1863. Later, he was also hired in 1871 by Stanley during his search for Livingstone and by Cameron in 1873 for his transcontinental trip. He, therefore, had a major role in four of the most important European explorations of Africa. He was given a pension by the Royal Geographical Society in 1878 and died in about 1885.

Sidi and his famous teeth!

Jane Porter

Here is the Foundry Jane figure by Mark Copplestone. I finished her today having started her years ago but then had a failure of nerve over painting all that skin! I'm not sure whethere she should be in this blog or my Pulp one but as her fame is so closely linked to the Dark Continent I have put her here.

Jane Porter was the daughter of Professor Archimedes Q Porter and was stranded on the West African coast in 1912. Rather in the reverse of the situation regarding Henry Morton Stanley she is often believed to be British but was, in fact, an American, hailing from Baltimore, Maryland. Saved from the perils of the jungle by Lord Greystoke she returned home to become the fiancee of William Cecil Clayton. Back in Africa in the lost city of Opar Jane, appalled by Clayton's cowardice, renounced him and declared her love for Lord Greystoke.

Greystoke and Porter had many more adventures in the jungle and indeed, elsewhere. They married (although there must like, the Bakers, be suspicions about the nature of their relationship before this; especially given her immodest garb) and had a son Korak.

Henry Morton Stanley

I finished him off today and he has come out OK. He was a repaint of a figure I did years ago but doesn't look too bad given the number of coats of paint he has had!

The Copplestone sculpted Foundry figure is based on his clothes in a series of photographs taken in London, with his young gun-bearer Selim, after finding Livingstone. Unlike some of Copplestone's other Darkest Africa sculpts, which really capture the look of the historical figures, the Stanley figure is too gaunt and angular. Stanley had a rather rounded face but in a figure only just over an inch tall we can't complain too much I suppose!

The way I painted the pugaree on his pith helmet is based on the one he wore when he discovered Livingstone which is now in the Royal Geographic Society.

Famous "American" journalist Henry Morton Stanley was actually an illegitimate Welshman named John Rowlands who spent much of his early life in the workhouse. He got himself to America as a teenager and promptly started to re-invent himself more often than Madonna, taking on the name for which he is now famous. Stanley fought for both sides in the American Civil War and then covered the Indian Wars as a journalist, using very little veracity but a lot of writing style. As a result, he was hired to cover the British-Abyssinian war by the New York Herald and scooped his rivals by means of the creative use of bribes to ensure that his story was telegraphed first. He became a roving reporter and eventually found the "lost" Scottish Missionary Dr David Livingstone in 1871 during an expedition financed by his newspaper but which was almost entirely his idea.

His "Dr Livingstone, I presume" quote probably is, like much of what he wrote, total invention or, at least, hugely embroidered truth.

An excellent book on this quest is Into Africa by Martin Dugard which, whilst not entirely totally historically accurate in some areas, is, nevertheless a fantastic narrative acount written with great drive and style and is highly recommended for anyone interested in Darkest Africa.

Stanley's own book, How I Found Livingstone, is also a very good read only being even more inaccurate.

He returned to Africa for a truly epic expedition which saw him cross the continent from one side to the other finally tracing the route of the Congo a task which had been beyond many other explorers. He used a steamer called Lady Alice which could be taken apart and transported overland. The boat was named after a girl he thought was his fiance in New York but during his journey she married someone else, much to Stanley's understandable distress when he eventually returned from Africa.

Stanley did not receive the acclaim he expected for this amazing achievement largely because of passages in his book, In Darkest Africa, where he describes making what looked like an unprovoked attack on some natives. He tended to over-exagerate the numbers of natives killed in various skirmishes and rather than make him look more heroic as he had intended, even to Victorian readers this was considered excessive. It was not helped by the fact that the British public thought he was an American.

Tim Jeal's excellent book on Stanley offers a convincing defence for Stanley's actions, which has made it unpopular in some circles, but it is a truly wonderfully researched and written book which is unlikely to be superseded as the standard work for some time, if ever.

It is here that we leave him because Foundry make an older Stanley in his characteristic self-designed outfit from the period when he cut his way across King Leopold's Congo Free State and I will look at that controversial period another time.

Sir Samuel and Lady Florence Baker

Sir Samuel Baker was one of the most active of African explorers in the 19th century and travelled everywhere with his “wife” Florence. He was one of those captivated by the race to find the source of the Nile, which was eventually discovered by his friend John Hanning Speke who trekked inland from Zanzibar. Baker took the more conventional, but no less arduous, route of following the river from Egypt.

Born in 1821 in Enfield, Middlesex, Baker came from a well-off family who had made their money from sugar plantations. He had three sisters and three brothers, including younger brother Valentine who commanded the Egyptian forces at the disastrous first battle of First El Teb in the Sudan in 1884.

He married a conventional wife, a vicar's daughter, and dragged her off to Ceylon for eight years where he successfully bred cattle and embarked on many of his characteristic hunting forays into the wilderness, publishing a number of books including the splendidly named The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon. His wife was obviously not so robust and died in 1855 shortly after they returned to England. Not sure of what to do with his life he accompanied the Maharajah Duleep Singh, last crowned ruller of the Punjab, on a hunting trip to Central Europe.

Vidin

Their boat was holed on an ice floe in the Danube and they had to stop off in Vidin, in what is now Bulgaria but was then part of the Ottoman Empire, for repairs.

Whilst there he attended an Ottoman slave auction and saw on the block a beautiful teenage Transylvanian girl, Barbara Maria Szász, who had been orphaned in the Hungarian uprising and brought up in a harem where she had been given the name Florenz. Despite having being bought by the local pasha, Baker stole her away and the couple fled back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a coach. She was about fourteen years old at the time. He was thirty eight.

They lived in Central Europe for a while but all the time Baker was reading of the escapades of his friend Speke and his quest to find the source of the Nile and developed a great yearning to go to Africa..

In 1861 he traveled to Cairo with Florence, as she was now known, who he called his wife (although they were certainly not married at this stage). He explored and hunted in the Sudan and Abyssinia to acclimatize to the continent before setting off from Khartoum, still accompanied by Florence, for a journey up the Nile. Whilst Burton, Speke and Grant all took the conventional route from Zanzibar into the interior of Africa, Baker decided to follow the river Nile itself. This was no less arduous and involved having to cross the great marshy area of the Sudd.

He was ably assisted by Florence who spoke fluent Arabic (a well as Hungarian, German) which she had learned in the harem. They met Speke returning from Lake Victoria, in 1863, which he had rightly identified as the source of the Nile, although his inability to conclusively prove it haunted him and he died shortly afterwards either from a hunting accident or suicide.

The Bakers continued exploring in the lake regions of Africa and went on to discover and name Murchison Falls and Lake Albert despite usually having a far smaller accompanying party than other expeditions.

Returning to the UK after four years in Africa he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal and got married to Florence in 1865.

In 1869 he led a military expedition (with Florence) to fight slavers in Equatorial Africa, having been made Major General and Governor of Equatoria by the Viceroy of Egypt with a salary of a staggering £10,000 per annum. They fought the slavers, including a pitched battle in Masindi, for three years.

The Bakers returned to Britain in 1874 and bought an estate in Devon. He continued to travel and write books until his death in 1893. Florence outlived Baker by 23 years and in later life was looked after by her step daughters, one of whom was only six years her senior.

Baker has never been as well regarded or famous as his contemporaries Burton, Livingstone, Speke or Stanley. Although he was knighted in 1866 there was always rumour and innuendo about his relationship with his wife and her unconventional origins. Although she had been only fourteen when she first started living with Baker this in itself would not have counted for much; the age of consent in Victorian England was 12, although no lady would be generally acceptable until she came out into society at 17. Although Sir Samuel and Lady Baker were personally charming enough to conquer most of Victorian society the Queen refused to receive Florence at Court as she believed Baker had been "intimate with his wife before marriage", as indeed he had.

These days Baker is vilified because of his attitude towards the Africans and Arabs he met during his travels and is now considered a racist. Unlike Burton, Speke or Livingstone, Baker detested most of the Africans that he met; although to be fair, reading his book In the Heart of Africa, he does seem to have met up with the most despicable, untrustworthy, traitorous and ghastly people on his travels.

The figures are both from the Foundry Darkest Africa range. Although many pictures of Florence in Africa show her in a conventional Victorian lady’s dress and wide brimmed hat she did, when away from western company, indeed dress in an outfit almost identical to the one her husband had designed for himself. The Foundry figure reflects this and looks like the self portraits that Baker did of himself in his exploring clothes. No pictures exist of Florence in her equivalent outfit but Baker was very careful in his writings and pictures to portray Florence as a conventional Vicyorian woman. This she most avowedly was not, riding astride a horse in trousers, for example, when ladies rode side-saddle. So it is quite likely that the pictures he drew of her were not reflecting what she actually wore but what society would expect her to wear. As Baker seemed to often portray her in a blue dress (perhaps it set off her hair, she was a blonde – a source of constant amazement to the Africans) I have chosen to interpret this as her wearing a blue version of Baker's more conventionally coloured attire.