By the early 1850s, virtually all that was known about the central African region - to Europeans, at least - was that a large body of water lay somewhere in the continent’s interior, along with a group of peaks known as the Mountains of the Moon. For a swashbuckler like Burton, finding the source of the Nile was an adventure too challenging to pass up.

And little wonder why: Oxford dropout, brilliant scholar and linguist, fearless traveler, and translator of classic books considered obscene by his peers, he was the kind of man who would disguise himself as a Muslim (to the extent of getting circumcised) in order to be the first undercover Englishman to enter Mecca. It’s a refreshing shift in emphasis and certainly overdue, but since relatively few details about Bombay survive in the historical record, there are limits to how much Millard can tell us.Ī lack of documentation is certainly not a problem for the other two members of this triumvirate - especially Burton, who has been the subject of numerous biographies over the years. Perhaps as a corrective to the Anglocentrism of earlier accounts, she brings a third figure into the foreground: Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a formerly enslaved African who acted as guide and interpreter for Burton, Speke and several other explorers over the years. And while her book is neither as infectiously readable as Moorehead’s (which is now outdated) nor as comprehensive and deeply researched as Jeal’s, she does add a new dimension to the story. With her new book, “ River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile,” she takes a similar slice-of-the-story approach to the decades-long Nile drama, focusing on the bitter rivalry between explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. Now enter Candice Millard, who has made a specialty of writing about individual episodes in the lives of colorful historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Given the depth of this fascination, it’s not surprising that many books have been written about this holy grail of Victorian exploration - notable among them “ The White Nile” by Alan Moorehead (1960) and “ Explorers of the Nile” by Tim Jeal (2011).

River of the gods candice millard