As John Humphries says, John Petherick has been a footnote to the historical extravaganza surrounding John Hanning Speke and the search for the Nile's source. Humphries' biography remedies this neglect handsomely through an account that begins with Petherick's background in the bleak, industrial landscape of nineteenth-century Wales, follows him to Breslau where he trained as a mining engineer, and then on to Africa where he spent the largest part of his life. What it does not do, because it cannot be done, is answer with any certainty whether Petherick the merchant and explorer was also a slave trader, as Speke and others believed. For those familiar with the Speke-Burton quarrel, Speke's strange death and Petherick's ruined reputation (for which Speke bore substantial responsibility), seem to result from a mysterious pathology that infected the precolonial experience; a forewarning of more bad things to come.
Humphries situates the Nile story, to good advantage, in the larger context of Europe's nineteenth-century presence in Africa. Not only are the familiar British suspects on hand – Burton, Speke, Grant, Samuel Baker, Petherick, Roderick Murchison, and the Royal Geographical Society – but so also were the slave trader the Maltese DeBonos and the Venetian explorer Giovanni Miani, who carved his name on a tamarind tree. Also of note is the captivating Dutch heiress Alexine Tinné, who took her mother along on an ill-fated African adventure. Africa was where nineteenth-century Europe often went to find or lose itself.
On the subject of Petherick and the slave trade, Humphries treads carefully. Whether the Welshman was actively involved in the trade or guilty only by association is obscure: his wife Katherine, Humphries thinks, may have influenced his views for the better after the couple married and Petherick returned to Africa for a second time. On the interactions between Petherick, Speke, and Samuel Baker, Humphries is unambiguous. Whatever his failings, Petherick fell innocent victim to Speke's irrational rage when Petherick was not at Gondokoro to meet him after he and Grant completed their voyage to the lakes. The easily-offended Speke believed that Petherick had thereby breached his contract with the Royal Geographical Society. Samuel Baker's surprise arrival in Gondokoro, in Humphries's view, was self-interested opportunism. A case, in other words, of English merchant-gentry ganging up on the rough-hewn mining engineer from Wales. Given Humphries's extensive evidence, it would be hard to disagree. John Petherick and the intrepid Katherine emerge from this judicious biography as far more sinned against than sinning, an engaging couple, especially Katherine, who deserve more and better press than they have received.
The volume is imperfect in details. The source of a poorly reproduced map (p. 41) is not given, though a magnifying glass reveals its date, 1865, and its maker, John Arrowsmith of the great map-making family. Perhaps it appears in other 1869 issues of the Pethericks' Travels in Central Africa than the one I have at hand. Not only this map but also other illustrations, some apparently modern photos, are uncredited, as are several portraits, including one of Speke and Frederic Leighton's famous portrait of Burton. This is surprising in an otherwise well-documented volume.
Humphries's prose is mostly crisp despite an excessive use of exclamation marks; an occasional descent into cliché (‘The sun was a fiery ball setting in the west‘ [p. 81]); and, a rare purple patch (‘The blank space at the centre of Victorian maps of the Dark Continent was shaped like a human heart –- and for the Pethericks it bled!’ [p. 2]). Copyediting is erratic; footnotes in Chapter Four are numbered, consecutively, 2; 4; 3; 4 – with resulting confusion. Footnote 10 in Chapter Six reads: ‘Jordans weekend reference’ – evidently a placeholder that was never filled in, referring to a weekend that Petherick spent at the Speke estate in Somerset. Other lapses are typographical: ‘Spinx’ for Sphinx (p. 13); ‘brushed passed’ for brushed past (p. 92); and, in an index entry, ‘Walshe, Katherine see Catherine Petherick’ (p. 178). There are others, too: nothing disabling, but all creating an incongruous effect of carelessness.
Tucked away at the close of a chapter on the sad denouement of Speke's quarrel with Burton, is an assertion that may puzzle some, as it did me: ‘the true source of the Nile’, Humphries says, was only discovered in ‘the early 21st century’, in a remote mountain spring. Hastening to the Web, I found that a BBC motoring show had sponsored a race, followed by millions of viewers, to locate the source. Or should one say, ‘the source’? The Independent (9 November 2014) called the episode ‘geographically illiterate’. The Nile source, still a vexation after two thousand years, seems ever more like a chimera. It was Petherick's bad luck to get tangled in its clutches.
