eBook Lovers on the Nile ePub

This is one i cannot put down! It covers their lives in detail without embellishment and you can easily read the hardship and endurance between the lines. Historically, its very accurate and gives a very interesting glimpse at some of the main players in that section of Africa during white exploration. The title gives it an impression that it may be a romance novel but it is a well researched historical tome. I will be keeping my copy and rereading more than once.

Sam Baker got his wife the old-fashioned way: he bought her at a slave auction.

The 19th Century Brits made superstars of their explorers. David Livingstone, Burton & Speke, Grant & Speke, Mungo Park....the list goes on. These men were intrigued by the uncharted fringes of the Empire, and many of them were also dedicated to wiping out slavery and its attendant miseries.

Sam Baker caught the bug and spent years in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) raising his family: his first wife and three of his seven children died there, probably of typhus, and he brought his remaining daughters home to England. But he couldn't shake the urge to go exploring, and he ended up accompanying a young Indian noble on a trip to the Near East.

The Ottoman Empire (the "other" superpower) was waning, but it had gobbled up lots of territory, and people, during its heyday. One of the institutions very much entrenched in Ottoman (and on a larger scale, Muslim) society was slavery. Huge numbers of displaced Eastern/Central Europeans were captured and sold as slaves. The boys were absorbed into the military, and fair-haired young women were in particularly high demand as concubines. Florence--the future Mrs. Baker--ethnically German and politically Hungarian--was one of these. Out of curiosity, Sam attended an auction the night she went up for sale, and found himself outbidding all other contenders.

She was around the same age as his own daughters, and at first their relationship was one of protector/damsel-in-distress. But they found soul mates in each other. She was a quick study, and so ended up accompanying him to Egypt and, from there, into the heart of Africa.

I don't know if they had conversations like, "Honey, I'm home!" "Oh good, Sam--I've been slaving over a hot stove ALL DAY!" "HAHA!" But their love affair grew, although, it being the Victorian Era and Sam being a product of his culture, he was REALLY slow to make everything legit. It was awkward to suddenly introduce Florence into society after word got out they were An Item.

At any rate, he wasn't slowed down by having a woman partner on his explorations. She was actually able to use her status as a European woman to pique the curiosity of some of the more remote tribes and so "prime the pump" for Sam's dealings with the people they encountered. They endured sickness, political unrest, mutinies, warfare, near-starvation, animal attacks, losing friends and fellow travellers to horrible deaths...all for the greater glory of England. (And England amply rewarded them, too.)

England was dedicated to wiping out the slave trade, which had a stranglehold on Africa. Slavery pre-dated European, and later American, exploration/colonialization, and it remained part of African society long after it was outlawed in the West. It's still practiced today, and reading about the Bakers in the Sudan is chilling. Their observations of slavery match what's going on today, and one similarity is the continued persecution of the indiginous tribes by Muslim Arabs. Sadly, it seems only the weapons have become more sophisticated.

(One of the reasons the US Navy came into existence was to address the Barbary Coast slavers preying on Americans. Obama says Muslims helped build America...well, in this case they certainly forced the creation of the greatest naval power on the planet!)

Sam, aside from his personal interest in Florence, had grown up familiar with slavery. His dad owned plantations in the Caribbean, and Same was brought up to believe that the life of a New World slave (at least, one owned by Baker Sr.) was far more preferable to life as a slave, or even freeman, in Africa. Baker Sr. argued that his slaves were well-cared-for, educated, and had fulfilling lives, and that he had pretty much rescued them from a life of hardship, destitution and pain.

We may scoff at that small-mindedness: after all, these people had been wrenched from their homelands, cut off from their language and religion, torn from their families. What could make up for that?

Except that what Sam witnessed in Africa reinforced his father's view--not that slavery was acceptable, but that American slavery is a far more attractive option than what awaited slaves who remained in Africa. (And, BTW, it wasn't just the Arabs who were bartering in human flesh. A lot of "advanced" African tribes had their own slave trades going, and trafficking people was a thriving business all over the Continent.) Baker believed slavery was morally wrong, but he also saw a brutal form of it everywhere he went.

One example is castration, which Burton and others have written about. African slaves in Africa, or those destined for Turkey or Arabia, were routinely castrated....and they didn't just lose their testicles to make them "safe" to have around the harem. They also had their penises removed. Most of the boys who went through this operation--carried out under the most primitive circumstances--died of infection. While it has been argued that slavery in the Americas is, in itself, an emotionally emasculating experience, it would have been economically counterintuitive for plantation owners in the New World to castrate their slaves. A new generation of slaves would not have been possible without fertile males.

Sam and Florence ended up in England for their final years, and today are usually relegated to the footnotes of history. But it would be instructive to seek out a copy of this book and read about them. Theirs is a great love story (although "Lovers on the Nile" isn't exactly a great title for this book--there's so much more to their lives than their courtship). Richard Hall did a good job providing context for the Bakers' experiences, and Florence's life is truly amazing. If Sam hadn't gone to the auction that night, she certainly would have been sold into a harem and no one would have ever heard of her.

Sam and Florence, unfortunately, never had kids. She did become close to her stepdaughters, after a bit a manuevering with Sam's sisters, who had raised the girls while he was off on his jaunts. Florence seemed to genuinely like children, and she cared for a little boy while in Africa, and became quite attached to him. Unfortunately, his owner retrieved him and sold him. His story, unlike the Bakers', really is lost.

This book's title is misleading. It is not historical romance as one would guess from the jacket and the title. It is instead a well-written bioghraphy of two of the less well known (today at least) explorers who searched for the fabled source of the Nile river. Anyone with an interest in African exploration would do well to add this title to their shelves. Sam Baker was already a famous big-game hunter and author from his time in Ceylon before venturing up the Nile. Florence (later to marry Sam) ventured farther into the largely unknown upper Nile regions than any other contemporary European woman.