WANTING to relax before a very important meeting the following day at Bath, two cousins set out on the afternoon of the 15th of September 1864 for a bit of partridge shooting at Neston Park in Wiltshire, England. A gamekeeper, Daniel Davis, was with them, marking birds and picking up for them. They were walking about sixty metres apart, when one of the shooters placed his gun against a two foot high stone wall and proceeded to climb over. What happened then is rather sketchy; official reports are vague and at most unreliable. A shot went off that entered the man’s chest just below the armpit, shattered his lungs and severed the arteries around his heart. He was still lucid when his two companions reached him. “Don’t move me,” were his last words. Within 15 minutes he was dead.
The man was 37-year-old John Hanning Speke, the famous explorer – the first white man ever to set eyes on Lake Victoria and who claimed to be the discoverer of the source of the Nile.
The middle of the 19th century was
