{"product_id":"mimi-and-toutous-big-adventure-isbn-9781400075263","title":"Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure","description":"When the First World War breaks out, the British navy is committed to engaging the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship—even if the body of water in question is a remote African lake and the enemy an intimidating fleet of German steamers. The leader of this improbable mission is Geoffrey Spicer-Simson whose navy career thus far had been distinguished by two sinkings. His seemingly impossible charge: to trek overland through the African bush hauling Mimi and Toutou—two forty-foot mahogany gunboats–with a band of cantankerous, insubordinate Scotsmen, Irishmen and Englishmen to defeat the Germans on Lake Tanganyika. With its powerfully evoked landscape, cast of hilariously colorful characters and remarkable story of hubris, ingenuity and perseverance, this incredibly bizarre story–inspiration for the classic film \u003ci\u003eThe African Queen\u003c\/i\u003e–is history at its most entertaining and absorbing.\"Reads like an amalgam of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Conrad. The truth is stranger than any fiction, and the pleasure of this book lies in its unbelievable veracity.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Brisk [and] deliciously entertaining. . . . Foden plays up the peculiar details and eccentric personalities of his story.”—\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\"Satisfying. . . . Fast-paced. . . . Filled with fascinating characters.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\"[An] enjoyable book. . . . The real story is . . . more fascinating than the movie [\u003ci\u003eThe African Queen\u003c\/i\u003e].\"—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\"Filled with oddball characters and events that . . . just could not be made up. . . . An amazing tale.\" —\u003ci\u003eSanta Fe New Mexican\u003c\/i\u003eGiles Foden was born in England in 1967 and grew up in Africa. The author of three novels, he writes for the books pages of \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eGuardian\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1998 he won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Award.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe rectangular patch of gravel in front of the Admiralty had been  criss-crossed countless times since the outbreak of hostilities. It is  entirely possible that the retired petty-officer doorman paid little  attention to the guest who arrived on 21 April 1915. There were, after  all, more important matters for a retired petty-officer doorman to  consider; not least the recent departure from the Admiralty of the two  dynamic but headstrong individuals who had run the place. Namely, the  First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and the First Sea Lord  Admiral Fisher. They had clashed bitterly over the military fiasco of  the Gallipoli campaign. Both were great men; both had fallen because of  Churchill’s plan to cut short the War with an invasion of western  Turkey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe visitor was tanned and fit and wore civilian clothes, but otherwise  there was nothing remarkable about him. His profession sounded  glamorous, however. He was a big-game hunter from Africa and he had an  appointment to see the new First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Jackson.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story the hunter told would set in train some of the strangest  events of the First World War. Their conclusion would make famous—for a  while, at least—the navy’s most quixotic character since the days of  the privateers. Like the hand-made cigarettes he commissioned, his  personality was a particular mixture: one that involved as much  cowardice as heroism, as much self-regard as self-belief.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis individual’s name—inscribed in pale blue on those hand-made  cigarettes—was Geoffrey Spicer-Simson and he held the rank of  Lieutenant Commander. He was based in the Admiralty when the hunter  paid his visit. The doorman would have known this, because the doormen  of Whitehall know everything about the workings of  government—especially in wartime, the only time when the Whitehall  machine works properly. He would have known that Spicer-Simson sat in  no great splendour in a barely furnished office somewhere high up in  the building.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHigh up geographically, that is, because Spicer-Simson was actually in  disgrace. And there was a good reason—several good reasons, in fact—why  a trained naval commander had spent the first eight months of the War  in a dusty office containing two chairs, two desks piled with papers  and little else, except a stone fireplace without a fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBorn in Tasmania in 1876, Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson was one of five  children. Formerly in the merchant navy, their father Frederick Simson  was a dealer in gold sovereigns in India who eventually settled in Le  Havre, France, at the age of thirty-one. There he met eighteen-year-old  Dora Spicer, daughter of a visiting English clergyman,* and on marrying  changed his name to Spicer-Simson. In 1874 they moved to Tasmania,  having some family there, and ran a sheep farm for five years. Dora  didn’t care for the colonial life, however, and in 1879 they returned  to France. The children were sent to schools in England. The eldest,  Theodore, became an artist, moving between France and the United  States. The youngest, Noel, eventually joined the British army.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGeoffrey Spicer-Simson entered the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen,  embarking on what for a considerable time would be a disastrous career.  This was partly due to the eccentricities of his character. Boastful  and vain-glorious, by the time war was declared he was well known  throughout the officer corps. They generally avoided him. One reason  for this was that he took every opportunity to show off his arms and  upper torso, which were heavily tattooed with depictions of snakes and  butterflies. He liked to brag, too, about his individual bravery in  many dangerous adventures. Recounted with a distant, rhapsodic look,  most of these tales were lies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn expert on every subject (even in the presence of genuine experts),  Spicer also enjoyed telling jokes (nobody laughed at them) and singing  (he was invariably off-key). It is not surprising that his fellow  officers thought of him as at best peculiar, at worst downright  dangerous. It didn’t help that he spoke in a curious manner. Nor that  he tended to swagger and throw his weight around. In his groundbreaking  history The Great War in Africa (1987), Byron Farwell describes Spicer  as “a large, muscular, round-shouldered man with thin, close-cropped  hair, a Vandyke beard, and light grey eyes, he affected a nasal drawl .  . . He indulged in a proclivity for browbeating waiters and others  serving on lower rungs of life than his own.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSpicer had always wanted to be a hero. After joining the training ship  Britannia in 1890 as a cadet, he advanced some way through the ranks,  serving in the Gambia and on the China Station, where he made the first  hydrographic survey of the Yangtse River. But a series of bumbling  errors and catastrophic misjudgements had left him stuck in the naval  hierarchy, the oldest lieutenant commander in the navy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was, for example, that time during the Channel manoeuvres of 1905  when he suggested it would be a good idea for two destroyers to drag a  line strung from one to the other in a periscope-hunting exercise. He  nearly sank a submarine. Or there was the time when, in an exercise  intended to test the defences of Portsmouth Harbour, he drove his ship  onto a nearby beach. He was court-martialled for that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was also court-martialled for sinking a liberty boat in a collision,  after smashing his destroyer into it. Someone was killed. The incident  was reported in the local papers. Lieutenant Commander Spicer-Simson  had something of a reputation for disaster.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn August 1914, at the start of the War, Spicer was put in charge of a  coastal flotilla consisting of two gunboats and six boarding tugs  operating out of Ramsgate. He felt confident enough of the anchorage of  his gunboats to come onshore and entertain his wife and some lady  friends in a hotel. He could see HMS Niger, one of the ships in  question, well enough from the window, could he not?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFate answered this question with a resounding Yes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, from the window of the hotel bar Spicer could see Niger as the  Germans torpedoed her. He could watch her sink, too, in just twenty  minutes. And going down with her, he could see his hopes of advancement  to the highest echelon of the navy disappear beneath the waves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuch was the state of Spicer’s fortunes on 21 April 1915 when a  big-game hunter called John Lee arrived at the Admiralty with an  appointment to see the new First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Jackson. Lee had  great experience of Lake Tanganyika. He also had a scheme to bring it  under British control. Britain had no ships on the lake and it was not  an area Sir Henry knew anything about, so he was happy to listen to  Lee’s plan and called for a map.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did the War stand in April 1915 on the “forgotten front”? The  conflict on the plains, lakes and mountains of Central and East Africa  had almost slipped from the mind of the British authorities. On a  wooden chart table at the offices of the First Sea Lord at Admiralty  House, Whitehall, Lee showed Sir Henry the lie of the land . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere was German East Africa, comprising the present territory of  Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Here were Kenya and Uganda, under British  control. So too were the Rhodesias Northern and Southern (now Zambia  and Zimbabwe respectively). Further down was South Africa, which was  British—though some of the Boers with whom Britain had fought a war  between 1899 and 1902 could not be trusted. The South Africans had  invaded German South West Africa (now Namibia) at the start of the War.  Superior in numbers, by September 1914 the British South Africans had  more or less overrun the South-west German territory, though a  pro-German rebellion by Boer officers rumbled on until February 1915.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Germans had more success in East Africa, mainly thanks to their  force of Schütztruppen. These highly trained units of German officers  and African askaris respected their commander, a military genius called  Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. In November 1914 he had repelled a British  landing of troops from India at the northern Tanganyikan port of Tanga.  This was “a major setback for British ambitions in east Africa,” as  Ross Anderson notes in his 2002 study of the battle—and it left many  British guns and other supplies in von Lettow’s hands. Another problem  was the continuing existence of a big German cruiser called the  Königsberg, which was hidden in the swamps of the Rufiji delta farther  south near Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf we compare the German army marching into Belgium at the start of the  War with the African experience a year or so later, we get a sense of  how utterly different were the two theatres of conflict. Here is  journalist Richard Harding Davis describing the Germans entering  Brussels, mesmerised by their massed grey uniforms:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is a grey-green . . . the grey of the hour just before daybreak, the  grey of unpolished steel, of mist among green trees. I saw it first in  the Grande Place in front of the Hôtel de Ville. It was impossible to  tell if in that noble square there was a regiment or a brigade. You saw  only a fog that melted into the stones, blended with the ancient house  fronts, that shifted and drifted, but left nothing at which you could  point.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was, Davis adds, “typical of the German staff striving for  efficiency to leave nothing to chance.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Africa, by contrast, von Lettow’s Schütztruppen—cut off by British  naval power from German supply lines—quickly became a raggedy, make-do  outfit that depended on chance and thrived on opportunism. Motor fuel  was improvised from cocoa; quinine was brewed from the barks of trees;  ammunition was captured from the British. Hippopotamus were shot for  their meat and fat, the latter being used to make candles and soap. As  Hew Strachan points out (in The First World War, 2001), the most  important difference between the two theatres was that the individual  was not tyrannised, as he was on the western front, by the  industrialisation of warfare.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet if there was a great material and psychological difference between  von Lettow’s rag-tag force and the Prussian Junker—the “road-hog of  Europe” as Lloyd George once described it—they shared the same  philosophy, the same sense of belonging to a military brotherhood. It  was an emotional business, as the memoirs of one German captain reveal.  Describing the moment when the German army crossed the Rhine into  Belgium, Walter Bloem wondered: “Was it real or was I living in a  dream, in a fairy-tale, in some heroic epic of the past?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo stranger himself to such feelings of fraternal heroism, von Lettow  had something else, too. Nous, you might call it: that quality of  cunning which brings Odysseus home to Ithaca and saves the fox from the  hounds. Like Odysseus, von Lettow did not follow a straight line. He  made the British chase him all over Central and East Africa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNor would Spicer-Simson, on the great journey that was to come, follow  straight lines. But he wanted to. He strayed from the path through  error, showed nous not by design but by mistake. It was his dream, his  hope, to be an epic hero. What kind of hero he turned out to be  instead—well, that is what this book hopes to show. It is not  necessarily the story of a career in decline, because there was nowhere  left for him to fall. Much later, his friend Dr. Hanschell, who would  accompany him to Africa, recalled Spicer’s dilapidated office in the  Intelligence Division of the Admiralty office:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLight filtered through the upper part of a dusty window and showed its  meagre furnishings—a filing cabinet, an empty fire grate with a bare  yellow mantelpiece, and above it a signed photograph of His Majesty the  King in a heavy frame. There were two swivel armchairs, and two desks  piled high with papers—it appeared that it was only the room, and not  Spicer, that was in the Intelligence Division, for the papers dealt  with the transfer of Merchant Marine Officers and Seamen to the Royal  Naval Reserve. A cracked teapot on a tray with two empty cups was  perched on a corner of the mantelpiece.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo Spicer at that time it must have seemed that the First World War was  his last chance to make good and win the laurels he longed for. His  sculptor brother Theodore Spicer-Simson was famous for his portrait  medallions of celebrities such as the conductor Toscanini and the  philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Why shouldn’t he have his share of  glory too? Why was he now stuck in a desk job in Whitehall and not out  on the high seas in the thick of the action?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohn Lee, the big-game hunter, explained to the Admiral that the  Germans had two steamers under military orders on Lake Tanganyika: the  60-ton Hedwig von Wissmann and the 45-ton Kingani. There were two  petrol motor boats as well. One of them, the Peter, had been donated to  the German forces by the Gesellschaft für Schlaftkrankheitsbekämpfung  (The Society for the Fight against Sleeping Sickness). The Germans also  had a fleet of dhows and a number of “Boston whalers”—wooden boats  based on an American design that were originally brought to East Africa  in the early 1900s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLee had also heard vague talk of another steamer (his spies among the  Holo-holo tribe had definitely said the Germans had three big boats),  but he made no particular mention of it to Sir Henry. Nor did the  Belgian army intelligence report which Sir Henry commissioned as a  follow-up. This omission, as it turned out, would have devastating  consequences.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLee’s scheme to attack the German steamers was simple in conception,  but difficult in practice: if two British motor boats could be sent to  South Africa, up the railway to the Belgian Congo, and dragged through  mountains and bush to the lake, they could then sink or disable the  Hedwig and the Kingani. Taking control of Lake Tanganyika in this  manner would allow Belgian forces from the Congo and British forces  from Kenya and Northern Rhodesia to drive the Germans back to the  eastern seaboard. That was the idea, anyway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn one of the Admiralty’s beautifully appointed rooms—all oak panels  and heavy chairs and paintings of Drake and Franklin—naval experts  quizzed Lee on why it was not better to take much bigger boats. The  Germans had taken out the Hedwig in sections in 1900, they told him.  Why could we not do the same?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe hunter explained that African spies told the Germans everything. If  they heard that a big ship was being assembled on the lakeshore they  would land and try to damage or destroy it, just as they had done with  the Belgian ship Alexandre del Commune. This, and associated problems  with the supply of parts, was why the Belgians were keeping back their  biggest steamer, the Baron Dhanis, which remained in pieces at a  railhead in the Congolese interior.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301725720805,"sku":"NP9781400075263","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400075263.jpg?v=1767732707","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/mimi-and-toutous-big-adventure-isbn-9781400075263","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}