National Geographic - Adventures The Jungle Navy (1999)

National Geographic - Adventures The Jungle Navy (1999)

At the height of the First World War, as armies of thousands fought with each other on European soil, a much more unusual battle was waged in eastern Africa, where Belgian and German colonial territories were separated by the second largest body of water on the continent Lake Tanganyika. An English big-game hunter living in the region came up with a plan to take out the German warships that patrolled the lake, and command of the mission was given to Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, a disgraced British career officer whose boorish incompetence had earned him the dubious distinction of being the oldest lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy. Spicer led a motley crew of 28 daring young men and two 40-foot gunboats named Mimi and Toutou, on a 9,000 mile trek from England to the Cape, and then through the wilds of Central Africa, to destroy a German enemy flotilla in Lake Tanganyika. Like the obsessed Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog's movie, Spicer and company (whose ranks boasted a pet monkey named Josephine) dragged the pieces of the Mimi and the Toutou (the two gunboats) over some fearsome terrain – “…like swamps which actually move about”, Spicer wrote. Despite a lack of tactical skills (even his semaphore signals were indecipherable), Spicer managed to sink a German ship, then immediately spiralled into a funk, reverting to relative obscurity until re-emerging, highly disguised, as Charlie Allnut. This true story formed the basis for Hollywood’s famous blockbuster “African Queen” with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.

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