Up the White Nile to Lake Albert

Samuel and Florence Baker · 1861 CE – 1865 CE · Earth

Up the White Nile to Lake Albert — Samuel and Florence Baker · 1861 CE – 1865 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Meet the expedition coming down from the interior and close the last unknown stretch of the White Nile.

Historical context

Above Gondokoro the White Nile disappeared into a country known to Europeans only through the ivory and slave convoys that worked it. Samuel and Florence Baker went up on their own money to meet whoever came down from the lakes, and found Speke and Grant walking out of the interior in February 1863. What Speke had left undone — a second great lake to the west — became their journey.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Up the Nile from Cairo

    April 1861

    Samuel and Florence start south in April 1861 with no official backing at all.

  2. Khartoum

    1862 CE

    They fit out boats in the Egyptian provincial capital, against the advice of everyone there.

  3. Meeting Speke and Grant

    February 1863

    In February the two exhausted travellers walk in from the south and hand over their map.

  4. Detained in Bunyoro

    1864 CE

    Kamrasi keeps them for months at his court while both of them burn with fever.

  5. Lake Albert, 14 March 1864

    14 March 1864

    From the escarpment above Vacovia they look down on a sea of water to the horizon.

  6. Murchison Falls

    1864 CE

    Rowing up the Victoria Nile they reach the gorge where the river squeezes through six metres of rock.

  7. Back down the White Nile

    May 1865

    After two more years of fever and delay they reach Khartoum in May 1865.

Outcome

Met Speke and Grant at Gondokoro in 1863, reached and named Lake Albert in March 1864 and returned by the sudd to Khartoum in 1865.

Samuel and Florence Baker

British couple who traced the White Nile above Gondokoro and reached Lake Albert and Murchison Falls in 1864.

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Sources

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