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, the lake the people of Bunyoro called the Luta N’zige, which he believed a second source of the Nile, became their journey.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Up the Nile from Cairo

    April 1861

    Samuel and Florence start south in April 1861 on Baker’s own money, with a viceroy’s firman but no men or boats from the government.

  2. Khartoum

    1862 CE

    They hire and fit out their own boats in the Egyptian provincial capital, where the governor ignores their firman and refuses them government boats.

  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’s people hold them at the Karuma crossing and on a marsh below his capital 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 from Magungo, they reach the gorge where the whole river leaps through a narrow cleft in the rock.

  7. Back down the White Nile

    May 1865

    After another year held in Bunyoro and on the road, they reach Khartoum on 5 May 1865.

Outcome

Met Speke and Grant at Gondokoro on 15 February 1863, reached and named Lake Albert on 14 March 1864, followed the Victoria Nile up to Murchison Falls, and came back down the White Nile through the sudd to Khartoum on 5 May 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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