confluence of the White and Blue Niles, founded the city of Khartum, and ascended the Blue Nile to Fazokl. In 1827 Adolphe Linant, a Belgian in the service of the British African Association, ascended the White Nile 132 m. above Khartum, being the first white man to do so since the 1st century A.D. Then followed three Egyptian expeditions sent in 1839–41 and 1842 by Mehemet Ali up the White Nile. The first expedition reached, on the 28th of January 1840, a point 6° 30′ N., the second and third pressed further south, reaching 4° 42′ N.—or the foot of the rapids above Gondokoro. A Turkish officer, Selim Bimbashi, commanded the expeditions, and among the members were the Frenchmen Thibaut (a convert to Islam and for nearly forty years French consular agent at Khartum), D’Arnaud and Sabatier, and a German, Ferdinand Werne. The last-named wrote a scientific account of the second expedition and drew a map of the Nile between Khartum and Gondokoro. An Austrian Roman Catholic mission was established in the Sudan, and in 1850 one of its members, Dr Ignatz Knoblecher, sent to Europe reports, gleaned from the natives, of the existence of great lakes to the south. About the same time two Protestant missionaries, Ludwig Krapf and John Rebmann, stationed on the Zanzibar coast, sent home reports of a vast inland sea in the direction where the Nile sources were believed to be. This sea was supposed to extend from 0° 30′ N. to 13° 30′ S. These reports revived interest in Ptolemy’s Geography. The exploration of the Bahr-el-Ghazal by John Petherick, Miss Tinne and her companions, and others followed the opening up of the White Nile (see Bahr-el-Ghazal.). The general result of the work carried on from the north was that by 1858 the Nile system was known as far south as the rapids at Bedden.
On the 3rd of August 1858 the English explorer J. H. Speke (q.v.) discovered the large nyanza (lake), which he rightly conceived to be the head reservoir of the White Nile, and which in honour of the queen of England he named Victoria Nyanza. Captain (Sir Richard) Burton and Speke had gone inland from Zanzibar to investigate the reports concerning the vast lake which Rebmann and Krapf had called the Sea of Unyamwezi. These reports proved to be exaggerated accounts of three distinct lakes—Nyasa, Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza. In 1860 Speke returned to Zanzibar accompanied by J. A. Grant (q.v.), bent on solving the problem of the Nile. In spite of great difficulties he made his way to Uganda, on the north-west of Victoria Nyanza, and (without exploring the lake) succeeded in reaching its outlet. On the 28th of July 1862 Speke stood by the Ripon Falls—the birthplace of the Nile. In his journey he had discovered the Kagera river, now known to be the most remote headstream of the Nile, a fact of which Speke was uncertain. though he recognized that it was the largest river entering the nyanza. Speke and Grant paddled down the Nile a short distance, but before reaching Lake Kioga they were stopped by hostile natives and compelled to go westward to Unyoro. There they heard of another great lake further west, but the king of Unyoro refused them permission to visit it. In the end they descended the Kafu river to its confluence with the Nile and then down the main stream to the Karuma Rapids. Here Speke and Grant left the river, and travelled overland east of the stream, which they did not strike again until just above the Asua confluence. Thence they travelled down the Nile to Gondokoro, reached on the 15th of February 1863.
This remarkable journey virtually solved the Nile problem so far as the source of the main stream was concerned, but there remained much to be done before the hydrography of the whole Nile basin was made known. At Gondokoro Speke and Grant met Mr (afterwards Sir Samuel) Baker[1] and his wife—a Hungarian lady—who had journeyed thither to afford the explorers help. To Baker Speke communicated the news he had heard concerning the western lake, and this lake Baker determined to find. On the 26th of March 1863 Baker and his wife left Gondokoro, and despite much opposition, especially from slave-dealers, followed, in the reverse direction, the route of Speke and Grant as far as Unyoro, whence they journeyed west. On the 14th of March 1864 they struck the lake (Albert Nyanza) on its S.E. side. They paddled up the lake to the point where a large river coming from the east poured its waters into the lake. This stream, which they rightly conjectured to be Speke’s Nile, they followed up to the Murchison Falls. Thence they went overland to the Karuma Rapids, and so back to Gondokoro by their old tracks. It fell to the lot of General C. G. Gordon (when that officer administered the Egyptian Equatorial provinces) and his assistants to fill up the gap left by Speke and Baker in the course of the main stream. In 1874–75 two English engineer officers—Lieut. (afterwards Colonel Sir Charles M.) Watson and Lieut. H. Chippendall—followed the river between Gondokoro and Albert Nyanza; in 1876 an Italian, Romolo Gessi Pasha, circumnavigated that lake, proving Baker’s estimate of its size to be vastly exaggerated; Gordon in the same year traced the river between Murchison Falls and Karuma Rapids, and an American, Colonel C. Chaillé-Long followed (1874) the Nile from the Ripon Falls to the Karuma Rapids, discovering in his journey Lake Kioga (which he named Ibrahim). In this manner the identity of the Victoria Nile with the river which issued from the Albert Nyanza was definitely established.
In 1874 H. M. Stanley (q.v.) went to Africa with the object of completing the work left unfinished by David Livingstone, who believed, erroneously, that the ultimate sources of the Nile were far to the south (see Congo). Stanley, in 1875, circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza, setting at rest the doubt thrown on Speke’s statement that it was a huge sheet of water,[2] but proving Speke mistaken in believing the nyanza to have more than one outlet. On the same journey Stanley encamped at the foot of the Ruwenzori range, not knowing that they were the “Mountains of the Moon,” whose streams are the chief feeders of Albert Nyanza. (At the time of his visit the snow-peaks and glaciers were hidden by heavy clouds.) In 1888, however, Stanley saw the mountains in all their glory of snow and ice, discovered Albert Edward Nyanza, and traced the river (Semliki) which connects it with Albert Nyanza. The Semliki had been discovered, and its lower course followed in 1884 by Emin Pasha. Thus at length the riddle of the Nile was read, though much was still to do in the matter of scientific survey, and in the exploration of the valley of the Sobat (q.v.). The Kagera had been partly explored by Stanley (1875), by whom it was called the Alexandra Nile, and between 1891–98 its various branches were traced by the German travellers Oscar Baumann, Richard Kandt and Captain H. Ramsay, and by Lionel Décle, a Frenchman. A British officer, Colonel C. Delmé-Radcliffe, made the first accurate survey (1900–1901) of the Nile between Albert Nyanza and Gondokoro. In 1903 an Anglo-German commission under Colonel Delmé-Radcliffe and Captain Schlobach made a detailed survey of the Kagera from 30° E. to its mouth. The Kioga system was surveyed in 1907–1908 by Lieut. C. E. Fishbourne. A trigonometrical survey of the upper river was begun by Colonel M. G. Talbot, director of Sudan surveys, in 1900, and other surveys were made by Captain H. G. Lyons, director-general of the Egyptian survey department. A fish-survey of the waters of the Nile was also undertaken.
The Removal of Sudd.—As already stated, the sudd above the Sobat confluence seems to have stopped the Roman centurions sent by the emperor Nero to explore the Nile. When the river above the Sobat was again reached by white men (1840) the stream was clear of sudd, and so continued until 1863–1864, when both the Bahr-el-Jebel and the Bahr-el-Zeraf became blocked by floating masses of vegetation. When Baker proceeded to Gondokoro in 1870 he thus described the increase that neglect had caused in the obstruction: “The immense number of floating islands that were constantly passing down the stream of the White Nile had no exit; thus they were sucked under the original obstruction by the force of the stream, which passed through some mysterious channel, until the subterranean passage became choked with a wondrous accumulation of vegetable matter. The entire river became a marsh, through which, by the great pressure of water, the stream oozed through innumerable small channels. In fact, the White Nile had disappeared.” Baker, who had to cut through 50 m. of sudd in his passage to Gondokoro, urged to Khedive
