JOSEPH THOMSON, MT. ELGON, AND KAVIRONDO BAY
It will be remembered that a remarkable turn was given to Nile
exploration when between 1849 and 1855 the German missionaries in the
employ of the Church Missionary Society at Mombasa reported their
explorations of inner East Africa,--explorations which revealed the
existence of snow-mountains, and which gathered reports of great lakes
in the interior. The outcome of these researches on the part of Krapf
and Rebman was the despatch of Speke and Burton in search of the Nile
lakes. We read that only Burton’s excessive prudence prevented this
first expedition to the lakes from starting inland from Mombasa and
following the trading route right through the Masai country to the
Victoria Nyanza. This was the route followed by Arab traders as far
back as 1850. The terror caused by the Masai led to great exaggerations
of the dangers of this direct journey. Its chief difficulty lay in the
fact that owing to the ravages of the Masai and the somewhat waterless
character of the intervening country, there were no inhabitants for
a distance of some two hundred miles between the coast regions on
the east and the fertile lands bordering the Victoria Nyanza on the
west. The missionaries, German and English, who were settled at or
near Mombasa, continued to collect information from Arab caravans.
In this way news arrived of the existence of the Rift valley, with
its chain of lakes, salt and fresh, and of some greater lake beyond
called “Samburu,” afterwards known as Lake Rudolf; also of the Nilotic
Negroes in the country of Kavirondo, on the northeast coast of the
Victoria Nyanza. Much of this information was industriously gathered up
by a most excellent missionary, the late Mr. Wakefield,[96] who sent
his notes and theories to an eminent geographer, E. G. Ravenstein.
Mr. Ravenstein prepared this information for the use of the Royal
Geographical Society, and in about 1880 had gathered together all that
was known from surveys and reports into maps illustrating Eastern
Equatorial Africa.
[Illustration: N.E. CORNER OF VICTORIA NYANZA (WITH SAMIA HILLS IN
DISTANCE).
Near where Joseph Thomson struck the lake shore at the end of his long
march, December, 1883.]
As the result of the interest these maps inspired, the Royal
Geographical Society resolved, in 1882, to despatch on this search for
a direct route to the Victoria Nyanza, Joseph Thomson, a very young and
very brilliant African explorer, who had already performed a remarkable
journey to lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika. Joseph Thomson left Mombasa
in the spring of 1883, and after several checks and disappointments,
finally crossed Masailand (Dr. Fischer, a German, had discovered the
Rift valley and Lake Naivasha a year previously), settled at last the
existence of the much exaggerated Lake Baringo, and finally reached
the northeast coast of the Victoria Nyanza, in Kavirondo Bay, on the
borders of Busoga. So far as Nile exploration was concerned, the
chief immediate result of Joseph Thomson’s remarkable journey was
to draw attention to Stanley’s blunder about Ugowe Bay. But Thomson
himself only made a step towards the delineation of this gulf; his
work had subsequently to be finished by Mr. C. W. Hobley and Commander
Whitehouse. He discovered Mount Elgon, however (previously alluded to
by Stanley as Mount Masawa), and was, politically, the forefather of
the Uganda Railway.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Jamieson & Co._]
JOSEPH THOMSON.]
The present writer supplemented Thomson’s work in the neighbourhood of
the snow-mountain Kilimanjaro, and laid the foundations there of the
British Protectorate of East Africa. Bishop Hannington followed in an
attempt to repeat Thomson’s journey to the Victoria Nyanza, and thus
enter Uganda. The missionary bishop was murdered on the confines of
Uganda, and his plucky enterprise added nothing to our geographical
knowledge. Then came Count Samuel Teleki von Szek (a Hungarian) and
Lieutenant von Höhnel (an Austrian naval officer) in 1887. Although
the expedition led by these gentlemen never actually entered the Nile
basin, it achieved the most important results of discovering lakes
Rudolf and Stephanie, and thereby limiting the Nile basin on the
southeast. Ernest Gedge and F. J. Jackson crossed what is now British
East Africa in 1889–1890, and reached Elgon, the Victoria Nyanza,
and Uganda. Dr. Carl Peters made the same journey in 1890, but did not
add to our geographical knowledge in the basin of the Nile. All these
expeditions were the direct result of Joseph Thomson’s work.