CHAPTER XXI

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.