SIR SAMUEL BAKER, AND THE SOURCES OF THE NILE.
OF late years the Lake Regions of Central Africa have offered a fertile and attractive field to the explorer. The interest of the public in African discovery, which had for some time been dormant, was revived in 1849, by the achievements of Dr. Livingstone, who, starting from the south, crossed the tropic of Capricorn, and penetrated to the shores of Lake Ngami. In 1853 to 1856 the same great traveller traced the course of the river Leeambye or Zambési, and traversed the entire breadth of the “black continent” from Angola on the west coast to Zanzibar on the east. In 1865 he resumed his labours, striking into the very heart of Africa, with the view of tracing out the Sources of the Nile, and entering into a fertile country, the resources of which he found to be capable of immense development. For the first two or three years of his absence his letters and despatches reached England with some degree of regularity, but at length a veil of silence fell across his path, and it began to be feared that he, like other explorers, had fallen a victim to his enthusiasm. An expedition in search of the missing traveller was equipped by Mr. Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the _New York Herald_, in 1871, and placed in charge of Mr. Henry M. Stanley, who had the good fortune to find Livingstone at Ujiji, near Unyanyembé, on the 10th of November. He remained with him until the 14th of March, 1872, when he returned to England with his diary and other documents. Dr. Livingstone at this time reported that, in his belief, the Nile springs up about six hundred miles to the south of the southernmost point of Lake Victoria Nyanza. In November, 1872, a relief or auxiliary expedition, under Lieutenant V. Lovett Cameron, started from Zanzibar; but in October, 1873, while at Unyanyembé, its leader received the intelligence of Livingstone’s death, which had taken place at Ujiji, and soon afterwards the corpse arrived in charge of his faithful followers. Cameron then took up the work of exploration, and in spite of immense difficulties, great mental and physical suffering, and obstacles of every kind, he made his way to Lake Tanganyika, thence to Nyangwé, and after identifying the Lualaba with the Kongo, struck to the southward, and passing through regions hitherto unexplored, struck the west coast at Benguela. As a result of his observations, Lieutenant Cameron thus sketches the river system of Africa:—