Speke, John Hanning

Speke, John Hanning (1827-1864), British explorer, born in Bideford, England. In 1854 he joined an expedition to explore Somaliland, led by Sir Richard Burton. The Royal Geographical Society sponsored (1856) an expedition by Speke and Burton to search for the great equatorial lakes that were believed to exist in East Africa, and were thought to be the sources of the Nile. In 1858 the two men found Lake Tanganyika; then Speke, travelling alone, became the first European to see Lake Victoria, which he believed was the source of the Nile River. On a later expedition with James Grant he discovered (1862) falls at the point where the Nile flows out of the lake and named them Ripon Falls. He also crossed the Kagera River, which was later to prove the only major tributary of Lake Victoria. Speke and Grant descended the Nile as far as Juba, where they encountered Sir Samuel Baker and his wife, who were ascending the river. Speke had never established Lake Victoria conclusively as the source of the Nile, and he was due to debate the subject in public with Richard Burton, with whom he had fallen out, when he died in a shooting accident that many have since suspected was suicide. Speke wrote Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) and What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1864).