Samuel Baker

Samuel Baker (1821-1893), British traveler and explorer, discoverer of Lake Albert in Africa. Samuel White Baker was born in London and educated in England and Germany. In 1859 and 1860 he superintended the construction of a railway between the Danube River and the Black Sea. In 1861 he and his wife, Florence, set out from Cairo to search for the source of the Nile River. In the Sudan the Bakers explored Nile tributaries in Ethiopia, determining that the ‘Aţbarah River provided the Nile delta with its fertile soil. In 1862 they proceeded up the Nile to Gondokoro (in the Sudan), where they met British explorers John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant. Speke and Grant had left Bagamoyo (now in Tanzania) in 1860, and the former had found Lake Victoria to be the major source of the Nile. Informed by Speke of another lake, said to be crossed by the Nile on its course to Gondokoro, Samuel and Florence Baker continued their journey. Despite hostile slave traders and a mutiny of their troops, on March 14, 1864, they reached the lake and named it Lake Albert, in honor of Prince Albert of Britain.

From 1869 to 1873 Samuel Baker commanded an expedition to suppress slavery and open trade in the equatorial lake region. He explored in Cyprus, Syria, India, Japan, and the United States. He wrote Eight Years Wandering in Ceylon (1855), The Albert Nyanza (1866), The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867), and Wild Beasts and Their Ways (1890).