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John Hanning Speke was born May 4, 1827 in Bideford, England. On his father's side he descended from the ancient Yorkshire family of Espec, a branch of which migrated to Somerset in the 15th century. His mother was a Miss Georgina Hanning, of Dillington Park, Somerset.
Through his mother's influence with the duke of Wellington Speke obtained a commission in the Indian Army, which he entered in 1844. He served in Sir Colin Campbell's division in the Punjab campaigns, and acquired considerable repute both as a soldier and as a sportsman and naturalist.
Invalided home, Speke shortly afterwards volunteered for the Crimea and served during the war with a regiment of Turks.
In 1856 he accepted an invitation from Burton to join an expedition to verify the reports as to the existence of great lakes in east central Africa, and especially to try and find Lake Nyassa. The route to Nyassa was closed by the Arabs, and the travellers left Zanzibar in June 1857 by a more northerly route, which brought them by November to a place called Kaze in Unyamwezi. Continuing westward in January 1858 the travellers reached Lake Tanganyika, of which they made a partial exploration, Speke marking on his map the mountains which close in the lake to the north, "Mountains of the Moon. " Marching north for twenty-five days, on the 30th of July Speke reached a creek, along which he travelled till, on the 3rd of August, he saw it open up into the waters of a lake extending northward to the horizon. He no longer doubted that this lake-the Victoria Nyanza-was the source of the Nile. Returning to Kaze (August 25) he made known his discovery to Burton, who did not believe Speke's theories. Despite the scepticism of his fellow traveller and many geographers, he secured the support of Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, under whose direction a new expedition, expressly intended to solve the Nile problem, was fitted out. The expedition, over 200 men all told, started from Zanzibar in October 1860 and reached Kaze on the 24th of January 1861. Despite illness and the hostility and extortions of the natives the Victoria Nyanza was again reached, at its south-west corner, in October 1861. Following the western shores of the lake Speke crossed the Kagera on the 16th of January 1862, and arrived at the capital of Uganda on the 19th of February. The great discovery was made, the problem which had baffled all previous efforts -
extending over 2000 years - was solved. The troubles of the travellers were, however, by no means over; with difficulty they obtained permission to enter Unyoro, and with difficulty were allowed to leave, without being permitted to visit another large lake (the Albert Nyanza) of whose existence and connexion with the Nile they learned. On the 15th of February 1863 they arrived at Gondokoro, the Egyptian post on the Nile marking the limit of navigability from the north. At Gondokoro they met Sir Samuel Baker, generously giving him the information which enabled him to discover the Albert Nyanza. From Khartum Speke telegraphed to London the great news that the Nile had been traced to its source, and on his return to England he was received with much enthusiasm. In the same year (1863) he published his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, a work full of geographical, ethnological and zoological information, and written in a frank, attractive style. The accuracy of his observations and the correctness of his main deductions have been since abundantly justified. But as Speke had not been able to follow the Nile the whole way from the Victoria Nyanza to Gondokoro, and as the part played in the Nile regime by the Albert Nyanza was then unknown, Burton and others remained unconvinced, and Speke's conclusions were criticized in The Nile Basin (1864), a joint production of Burton and James McQueen; it being argued in this work that Tanganyika was the true Nile source. A debate was planned between Speke and Burton before the geographical section of the British Association in Bath on 16 September 1864, but Speke had died the previous afternoon from a self-inflicted gunshot wound while shooting at Neston Park in Wiltshire.
A granite obelisk to Speke's memory was erected by public subscription in Kensington Gardens.
Discovered the Source of the Nile
