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. CHAPTER XXII EMIN PASHA