Not only Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans, but Italians and Maltese had by this time appeared as explorers, traders, and naturalists on the White Nile and its tributaries.[45] Some of these came as members of the Austrian Roman Catholic Mission. Perhaps out of jealousy of Austria, or with the idea of spreading North Italian trade and influence, the then Kingdom of Sardinia appointed Signor Vaudet (apparently a Piedmontese trader) Sardinian proconsul at Khartum. Vaudet invited out his two nephews, the brothers Poncet (one of whom published a book on the White Nile in 1863). Vaudet was killed by the Bari tribe near Gondokoro about 1859. This Bari people, now so much diminished by famine and by the raids of the Sudanese slave-traders and Dervishes, was a far more serious bar to the prosecution of exploration up the Mountain Nile in the direction of the great lakes than the rapids above Gondokoro. The Bari, no doubt, were wronged by the Europeans and Nubians, but they were nevertheless responsible for the death of not a few European explorers. But for their determined hostility, there is little doubt that the earlier French, Italian, German, and English pioneers would have found their way to Lake Albert long before its discovery by Baker. Indeed Giovanni Miani, a Venetian, got as far south as Apuddo,[46] if not farther, in the prosecution of his search for the rumoured lake. Miani subsequently explored the regions of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the headwaters of the streams rising in the Nyam-nyam country. He it was who, first of all explorers, brought back those rumours of a watershed beyond the Nile system, with a great river (the Welle) flowing to the west.