What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the NileSpeke, John Hanning
History
What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile
Speke, John Hanning
Horn of Africa -- Description and travel; Nile River; Tanganyika, Lake
Other Arab and Wasuahili merchants have corroborated Snay's statement,
as also a Hindi merchant, called Musa, whom I especially mention, as I
consider him a very valuable informant--not only from the
straightforward way he had of telling his story, but also because we
could converse with one another direct, and so obviate any chance of
errors. After describing his route to the north in minute detail,
stage by stage, with great precision, which was to the same effect as
all the other accounts, he told me of a third large river to the
northward of the Line, beyond Uganda; this he spoke of as much larger
than the Katonga, and generally called the Usoga River, because it
waters that district. Although he had recently visited Kibuga, and had
lived with Sultan Mtésa, the present reigning monarch in place of
Sunna, who died since Snay was there, he had no positive or definite
idea of the physical features of any of the country beyond the point
which he had reached; but he produced a negro slave who had been to
Usoga, and had seen the river in question. This man called the river
Kivira, and described it as being much broader, deeper, and stronger
in its current than either the Katonga or Kitangulé river; that it
came from the lake, and that it intersected stony hilly ground on its
passage to the north-west.
This river Kivira, I now believe (although I must confess I did not
until I made Snay alter his original statement about the direction of
its flow, and so proved he meant this for his Jub), is the Nile
itself. On a subsequent occasion, when talking to a very respectable
Suahili merchant, by name Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasib, about the
N'yanza, he corroborated the story about the mariners, who are said to
keep logs and use sextants, and mentioned that he had heard of the
Kidi and Bari people living on the Kivira river. Now, the Bari people
mentioned by him are evidently those who have long since been known to
us as a tribe living on the Nile in latitude 5° north and longitude
32° east, and described by the different Egyptian expeditions sent up
the Nile to discover its source. M. Ferdinand Werne (says Dr Beke) has
published an account of the second expedition's proceedings, in which
he took part; and which, it appears, succeeded in getting farther up
the river than either of the others. "The author states that,
according to Lacono, King of Bari, the course of the river continues
thence southwards a distance of thirty days' journey." This, by Dr
Beke's computation, places the source of the Nile just where I have
since discovered the N'yanza's southern extremity to be--in the second
degree south latitude, lying in the Unyamuézi country.[48]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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