Lake Tanganyika Reached

In February 1858, the British explorers Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke became the first Europeans known to have seen Lake Tanganyika, the long, deep body of water in the Great Rift Valley of East-Central Africa. The sighting was a landmark in the European mapping of the African interior. It also set off one of the most bitter rivalries of the age of exploration, over the source of the Nile.

The expedition was sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society, which wanted to learn about the lakes and peoples said to lie inland from the East African coast. Reports from missionaries and from Arab and Swahili traders described a vast inland sea. Burton, a linguist and former officer of the East India Company, led the venture, and Speke, an army officer and hunter, was his second-in-command. They left the coast near Zanzibar in mid-1857 and followed the established caravan route to Tabora, a major trading hub. Their journey was possible only because of this commercial network, which Swahili and Arab traders had built over many years, and because of the porters, guides, and interpreters who made up most of the party.

Both men were weakened by illness during the trek, and the hardships were severe. By the time the expedition reached the lake at Ujiji, in February 1858, Burton was partly paralysed and Speke was suffering from eye trouble that left him temporarily almost blind. Some accounts say Speke saw little of the lake at first. The two spent several weeks in the area and explored part of the lake by canoe, but they lacked the means and the health to survey it fully. Local rulers, traders, and boatmen already knew the lake well, so "discovery" here means only that Europeans first saw and recorded it.

On the return journey to Tabora, Speke left Burton and travelled north on his own. In July 1858 he reached a much larger lake, which he named Victoria and soon claimed was the source of the Nile. Burton doubted this, and the dispute turned the two men into enemies. It was still unresolved when Speke died in 1864, the day before a planned public debate with Burton. Later explorers, including David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, helped settle the question in Speke's favour in broad terms.

Lake Tanganyika remained a focus of European interest. Livingstone and Stanley met at Ujiji in 1871, and missionaries and colonial administrators followed. The lake is now known as one of the longest and deepest freshwater lakes in the world, with rich and distinctive wildlife, and it borders four countries: Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia.