Note 13 — Chapter III · HOW THE NILE QUESTION STOOD IN THE YEAR OF GRACE 1856.

In 1859 I had written (Journal Royal Geographical Society, vol. xxix. 272) ‘The Nyanza, as regards name, position, and even existence, has hitherto been unknown to European geographers; but descriptions of this “sea” by native travellers have been unconsciously transferred by our writers to the Tanganyika of Ujiji, and even to the Nyassa of Kilwa.’ Mr Hogg proposes to show that such was not the case. But the map by John Senex (1711) throws into one three or at least two waters. Mercator (Kauffman) lays the ‘Garava’ lakelet almost parallel with the Zaflan (Zambeze) or Kilwa Lake. Walker (1811) and Lizars (1815) fit in the Tanganyika correctly, whilst the Nyassa is wholly incorrect.

Of the five maps one only, that of John Senex, deserves consideration. ‘This great lake placed here by report of the negroes,’ alludes, I believe, to legends of the Bahari-ngo (the ‘great sea,’ vulgarly, Baringo), of which many East African travellers have heard. One Rumu wa Kikandi, a native of Uemba, described the water to Dr Krapf as lying five days’ journey from Mount Kenia: in the Introduction to his last travels (p. xlviii.), however, the enterprising missionary identifies it with the so-called Nyanza or Ukerewe Lake. I was told of it by the Wakamba at Mombasah in 1857. The Père Léon d’Avanchers (Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, vol. xvii. 164) also collected, when travelling on the East African coast, in August, 1858, information concerning Baharingo, as he writes it. Senex finally disconnects it with the Nile, and indeed gives it no drainage at all.

I cannot but think that Mr Hogg’s learning and research have considerably strengthened my position, and that the so-called Nyanza Lake was, curious to say, the least known, and at the same time the nearest, to European geographers.