Sir Samuel Baker(1821–1893)

Samuel White Baker was born at Thorngrove on the outskirts of Worcester on the eighth of June 1821, eldest son of Samuel Baker the senior, a sugar-cane plantation owner of Mauritius and Jamaica and a director of the Great Western Railway, and Mary Dobson of Bristol. He was schooled at Tottenham, Rottingdean and Frankfurt, joined his father's sugar interests at Mauritius in 1843 at twenty-two, and from 1846 to 1855 ran the family-sponsored Ceylon hill plantations and the elephant-hunting expeditions in the central Ceylon highlands that produced his first published book The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1853). His first wife Henrietta and four of their children died of typhus at Ceylon in 1855; he came home a widower at thirty-four.

In 1858 he undertook on his own commission the engineering survey of the route of the proposed Danube and Black Sea Railway across the Dobruja, supervised the construction work as Chief Engineer through 1859 to 1860, and at Vidin in the Bulgarian Danube country in 1859 met and married the Hungarian-Transylvanian Florence von Sass Maria, who became his lifelong working partner across the next thirty years of African exploration. Florence accompanied him on every subsequent expedition; their two-person teamwork in the field was unprecedented in Victorian African exploration.

In April 1861 the Bakers sailed from Cairo up the Nile to Khartoum and from Khartoum south into the largely-unmapped Sudd marshes of the White Nile in search of the source-lakes of the Nile that John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant had been seeking from the East African coast since 1857. They wintered at Gondokoro on the upper Nile in the early months of 1863, met Speke and Grant there in February 1863 (Speke and Grant arrived from the Lake Victoria south, having confirmed the source of the White Nile at Ripon Falls on the lake's north shore), took from Speke the geographical instruction that a second great lake lay to the west of the White Nile course, and committed themselves to the exploration of that western lake.

They marched south-west from Gondokoro into the Equatoria highlands across the next eleven months, were detained by the Bunyoro king Kamrasi for four months over the winter of 1863 to 1864, and on the morning of the fourteenth of March 1864 came over a ridge of the Bunyoro plateau and saw the second great lake of the equatorial White Nile system extending below them. They descended the cliff to the lake shore at Vacovia, took the small canoes the Bunyoro tribesmen had built for them, and over the next thirteen days circumnavigated the eastern half of the lake. Baker named it Lake Albert N'yanza after the Prince Consort. The lake is the second of the two source-lakes of the Nile (the White Nile flows from Lake Victoria north into Lake Albert through the Albert Nile river and then from Lake Albert north through Sudan to Egypt) and the Baker-Florence circumnavigation of March 1864 was the second of the two great mid-Victorian Nile-source discoveries.

They returned to Khartoum and Cairo in 1865; Baker was knighted by Queen Victoria in August 1866, was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founders' Medal the same year, and published The Albert N'yanza, Great Basin of the Nile in 1866. He was appointed by Khedive Ismail of Egypt as Governor-General of Equatoria with the rank of Pasha in April 1869, took up the post for a four-year tenure 1869 to 1873 in the campaign to suppress the slave trade of the upper Nile, was succeeded by Charles Gordon, and retired to his country house Sandford Orleigh in Devon in 1874. He died there on the thirtieth of December 1893 in his seventy-third year. The Baker name in modern geographical history carries the weight of the cliff above Lake Albert on the fourteenth of March 1864.