Baker · 1864
Sir Samuel and Florence Baker on the cliff above Lake Albert
On the morning of 14 March 1864 the Norfolk-born hunter-explorer Sir Samuel White Baker, forty-two years old, and his Transylvanian-born wife Florence, twenty-three years old, climbed the escarpment above the Bunyoro fishing village of Vacovia and saw the expanse of fresh water of Lake Albert (the small Nyanza on the Bunyoro-Bantu naming, the *Mwitanzige* of the local Banyoro people) stretching out below them to the western Congo-Forest horizon. The small ten-month overland expedition from Khartoum that had brought them through the Lower Sudan, the Bahr-el-Jebel marshes, the Acholi country of Northern Uganda and the Bunyoro kingdom of King Kamurasi to the western Albertine-Rift was the senior expedition of the post-Speke-Burton 1860-to-1864 Nile-source-exploration cycle. The small Lake Albert discovery was, on the post-1864 working geographical-society assessment of the Nile-headwaters problem, the second-of-two-major-lakes (alongside the Speke 1862 Lake Victoria discovery) that the post-1864 working Nile-source orthodoxy was built on. The small Florence-Baker partnership at the escarpment moment was, on the subsequent post-1864 sentimental-Victorian-public-imagination, the senior small wife-and-husband-explorer image of the mid-Victorian senior-Geographical-Society-publication tradition.
It is the late morning of 14 March 1864, on the small Vacovia escarpment above the western shore of Lake Albert (about latitude 1°15′N, longitude 30°50′E) on the contemporary Uganda-Democratic-Republic-of-the-Congo border, in the working equatorial-haze light through the mid-March small dry-season morning. He is forty-two years old. He is Samuel White Baker, born at the Enfield London-merchant family of Samuel Baker the elder on 8 June 1821, schooled briefly at the Rottingdean Anglican preparatory school, run the Newera Eliya Ceylon coffee-plantation 1846-1855, and the Hungarian-Transylvanian Florence Maria Finnian von Sass (b. 1841, a Hungarian-orphan refugee whom he had met at the slave-market at Vidin in 1859 and married soon after) has been his wife and small partner-on-expedition continuously since 1859.
On the Vacovia escarpment in front of them the expanse of fresh water stretches to the western horizon as far as the eye-and-binocular working observation can reach: the lake-shore at the foot of the escarpment running north-south for the visible extent of the horizon, the western shore on the fifty-mile-distant Congolese side of the Albertine Rift, the floating fishermen's papyrus-boats on the lake-surface to the north and south.
He thinks: the lake is the second-of-two-major-Nile-headwater-lakes that the Speke-and-Grant 1862-and-1863 expedition has identified as the Lake Victoria foundational headwater. The small Lake-Victoria-and-Lake-Albert system is, on the working geological-and-hydrological observation, the foundation reservoir of the upper White Nile. The small post-1864 Royal-Geographical-Society small Nile-source orthodoxy will run on the Speke-and-Baker double-lake foundation.
He thinks: the lake is, on the working post-1857 Burton-and-Speke and post-1862 Speke-and-Grant priority of small Nile-source discovery, the Baker-and-Florence senior small claim-of-discovery moment of the expedition. The small lake will, on the working post-1864 Royal-Geographical-Society reporting, be named for the Prince Consort Albert who has died on 14 December 1861. The small Speke-Lake-Victoria-naming of 1862 had been on the Queen Victoria small living-monarch nomination; the post-1862 Baker-Lake-Albert-naming will be on the Prince-Consort-Albert small dead-Prince-Consort posthumous nomination.
He names the lake the Albert Nyanza (the Lake Albert) on the expedition-journal entry of that morning, in honour of the late Prince Consort. He and Florence return to Cairo across the subsequent twelve-month expedition through Bunyoro, Acholi, Lado-Enclave, and the Khartoum-and-Lower-Sudan route through to early 1865. He is knighted at Windsor on 23 August 1866 on the Royal Geographical Society medal recommendation of the previous year; she is created Lady Baker on the knighthood but is never received at Court on the small private working assumption of the Royal-Household assessment of the Hungarian-and-slave-market-and-already-married-when-met biographical circumstances. They serve at the Khedivial Egyptian government 1869-1873 in the Pasha-and-Lady-Baker administrative-and-anti-slave-trade-and-exploration commission of the Khedive Ismail's Upper-Nile-Equatorial-Province modernisation project. Sir Samuel dies at his Sandford Orleigh country estate in Devon on 30 December 1893 at seventy-two; Florence outlives him by twenty-two years and dies at Sandford Orleigh on 11 March 1916 at seventy-four. The small Lake Albert remains the post-1864 western-Ugandan-and-Democratic-Republic-of-the-Congo small Albertine-Rift lake of the senior modern East-African geographical map.