During his imprisonment Baker spent his time mainly in writing. His chief work is the Chronicle of the Kings of England from the Time of the Romans' Government unto the Death of King James (1643, and many subsequent editions). It was translated into Dutch in 1649, and was continued down to 1658 by Edward Phillips, a nephew of John Milton. For many years the Chronicle was extremely popular, but owing to numerous inaccuracies its historical value is very slight. Baker also wrote Cato Variegatus or Catoes Morall Distichs, Translated and Paraphrased by Sir Richard Baker, Knight (London, 1636); Meditations on the Lord's Prayer (1637); Translation of New Epistles by Moonsieur D'Balzac (1638); Apologie for Laymen's Writing in Divinity, with a Short Meditation upon the Fall of Lucifer (1641); Motives for Prayer upon the seaven dayes of ye weeke (1642); a translation of Malvezzi's Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus (1642), and Theatrum Redivivum, or The Theatre Vindicated, a reply to the Histrio-Mastix of William Prynne (1642). He also wrote Meditations upon several of the psalms of David, which have been collected and edited by A. B. Grosart (London, 1882).
See J. Granger, Biographical History of England to the Revolution (London, 1804); Biographia Britannica, corrected by A. Kippis (London, 1778-1793).
BAKER, SIR SAMUEL WHITE (1821-1893), English explorer, was born in London on the 8th of June 1821. He was educated partly in England and partly in Germany. His father, a West India merchant, destined him for a commercial career, but a short experience of office work proved him to be entirely unsuited to such a life. On the 3rd of August 1843 he married Henrietta Biddulph Martin, daughter of the rector of Maisemore, Gloucestershire, and after two years in Mauritius the desire for travel took him in 1846 to Ceylon, where in the following year he founded an agricultural settlement at Nuwara Eliya, a mountain health-resort. Aided by his brother, he brought emigrants thither from England, together with choice breeds of cattle, and before long the new settlement was a success. During his residence in Ceylon he published, as a result of many adventurous hunting expeditions, The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1853), and two years later Eight Years' Wanderings in Ceylon (1855). After a journey to Constantinople and the Crimea in 1856, he found an outlet for his restless energy by undertaking the supervision of the construction of a railway across the Dobrudja, connecting the Danube with the Black Sea. After its completion he spent some months in a tour in south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor. It was during this time that he met in Hungary the lady who (in 1860) became his second wife, Florence, daughter of Finnian von Sass, his first wife having died in 1855. In March 1861 he started upon his first tour of exploration in central Africa. This, in his own words, was undertaken "to discover the sources of the Nile, with the hope of meeting the East African expedition under Captains Speke and Grant somewhere about the Victoria Lake." After a year spent on the Sudan-Abyssinian border, during which time he learnt Arabic, explored the Atbara and other Nile tributaries, and proved that the Nile sediment came from Abyssinia, he arrived at Khartum, leaving that city in December 1862 to follow up the course of the White Nile. Two months later at Gondokoro he met Speke and Grant, who, after discovering the source of the Nile, were following the river to Egypt. Their success made him fear that there was nothing left for his own expedition to accomplish; but the two explorers generously gave him information which enabled him, after separating from them, to achieve the discovery of Albert Nyanza, of whose existence credible assurance had already been given to Speke and Grant. Baker first sighted the lake on the 14th of March 1864. After some time spent in the exploration of the neighbourhood, during which Baker demonstrated that the Nile flowed through the Albert Nyanza—of whose size he formed an exaggerated idea—he started upon his return journey, and reached Khartum after many checks in May 1865. In the following October he returned to England with his wife, who had accompanied him throughout the whole of the perilous and arduous journey. In recognition of the achievements by which Baker had indissolubly linked his name
with the solution of the problem of the Nile sources, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its gold medal, and a similar distinction was bestowed on him by the Paris Geographical Society. In August 1866 he was knighted. In the same year he published The Albert N'yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, and Explorations of the Nile Sources, and in 1867 The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, both books quickly going through several editions. In 1868 he published a popular story called Cast up by the Sea. In 1869 he attended the prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII., in a tour through Egypt. In the same year, at the request of the khedive Ismail, Baker undertook the command of a military expedition to the equatorial regions of the Nile, with the object of suppressing the slave-trade there and opening the way to commerce and civilization. Before starting from Cairo with a force of 1700 Egyptian troops—many of them discharged convicts—he was given the rank of pasha and major-general in the Ottoman army. Lady Baker, as before, accompanied him. The khedive appointed him governor-general of the new territory for four years at a salary of £10,000 a year; and it was not until the expiration of that time that Baker returned to Cairo, leaving his work to be carried on by the new governor, Colonel Charles George Gordon. He had to contend with innumerable difficulties—the blocking of the river by sudd, the bitter hostility of officials interested in the slave-trade, the armed opposition of the natives—but he succeeded in planting in the new territory the foundations upon which others could build up an administration. He returned to England with his wife in 1874, and in the following year purchased the estate of Sandford Orleigh in South Devon, where he made his home for the rest of his life. He published his narrative of the central African expedition under the title of Ismailia (1874). Cyprus as I saw it in 1879 was the result of a visit to that island. He spent several winters in Egypt, and travelled in India, the Rocky Mountains and Japan in search of big game, publishing in 1890 Wild Beasts and their Ways. He kept up an exhaustive and vigorous correspondence with men of all shades of opinion upon Egyptian affairs, strongly opposing the abandonment of the Sudan and subsequently urging its reconquest. Next to these, questions of maritime defence and strategy chiefly attracted him in his later years. He died at Sandford Orleigh on the 30th of December 1893.
See, besides his own writings, Sir Samuel Baker, a Memoir, by T. Douglas Murray and A. Silva White (London, 1895).
BAKER, THOMAS (1656-1740), English antiquary, was born on the 14th of September 1656 at Lanchester, Durham. He was the grandson of Colonel Baker of Crook, Durham, who won fame in the civil war by his defence of Newcastle against the Scots. He was educated at the free school at Durham, and proceeded thence in 1672 to St John's College, Cambridge, where he afterwards obtained a fellowship. Lord Crew, bishop of Durham, collated him to the rectory of Long-Newton in his diocese in 1687, and intended to give him that of Sedgefield with a prebend had not Baker incurred his displeasure by refusing to read James II.'s Declaration of Indulgence. The bishop who disgraced him for this refusal, and who was afterwards specially excepted from William's Act of Indemnity, took the oaths to that king and kept his bishopric till his death. Baker, on the other hand, though he had opposed James, refused to take the oaths to William; he resigned Long-Newton on the 1st of August 1690, and retired to St John's, in which he was protected till the 20th of January 1716-1717, when he and one-and-twenty others were deprived of their fellowships. After the passing of the Registering Act in 1723, he could not be prevailed on to comply with its requirements by registering his annuity of £40, although that annuity, left him by his father, with £20 per annum from his elder brother's collieries, was now his whole subsistence. He retained a lively sense of the injuries he had suffered; and inscribed himself in all his own books, as well as in those which he gave to the college library, socius ejectus, and in some rector ejectus. He continued to reside in the college as commoner-master till his sudden death from apoplexy on the 2nd of July 1740. The whole of his valuable books and manuscripts he bequeathed to the university. The only works he published were, Reflections on Learning, showing the Insufficiency thereof in its several particulars, in order to evince the usefulness and necessity of Revelation (Lond., 1709-1710) and the preface to Bishop Fisher's Funeral Sermon for Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1708)—both without his name. His valuable manuscript collections relative to the history and antiquities of the university of Cambridge, amounting to thirty-nine volumes in folio and three in quarto, are divided between the British Museum and the public library at Cambridge,—the former possessing twenty-three volumes, the latter sixteen in folio and three in quarto.
The life of Baker was written by Robert Masters (Camb., 1784), and by Horace Walpole in the quarto edition of his works.
BAKER, VALENTINE [Baker Pasha] (1827-1887), British soldier, was a younger brother of Sir Samuel Baker (q.v.). He was educated at Gloucester and in Ceylon, and in 1848 entered the Ceylon Rifles as an ensign. Soon transferred to the 12th Lancers, he saw active service with that regiment in the Kaffir war of 1852-53. In the Crimean War Baker was present at the action of Traktir (or Tchernaya) and at the fall of Sevastopol, and in 1859 he became major in the 10th Hussars, succeeding only a year later to the command. This position he held for thirteen years, during which period the highest efficiency of his men was reached, and outside the regiment he did good service to his arm by his writings. He went through the wars of 1866 and 1870 as a spectator with the German armies, and in 1873 he started upon a famous journey through Khorassan. Though he was unable to reach Khiva the results of the journey afforded a great deal of political, geographical and military information, especially as to the advance of Russia in central Asia. In 1874 he was back in England and took up a staff appointment at Aldershot. Less than a year later Colonel Baker's career in the British army came to an untimely end. He was arrested on a charge of indecent assault upon a young woman in a railway carriage, and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine. His dismissal from the service was an inevitable consequence; it must be stated, however, that the view taken of the circumstances by good authorities was that Baker's conduct, when judged by conventional standards, admitted of considerable extenuation. He himself never opened his mouth in self-defence. Two years later, having meanwhile left England, he entered the service of Turkey in the war with Russia. At first in a high position in the gendarmerie, he was soon transferred to Mehemet's staff, and thence took over the command of a division of infantry. With this division Baker sustained the brilliant rearguard action of Tashkessan against the troops of Gourko. Promoted Ferik (lieutenant-general) for this feat, he continued to command Suleiman's rearguard with distinction. After the peace he was employed in an administrative post in Armenia, where he remained until 1882. In this year he was offered the command of the newly formed Egyptian army, which he accepted. On his arrival at Cairo, however, the offer was withdrawn and he only obtained the command of the Egyptian police. In this post he devoted by far the greater amount of his energy to the training of the gendarmerie, which he realized would be the reserve of the purely military forces.
When the Sudan War broke out, Baker, hastening with 3500 men to relieve Tokar, encountered the enemy under Osman Digna at El Teb. His men became panic-stricken at the first rush and allowed themselves to be slaughtered like sheep. Baker himself with a few of his officers succeeded by hard fighting in cutting a way out, but his force was annihilated. British troops soon afterwards arrived at Suakin, and Sir Gerald Graham took the offensive. Baker Pasha accompanied the British force, and guided it in its march to the scene of his defeat, and at the desperately-fought second battle of El Teb he was wounded. He remained in command of the Egyptian police until his death in 1887. Amongst his works may be mentioned Our National Defences (1860), War in Bulgaria, a Narrative of Personal Experience (London, 1879), Clouds in the East (London, 1876).
BAKER CITY, a city and the county-seat of Baker county, Oregon, U.S.A., about 337 m. E. by S. of Portland. Pop. (1890)