Lady Baker
An even greater African explorer than Mrs. Livingstone was Lady Baker, wife of Sir Samuel Baker. She was a Hungarian, and married Baker in 1860, when he had already done some colonisation work by settling a number of Englishmen in Ceylon. In the year following their marriage, the Bakers went to Egypt, determined to clear up that greatest of all mysteries to African explorers—the secret of the Nile sources. Arrived at Khartoum, they fitted out an expedition and set off up the river with twenty-nine camels.
One day, as they pushed on slowly in that silent, burning land, they heard that white men were approaching; and sure enough, there soon appeared before them the figures of Speke and Grant, two well-known explorers who had gone out a year before and whom many feared to have been lost. These men had found the source of the Nile in the Victoria Nyanza. But they told the Bakers a wonderful story of how they had heard rumours from time to time of the existence of another lake into which the Nile was said to flow.
The minds of Baker and his wife were fired to emulation. Parting from their newly-met countrymen, they pressed onwards and southwards. They had to go a long distance out of their way to avoid the slave-traders who were determined to wreck their plans if they could.
"We have heard a good deal recently of lady travellers in Africa," said the Times a long time afterwards, "but their work has been mere child's play compared with the trials which Lady Baker had to undergo in forcing her way into a region absolutely unknown and bristling with dangers of every kind."
But after encountering many adventures, the determined traveller and his brave wife at last reached the top of a slope from which, on looking down, they saw a vast inland ocean. No eye of white man had ever beheld this lake before, and to Lady Baker, not less than to her husband, belongs the glory of the discovery of the lake which all the world knows to-day as the Albert Nyanza.
"Thus," to quote an earlier passage in the same Times article, "amid many hardships and at the frequent risk of death at the hands of Arab slavers and hostile chiefs, Baker and his wife forged one of the most important links in the course of one of the world's most famous rivers."
After many further difficulties, the explorers found their way back to the coast, and thence to England. But their fame had gone before them, and everywhere they were welcomed. And though it was Baker who was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Geographical Society, all must have felt that the honour belonged, not less, to his courageous wife.
Mary Kingsley
It may be said that Lady Baker was not alone in her journeys. On the other hand, Mary Kingsley, another woman African traveller, led her own expeditions. Moreover, her travelling was often done through territory reeking with disease. At the age of twenty-nine she explored the Congo River, and visited Old Calabar, and in 1894 ascended the mountain of Mungo Mah Lobeh. After her return to England she lectured upon her adventures. One more journey, this time not of exploration, was she to make to the great African continent. In 1900 she volunteered as a nurse during the war, and went out to the Cape. Here she was employed to nurse sick Boer prisoners. But her work was done. Enteric fever struck her down and, before long, the traveller had set out upon her last journey.