European exploration of Africa 1840s, so that around the midpoint of the 19th century and the beginning of the colonial Scramble for Africa, the unexplored parts were now limited to what would turn out to be the Congo Basin and the African Great Lakes. This "Heart of Africa" remained one of the last remaining "blank spots" on world maps of the later 19th century (alongside the Arctic, Antarctic and the interior of the Amazon basin). It was left for 19th-century European explorers, including those searching for the famed sources of the Nile, notably John Hanning Speke, Sir Richard Burton, David Livingstone and Henry Morton
David Ingram (explorer) David Ingram (explorer) David Ingram (dates uncertain) was a 16th-century English sailor and explorer who claimed to have walked across the interior of the North American continent from Mexico to Nova Scotia in 1568. Ingram signed on with English privateer John Hawkins in 1567 to raid and trade along the coasts of Portuguese Africa and Spanish Mexico. In November 1567, he was marooned with some 100 of his shipmates near Tampico on the coast of Mexico, about 200 miles south of the present Texas/Mexico border. Ingram and two dozen of his party struck out northward into the interior to avoid