John Hanning Speke of the way. Once Speke and Burton were back on the coast they went by ship to Zanzibar and then traveled to Aden. When back at the coast Burton had written a letter to Norton Shaw of the Royal Geographical Society (which had partially sponsored the journey) in which Burton enclosed a map of Lake Victoria made by Speke and wrote "there are grave reasons for believing it (the map) to be the source of the principal feeder of the White Nile." Once in Aden, Burton was not granted a medical certificate to travel and thus Speke left on HMS
John Hanning Speke it was vast and they only could get small canoes from the locals. Burton was too ill to journey and thus Speke crossed the lake with a small crew and some canoes to try to rent a larger vessel from an Arab who, they were told, had a large boat and lived on the west side of the lake. (Lake Tanganyika is over 400 miles long on the north-south axis but only about 30 miles wide.) During this trip Speke, marooned on an island, suffered severely when he became temporarily deaf after a beetle crawled into his ear and he