Burton and Speke (novel) incompetent, unable even to learn how to use simple measuring devices, vital to serious exploration. Despite these obvious drawbacks however, it is Speke who eventually discovers Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile, due to Burton falling seriously ill with malaria and having to be left behind in an Arab trading camp. Here their mutual antipathy turns to bitter enmity when Speke, breaking his word to Burton, claims sole credit for the discovery. Unfortunately for Speke his lack of accurate readings and sloppy map making skills lead the scientific world to doubt his word. Speke dies from a self-inflicted
John Kirk (explorer) William Carnegie Kirk was author of "A British Garden Flora". The engineer, Alexander Carnegie Kirk, was John Kirk's elder brother. From 1858 to 1864 Kirk accompanied the explorer Dr David Livingstone on the Second Zambezi Expedition as a botanist and experienced his work to end the East African slave trade. He found Livingstone an inept leader and in 1862 wrote "I can come to no other conclusion than that Dr. Livingstone is out of his mind and a most unsafe leader"". In 1866 Livingstone’s began his next and final expedition, to find the source of the Nile, from Zanzibar. From