Nile game such as buffalo. Lake Victoria was first sighted by Europeans in 1858 when the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore while traveling with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate the great lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this "vast expanse of open water" for the first time, Speke named the lake after the then Queen of the United Kingdom. Burton, recovering from illness and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was outraged that Speke claimed to have proved his discovery to be the true
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