Lake Victoria Lake Victoria Lake Victoria (' in Luo; ' in Uganda; "" in Kinyarwanda and some Bantu languages) is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer John Hanning Speke, the first Briton to document it. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River. With a surface area of approximately , Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropical lake, and the world's second largest fresh water lake by surface area after Lake Superior in North
Unyamwezi would be held at Tabora, then sent down to the coast in small groups for onward shipment. The first Europeans to reach the region were Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, who had been sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and the British government to investigate the great Lake Uniamési said by German missionaries to lie in the region and determine if it was the source of the Nile. Burton and Speke reached Zanzibar on 20 December 1857, visited Johannes Rebmann (who had reported the lake) at his Kisuludini mission station, and paid a visit to Fuga, capital of