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 Hanning Speke highlands of today's Rwanda and Burundi into the Lake across the Kagera Region of today's Tanzania. Much of Speke's "Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile" is a description of the physical features of Africa's races, in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures." Living alongside the negroes, Speke found a "superior race" of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of the natives" due to their "fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssinia" –; that is, Ethiopia. This