Ripon Falls Ripon Falls Ripon Falls at the northern end of Lake Victoria in Uganda was formerly considered the source of the river Nile. In 1862–3 John Hanning Speke was the first European to follow the course of the Nile downstream after discovering the falls that his intuition had marked as the source of the Nile. The water from Ripon Falls falls into a narrow opening and that is where some people believe the River Nile starts. He named the falls after George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon. The Falls functioned as a natural outlet for Lake Victoria, until in 1954 the
John Hanning Speke tried to remove it with a knife. Unable to rent the larger vessel from the Arab, Speke returned. The pair were unable to explore Lake Tanganyika properly and they initially misunderstood that a river flowed out of it from the north side. A few weeks later Sidi Mubarak Bombay confirmed via locals that the river flowed into the lake; however, since neither man actually saw this river, this remained a source of speculation. They had also heard of a second lake to the north-east, and in May 1858, they decided to explore it on the way back to the coast.