John Hanning Speke John Hanning Speke John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864) was an English explorer and officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa. He is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile and was the first European to reach Lake Victoria. He is also known for propounding the Hamitic hypothesis in 1863, in which he supposed that the Tutsi ethnic group were descendants of the biblical figure Ham, and had lighter skin and more Hamitic features than the Bantu-featured Hutu over whom they ruled. Speke was born on
Jakob Erhardt then in the "Church Missionary intelligencer" in 1856. The map was reproduced with commentary in other publications. The reports of snow on mounts Kilimanjaro and Kenya, near to the equator, caused considerable controversy. The map caused the British government and the Royal Geographical Society to hire Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke to investigate the great lake, or lakes, and determine if they were the source of the Nile. The map came to be known as the "slug map" from the shape of the Uniamesi or Niassa inland sea. Burton called it the Mombas Mission Map. Erhardt worked in