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
John Hanning Speke an appendix in his own book on his travels to Harrar. It seemed unlikely that the two would join again and Burton believed that he would not lead an expedition to the interior of Africa, his fervent hope, after this failed journey. In 1856, Speke and Burton went to East Africa to find the Great Lakes, which were rumored to exist in the center of the continent. It was hoped that the expedition would locate the source of the Nile. The journey, which started from Zanzibar Island in June 1857, was extremely strenuous and both men fell ill from a