BAKER, SIR SAMUEL WHITE English explorer, was born in London, June 8, 1821, the son of a West India merchant. He was educated partly in England and partly in Germany. He spent two years in Mauritius (1844-46) and then went to Ceylon, where he founded an agricultural settlement at Nuwara Eliya, a mountain health-resort. He introduced emi grants from England and imported choice breeds of cattle. Dur ing his residence in Ceylon he published The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1853), and two years later Eight Years' til'anderings in Ceylon (1855). After a journey to Constantinople and the Crimea in 1856, he undertook the supervision of the construction of a railway across the Dobruja, connecting the Danube with the Black Sea. In March 1861 he started upon his first tour of ex ploration in central Africa, "to discover the sources of the Nile, with the hope of meeting the East African expedition under Cap tains Speke and Grant somewhere about the Victoria Lake." After a year spent on the Sudan-Abyssinian border, during which time he learnt Arabic, explored the Atbara and other Nile tributaries, and proved that the Nile sediment came from Abyssinia, he arrived at Khartum, leaving that city in Dec. 1862 to follow up the course of the White Nile. Two months later at Gondokoro he met Speke and Grant, who, after discovering the source of the Nile, were fol lowing the river to Egypt. Their success made him fear that there was nothing left for his own expedition to accomplish; but the two explorers generously gave him information which enabled him, after separating from them, to discover the Albert Nyanza, of the existence of which credible assurance had already been given to Speke and Grant. Baker first sighted the lake on March 14, 1864. After some time spent in the exploration of the neighbour hood, during which Baker demonstrated that the Nile flowed through the Albert Nyanza—of the size of which he had formed an exaggerated idea—he started upon his return journey, and reached Khartum after many checks in May 1865. In the following Octo ber he returned to England with his wife, a Hungarian lady nee Florence von Sass, who had accompanied him throughout the whole of the perilous and arduous journey. On his return the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its gold medal, and a similar distinction was bestowed on him by the Paris Geographical Society. In Aug. 1866 he was knighted. In the same year he published The Albert N'yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, and Ex plorations of the Nile Sources, and in 1867 The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, both books quickly going through several editions. In 1868 he published a popular story called Cast up by the Sea. In 1869 he attended the prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII., in a tour through Egypt. In the same year, at the request of the khedive Ismail, Baker undertook the command of a military expedition to the equatorial regions of the Nile, with the object of suppressing the slave-trade there and opening the way to corn merce and civilization. Before starting from Cairo with a force of 1,700 Egyptian troops—many. of them discharged convicts—he was given the rank of pasha and major-general in the Ottoman army. Lady Baker, as before, accompanied him. The khedive appointed him governor-general of the new territory for four years at a salary of I10,000 a year, and at the expiration of that time Baker returned to Cairo, leaving his work to be carried on by the new governor, Colonel Charles George Gordon. He had to con tend with innumerable difficulties—the blocking of the river by Budd, the bitter hostility of officials interested in the slave-trade, the armed opposition of the natives—but he succeeded in planting in the new territory the foundations upon which others could build up an administration. He returned to England with his wife in 18i4, and in the following year purchased the estate of Sand ford Orleigh in south Devon, where he made his home for the rest of his life. He published his narrative of the central African ex pedition under the title of Ismailia (18i4). Cyprus as I saw it in 1879 was the result of a visit to that island. He spent several winters in Egypt, and travelled in India, the Rocky Mountains, and Japan in search of big game, publishing in 1890 Wild Beasts and their Ways.
See, besides his own writings, Sir Samuel Baker, a Memoir, by T. Douglas Murray and A. Silva White (1895).