The son of a merchant, Baker lived on Mauritius from 1843 to 1845 and Ceylon from 1846 to 1855. He then travelled to the Near East during 1856 to 1860. In 1861, he went to Africa and established an expedition in 1863 to find the source of the Nile based on maps supplied by John Hanning Speke. In 1864, he reached Lake Albert, which he named Albert Nyanza, and determined that this was the source of the Nile. Returning to England in 1865, he was knighted in 1866.
Baker returned to Africa in 1869 at the request of Isma-il Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, to lead an expedition to quell the slave trade in the Nile equatorial regions. He was rewarded with the position of governor-general of these territories; a post he held for four years. His many works included The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon (1854), The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867) and Cyprus As I Saw It in 1879. |
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