John Hanning Speke's African travel writing appeared just prior to the great scramble for Africa, when European expeditions, financed privately or by political and scientific institutions, began systematically probing and mapping the interior of a subcontinent that had, until then, remained a cipher for Europeans. Speke's achievement was that of being the first to identify Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile River, a geographical mystery that had puzzled commentators and explorers for several centuries. The particular position Speke occupies in the history of travel writing derives not only from the controversy that surrounded his discovery and from the peculiar circumstances under which his work was produced and received, but also from the way in which his work reflects nineteenth-century British perceptions of Africa and the role of the imperial explorer and adventurer.

John Hanning Speke was born at Orleigh Court, near Bideford in Devon, on 4 May...