The Search for the White Nile's Source: Two Explorers Who Failed

Abstract

The story OF the search for the source of the White Nile was brought to an end by t discoveries of Speke and Grant in 1862. T e failures?the men who were turned back or who died on the way or who failed through cowardice or incompetence ?got less publicity; they paid in silence the price of failure. Two of these explorers, certainly no cowards, died in the Sudan in circumstances which have never been explained: Captain Robert James Gordon, r.n., and an ensign of the Bengal Army, Henry Pyke Welford. There was a third, John Ledyard, whose attempt to uncover the secret of the Nile has already been told in the * Dictionary of American Biography,' but this young man from Connecticut only got as far as Cairo where he died in 1789 when he was on the point of joining a caravan bound for Sennar. Gordon was born at Everton in Nottinghamshire, the third son of an infantry captain, and entered the Royal Navy as a volunteer in 1798, the year of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt. After a brilliant career in the naval campaigns against the French (he was twice shipwrecked and once escaped as a prisoner of war from France) he retired from the Royal Navy in 1815 with the rank of captain.1 The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inner Parts of Africa, briefly known as the African Association of London, which had employed Ledyard, now engaged Gordon who left England, probably at the beginning of 1822, and arrived in Cairo. From here news of the explorer's movements reached London: