220 HISTOHY OF THE PROTECTOEATE TERRITORIES 



Grant obtain 'a C.B., and that, I believe, was in recognition of some 

 comparatively inconspicuons services which he rendered in connection witli 

 the Abyssinian Expedition.) 



After jNIuhammad All's conquest of the Egyptian Sudan and the 

 foundation of Khartum as its capital, the Austrian Government had 

 interested itself to some degree in the territories which might lie in that 

 direction as fields for European commerce and even colonisation. To 

 acquire information about the country it had encouraged, and to some 

 extent subsidised, the establishment of an Austrian Eoman Catholic 

 mission which should carry on a propaganda among the ISile Negroes, 

 with stations at Khartum and various places higher up the Nile. During 

 the 'fifties these missionaries had penetrated as far south as Gondokoro, 

 which is now the frontier post of the Uganda Protectorate. Petherick, an 

 enterprising Briton, had started an ivory-trading establishment at Khartum, 

 and in ihis sailing vessels had penetrated up the Bahr-al-Ghazal, and up 

 the White Nile as far as Gondokoro. x\n Italian traveller, Miani, had 

 even at this time gone beyond, and reported a story of the Nubian 

 slave-traders to the effect thai there was a great river flowing westwards 

 to the south of the Nile watershed. 



Petherick first brought to our notice the whale-headed stork ; and the 

 ivory-traders, whom he supplied with guns and ammunition to range far 

 and wide and shoot elephants, brought back from the Acholi people far to the 

 south of Gondokoro the story of womanish races addicted to the keeping 

 of pet dogs who dwelt beyond the naked Nile negroes. (It was supposed 

 by Speke that the Bantu races of Unyoro and Uganda were alluded to as 

 womanish because of their habit of scrupulously clothing themselves in long 

 garments of bark-cloth in contradistinction to the Acholi, who consider it 

 unmanly to drape male nudity. The Baganda until recent years prized 

 the domestic dog highly as a pet). It was the rapids of the Nile beyond 

 Gondokoro which, at the time of Baker, stopped European exploration at 

 that point. A Maltese ivory-trader named Debono, however, penetrated to 

 the south of the Nile rapids, and was the first European (though an 

 illiterate one) to reach the inner Bari and Latuka countries east of the 

 Nile, within the present Nile Province of the Uganda Protectorate. 



Sir Sam.uel Baker and his wife discovered the Albert Nyanza, which 

 they believed to be of very much greater length than it really is, decei^■ed 

 in this res])ect by the strongly marked indications to the south of the 

 Albertine Kift Valley. The plain of the Semliki, lying between the 

 Balega* heights on the west and the cloud-capped Ruwenzori range on 

 the east, appeared to them in its blue distance to be an indefinite 



* In Negro languages there is often little distinction between "1" and "r," "d" 

 and "1"; this root is indifferently iironounced " -lega " or " -rega." 



