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John Hanning Speke was one of the great Victorian explorers and his most famous achievement was the discovery in 1862 of the main source of the White Nile in Lake Victoria Nyanza. Born in 1827, he joined the Indian Army at the age of seventeen, and after serving for ten years he joined Sir Richard Burton's abortive expedition to Somaliland.

After a military interlude in the Crimea, Speke joined Burton's second Central African expedition in the winter of 1856, twice crossed Lake Tanganyika by canoe and finally pressed on to the Ukerewe Lake which he thought was the source of the Nile; Burton was sceptical.

Speke's courage, perseverance and toughness were heroic and his instinct for wild life and wild country remarkable.

In 1860 Speke was put in charge of a new expedition and finally penetrated to the place where the Nile flows out of Lake Victoria Nyanza.

First published in 1971, Alexander Maitland's biography remains the only full-length study of Speke.

Explorers and travellers have always been attracted by the lure of the unknown. By traversing and mapping our planet, they have played a vital role in mankind's development. For almost two hundred years, the Royal Geographical Society has recognised their achievements by awarding its prestigious gold medals to those who have contributed most to our knowledge of the world. Taking us on a journey across mountains and deserts, oceans and seas, Exploring the World tells the stories of more than eighty of these extraordinary men and women. Some, such as David Livingstone, Scott of the Antarctic and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, are well known; whilst others, such as William Chandless and Ney Elias, are today less familiar. Some dreamed of being the first to sight a lake or a river; others sighted some of the world's greatest natural features by chance. Some were naturalists, anthropologists or mountaineers; others went in search of explorers who had vanished without trace, or had been shipwrecked or marooned. Filled with epic tales of endurance and perseverance, Exploring the World celebrates a group of exceptional individuals possessed of indomitable courage, boundless determination and adventurous spirit. It portrays a variety of fascinating lives driven by curiosity, wanderlust and the pursuit of knowledge - and, in doing so, provides a unique overview of two centuries of exploration.

Explorers and travellers have always been attracted by the lure of the unknown. By traversing and mapping our planet, they have played a vital role in mankind's development. For almost two hundred years, the Royal Geographical Society has recognised their achievements by awarding its prestigious gold medals to those who have contributed most to our knowledge of the world. Taking us on a journey across mountains and deserts, oceans and seas, Exploring the World tells the stories of more than eighty of these extraordinary men and women. Some, such as David Livingstone, Scott of the Antarctic and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, are well known; whilst others, such as William Chandless and Ney Elias, are today less familiar. Some dreamed of being the first to sight a lake or a river; others sighted some of the world's greatest natural features by chance. Some were naturalists, anthropologists or mountaineers; others went in search of explorers who had vanished without trace, or had been shipwrecked or marooned. Filled with epic tales of endurance and perseverance, Exploring the World celebrates a group of exceptional individuals possessed of indomitable courage, boundless determination and adventurous spirit. It portrays a variety of fascinating lives driven by curiosity, wanderlust and the pursuit of knowledge - and, in doing so, provides a unique overview of two centuries of exploration.

For nearly two hundred years the Society has been awarding gold medals to those individuals who have contributed most to our geographical knowledge. Winners of the Founder's and Patron's medals now number around three hundred individuals, and the roll-call of names is a veritable Who's Who of exploration. Telling their stories, of the many and varied ways in which they have helped 'fill in the maps', is nothing less than a history of exploration itself. The book begins with the Quest for the Niger, and the surprising fact that when Burton began his journey the maps he used 'had scarcely advanced beyond those drawn by Ptolemy, Pliny and Herodotus'. The quest to discover and map Africa has several sections. This first is profiles of the early African explorers. Among them is Heinrich Barth, who survived a crossing of the Sahara (his companions did not), and is thought to be the greatest of the African explorers. Other sections are The Lake Regions and the Source of the Nile; Travel and Adventure in East and South-East Africa; and Desert and Forest. Each section describes 19th- and 20th-century expeditions. In Part Two we meet the tough and resolute Fathers of Australian Exploration: Edward John Eyre, and Charles Sturt. In Part Three, titled North America and the Arctic, Maitland turns to the enduring quest to find the North-West Passage and to find the explorers who became lost, shipwrecked and marooned in the course of their expeditions. Part Four is devoted to the exploration of South America., and it gives tribute to the work of the geographer, explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and his friend Bonpland, who mapped Central and South America in the early 19th century. Part Five describes the exploration of the enormous area of Asia, Arabia and the Middle East that since the 1830s has produced more RGS medallists than any other, except the Arctic and Antarctic. Part Six is devoted to Europe; Seven to Antarctica; and VIII to the Oceans. This section contains the stories of Captain Cook and the early navigators; the voyage of Thor Heyerdahl and the balsa-wood Kon-tiki from Peru to Raroia in French Polynesia; the underwater exploration of Jacques Cousteau, and the ocean adventurers who have made long journeys across and through the seas, on the clipper routes and around the shores of the islands off the coast of Chile. It concludes with an appreciation of the work of the chief scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Sylvia Alice Earle. Discovering the World marvels at the indomitable courage, determination and perceptive insights of an exceptional group of men and women; and aims to investigate and re-tell - or, in some instances, tell for the first time - their extraordinary stories.

An illustrated look at two early-twentieth-century explorers whose work took them to deserts and mountain peaks, coinciding with the rise of modern photography along the way. Vittorio Sella (1859-1943) was the foremost mountaineering photographer of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, producing widely celebrated images of K2 and other famed peaks. Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) was a writer, photographer, and explorer, whose greatest journey took him across the Rub' al Khali, a vast desert encompassing much of the Arabian Peninsula. In his new book, Roger Hartl considers these two far-flung figures side by side, telling the stories of two influential explorers through their bibliographic and photographic work, and creating a tapestry where exploration, writing, and image-making all conjoin. As Hartl shows in this richly illustrated volume, the triumphs of Sella and Thesiger coincided with the end of a golden age of geographical exploration and with the rise of photography as we know it today.

At the age of 23, three years after attending the coronation of Haile Selassie, Thesiger made his first expedition into the country of the murderous Danakil tribe. Since then he has traversed the Empty Quarter twice, spending five years among the Bedu, followed by several years living as no Westerner had in the strange world of the Marshmen of Iraq.

Later he made many mountain journeys in the awesome ranges of the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, Ladakh and Chitral. After these varied and often dangerous adventures among fast-disappearing cultures, Thesiger settled down to spend over twenty years living mostly among the pastoral Samburu in Northern Kenya, until 1994 when he finally returned to England permanently.

These experiences have, over the years, provided rich material for writings which express a romantic but austere vision, and for exquisite photographs which capture the spirit of a bygone era. This book contains extracts from the eight books Thesiger published to great acclaim between 1959 and 1998, most notably Arabian Sands, Marsh Arabs and The Life of My Choice.