Chapter V, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 9 page 6

From the mysterious central lands of Africa information of the most interesting character came this year to England, being communicated by the enterprising travellers Captain Speke and Captain Grant, who landed at Southampton on the 17th June, and five days afterwards received a public welcome at a special meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. Starting from Zanzibar, and penetrating the country in a north-westerly direction, Captain Speke had, though with incredible difficulty, and through the exertion of wonderful patience and adroitness in bribing, coaxing, mystifying, or browbeating the native rulers whose kingdoms he traversed, reached the shore of a vast lake, to which he gave the name of Victoria Nyanza, and seen the White Nile flowing out at its northern end, in the direction of Gondokoro. Captain Speke too hastily assumed that he had found the true source of the Nile in the Victoria Nyanza, just as, nearly a hundred years ago, Bruce was convinced that he stood at the fountain head of the great river, when he had merely traced up the lesser current of the Blue Nile. We now know that the Nile runs out of another large lake, the Albert Nyanza of Sir Samuel Baker, into the Victoria Nyanza; and the true source of the Nile is to this day wrapped in mystery, and will remain so till the entire hydrographie basin of the Albert Nyanza has been explored, or else unless the river discovered by Livingstone (which most geographers suspected to be a branch of the Congo) shall be proved to be really identical with the Nile. Captain Speke, though one of the best hearted of men, was rather too much disposed to self-assertion and the magnifying of his own discoveries; and this led to unpleasant controversy between him and other African explorers, such as Captain Burton. A day had been fixed, in the autumn of 1864, for a discussion between him and Burton on the question of the Nile sources, before a meeting of the British Association at Bath, when a sudden and lamentable accident put a period to the explorer's career. He was shooting in Neston Park, in Wiltshire; and from the posture in which the body was found, he appeared to have been getting over a low stone wall, when by some mischance his gun exploded while the muzzle was pointed at his breast. The charge entering his body passed completely through, severing the main arteries of the chest, lacerating the lungs, and passing- close to the heart. Death ensued in a few minutes.