Qualla: Lake Uniamési

Lake Uniamési: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1855 a map appeared in Europe showing a vast inland sea at the heart of Africa, big enough to swallow the Black Sea twice over, supposedly feeding the Nile, the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Benue in four directions. German missionaries on the Indian Ocean coast had never seen it. They had only heard about it from caravan traders who had walked there and back. Europeans called it the 'slug map' for the S-shape of the huge lake the missionaries drew, and it became one of the most influential geographical errors in African exploration. The lake didn't exist. But the map that showed it set in motion the expeditions that eventually revealed the three great lakes that actually do lie behind its fiction.

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Image: Public domain

Lake Uniamési: The Land They Never Saw

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit n., Public domain. In 1844 the Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Said, gave the German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf permission to establish a mission on the East African coast. Krapf arrived in Mombasa that March, was joined in 1846 by Johannes Rebmann, and in 1849 by Jakob Erhardt. The three men were c...

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Image: n. | Public domain

Lake Uniamési: A Map Drawn In November

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit n., Public domain. In November 1854 Erhardt and Rebmann put together the geography that had puzzled them for years. 'At one and the same moment,' Rebmann wrote, 'the problem flashed on both of us solved by the simple supposition that where geographical hypothesis had hitherto supposed an enormous m...

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Image: n. | Public domain

Lake Uniamési: The Slug Map Goes To London

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit n., Public domain. Sir Francis Galton, who had won the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1853, arranged for Erhardt's map to be printed in the society's Proceedings. From Paris the engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps - who would later build the Suez Canal - wrote to the Académie des Sciences in ...

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Image: n. | Public domain

Lake Uniamési: Three Lakes, Not One

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit n., Public domain. Burton and Speke reached Lake Tanganyika at Ujiji in March 1858. The actual year was 1858, not the typo sometimes repeated in older accounts. They learned the lake extended hundreds of miles south but was not, as the slug map had claimed, connected to Lake Nyasa. At Kazeh - now T...

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Image: n. | Public domain