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Samuel Baker

 
Art Encyclopedia: Sir Herbert Baker
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(b Cobham, Kent, 9 June 1862; d Cobham, 4 Feb 1946). English architect and writer, also active in South Africa and India. He was articled to a cousin, Arthur Baker, a former assistant of George Gilbert Scott I, in 1879 and attended classes at the Architectural Association and Royal Academy Schools before joining the office of George & Peto in London (1882), where he first met and befriended Edwin Lutyens. Baker set up in independent practice in 1890 but moved to South Africa in 1892 to join his brother Lionel Baker. In Cape Town he met Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, who directed his attention to the traditional European Cape Dutch architecture of the province and asked him to rebuild his house Groote Schuur (1893, 1897), now the official residence of South Africa's prime ministers. Applying the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement to local conditions, Baker produced a series of houses, both in the Cape Province and the Transvaal, which were instrumental in the revival of Cape Dutch architecture. In 1899 he entered into partnership in Cape Town with FRANCIS MASEY, who was involved with most of his buildings in the Cape. Rhodes then sent Baker on a Mediterranean tour (1899-1900) to study the monuments of Greek and Roman antiquity as the basis for creating an imperial British architecture. This bore fruit in Baker's Kimberley Siege Memorial (1904) and Rhodes Memorial (1905-8), Cape Town, a Hellenistic Doric stoa, on the slopes of Table Mountain, as well as several neo-classical commercial buildings in Cape Town. In 1902 he moved to Johannesburg, establishing partnerships first with Ernest Willmott Sloper (1871-1916) and then with Francis Fleming (1875-1950); a third office in Bloemfontein was run by F. K. KENDALL, who took over the Cape Town practice as Baker's partner (1910-18) after Masey's departure.

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Biography: Sir Samuel White Baker
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Sir Samuel White Baker (1821-1893) was an English explorer, author, and administrator who explored the Upper Nile and discovered Lake Albert. He also sought to suppress the slave trade in the southern Sudan.

Samuel Baker was born in London on June 8, 1821. He was a large man with prodigious energy and great bravery and determination. A firm believer in the economic potential of the tropics, he went to manage his family's plantations in Mauritius in 1844 and later established his own estates in Ceylon. The plantations in Ceylon prospered, and he returned to England with his family. After his first wife, Henrietta, died in 1855, Baker traveled in the Crimea, Asia Minor, and the Balkans. In 1860 he married Florence Ninian von Sass, a young and beautiful Hungarian, and the following year he arrived in Cairo determined to seek the source of the River Nile.

Traveling up the Nile to Berber, Baker spent a year wandering along the Atbara River and the Blue Nile, hunting and learning Arabic before returning to Khartoum, from which he and his wife launched an expedition up the White Nile in December 1862. Arriving at Gondokoro, the Bakers met the British explorers John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant, who had reached Lake Victoria and the Nile from the East African coast. In 1863-1864 Baker and his wife discovered and explored the eastern shore of Lake Albert, visited Kamrasi, the ruler of Bunyoro, and after many delays returned to London, where Baker wrote an extremely popular book about his explorations and the horrors of the Sudanese slave trade.

In the spring of 1869 Baker was approached by Ismail, the khedive of Egypt, to lead an Egyptian expedition to the Upper Nile to extend Egyptian control to Lake Victoria, to claim the territory for Egypt, and to end the slave trade. Baker was consequently appointed governor general of Equatoria Province and sailed up the Nile with a large expedition of 1200 troops, the most expensive expedition to penetrate Africa.

Baker had agreed to serve for 4 years. Unfortunately, the first year was wasted breaking through the great swamps of the Nile, whose sudd formations provide an almost impenetrable barrier to navigation. Baker reached Gondokoro in 1870 and spent the second year organizing his men and establishing stations in Equatoria.

Frustrated at every turn, he began to employ increasing force to pacify the people and acquire supplies for his troops and followers. Although these raids alienated important tribes, Baker continued to push south into Bunyoro in 1872, where he was again forced to fight, this time against Kabarega, who had succeeded Kamrasi as ruler. Like most African leaders who had to deal with Baker and his forces, Kabarega refused to trust the intruders, and Baker possessed neither the tact nor the tolerance to allay his fears.

Nevertheless, when Baker retired to England and fame and fortune in 1873, he had struck the first blow against the Nilotic slave trade and had laid the foundations for colonial rule in the southern Sudan. He died in Devonshire on Dec. 30, 1893.

Further Reading

Dorothy Middleton, Baker of the Nile (1949), is a full-length biography. Also useful for information on Baker are Emile Ludwig, The Nile: The Life-Story of a River (1935; trans. 1937), and Alan Moorehead, The White Nile (1961).

Architecture and Landscaping: Sir Herbert Baker
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(1862–1946)

Kent-born architect who worked for Ernest George and Harold Peto (1882–7) before opening his own office and then emigrating to Cape Colony, South Africa. He quickly became a protégé of Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) and Lord Milner (1854–1925), under whose aegis he began to create a distinctive architecture for British South Africa, drawing together English vernacular elements, aspects of the Arts-and-Crafts movement, Dutch Colonial architecture, Baroque architecture of the Wren Revival, and much else. He adapted his eclectic style for later buildings in Rhodesia, Kenya, India, and England. For Rhodes he built the house known as Groote Schuur, Rondebosch (1893–8), in which Dutch-Colonial elements were well to the fore, followed by Government Buildings in Bloemfontein, and the masterly Union Buildings, Pretoria (1909–13), with twin cupolas derived from Wren's work at Greenwich. Baker was then appointed joint architect (with Lutyens) for the design of the Imperial Capital of New Delhi, and designed (from 1913) the north and south Secretariat Blocks as well as the circular Legislative Building. At New Delhi he introduced Indian architectural features such as chattris, and successfully combined Western and Eastern elements. Baker set up an office in London in 1912, and in 1917 he was appointed Principal Architect to the Imperial War Graves Commission, in which capacity he encouraged design of the highest calibre. Thereafter, he was responsible for some of the most grandiose developments in London, including the enormous Bank of England works (1921–39) which destroyed Soane's building (apart from the screen-wall), India House (1925), and South Africa House (1930–5) in Trafalgar Square. These buildings cannot really be described as wholly successful, for Baker seems to have been happier using Classicism with a strong dose of Arts-and-Crafts influence: in this respect his beautifully articulated war-memorial cloister at Winchester College, Hants. (1922–5), demonstrates a sensitivity not so apparent in his grander buildings.

Bibliography

  • H. Baker (1934, 1944)
  • A.S.Gray (1985)
  • Greig (1970)
  • Irving (1981)
  • Keath (1992)
  • Stamp (1977)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Sir Samuel White Baker
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Baker, Sir Samuel White, 1821-93, English explorer in Africa. He explored the Nile tributaries in Ethiopia in 1861-62. Going up the Nile from Cairo, he reached Gondokoro in 1863. He continued his journey southward in spite of the opposition of Arab slave traders and visited Lake Albert (Albert Nyanza) on Mar. 14, 1864. In 1869, with the authority of the khedive of Egypt, he returned to the region and, creating an administration in the Lado Enclave, he suppressed the slave trade and opened up the lake areas to commerce.
Wikipedia: Samuel Baker
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Sir Samuel White Baker
(8 June 1821 - 30 December 1893)
Sir-Baker.jpg
Sir Samuel White Baker
Nickname The White Pasha
Place of birth EnglandLondon, England
Place of death England His Sandford Orleigh Estate in Newton Abott, Devonshire, England. Buried: Brompton Cemetery, London.
Allegiance United Kingdom British Empire, Ottoman Empire Ottoman Empire's Egypt.
Rank Explorer, British Governor-General. Also Pasha, Major-General of Ottoman Empire.
Unit The Ottoman-Egyptian Expeditionary Corp (some 1700 strong)
Commands held Ottoman-Egyptian Campaign in Sudan, 1869
Battles/wars Various on Upper Nile
Awards Fellow of the Royal Society, Gold Medal and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, Grande Medaille d'Or de la Société de Géographie de Paris. Governor-General of Equatoria (1869-1873). President of the Devonshire Association (1878).
Relations Lady Florence (Mary Barbara) White Baker, wife.
Other work African and Asian big game hunter, explorer, writer, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society

Sir Samuel White Baker, KCB, FRS, FRGS (b. 8 June 1821 - † 30 December 1893) was a British explorer, officer, naturalist, big game hunter, engineer, writer and abolitionist. He also held the titles of Pasha and Major-General in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. He served as the Governor-General of the Equatorial Nile Basin (today's Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda) between Apr. 1869 - Aug. 1873, which he established as the Province of Equatoria. He is mostly remembered as the discoverer of Lake Albert, as an explorer of the Nile and interior of central Africa, and for his exploits as a big game hunter in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Baker wrote a considerable number of books and published articles. He was a friend of King Edward, who as Prince of Wales, visited Baker with Queen Alexandra in Egypt. Other friendships were with explorers Henry Morton Stanley, Roderick Murchison, John H. Speke and James A. Grant, with the ruler of Egypt Pasha Ismail The Magnificent, Major-General Charles George Gordon and Maharaja Duleep Singh.

Contents

Family and early biography

Samuel White Baker was born on June 8, 1821 in London as the offspring of a wealthy commercial family. His father, Samuel Baker Sr., was a sugar merchant, banker and ship owner from Thorngrove, Worcestershire with mercantile ties in the West Indies (Caribbean). His younger brother, Col. Valentine Baker (1827-1828), known as Baker Pasha, was initially a British hero of the African Cape Colony, the Crimean War, Ceylon and the Balkans, later dishonored by a civilian scandal, who had successfully sought fame in the Ottoman Empire, notably the Russian-Turkish War in the Caucasus and the War of Sudan from Egypt. His other siblings were: James, John, Mary "Min" and Ann Baker.[1]

The young Samuel Baker was educated at a private school at Rottingdean, at the College School, Gloucester (1833-1835), and privately at Tottenham (1838-1840), before completing his studies in Frankfurt, Germany in 1841. He studied and graduated MA as Civil Engineer. While commissioned, at Constanta, Romania, where, as Royal Superintendent, he designed and planned railways, bridges and other structures corridoring across the Dobrogea region, from the Danube to the Black Sea.

On 3 August 1843 he married his first wife, Henrietta Biddulph Martin, daughter of the rector of Maisemore, Gloucestershire. Together, they had seven children: Agnes, Charles Martin, Constance, Edith, Ethel, Jane & John Lindsay Sloan.[1] His brother married Henrietta's sister and after a double wedding, the four moved to Mauritius, overseeing the family's plantation. After two years in Mauritius the desire for travel took them in 1846 to Ceylon, where in the following year he founded an agricultural settlement at Nuwara Eliya, a mountain health-resort.

Aided by his family, he brought emigrants from England, together with choice breeds of cattle, and before long the new settlement was a success. During his residence in Ceylon he wrote and published The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1853) and two years later Eight Years' Wanderings in Ceylon (1855). After twelve years of marriage, his wife, Henrietta, died of typhoid fever in 1855, leaving Samuel a widower at the age thirty-four. His two sons and one daughter also died young and Baker left his four surviving daughters in the care of his unmarried sister.

After a journey to Constantinople and the Crimea in 1856, he went to Constanta, Romania and acted as Royal Superintendent for the construction of a railway and bridges across the Dobrogea, connecting the Danube with the Black Sea. After its completion he spent some months on a tour of south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor.

Lady Florence Baker and East Europe experience

Lady Florence Baker (1841-1916).

While Baker was visiting the Duke of Atholl on his shooting estate in Scotland, he befriended Maharaja Duleep Singh and in 1858-1859, the two partnered an extensive hunting trip in central Europe and the Balkans, via Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. On the last part of the voyage, Baker and the Maharajah, hired a wooden boat in Budapest, which was eventually abandoned on the frozen Danube. The two continued into Vidin where, to amuse the Maharajah, Baker went to the Vidin slave market. There, Baker fell in love with a white slave girl, destined for the Ottoman Pasha of Vidin. He was outbid by the Pasha but bribed the girl's attendants and ran away in a carriage together and eventually she became his wife and accompanied him everywhere he journeyed.

Before she became Lady Florence Baker, she was the daughter of a Hungarian Szekely officer in Transylvania. She was born Aug 6, 1841 in Nagyenyed, Austro-Hungary (today Aiud, Romania) and was baptised Barbara Maria. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 most of her family was killed, and eventually her wounded father got them to a refugee camp in Vidin, Bulgaria, where she was stolen and sold to an Armenian slave merchant, who groomed her for the Harem. From then on she never saw her father again.

Baker and the girl fled to Bucharest and remained in Romania, Baker applying for the position of British Consul there but he was refused. In Constanta, he acted as the Royal Superintendent for the construction of a railway and bridges across the Dobrogea, connecting the Danube with the Black Sea. After its completion he spent some months on a tour in south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor. The new consul issued Baker's companion with a British passport under the name Florence Barbara Maria Finnian, although she was British neither by birth nor yet by marriage. She was affectionately called "Flooey" by Baker and nicknamed Anyadwe or Daughter of the Moon in what is now northern Uganda by the Luo-speaking Acholi natives, in esteem for her long blonde hair.

Florence refused to stay home, instead following her husband in his travels. She spoke English, German, Hungarian, Romanian and Arabic, rode camels, mules and horses and carried pistols when in the wilds. In March 11, 1916, she died, 19 years after her husband, aged 74, and like him she died at their estate in Sandford Orleigh, Newton Abbot, Devonshire.

Career

In March 1861 he started upon his first tour of exploration in central Africa. This, in his own words, was undertaken "to discover the sources of the river Nile, with the hope of meeting the East African expedition under Captains Speke and Grant somewhere about the Victoria Lake." After a year spent on the Sudan-Abyssinian border, during which time he learned Arabic, explored the Atbara river and other Nile tributaries, and proved that the Nile sediment came from Abyssinia, he arrived at Khartoum, leaving that city in December 1862 to follow up the course of the White Nile.

Two months later at Gondokoro he met Speke and Grant, who, after discovering the source of the Nile, were following the river to Egypt. Their success made him fear that there was nothing left for his own expedition to accomplish; but the two explorers gave him information which enabled him, after separating from them, to achieve the discovery of Albert Nyanza (Lake Albert), of whose existence credible assurance had already been given to Speke and Grant. Baker first sighted the lake on March 14, 1864. After some time spent in the exploration of the neighbourhood, Baker demonstrated that the Nile flowed through the Albert Nyanza. He formed an exaggerated idea of the relative importance of the Albert and Victoria lake sources in contributing to the Nile flow rate. Although he believed them to be near equal, Albert Nyanza sources add only ~15% to the Nile flow at this point, the remainder provided primarily by outflow from Lake Victoria[2]. He started upon his return journey, and reached Khartoum, after many checks, in May 1865.

In the following October Baker returned to England with his wife, who had accompanied him throughout the dangerous and difficult journeys in Africa. In recognition of the achievements, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its gold medal, and a similar distinction was bestowed on him by the Paris Geographical Society. In August 1866 he was knighted. In the same year he published The Albert N'yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, and Explorations of the Nile Sources, and in 1867 The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, both books quickly going through several editions. In 1868 he published a popular story called Cast up by the Sea. In 1869 he travelled with King Edward VII (who was the Prince of Wales at that time) through Egypt.

Baker never received quite the same level of acclamation granted to other contemporary British explorers of Africa. Queen Victoria, in particular avoided meeting Baker because of the irregular way in which he acquired Florence, not to mention the fact that during the years of their mutual travels, the couple were not actually married. A court case involving his brother Valentine Baker (following his indecent assault of a woman on a train) also harmed Samuel Baker’s chances of wider acceptance by the Victorian establishment.

In 1869, at the request of the khedive Ismail, Baker led a military expedition to the equatorial regions of the Nile, with the object of suppressing the slave-trade there and opening the way to commerce and civilization. Before starting from Cairo with a force of 1700 Egyptian troops - many of them discharged convicts - he was given the rank of pasha and major-general in the Ottoman army. Lady Baker, as before, accompanied him. The khedive appointed him Governor-General of the new territory of Equatoria for four years at a salary of £10,000 a year; and it was not until the expiration of that time that Baker returned to Cairo, leaving his work to be carried on by the new governor, Colonel Charles George Gordon.

He had to contend with innumerable difficulties - the blocking of the river in the Sudd, the hostility of officials interested in the slave-trade, the armed opposition of the natives - but he succeeded in planting in the new territory the foundations upon which others could build up an administration.

Later life

He published his narrative of the central African expedition under the title of Ismailia (1874). Cyprus as I saw it in 1879 was the result of a visit to that island. He spent several winters in Egypt, and traveled in India, the Rocky Mountains and Japan in search of big game, publishing in 1890 Wild Beasts and their Ways.

He kept up a correspondence with men of all shades of opinion upon Egyptian affairs, strongly opposing the abandonment of the Sudan by the British Empire and subsequently urging its reconquest. Next to these, questions of maritime defence and strategy chiefly attracted him in his later years.

In November 1874 he purchased the Sandford Orley estate in Newton Abbot, Devonshire, England where he also died after a heart attack, at the age of seventy-one, on December 30, 1893. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London.

Hunting authority

Explorer and big game hunter Samuel Baker chased by an elephant.

Samuel Baker lived as a reputed Victorian Nimrod and was a milestone in the history of modern hunting through his works and deeds. He was proud of his British heritage and was an advocate of the virtues of his nation, while he non-biased of others and a fighter against slavery.

Sir Samuel Baker in hunting attire with trophies of rhino and buffalo.

An acclaimed sportsman, he likely started hunting in the Scottish Highlands; his skills were renowned, and he once gave a demonstration to friends in Scotland of how he could, with dogs, successfully hunt down a stag armed only with a knife, he did the same with the large boars in the jungles of Ceylon. He hunted consistently until his last years, in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.

He forged his skills chasing asian elephants and sambar in Ceylon, a place where Rowland Ward's records account him for some of world largest wild boar trophies. He traveled looking for sport in Asia Minor in 1860, in Scotland in 1869 for red stag, in the Rocky Mountains in 1881 downing elk, grizzly and buffalo. In 1886 he was in the French Alps, looking for brown bear and many times in India in 1885 and 1887-1889 pursuing tigers and blackbuck. His most memorable cynegetic exploits remained the episodes in Africa and Ceylon, where he returned again towards the end of his life in 1887. He also visited for sport, Transylvania for bears, Serbia for wild boars, Hungary for deer, Cyprus in 1879, China and Japan.

He left a wealth of study in the science of hunting firearms and ballistics, and accounts as one of the world's few hunters that used the two bore rifle, the world's largest gun caliber for the purpose. He described in great detail his observations of the animal world, account in which, his book Wild Beasts And Their Ways (1890) ranks highest.

In 1863, the German zoologist Theodor von Heuglin, named a subspecie of Roan antelope in his honor: Hippotragus e. bakeri or Baker’s antelope. In Sri Lanka the Baker's Falls bears his name, and in 1906 Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi while in Ruwenzori, Uganda named Mount Baker in his honour.

Bibliography

Complete works of Sir Samuel White Baker
  • The Rifle And Hound In Ceylon. (1853)
  • Eight Years' Wanderings In Ceylon. (1855)
  • The Albert N'Yanza Great Basin Of The Nile; And Exploration Of The Nile Sources. (1866)
  • The Nile Tributaries Of Abyssinia; And The Sword Of Hamran Arabs. (1867)
  • Cast Up By The Sea Or The Adventures Of Ned Grey, A Book For Boys. (1869)
  • Ismailia - A Narrative Of The Expedition To Central Africa For The Suppression Of Slave Trade, Organised By Ismail, Khadive Of Egypt. (1874)
  • Cyprus As I Saw It In 1879 (1879)
  • In The Heart Of Africa. (1886)
  • Wild Beasts And Their Ways, Reminescenses Of Europe, Asia, Africa And America. (1890)
  • True Tales For My Grandsons. (1891)
Books about Sir Samuel White Baker
  • Sir Samuel White Baker: A Memoir by T. Douglass Murray & Arthur S. White. Published by MacMillan & Co. 1895 London.
  • Baker Of The Nile by Dorothy Middleton. Published by Falcon Press, 1949, London.
  • To The Heart Of The Nile: Lady Florence Baker and the Exploration of Central Africa, by Pat Shipman. Published by Harper Collins, NY, 2004
  • The Perfect Victorian Hero. The Life And Times Of Sir Samuel White Baker by Michael Brander. Published by Mainstream Pub. Co. 1982, London and Edinburgh.
  • Four Fathers of Big Game Hunting - Biographical Sketches Of The Sporting Lives Of William Cotton Oswell, Henry Astbury Leveson, Samuel White Baker & Roualeyn George Gordon Cumming, by T. R. Thormanby. Published Read Country Book, 2007
  • Le tour du monde - nouveau journal des voyages - livraison n°366,367 et 368 - Voyage à l'Albert N'Yanza ou lac Albert (le louta n'zigé du capitaine Speke) par Sir Samuel White Baker (1861-1864). by Edouard Charton. Published by Hachette, 1867, Paris.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b To The Heart Of The Nile: Lady Florence Baker and the Exploration of Central Africa, by Pat Shipman
  2. ^ [http://www.fao.org/docrep/W4347E/w4347e00.HTM Irrigation potential in Africa: A basin approach (Chapter 6 - The Nile Basin)]

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Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
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