me [v.03 p.0228]
with the solution of the problem of the Nile sources, 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 attended the prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII., in a
tour through Egypt. In the same year, at the request of the khedive Ismail,
Baker undertook the command of 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 for four years at a salary of L10,000
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 by sudd, the bitter 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. He returned to England
with his wife in 1874, and in the following year purchased the estate of
Sandford Orleigh in South Devon, where he made his home for the rest of his
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 travelled
in India, the Rocky Mountains and Japan in search of big game, publishing
in 1890 _Wild Beasts and their Ways_. He kept up an exhaustive and vigorous
correspondence with men of all shades of opinion upon Egyptian affairs,
strongly opposing the abandonment of the Sudan and subsequently urging its
reconquest. Next to these, questions of maritime defence and strategy
chiefly attracted him in his later years. He