Sir Samuel White Baker was a British explorer of central Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century. Travelling to Sudan in 1861 in the hopes of meeting Nile expedition of John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant, Baker spent a year in the region where he learned Arabic and surveyed various Nile tributaries, before venturing to Khartoum and thence to South Sudan. He remained in the region until 1865 and was knighted in 1866. He accompanied Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) on his 1869 Egyptian tour. Also in 1869, Baker was commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt, Ismail, to undertake an expedition to the region known as Equatoria (now South Sudan and parts of Northern Uganda) in order to suppress the slave trade there, making him governor of the territory. He published this account of the expedition in 1874 under the title Ismailia, in honour of his patron.