Sámuel Teleki

Count Sámuel Teleki de Szék (November 1, 1845 – March 10, 1916) was a Hungarian explorer who led the first expedition to Northern Kenya. He was the first European to see, and name, Lake Rudolf (Lake Turkana), though the existence of the lake was known in Europe long before Teleki arrived at the scene.

Teleki was born in Sáromberke, a village in the Kingdom of Hungary, Transylvania (today in Romania). He was a member of a prominent Hungarian family active in both politics and culture. His great-grandfatherSámuel Teleki (1739–1822), a chancellor of Transylvania, had founded the Teleki library in Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely), one of the first Hungarian public libraries, which opened in 1802 and holds today more than 200,000 volumes.

For some 40 years, Count Sámuel Teleki von Szék, "a jovial Hungarian aristocrat of immense wealth," managed his property and assets and started a political career by becoming a member of the Hungarian Upper House of Parliament in 1881. A keen hunter, he was fascinated by the early African explorers. In 1886, he accepted a suggestion by his friend and benefactor, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, son of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King Franz Joseph I, to turn the East African safari he was planning into a journey of exploration of the territories north of Lake Baringo. He was to explore the lands beyond where Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson had set foot, in order to find the desert lake previous travellers had heard rumours about, based on local legends about a sea that lay beyond the desert, surrounded by tribes of giants and islands inhabited by monsters and ghosts.

...
Wikipedia