ABSTRACT
On July 29, 1894, Arthur Donaldson Smith, M.D., of Philadelphia, set out for the lake from Berbera on the Somali coast, leading a caravan of eighty-two Somalis. Arthur Donaldson Smith was born on April 27, 1866, in Andalusia, Pennsylvania, a small community on the Delaware River in Bucks County, close to the city of Philadelphia. Smith had good reason to feel satisfied about his accomplishment. He was the first white man to reach the lake from the north and the first to see it since it had been visited seven years before by Count Samuel Teleki and Lieutenant Ludwig von Hohnel. As in the British East Africa Protectorate to the south, coast-based officials in Somaliland constantly worried about indigenous challenges to their authority and the covert activities of their colonial rivals. Hunting trips for wealthy Europeans and Americans were extremely common in northern Somaliland in the 1890s because the area was teeming with big game.
