REPORTED MURDER OF SIR SAMUEL AND LADY BAKER IN AFRICA.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 225, 27 June 1873, Page 5

REPORTED MURDER OF SIR SAMUEL AND LADY BAKER IN AFRICA.

The rumor of a lamentable tragedy has reached the ' Times' which we would fain believe to be at worst the exaggeration of disaster. . We give it currency with-doubt and hesitation. We cannot accept it as a record of facte until it is confirmed by proofs which forbid incredulity. It is reported that Sir Samuel Baker, Lady Baker, and the few survivors of the band which set out with them now more than three years ago have been murdered by the savage tribes in whose neighborhood they have for some time past been lingering with their lives in their hands. ■ A catastrophe so terrible cannot be credited until' belief is forced upon us, yet we are obliged to confess that it is not an impossible, or even an issue of the situation in which Sir Samuel Baker and his wife were placed when we last received authentic intelligence of them. Their forces had then dwindled to a handful, and this not so much from disease or from difficulty of travel as from the hostility of the natives. The survivors of the expedition were, blockaded in , a small building, which they were struggling to hold against their enemies; but their numbers were painfully few' and their resources well nigh ex)lausted. A rescue had bee a planned," and an expedition had, in- I deed, been dispatched .by-.'the Khedive to their.' aid ;■ "but it was judged prudent• to attempt to reach them from the south by way of Zanzi bar, ratber than by pursuing the-route ihev themselves had travelled. ' We are constrained

to own that thoro are here - all thfi elements which point to a tragical end. Perhaps we may find some hope even from the circumstances that seem at first fitted to make us most hopeless. When the chance of reaching Baker m time must be doemed so slight ihe possibility of some false rumor, stating as ; ; a fact the'disaster which all men recognise as probable, becomes considerable. The very •consistency of the present story, that Sir Sam-, uel and-Lady Baker were obliged at last to-• surrender, and were mur lered afterwards,, with the last intelligence of theircondition ' received in Egypt, allows us to entertain- the hope that the report is no more than a fore-boding of a tragic conclusion to a . great enterprise,, which has been translated into a fact in its passage down the iNile.