Count Sámuel Teleki de Szék (1 November 1845 – 10 March 1916) was a Hungarian explorer who led the first expedition to Northern Kenya. He was the first European to see Lake Turkana Early life Teleki was born in 1845 in Sáromberke, a village in Transylvania, then in the Kingdom of Hungary and today in Romania. He was a member of a prominent Hungarian family active in both politics and culture. His great-grandfather Sámuel Teleki (1739–1822), a chancellor of Transylvania, had founded the Teleki library in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureș, Romania), 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. His first expedition Count Teleki and his companion, Lieutenant Ludwig von Höhnel, an Austrian naval officer, left Pangani (Tanzania) in February 1887 with around 400 porters, following the Ruvu River. They were the first to survey a great part of the East African Rift. Teleki was the first to reach the snow-line on Mount Kilimanjaro at , and the first explorer to set foot on Mount Kenya, climbing up to around . He later headed on northwards, following the interior river system, to see on 5 March 1888 the last of the African Great Lakes, referred to as the Jade Sea by Count Teleki, who named the lake after his friend, Prince Rudolf. The lake was renamed Turkana in 1975 after the people that live to the west of its shores. Teleki's and von Höhnel's journey in southern Ethiopia also unveiled a smaller lake,