region would be held at Tabora, then sent down to the coast in small groups for onward shipment. The first Europeans to reach the region were Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, who had been sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and the British government to investigate the great Lake Uniamési said by German missionaries to lie in the region and determine if it was the source of the Nile. Burton and Speke reached Zanzibar on 20 December 1857, visited Johannes Rebmann (who had reported the lake) at his Kisuludini mission station, and paid a visit to Fuga, capital of the Usambare kingdom. They left for the interior on 26 June 1858. After travelling through mountainous country they reached the inner plateau of Uniamesi. At the Arab trading post of Kazeh (now Tabora) they recorded an elevation of . At Kazeh Burton and Speke found a mixed population of Nyamwezi, Tutsi and Arabs engaged in cattle farming and cultivation of foods such as rice, cassava, pawpaw and citrus. Burton called Unyamwezi the garden of inter-tropical Africa. Henry Morton Stanley visited the region in 1871, where he found that the Zanzibar Arabs were predominant in the country. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "later the natives rose and, under Mirambo—who had been a common porter and rose to be a conquering chief, earning for himself the title of the Black Bonaparte—a Negro kingdom was formed. Since 1890 the country has been under German control and the power of the native chiefs greatly curtailed." Notes References Geography of Tanzania Historical regions