On the afternoon of 15 September 1864 John Hanning Speke, discoverer of the Source of the Nile, accidentally shot himself in a field at Neston Park, near Box, Wiltshire. In the hundred years since there have been numerous biographies of other explorers of Africa—shelves of books record the achievements of Livingstone, Stanley and Burton—but Speke has been accorded nothing longer than periodical articles or sections in books. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any extensive papers exist, but there is a good deal of scattered information in print, and this note is an attempt to relate this to an outline of his life.