Book repairs

I've been reading and repairing some of my very old books on Africa, and get distracted by the lovely maps they often contain.   BUT, one book, 'Tropical Africa', by Henry Drummond, and published in MDCCCLXXXIX, (1889) has several maps of central Africa but with NO Lake Rudolf !   This needs further investigation !!   An expedition in 1888 led by Count Samuel Teleki 'discovered' this vast lake and named it after the crown prince of Austria.  I say 'discovered' for surely the local people, the El Molo, Turkana, Njemps, Somali and so on, knew of its existence for thousands of years !  I'm trying to find out what the Turkana called it.   

I find it extremely hard to understand how the 'early' explorers could get so many details wrong on their published maps when they later wrote accounts of their explorations.  For example, one map I have just looked at, in a book by Henry Stanley, (In Darkest Africa) which was published 1897, misplaces the Equator.  I lived for several years with the Equator going right through my garden; we grew vegetables south of the Equator, and avacado trees, north of it !   Stanleys map shows the north east corner of Lake Victoria quite the wrong shape, with no Kavirondo Gulf, and has the Equator running through the northern part of the lake; whereas in truth, the Equator runs about 20 miles north-east of the lake (and through my ex garden at Maseno !

Map from 'Tropical Africa' ... see above ... with no L. Rudolf, 

though the lake shown due north of Mt Kenya might be the southern end of Rudolf.  

Where is the rest ?!

So I checked what was shown on my late Uncle Jacks school atlas, published in 1923, and behold !   A mere 26 years later than Stanleys book, the atlas map is correct as far as I can see, with the lake the right shape and the Equator where it should be.  Maps fascinated me as a child, and I wish I had then had access to these old books with their inaccurate maps .... but the books I did have, (and Uncle Jacks atlas) took me to Africa in the 1960's where I got to know Lake Victoria and the Equator.  

Stanley himself ackowledges the vagaries of 'modern' (i.e. 19th century ?) map-makers.  I quote:-  "The modern map-maker is quite as arbitrary as any of his predecessors.  In a late German map, considered to be one of the best in Germany, there is a large bay removed altogether from the Victoria Nyanza, and a straight line, drawn by pure caprice, usurps the place of a very interesting and much indented coastline, explored by me in 1875."  

The 'large bay' he mentions must surely be the Kavirondo Gulf, at the head of which is Kisumu, formerly known as Port Florence, and the rail-head of the 'Lunatic Express', the railway from Mombasa to the lake.