For a very long time, it has been impossible to approach and see the peak due to the poor climatic conditions of the Rwenzori region. The images taken by Vittorio Sella in 1906 helped to illustrate the legend in visual form. Sir Henry Morton Stanley from Lake Albert first witnessed the mountains on May 24, 1888. One of history’s greatest explorers, Stanley, corroborated Speke’s discoveries.
Before the Duke of Abruzzi’s research mission, and much before we had access to modern amenities like jet planes, the Internet, and Parking4less.com services, many explorers and adventurers traveled the Rwenzori. The Rwenzori range’s numerous peaks and summits derive many of their names from these encounters.

The mountains are said to be at the end of the known universe, which may be where the moniker “Mountains of the Moon” originated. The name may also be translated from the Arabic “Jebel Al Kamar,” or “White Mountains,” where the “moon” allusion is a result of the snow-covered peaks’ “white” color.
In the Bakonjo language, “Rwenzori” means “rain maker” or “rain mountains” and is the name given to the mountains by the inhabitants. The Baganda used to refer to the mountains as “Gambaragara,” which means “My Eyes Pain,” in reference to the gleaming snow, because they could see the mountain range from a distance. Dr. Franz Stuhlmann made an attempt to survey the Rwenzori summits for the first time in 1891. Krapelin, Moebius, Semper, and Weismann are the names of four of the six mountain groups that he identified. Sir Harry Johnston suggested using names of explorers who truly advanced the discovery of African mysteries in 1900; he gave the Portal Peaks its name because they serve as a portal to the Rwenzori. These names included Stanley, Emin, Stairs, Bagge, and Stuhlmann. The summits were known by the Bakonjo by their own names, but because they had never scaled them, it was unclear which peak was which.

For instance, they gave the three main peaks names, Kiyanja, Duwoni, and Ingomwimbi. For the Bakonjo, Kitasamba, a divinity who resides in the upper Rwenzori and is inaccessible, actually calls those mountains home. In order to honor the Italian royal family, Luigi Amedeo, the Duke of Abruzzi, named some of the peaks Margherita, Elena, Vittorio Emanuele, Iolanda, and Umberto in 1906. Given that the range was a protectorate of Britain over Uganda, the British Royal Geographical Society gave their permission.
Other names: The Pass was given its name by Professor Scott Elliott. Prof. Elliott was the first person to climb the mountain from the Uganda Protectorate, but he was unable to ascend to the location that bears his name. Douglas Freshfield, the President of the English Alpine Club, attempted to ascend the pass in 1905, but was unsuccessful owing to poor weather. Freshfield Pass is named after him.

Sir Samuel White Baker [ 1821 – 1893 ].

The first European to see Lake Albert near the Rwenzori was a rich and extraordinarily strong Scotsman. Additionally, he found Murchison Falls. After spending a considerable amount of time in Mauritius and Ceylon, he departed from Cairo in 1861 with his lovely and capable bride, a Transylvanian woman he had bought at a slave mart in the Balkans, in search of the source of the Nile. They continued up the Nile to Juba in 1862, where they encountered James Augustus Grant and John Hanning Speke, two British explorers. The Bakers continued upriver after Speke told them about a lake that the Nile was rumored to cross on its way to Juba. On March 14, 1864, they arrived at the lake and gave it the name Albert in honor of Queen Victoria’s late husband, who had passed away in 1861. Baker led an expedition from 1869 to 1873 on behalf of the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt to end slavery and open trade in the equatorial Lake region, but he never encountered the Rwenzori.

Romolo Gessi [ 1831 – 1881]

He was an Italian military commander who, in 1874, joined General Charles Gordon’s administration in the Egyptian Sudan’s Equatoria region and undertook the first voyage across Lake Albert to the north of the Rwenzori. Surprisingly, he missed the mountains. Later, he rose to the rank of Pasha and was appointed the province of Bhar-el-Ghazal’s governor. Despite his relative obscurity, he is regarded as one of the best Italian explorers on the Nile, and the hard-nosed Gordon had the utmost respect for him.
The Egyptian authorities ordered his recall from Bhar-el-Ghazal in 1881, and he was imprisoned for three months in the Sudd wetlands of the Nile. The majority of the 400 men in his group perished from famine, and Gessi himself passed away just two days after making it to Egypt.

Mohammed Emin Pasha [1840 – 1892]

Originally, Eduard Schnitzer was a Prussian doctor who had an affair with the mother of the Turkish pasha’s children while serving as their tutor. After the pasha’s death, Eduard Schnitzer took over as the family’s head. He left them all behind and traveled to Cairo in 1875. There, he was appointed a medical officer in the Egyptian army by General Charles Gordon. In 1878, Gordon made him administrator of Sudan’s Equatoria Province. Emin Pasha conducted expeditions in that role in eastern Sudan and central Africa, considerably advancing the geographic and scientific understanding of the region.

Under Mahdi’s leadership, a rebellion began in Sudan in 1883; the Egyptian government withdrew from the region the next year, and Emin Pasha came to be surrounded by the rebel forces. Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who had saved him in April 1888, had unsuccessfully urged him to go back to Egypt. Later that year, during a second Mahdist uprising, Emin Pasha was overthrown and put in prison. He went back to Egypt after being freed, where he handed in his resignation. He was given the task of leading an expedition into the central African territories that Germany had claimed in 1890 by the German East Africa Company. In Congo’s Kanema, he was killed by Arab slave traders in October 1892.

John Hanning Speke [1827 – 1864].

In 1854, he accompanied the linguist, diplomat, and author Sir Richard Burton on an exploration mission to Somaliland. They were fortunate to survive the journey, but only two years later, in 1856, they embarked once more on an expedition led by the Royal Geographical Society in an effort to locate the supposedly extant large East African equatorial lake that was assumed to be the source of the Nile.
In 1856, they discovered Lake Tanganyika. Speke ventured out on his own when Burton was too ill to travel, and he was the first European to see Lake Victoria, which he denied was the source of the Nile despite Burton’s vehement denials.

On a further journey in 1862 with James Augustus Grant, Speke found Ripon Falls and traveled down the Nile as far as Juba, where he encountered Sir Samuel Baker and his wife who were traveling up the river. Despite his observations and convictions, Speke was never able to demonstrate conclusively that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile. The day before he was scheduled to debate Burton in front of a large audience about this, Speke passed away in a shooting accident that many people—including Burton—thought might have been a suicide attempt.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley [1841 – 1904]

Regardless of whether he actually said it, he will always be remembered for the words “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” Leading player in the discovery and colonization of Africa, Stanley was a controversial yet well-liked Anglo-American journalist. His name was changed to Henry Morton Stanley after accepting a job with an American businessman named Henry Morton Stanley in New Orleans. He was born in Wales as John Rowlands and sailed there at the age of 18.

He participated in the American Civil War as a member of the rebel Confederate army and was taken prisoner at the Shiloh engagement in 1862. He started exploring Africa after the war, initially as a reporter for the New York Herald. Stanley made six significant excursions to Africa, and on each of those journeys, he encountered death. Numerous his soldiers died from illness, famine, or assault.
As a journalist-explorer, he participated in the British expedition that was sent to punish Ethiopia’s King Theodore II in 1868.

From 1874 to 1877, he circumnavigated both Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and crossed the continent from east to west, descending to the Atlantic Ocean along the Congo river. In 1871, he found the sick Scottish missionary and explorer Dr. David Livingston and explored Lake Tanganyika with him. In 1873, he reported on the British campaign against the Ashanti in Ghana.

Under the assistance of King Leopold of Belgium, he returned to the Congo for five years in 1879. Emin Pasha, the governor of Equatoria Province in the Egyptian Sudan, was encircled by rebel Mahdist forces in 1887, and Stanley led an expedition to liberate him. However, when he later tracked down Emin Pasha, he was unable to convince him to go back to Egypt. Stanley first saw the Rwenzori during this journey. He served in the British Parliament from 1895 to 1900. In 1899, he was knighted.
Mount Stanley, at 5.109 meters, is the tallest mountain in the Rwenzori.

Dr. Franz Stuhlmann.

The existence of the snowy mountains that fed the Nile has been rumored for ages. Ptolemy depicted them on a map about 1800 years ago and referred to them as the Lunae Montes, or the Mountains of the Moon. However, Dr. Franz Stuhlmann did not lead a 5-day expedition into the Rwenzori’s heart until 1891. Following Emin Pasha’s trip, F. Stuhlmann spends five days exploring the upper Butagu valley, one of the most significant on the western side of the mountain. He is forced to turn around after reaching 4036 meters and catching a glimpse of two snow-capped peaks. Upon his return, he discusses the progression of the various vegetational phases in great detail, but his most important description of the Rwenzori is that it is a genuine mountain range made up of four main groups and was not, in any way, formed by volcanic activity.