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SIR HENRY HAMILTON JOHNSTON (1858- )
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JOHNSTON, SIR HENRY HAMILTON (1858- ), British administrator and explorer, was born on the 12th of June 1858 at Kennington, London, and educated at Stockwell grammar school and King's College, London. He was a student for four years in the painting schools of the Royal Academy. At the age of eighteen he began a series of travels in Europe and North Africa, chiefly as a student of painting, architecture and languages. In 1879-188o he visited the then little known interior of Tunisia. He had also a strong bent towards zoology and comparative anatomy, and carried on work of this description at the Royal College of Surgeons, of whose Hunterian Collection he afterwards became one of the trustees. In 1882 he joined the earl of Mayo in an expedition to the southern part of Angola, a district then much traversed by Transvaal Boers. In 1883 Johnston visited H. M. Stanley on the Congo, and was enabled by that explorer to visit the river above Stanley Pool at a time when it was scarcely known to other Europeans than Stanley and De Brazza. These journeys attracted the attention of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association, and the last-named in concert with the Royal Society conferred on Johnston the leadership of the scientific expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro which started from Zanzibar in April 1884. Johnston's work in this region was also under the direction of Sir John Kirk, British consul at Zanzibar. While in the Kilimanjaro district Johnston concluded treaties with the chiefs of Moshi and Taveta (Taveita). These treaties or concessions were transferred to the merchants who founded the British East Africa Company, and in the final agreement with Germany Taveta fell to Great Britain. In October 1885 Johnston was appointed British vice-consul in