Alexandrine "Alexine" Pieternella Françoise Tinne (17 October 1835 – 1 August 1869) was a Dutch explorer in Africa who was the first European woman to attempt to cross the Sahara.
Philip Tinne settled in England during the Napoleonic Wars and later returned to his native land, marrying Henriette, daughter of a Dutch Vice-Admiral, Theodorus Frederik van Capellen, and Petronella de Lange, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Sofia.
The immense wealth of her father, much of which was amassed due to his activities in the spice and sugar trade (when slavery was abolished in 1833, his company was awarded £150,452, the second-largest payment made to any mercantile concern[1][2][3]), resulted in the young girl becoming the richest female in the Netherlands.
She worked with several commercial photographers: Robert Jefferson Bingham (who visited The Hague), Francis Frith (whom she met in Egypt) and the J. Geiser photostudio in Algiers.
Accompanied by her mother Harriette and her aunt, Tinne left Europe in the summer of 1861 for the White Nile region.
After a short stay at Khartoum, the party traveled up the White Nile and became the first European women to reach Gondokoro.
Directly after their return, Theodor von Heuglin and Hermann Steudner met the Tinnes and the four of them planned to travel to the Bahr-el-Ghazal, a tributary of the White Nile, to reach the countries of the 'Niam-Niam' (Azande).
He also intended to investigate the reports of a vast lake in Central Africa eastwards of those already known, most likely the lake-like expanses of the middle Congo.
Tinne successfully photographed during her 1862–1864 trip up the Nile and in the Bahr-el-Ghazal region, making her the author of the first known views of Gondokoro (1862), as well as of inhabitants of the areas explored.
She started from Tripoli with a caravan, with the intention of traveling to Lake Chad, followed by Wadai, Darfur and Kordofan before reaching the upper Nile.
In the early morning of 1 August, on the route from Murzuk to Ghat, she was murdered together with two Dutch sailors in her party, allegedly by Tuareg people in league with her escort.
Given the internal strife among the Northern Tuareg that lasted until the Ottoman occupation of the Fezzan Province (Southern Libya), this version is the most probable explanation of the otherwise unmotivated massacre.
A small marker near Juba in Sudan commemorating the Nile explorers of the 19th century bears Tinne's name, as well as a window plaque in Tangiers.
In 2024 Leiden University Library acquired eighteen photos made by Tinne in 1862 in Nubia and Sudan, including in the village of Gondokoro.