For my long Fourth of July weekend I was looking for something relaxing to read, something in my usual lines of interest, only as far removed from the year 2016 as possible. I found it with Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone. by Martin Dugard.
For those of you living in the modern day equivalent of “the
heart of Africa,” Dr. David Livingstone, a Brit from back when Great Britain was
at its greatest (the Victorian Age) is one of the world’s most renowned
explorers, ranking with the likes of Captain Cook, and Charles Darwin. The
ultimate and final exploration of his career was to be determining the source
of the Nile River. While on that quest, he went missing. Henry Morton Stanley,
a Welsh born American and journalist, was secretly tasked by the publisher of
the New York Herald to find Livingstone.
The rest, as they say, is history, not to mention one of the best quotes
of all recorded time: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
The book is a fictionalized history of the story that kept government
administrators, the science community, and everyday newspaper readers throughout
the British Empire, the rest of Europe, and the United States on edge in the 1870s. It’s not the first fictionalized version of
the Stanley & Livingstone story – that distinction, as explained by the
author in the epilogue, belongs to Joseph Conrad’s book The Heart of Darkness.
Dugard’s Into Africa excels as an adventure story – despite
the fact that most readers know the ending before turning the first page. It covers a range of topics: empire building,
the slave trade, the American civil war, the height of newspaper wars, cultural
racism, the coming colonialism, the inner working of the British Geological
Society, Gladstone & Disraeli; and serves as an incredible geography lesson
for readers (with maps). I’ll quote one
paragraph to show the book’s period setting and topic range:
“It was October 31 when Stanley
traveled onward again. In America,
Cochise and his Apache warriors were being hunted in the Arizona Territory,
Chicago had just been destroyed by fire, and President Grant was about to issue
a proclamation making the Ku Klux Klan illegal.
In England, Darwin’s The Descent
of Man was just days away from publication.
In Paris, the first exhibition of impressionist painting was about to
get under way. If Stanley were back in
the world, he would likely have been covering one of those events for the Herald
with great gusto and self-importance.”
Dugard’s telling of this story never lost my interest. And as it turns out, he is quite the eclectic
author. While his body of work includes Farther than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of
Captain James Cook and other books about explorers, it also includes a book
about running, a book about sailing, and a series of “Killing” books he
co-authored (ghost wrote?) will Bill O’Reilly:
Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing … fill in the blank. When he’s not writing, he’s a track &
field coach at a high school in California.
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