Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone Paperback – April 13, 2004

Nearly everyone of a certain age knows "Stanley and Livingstone" and the memorable line "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." It's just one of those cultural snippets that gets passed down. Martin Dugard's interesting book gives the story to that shared and brief tidbit. Quite a story it is.Dr. Livingstone was a poor boy who made good in Victorian England by earning the admiration of the better classes through exploration and perseverance in Darkest Africa. He would spend most of his adult life on the continent, greatly expanding European knowledge of the geography and peoples there. First as a missionary and later as a great explorer determined to find the source of the Nile River, Livingstone was in his own way a man of peace with great sympathy for Africa and Africans. He particularly detested the very active slave trade and slave raids run by Arabs between the interior and the central eastern coast of the continent.Henry Stanley started life as poor and unmoored as one could be in that day and age. A young crewman out of England on a boat headed to New Orleans, he see destined to finish an early life as one of those mid 19th century petty criminals and ne'er-do-wells who described the seedy side of life. He managed to enlist in both the Union and Confederate armies and fight for both during the Civil War. He had though developed a passion for reading and found himself in the newspaper business out west as a free lance journalist. This occupation would be his life raft. Eventually ending up at the New York Herald, Stanley showed a willingness to go anywhere and endure great hardship to deliver what would today be considered blockbuster news to the voracious readership each of New York's twenty some papers competed for.Dr. Livingstone's quest for the source of the Nile got him lost, physically weak, and stranded without the resources to get out of the interior. His English patrons and the world feared him lost, and his whereabouts were a source of great concern and focus. Here was Stanley's opportunity. With the promise of his publisher's help (although Stanley had to talk his way into a lot of credit), the journalist outfitted a secret expedition to find Livingstone and bring the story of his demise or rescue to the world. After almost a year of hard slogging through jungle and desert, mutinous porters and expedition members, participation in a native war, dalliance with Arab slavers, death and desperation on the trail and worry that he wouldn't find his needle-in-a-haystack, Stanley arrived at a village to discover a thin, sickly and ragged man much of the world had given up for lost and to whom he was able to greet with the immortal line "Dr. Livingstone I presume."This is a well written adventure book that will fascinate on many levels. It offers a great portrait of Stanley and Livingstone as men and the great hardships that shaped their lives. Nineteenth Century exploration in Africa with all the disease, war, slavery, and beauty are painted well on the author's canvass. The motivations and mindsets of two men-of-action are thoroughly explored. This book weaves all of the above elements into a gripping story that is well worth the time.

Like many, I already knew the basic story of Stanley's search for Livingstone but this book fleshed out the details of the men and their plights very well. The chapters alternate between Livingstone, Stanley, and the goings on of the RGS (Royal Geographical Society) in London. The Stanley-based chapters counted down the miles separating Stanley and Livingstone which served to build up suspense and I felt myself getting more excited as I closed in on the missionary/explorer myself. Into Africa contrasts the personalities of the two men in accomplishing their goals and as each face the many hardships of African exploration. I was amazed to see the trials these men and some of their porters survived including malaria, smallpox, elephantiasis, war, and the wild beasts of African fame. Dugard's telling leads us through swamps, jungles, grasslands, and mountains across some of the roughest terrains in the world. Temperatures reach the 120s Fahrenheit but our heroes continue their quests. We get to see how the trials devastate the mens' bodies and sometimes feverish minds. The research using the mens' own journals and RGS records is well done, easily readable, and excitingly doled out. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a true story of exploration and adventure especially because this book contains two of the best. I may have given this volume 5 stars if it had included some useful maps and if the pictures (especially the captions) were a little more viewable on the Kindle edition.

This book took over my free time for a couple days. I was not interested in the subject but I read a couple other books by Dugard and I cannot get enough now. So I read this. And now I'm very interested in the subject. There is so much to talk about but I'll just tell you, the way he writes, you get a real sense of how hard the lives of these men were. The bugs and the disease. It wore them out and shortened their lives. None of us could endure it. Highly recommended.