After an astonishing career as explorer and missionary, Dr David Livingstone disappeared back into his beloved Africa for one last time in search of the source of the Nile. He believed that the river sprang from four mysterious fountains which had been known to the ancient Greeks. Livingstone faced his task with unparalleled bravery but he was frail and eventually he died on the shores of a swampy lake. Over a century later, Colum Wilson and Aisling Irwin, husband and wife, retraced his last journey on foot, canoe and bicycle. They found vivid evidence of his continuing legacy to East Africa - and haunting echoes of his spirit.
Now in its 7th printing: A woman, travelling alone through time, Africa, and unnamed lands, searches for Dr. David Livingstone, celebrated by the West as a "discoverer" of Africa. Looking for Livingstone explodes Western assumptions about the "silence" of indigenous peoples; this is an elegant work which beautifully gives voice to the ancestors to whom it is dedicated.
What really happened to Dr. David Livingstone? The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Survivor: The Ultimate Game investigates in this thrilling account. With the utterance of a single line—“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”—a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformed into one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. But the true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley is one that has escaped telling. Into Africa is an extraordinarily researched account of a thrilling adventure—defined by alarming foolishness, intense courage, and raw human achievement. In the mid-1860s, exploration had reached a plateau. The seas and continents had been mapped, the globe circumnavigated. Yet one vexing puzzle remained unsolved: what was the source of the mighty Nile river? Aiming to settle the mystery once and for all, Great Britain called upon its legendary explorer, Dr. David Livingstone, who had spent years in Africa as a missionary. In March 1866, Livingstone steered a massive expedition into the heart of Africa. In his path lay nearly impenetrable, uncharted terrain, hostile cannibals, and deadly predators. Within weeks, the explorer had vanished without a trace. Years passed with no word. While debate raged in England over whether Livingstone could be found—or rescued—from a place as daunting as Africa, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the brash American newspaper tycoon, hatched a plan to capitalize on the world’s fascination with the missing legend. He would send a young journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, into Africa to search for Livingstone. A drifter with great ambition, but little success to show for it, Stanley undertook his assignment with gusto, filing reports that would one day captivate readers and dominate the front page of the New York Herald. Tracing the amazing journeys of Livingstone and Stanley in alternating chapters, author Martin Dugard captures with breathtaking immediacy the perils and challenges these men faced. Woven into the narrative, Dugard tells an equally compelling story of the remarkable transformation that occurred over the course of nine years, as Stanley rose in power and prominence and Livingstone found himself alone and in mortal danger. The first book to draw on modern research and to explore the combination of adventure, politics, and larger-than-life personalities involved, Into Africa is a riveting read.
A powerful, moving, and revelatory novel set in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried the body of explorer and missionary David Livingstone from Zambia to Zanzibar so that his remains could be returned home to England. Dawn, 1 May 1873, on the outskirts of Chitambo's village, near Lake Bangweulu in modern-day Zambia. The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone has died. He had been heading south in the African interior on an increasingly maniacal mission to penetrate the greatest secret of Victorian exploration. He wanted to find the source of the world's longest river, the Nile. Instead, on an isolated and swampy floodplain, Dr. Livingstone found his death. How Livingstone is to be buried will be decided by his African companions, a group of sixty-nine men, women, and children. They decide that come what may, Livingstone, his papers and maps, must all be carried to England. They bury his heart and other organs under a tree and dry his flesh like jerky in the sun. Over nine months, battling severe illness and hunger, hostile chiefs and unknown terrain, all while taking a tortuous route of more than 1,000 miles to the coast to avoid marauding slave traders, they march with Livingstone's body and the evidence of his explorations. Their journey has been called "the most extraordinary story in African exploration." In this novel, their story is retold anew in the distinct, indelible voices of Livingstone's sharp-tongued female cook, Halima; a repressed, formerly enslaved African missionary named Jacob Wainwright; and the collective voice of the retainers. The result is a profound and tragic journey--an epic like no other--that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love. In Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Petina Gappah has created an ambitious and artful masterpiece.
A Story of Dr. Livingstone's Travels in Africa in search of the Source of the Nile. The Zambesi and its Tributaries were explored by this intrepid Adventurer.
Join the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley on his amazing quest to find David Livingstone, England's most celebrated explorer, in this new addition to the #1 New York Times bestselling series! The world was fascinated and concerned. Dr. David Livingstone's 1866 expedition to find the source of the Nile River in Africa was only supposed to last two years. But it had been almost six years since anyone had heard from the famous British explorer. That's when a young American newspaper reporter named Henry Morton Stanley decided to go on his own expedition to find Dr. Livingstone. Author Jim Gigliotti chronicles the lives of both of these men and details the dangerous two-year journey that would eventually bring them face-to-face.
Nineteenth-century adventure fiction relating to the British empire usually served to promote, celebrate and justify the imperial project, asserting the essential and privileging difference between 'us' and 'them', colonizing and colonized. Andrea White's study opens with an examination of popular exploration literature in relation to later adventure stories, showing how a shared view of the white man in the tropics authorized the European intrusion into other lands. She then sets the fiction of Joseph Conrad in this context, showing how Conrad in fact demythologized and disrupted the imperial subject constructed in earlier writing, by simultaneously - with the modernist's double vision - admiring man's capacity to dream but applauding the desire to condemn many of its consequences. She argues that the very complexity of Conrad's work provided an alternative, and more critical, means of evaluating the experience of empire.
