Recently, I had read and written two blog posts about Former President Theodore Roosevelt's nearly fatal journey into the Amazon country and down the River of Doubt. I subsequently strayed into this book in a Goodwill store and since both my wife and I had thoroughly enjoyed the Roosevelt book by Candice Millard, I decided to buy and read t his one. While it is not quite as well written as the River of Doubt book, it is still a wonderful, and somewhat similar kind of story about two great explorers and adventurers in the times when much of the world was generally unexplored and unmapped. The research which the author Martin Dugard did for this book is nearly as thorough as the work Millard performed in order to write hers. The personalities of the four protagonists, two in each of the books, are very similar. They were all men determined to leave their individual marks on the history and the world and all succeeded in doing so. The book covers the period from about spring of 1866 to 1874 when Dr. David Livingstone is presumed lost, and perhaps dead, in Africa on a mission to locate the source of the Nile River, and Henry Morton Stanley is sent on a mission to find him by the newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr. of the New York Herald. All three men are bent on success, each of them in search of his own individual realm of success as he envisions it.
Dr. Livingstone is the considered to be the greatest explorer of his time and has actually become the first man to traverse the continent of Africa on foot. Bennett is rich, somewhat ruthless and on a drive to become the most successful and wealthy newspaper publisher in America. Stanley is a western cowboy type, highly motivated to become famous, and willing to do whatever it might take to accomplish his goals. Livingstone, despite being a very publicly and devoutly religious man has also admitted in at least one exchange with a friend that he has had sex with over 300 African women. He is becoming what had to be considered aged in those times and is finding his travels in Africa to be nearly all he can survive. Stanley is markedly younger and believes himself imminently qualified to follow Livingstone to the darkest reaches of the dark continent in order to make himself famous.
Both Stanley and Livingstone come close to meeting death on more than one occasion, but they do eventually have their famous meeting in which Stanley apparently actually did mouth is famous introductory query, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." Stanley returns to the so-called civilized world of the United States while delivering proof that Dr. Livingstone is actually alive and achieves the fame he has sought. Dr. Livingstone turns down Stanley's offer to be returned to his native England and shortly thereafter dies. His body is preserved, although his heart is buried at the site of his death in Africa, and the illustrious corpse is returned to England by his most devoted employee. This is a great book for the person who likes to read about real adventurers and achievers and well worth reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment