Book Description

This edition of Henry Morton Stanley's epic account of travels through Africa in search of Professor Livingstone includes the original sketches and illustrations of the journey. In the late 1860s, journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley was given an assignment to find and relieve the explorer Dr. David Livingstone. The respected doctor had not been in contact with civilization since departing to the wilderness of Africa in 1866, in a quest to discover the source of the River Nile. Henry M. Stanley set off on what became a more than two year trek to find Livingstone. He and his travelling company sojourned over seven hundred miles through the exotic landscapes and forests of rural Africa. The intense, tropical environment claimed the lives of many accompanying porters, while Stanley's horse perished after a deadly bite from a tsetse fly. Eventually, in November of 1871, Stanley discovered Dr. Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in what is now Tanzania. The famous phrase 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' was supposedly uttered by Stanley in greeting, although biographers of Stanley agree that he probably invented the greeting for the sake of boosting publicity and his lower class background. After the meeting, Stanley spent a total of four months with Dr. David Livingstone, learning that Lake Tanganyika infact had no connection to the River Nile. Just two years after the pair bade each other farewell, Livingstone died of malaria and dysentery in a village in what is today Zambia. Following the adventures related in this book, Stanley would spend years mapping the lakes of central Africa and the Congo River. As with his world-famous expedition to find Dr. Livingstone, Stanley was funded by the popular press of the time. The mapping was a success; Stanley credited his twenty assistants, many of whom knew the local lay of the land, for their valuable assistance with these efforts.