Henry Morton Stanley
Or the Sources of the Nile Around the Great lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean
Published: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London, 1878
Edition: First Edition, first printing
An unusually nice set, internally near pristine. Lack of foxing is very rare for the London editions.
First edition, 2 volumes, 8vo., xiv, [1], 522; ix, 566 pp., 2 frontispiece portraits, 10 maps including 2 large folding maps in pockets at rear, 33 wood-engraved plates, illustrations in the text, original brown pictorial cloth.
After the death of Livingstone, Stanley resolved to return to Africa and finish Livingstone's work, and also to resolve some of the problems introduced by Burton and Speke and Baker. Livingstone had considered it his mission to finish mapping and studying Central Africa, resolve some of the questions about the source of the Nile and to report on the doings of the slave traders, a practice that Livingstone spoke actively against. Criticized even at the time for what many considered his harsh treatment of the native peoples, Stanley did manage to finish what Livingstone had started and open up Central Africa to the west. When Stanley made his first journey, he was one of a very few white people on the entire continent. Within the twenty years which elapsed after Stanley's first journey, the continent was being viewed as a commercial, political, and strategic destiny by many of the countries in Europe.
The story of the Anglo-American expedition to Central Africa, commanded by Stanley and undertaken between 1874 and 1877. The discovery of the course of the Congo, though the greatest, was but one of the many geographical problems solved during this memorable expedition. Vast in size, "the procession that departed from Bagamoyo (Tanzania) on 17 November 1874 stretched for more than half a mile and included dozens of men carrying sections of the Lady Alice, the boat named for his seventeen-year-old fiancée, with which Stanley intended to explore Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika and Livingstone's Lualaba River. During the next two and a half years, the expedition would struggle in temperatures reaching as high as 138 degrees; the powerful Emperor Mtesa of Uganda and the Wanyoro chief Mirambo would consume a great deal of Stanley's time and test his diplomatic skills; he would have to negotiate with a notorious Arab ivory and slave trader named Tippu-Tib for safe passage of his men through the great rain forest; and he and his men would fight more than thirty skirmishes and battles on land and water against hostile tribes. The geographic prizes Stanley achieved on this expedition were unparalleled. He spent almost two months circumnavigating Lake Victoria, confirming that the only outlet was at Ripon Falls and hence establishing for good, he thought, the source of the Nile. He scouted Lake Albert, then moved south and west to Lake Tanganyika, which he also circumnavigated, proving it had no connection with Lake Albert. Stanley then solved the remaining geographical puzzle, determining that the Lualaba was not part of the Niger or Nile rivers but ultimately flowed into the Congo. He reached the Atlantic Ocean on 9 August 1877, after a journey of more than seven thousand miles, in utter exhaustion. Back in London, he learned that Alice had not waited for him" (Delaney)(Shapero) Mendelssohn II, p.380.
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