Though we sometimes chafe at its ubiquitousness and angst over its sensationalism, there can be no doubt that our world is better off for having a modern media. Its capacity to inform us about both the state of our world and the power of its prime movers allows us to be infinitely more educated about current affairs than any generation prior to the present. However, for all its good, the modern media does, in all its saturation, put an end to mysteries which, in the past, accrued enormous cultural significance as a direct result of their being impossible for the media to report on. No tale exemplifies this lost ignorance more than that of the lost adventurer who, having dropped off civilization's radar into the mists of the unknown, spends years in the wilderness, exploring, charting, engaging with new cultures while his many admirers back home fret over his absence and their lack of contact with him. Not only have most of our geographical frontiers been explored, satellites make such communication blackouts almost impossible. And thus, there may never again be another meeting like that which took place on October 27th, 1871, when the American newsman and explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, finally met the British missionary and expeditionist, Dr. David Livingstone in the depths of Africa, thousands of miles from the lights of civilization.
This vivid effort from Mr. Dugard is a dual biography which takes up, as its twin subjects, the life stories of Stanley and Livingstone. It reaches across decades in an effort to contextualize the famous meeting near Lake Tanganyika which forever connected newsman and Christian, sensationalist and explorer, rescuer and rescued. Though the two men receive equal treatment, it is Stanley's background that animates Into Africa. For while much is already known of the Scottish Livingstone and his exploratory sojourns through Africa which made him famous and inflamed his advocacy for the abolition of slavery as a Western practice, Henry Morton Stanley has remained something of a mystery. Orphaned young, Mr. Dugard burns off the many lies Stanley told about himself to reveal a complex figure who pursued Livingstone more out of personal gain than for any affinity or fondness for the man. After all, Stanley was a man of masks, a young and abused emigrant to America who, after being fostered for awhile by a successful family in New Orleans, found his way into the Confederate army during the American Civil War, only to be captured by Unionists and freed to fight for them against the South. Drifting through his own life, he caught on at the New York Herald, a popular newspaper of the period and eventually, thanks to a scandal which entangled President Grant, found himself charged with the ambitious task of finding Dr. Livingstone who, by 1870, was four years marooned in the jungles of Africa and long since believed dead by the West.
Though Stanley's background is more arresting, Dr. Livingstone's is not without its moments. Mr. Dugard paints a portrait of a man gripped by a powerful, Christian faith which, over a meritorious career, helped earn him fame and fortune as an adventurer, a chronicler of Africa, and a crusader against slavery. But no amount of success, professionally or privately, could sway him from an obsession to find the source of the Nile. It was this need to know which drove the then famous abolitionist back into Africa for a final and fateful five-year journey which culminated in the meeting with Stanley in 1871. The author describes a man who was so driven to see, to know, and to do, that his passion lead to his wife's demise at the hands of his Africa. What's more, he clearly sacrificed familiarity of his children to conquer both frontiers and iniquities which, as often as not, proved immune to his blows. A powerful and conflicted figure who, as a result of his fearlessness, his courage and his faith, was a national hero to the British Empire.
Interweaving the histories of these two men with the twin journeys which eventuated in their meeting on that fateful day, Mr. Dugard brings to life both his subjects and the times which shaped them. Though his account presumes to know a great deal about Henry Morton Stanley's psychological state, enough of the man's own writings are included here to back up the author's psychoanalysis. And so, though we may have left behind the era of the great adventure, we can relive them in literature and Mr. Dugard does not in the least disappoint with this chronicle of a famous and burdened explorer and the efforts of a troubled American to locate him at the end of the civilized world. (4/5 Stars)
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