DARK SAFARI : The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley by Bierman, John

New York 1990, Knopf, First edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6x9, VG/VG condition ( dj price clipped), illus, 3 maps, notes, bibliog, index. .................................................................... HENRY MORTON STANLEY, who enjoys a wry immortality for the classically fatuous phrase with which he greeted David Livingstone on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, was the most celebrated explorer of an age that worshipped explorers as ours reveres movie stars and rock musicians. A self-made man, imbued with the triumphalism of the Victorian culture from which he sprang, he conquered a continent through grit, resourcefulness, and sheer will. His life is one of the great adventure stories of all time.Stanley was born illegitimate in Wales in 1841, was brought up in a workhouse, fled to America, fought in the Civil War, and became a newspaperman, first covering the Indian Wars and eventually becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. The publisher of the New York Herald sent him to Africa to find Livingstone, and it was Stanley's success in that assignment (as well as "Dr. Livingstone, I presume") that first won him international acclaim.Subsequently he led two further African expeditions of far greater scope and scientific importance. Enduring the most perilous of circumstances-cannibals, treacherous rivers, malaria-and many times narrowly escaping death, he completed Livingstone's work by finding the source of the Nile. He also charted the 2,700-mile-long Congo River and located the legendary Mountains of the Moon in western Uganda. And, in what was one of the nineteenth century's greatest acts of geopolitical piracy, he built the roads and established the river communications that created the so-called Congo Free State (now Zaire) for his patron, King Leopold II of Belgium.To the Victorians, Stanley was the ultimate adventurer, an intrepid individual who reaffirmed their belief in "civilized" man's ability to overcome all physical obstacles as he extended his conquest of the natural world. But there is an adventure no less intriguing, and no less disturbing, in penetrating the heart of darkness that was Stanley's inner life. In Dark Safari, John Bierman, with the help of newly discovered documents, leads us with great style and assurance into the interior of both the man and the vast landmass he tamed.With 19 photographs and 3 maps