Africa Explored

Many outstanding men—James Bruce, Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and others—won lasting fame from their African journeys. Africa Explored collects their amazing tales of treks into the unknown. These tales of Europeans in Africa before the wave of colonialism mix exotic sights and startling customs with sympathetic meetings of Africa's people and scenes of sublime beauty. Africa Explored relates Mungo Park's being robbed and left for dead in the West African desert, then saved by repeated acts of kindness; Burton and Speke's search for the legendary Mountains of the Moon that fed the Nile; Alexander Laing's fatal voyage to Timbuktu; Livingston's journeys up the Zambezi River; German missionary Johannes Rebmann's astonishment at beholding the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro; and other incredible encounters with strange animals, the slave trade, crippling diseases, and desert nomads.

Christopher Hibbert has done well to compress a hundred years of discovery into one thoroughly readable volume., Sprightly, interesting reading., The stories are so good and Hibbert so expert in retelling them that… readers will be enthralled., Hibbert is a writer of absolute certainty, and it is hard not to believe that he was himself on hand at every occasion he recounts., Fascinating reading... . [Africa Explored] is likely to send the reader back to the explorers' own published accounts to gratify the curiosity Hibbert so entertainingly stimulates.

Christopher Hibbert is the author of Wolfe at Quebec and Agincourt, among many other books on history. He lives in England.