Hearts of Darkness

Hearts of Darkness
Author: Frank McLynn 1992 359 pp
My rating: 3*
Started November 31 2008, Finished December 3 2008.

“To face hostile tribesmen, to witness the horrors of the slave trade, and to endure Africa’s diseases would have pushed to the limit the mettle of the bravest adventurer alive. When we add to this the ordeal by wild animals faced by the white pioneers in Africa, it is hard not to conclude that in their insouciant disdain for danger, the explorers were either a genuine breed of supermen or perhaps clinically insane.” (300)

This study of the history of African exploration is organized as and reads like an academic monograph which is a shame as this approach results in details of the explorations themselves receiving short shrift. The first section of the book covers each of the significant explorations in a prosaic fashion (“explorer X went from A to C via B”) omitting most of the details of the attendant adventures which are what make such accounts compelling; the maps that accompany this section leave much to be desired, lacking captions, dates and track arrows. The in-depth examination of the difficulties encountered by Stanley in his three year long crossing of the continent, the subject of the chapter entitled “An Object Lesson in Obstacles” provided the level of detail and human drama that I desired and was for me the highlight of the book. The chapter on “Explorers and Imperialism” seemed particularly muddled.

In spite of these major shortcomings, I give this book an overall positive grade because it still manages to convey a sense of the continuous hardship experienced on virtually every expedition and instill a strong sense of disbelief in the reader that anyone who survived such an ordeal would be willing to have any more to do with the continent, let alone return for ever more ambitious explorations, as nearly every explorer did.

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Galton’s Art of Travel, published in 1855 “advised mountaineers to carry a cat with them as a barometric gauge, since felines were alleged to go into convulsions at precisely 13,000 feet about sea level”. (56)

Livingston’s last journey in 1873: “The crossing of the Chambezi brought torments from mosquitoes, poisonous spiders and ants to compound the pain from dysentery and haemorrhoids.”

Stanley’s 1874 expedition “ … saw a veritable roll-call of African diseases: dysentery, bronchitis, pneumonia, ophthalmia, rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, dropsy, emphysema, erysipelas, elephantiasis.” (99)

The first coast to coast crossing of Africa, completed by Stanley in 1877 took 999 days. (101)

Cloth, beads and wire were the staples of African commerce … (138)

For Africans labour’s role was primarily social: that of strengthening a kinship group by shared experiences or consolidating a hierarchy for reasons of social system. (155)

Stanley would not even allow his porters to stagger away into the jungle to die of smallpox; he insisted that they carried their loads until they dropped dead. (155)

In the eighteenth century it was estimated that between 24 and 75 per cent of the military died in their first year on the Guinea coast. (228)