Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard

be forced and Young’s authority wouldn’t be threatened by a power-hungry outsider. There was John Reid, who’d been ship’s carpenter on Pioneer ;Henry Faulkner, a former army officer with the 17th Lancers; and Patrick Buckley, a shipmate from Gorgon . Their expedition would be an adventure in the finest sense, just a few friends sallying into the wilds, attempting a goal beyond the ken of ordinary men.
    As the departure date drew near, the expedition became a symbol of hope to England. Four brave men setting out to find Livingstone didn’t guarantee anything, but it implied he just might be alive. This was important. When the nation was demoralized by the slaughter of her young men in the Crimean War between 1854 and 1856, it was Livingstone’s walk across Africa that made her stand tall again. And when England was devastated by the news that Indian nationals had slaughtered innocent British men, women and children in the Punjab in 1857, it was Livingstone’s triumphs that provided a diversion. And again, when social division and widespread unemployment during the 1850s sparked unrest and sapped British morale, it was Livingstone who stepped forth as their lion. He was more than just an explorer, he was a symbol of the potential greatness lying within each man, but tapped only by those willing to push beyond the limits of comfort and fear. In a smaller manner, Young had become such a source of hope.
    There was, however, a double edge to the hope. A considerable sum of money had been spent to outfit the expedition. Expectations were getting so high that people were losing sight of the hard fact that locating Livingstone would be a miracle (as Murchison noted, ‘the scheme would be stigmatized as the Livingstone Utopian Search’). He was a lone man in the middle of a vast continent. It had been a year since he’d even been seen alive, and stories of his demise seemed disturbingly plausible. If the rumour was false, a year would have also offered ample opportunity for Livingstone to put a few thousand miles between himself and civilization. So if Young was sincere about finding Livingstone, that might mean abandoning Search and beginning an overland expedition — a task for which he wasn’t prepared.
    On 10 June 1867, Young and his expedition sailed from Portsmouth aboard the mail ship Celt . By July, just four short months since his letter to Murchison, Young’s expedition had travelled to Africa, launched Search and prepared to sail up the Zambezi delta. If all went well, he and the men had arranged to be picked up at the delta’s mouth by a British warship on 2 December for the cruise home.
    The journey up the Zambezi was like a homecoming for Young. The fourth largest river in Africa, the Zambezi also ranks as one of the largest in the world. The delta at its mouth is fifty miles wide, and the river itself is almost two miles across where it empties into the Indian Ocean. Livingstone had travelled almost every inch of the mighty river. The low-lying areas along its lush green banks were a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes, tse-tse flies, spiders, scorpions and smallpox. Mary, Livingstone’s wife, was buried along those banks, in the village of Shupange, after she died in April 1862. Young was at the funeral, and would stop to tend her grave on his quest to find her husband.
    For Young and his mates, the romance of their journey was soon replaced by the realities of life on a dangerous body of water. There were mosquitoes to infuriate them all day and night. The foetid banks stank of rot and vegetation. The current was sometimes languid, sometimes swirling. When Young made the lazy right turn from the Zambezi into the narrower, serpentine Shire, the complexion of their journey changed, too. The Shire was a river of contrasts — miles of impassable rapids and miles of equally daunting marsh, choked with tall grasses. So many elephants wallowed in the shallows of the marsh that Livingstone had once,