The Explorers: A Story of Fearless Outcasts, Blundering Geniuses, and Impossible Success - Hardcover

Dugard, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385677820 ISBN 13: 9780385677820

Publisher: Bond Street Books, 2014

Synopsis

The story of Sir Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke--their friendship, bitter rivalry, and the two thousand year search for the source of the Nile--is almost too good to be true.
     Imagine a story in which two daring adventurers set off to solve the greatest and oldest of geographical mysteries: the source of the Nile. Their journey begins with great fanfare. The young friends travel deep into a forbidding and uncharted wilderness. Their path is fraught with peril: poisonous snakes, deadly spiders, man-eating beasts, and cannibals. Their bodies are wracked by disease. But there is also pleasure, for the explorers are to the liking of the jungle women.
     In the end, the mystery is solved.
     But there's a catch. Each man has come up with a different answer.
     They fight. Their friendship shatters. They split up in the heart of Africa and race back to civilization, each man striving to be the first to announce his findings to an adoring public. The man who wins the race is lionized as a national hero, only to have his claims publicly repudiated when the second explorer straggles home. The feud becomes an international sensation. A master showman arrives on the scene, one who decrees that the answer will be decided with a single public debate. It will be a massive spectacle, in the manner of a heavyweight prize fight. The answer will literally change the course of history.
     The world is watching and waiting, eager to know the outcome. The loser will be disgraced. The winner is guaranteed fame and riches.
     But the result is far more dramatic than anyone has a right to expect.
     This, written with thrilling, page-turning, novelistic verve, is that story.

About this title

About the Author

MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history. His book Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone has been adapted into a History Channel special. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three sons.

From Booklist

Author of titles about Christopher Columbus, James Cook, and David Livingston, Dugard here delves into the explorer as a personality type. Acknowledging a debt to a similar inquiry, mountaineer Wilfrid Noyce’s The Springs of Adventure (1959), Dugard structures his title around a famous expedition, Richard Burton and John Speke’s 1857–58 quest to discover the source of the Nile. Using seven traits to illustrate their characters as explorers, Dugard discusses the events of their journey in terms of each man’s—as the book’s chapters are headed—curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline, and perseverance. As Burton and Speke encounter problems typical in discovery annals—daunting terrain, illness, privation, and mutual acrimony—Dugard develops the seven traits along several tracks, including psychology, physiology, and other adventurers who exemplified the trait under discussion. Thus, his narrative can jump from introversion to dopamine, and from Burton-Speke to Ernest Shackleton’s courageous perseverance to rescue his crew from Antarctica in 1914–16. Such a varied shuffling of subjects should keep the exploration audience locked into Dugard’s portrait of the discoverer archetype. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Bond Street Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0385677820
• ISBN 13: 9780385677820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304