The Search for the Niger

by Christopher Lloyd

220p G/VG Jarrolds.

Genres: Africa

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Charles Christopher Lloyd

British naval historian; authored/edited 91 works in 549 publications in 3 languages.

https://www.worldcat.org/identities/l...

Reviews

[AnnetteW · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I was a child books of exploration have enthralled me, especially those to do with Africa. Alan, Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile are still among my favourite and most read books. This is the first time however I have come across The Search for the Niger. For some reason the exploits of the brave and foolhardy men who sought both the source and the mouth of the Niger did not fire the imagination of the public in the same way that those of Speke and Burton and Livingstone did. Many of these attempts to gain entry to the interior of the west part of Africa took place 50 or so years before the search for the Nile. Set against the backdrop of the English government trying to halt the slave trade, these largely young men set out with woefully inadequate resources and for the most part totally ill-equipped to handle the climate, the terrain and the warring Arab and African factions that made an already fraught journey almost suicidal. But set out they did and over the course of the next decades both the source of the river and where its delta lay were discovered. So many of the explorers and their team of both Europeans and Africans succumbed to disease, especially malaria and dysentery (quite often very quickly) that it is a wonder to me that anyone else would even try. Conditions were appalling and with no prevention until the very last of the explorers, for malaria, even those who survived and returned to Great Britain and Europe continued to suffer and nearly all died very young. I think it is high time that the names of Rene Caillie, Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, Richard and John Lander, Macgregor Laird, Heinrich Barth and Dr Baikie were known as far and as wide as Stanley and Livingstone. Rene Caillie's book "Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo" (1830) has never been out of print and is regarded as one of the greatest travel books of all time. And now next on my list to find!!

[Dr Susan Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

As historian Lloyd states, the Nile captured the Victorian imagination far more than the West African rivers and earlier exploration. His account of those feats through time and biographies of some great explorers many who lost their life inthe undertaking is a thrilling account. Illustrations are good, many sourced fromthe London Library. My favourite is Mungo Park, who was the inspiration for my friend Ian Gordon Wilson's own African journies across the Sahara and down the Niger in the 1960s to 70s - a story told in the pages of The Nigerian Field.