Henry Morton Stanley · 1872 · overland

Stanley's own account of the Herald expedition, published in 1872 and disbelieved by half of learned London. Eight months from Bagamoyo to Lake Tanganyika through war, fever and desertion, to a meeting on a beach that produced the most quoted greeting in the English language.

1. 1
   Paris

   October 1869, and Bennett of the New York Herald wakes a reporter at midnight at the Grand Hotel and tells him to find Livingstone - and when asked about the budget, says draw a thousand pounds now and another when that is gone.

2. 2
   Zanzibar

   January 1871, and the outfitting: six tons of cloth, beads and wire as currency, and nearly two hundred porters hired for a journey nobody on the island believes has any prospect of succeeding.

3. 3
   Bagamoyo

   The mainland caravan town, and the start of the march - the name meaning lay down your heart, which was what the slave caravans coming the other way had been told to do at the coast.

4. 4
   Mpwapwa

   Across the coastal plain and up into the Usagara hills, losing men to fever, desertion and the tsetse - and Stanley flogging deserters, which he wrote up frankly and was criticised for ever afterwards.

5. 5
   Tabora

   Unyanyembe, the great Arab trading town in the middle of the route - and a war between the Arabs and the chief Mirambo that closes the direct road west and holds the expedition for three months.

6. 6
   Ujiji

   10 November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika: a crowd, a grey-bearded white man in a blue cap, and the sentence Stanley spent the rest of his life being teased for having prepared in advance.

7. 7
   The Rusizi

   North with Livingstone to settle whether the river at the head of the lake flows in or out - it flows in, which kills Livingstone's theory that Tanganyika feeds the Nile, and he takes it well.

8. 8
   Tabora

   The parting in March 1872: Stanley going east with the journals and letters, Livingstone going west with fresh supplies to look for the Nile again, and neither expecting it to be the last time.

9. 9
   Bagamoyo

   The coast again, and a scoop that made Stanley the most famous journalist alive - and that a good part of the Royal Geographical Society spent the next year insisting could not have happened.