Cheap Biography - Stanley & Livingstone (Video) Price

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Excellent intro to the lives and legacy of the two explorers
They are two of the nineteenth century's most famous and celebrated explorers, but many today know little about them apart from the words uttered by Henry Morton Stanley on November 10, 1871: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." The story and significance of the lives of Stanley and Livingstone are much larger than I realized myself, and this video makes for a wonderful introduction to two men of vastly different backgrounds brought together by fate and united in a mission to explore the African interior. Together, they would open up the central African interior to the west and shine the light of knowledge into what was previously referred to as the Dark Continent. <
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>The lives of Stanley and Livingstone could not have been more different. Livingstone grew up in a poor but loving, pious household. He worked his way through school, decided to become a medical missionary, and was sent to Africa by the London Missionary Society. He married and had four children, but he sent his family back to England when he followed God's call to take the gospel into the remote tribal areas in the continent's interior. He traveled on his own into extremely dangerous areas, braving the deadly possibilities of sickness and tribal warfare. Appalled by what he saw of the slave trade, he decided to take action to stop it - and the best way he knew to do that was to introduce bona fide commerce into the region. From that point on, he became an explorer as well as a missionary. When he published accounts of his travels and notes, the books became bestsellers, Livingstone gained international fame, and he became a national hero back at home. In 1870, it had been three years since he had last been heard from, and speculations about his possible death gained great public attention. <
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>Someone had to go to Africa and find him, and that man was Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley's was a life of great tragedy and grievous rejection. He was born with the name John Rowlands, the illegitimate son of a town drunk and a promiscuous housemaid, neither of whom had any feelings for him at all. His grandfather raised him in his earliest years, but after his death, Stanley was shipped off to a workhouse, where he endured almost unimaginable brutality and cruelty. At fifteen, he managed to leave the workhouse and took a job on board a ship sailing to New Orleans, but this led to even more brutality. When he reached New Orleans, he was aided by a cotton broker named Stanley; he changed his own name to Henry Stanley in the man's honor, but his benefactor eventually rejected him as well. He joined the Confederate army, but he wound up in an infamous Union prisoner of war camp. Eventually, though, Stanley established himself as a journalist, and in 1870 he was called upon to lead an expedition to find the missing Dr. Livingstone. He knew nothing of Africa, but he was determined to succeed, and succeed he did. He and Livingstone developed a strong relationship over the course of their four months together in Africa. <
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>In many ways, Stanley's discovery of Livingstone marks only the beginning of the story. This video does a wonderful job of recounting Stanley's later missions to Africa and the controversies that surrounded those journeys. Livingstone was a missionary, but Stanley could be called a mercenary of sorts. We learn of the rejections that continued to descend upon Stanley even as his popularity as an explorer and writer grew by leaps and bounds. Most of all, though, we learn of the importance of his explorations in the African interior, as he became the first white man to travel and map the length of the deadly Congo River, for example. This video also helps the viewer understand just how wildly popular and celebrated both Livingstone and Stanley were in their lifetimes. In the case of Stanley, it is not always a happy story, but it is an important one. A&E Biography has once again created a gem of an introduction to the lives of two extraordinary but increasingly neglected men whose achievements did much to change the world they lived in.