Portrait of 19th-century explorer Henry M. Stanley, taken from volume two of Through the Dark Continent, or the sources of the Nile around the great lakes of equatorial Africa and down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878). The caption reads:
“H. M. Stanley, from a photograph taken at Simon’s Town, Cape of Good Hope, soon after emerging from Africa (on the West Coast), Nov., 1877.”
In this book, Stanley coined the term “dark continent” for Africa, a reference to the jungle being so dense that virtually no sunlight reached the ground.
Through the Dark Continent is a detailed account of Stanley’s 999-day journey, financed by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph, to document the Central African Great Lakes and rivers, and to confirm the source of the Nile River. In the process, he completed the mapping of the Lualaba, renamed the Livingstone River in honor of Dr. David Livingstone who started the process several years earlier.