Scouting for Stanley in East Africa

Thomas Stevens (1854-1935) was the first person to circle the globe by bicycle. The New York World asked Thomas in 1888 to join its search in East Africa for the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley had travelled up the Congo but a year and a half had passed without news. Stevens called it "a grand opportunity; the one chance, mayhap, of a lifetime, to spring into fame on the stage of African exploit. How would I Found Stanley look in the libraries with I Found Livingstone?"Stevens led a six-month expedition, writing for the newspaper of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and hunting big game. He found Stanley's camp in a race with the rival New York Herald and wrote his book, "Scouting for Stanley in East Africa". It concluded: "By the end of February 1890, I was again in New York. I had been gone fourteen months. I had not 'found Stanley,' as Stanley had found Livingstone in 1871; the circumstances were altogether different. I had, however, gratified a pardonable journalistic ambition in being the first correspondent to reach him and to give him news of the world, after his long period of African darkness. That I had done this under most trying conditions, Mr. Stanley fully appreciated; and warmly reciprocated by showing me every courtesy in his power, on the march to the coast, in Zanzibar, and in Egypt."No one who has read Thomas Stevens's "Around the World on a Bicycle" need be told that he is a brave, hardy traveller whom no obstacles or dangers can daunt. This quality was useful in the venture which he has described in Scouting for Stanley in East Africa. He repaired to Zanzibar, and not considering it advisable to fit out a large exploring party, pushed into Masai land, and waited for news. Not an hour was wasted by him, however, and his lively volume relates the abundance of the impressions he received of Africa and its peoples while waiting for letters from the great explorer. He had the pleasure of being the first correspondent to greet Stanley at last, and talks with him and with Emin Pasha fill the closing chapters. Scouting for Stanley in East Africa is entitled to a place among the most readable volumns written on that much bewritten land. The part which we think will most interest our readers is dealing with the slave trade. These cunning scoundrels, these dealers in women and children, set the chiefs of Chaga to warring and raiding, in order that they may obtain slaves for the Zanzibar and Pemba shambasi. . If these inhuman vultures were kept out of Chaga, or suppressed, the great incentive of the chiefs to make war on each other would be removed; and there is no reason why, with a little good management, peace and good-will might not be established between the fourteen bantam States of Kilimanjaro. Is it not too horrible to think of, that these Swahili slave hunters and dealers should purposely set these tribes fighting that they may purchase of them the captured prisoners?