And that was an obsession at the time of the Victorian age, where they're very interested in Egypt and all the promise and majesty of this ancient land and this ancient history. So - and that civilization relied on that. So it gave us one of the oldest and richest continuous civilizations in history. People had been obsessed with it from, you know, Egyptian kings to ancient philosophers, wondering, where is the source of the longest and most storied river in the world? You know, and you think of the Nile River, you think of Egypt, you know, so it brought life to this desert. MILLARD: Well, this is a mystery that had been going on for thousands of years. Why was there such interest in tracking the source of the Nile River? There would be maps with blank spaces where, you know, people hadn't - from Europe hadn't explored. This story is in the middle of the 19th century, back at a time when a lot of the African continent was unknown to Europeans.
Her latest is "River Of The Gods: Genius, Courage, And Betrayal In The Search For The Source Of The Nile." Well, Candice Millard, welcome back to FRESH AIR.ĬANDICE MILLARD: Thank you so much for having me.ĭAVIES: You know, I think of the age of exploration as the time of Vasco da Gama and the Spanish conquistadors. A third figure in the story is a resourceful, formerly enslaved African who guided the explorers through hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain, helping negotiate physical obstacles and the demands of tribal leaders.Ĭandice Millard is a former editor at National Geographic who's written three previous books. But when they returned to London, the two men engaged in a bitter public quarrel over their discoveries, leading to moments of high drama. Their expeditions would indeed reveal the source of the world's longest river.
They would share arduous journeys into East Africa in the process, getting serious injuries and suffering from fevers and afflictions that at times rendered one or another of them deaf, blind or paralyzed. The other, an aristocratic soldier and surveyor devoted to hunting big game.
One was a brilliant linguist, writer and explorer with endless self-confidence and a lifelong interest in pornography. Her latest book details the efforts of mid-19th century British explorers to find the source of the Nile River. Our guest, writer Candice Millard, has a knack for burrowing into a little-explored corner of history and spinning out a page-turning yarn that illuminates a part of our past.
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