The story. The Trail.

DR. WILLIAM  EDWARD  DILLON:  NAVY SURGEON  IN  LIVINGSTONE’S  AFRICA

This book will be available in February, 2014.  It tells the extraordinary life-story of an Officer-Surgeon who travelled in the 1860s on Tall Ships to South America, North America, South Africa, Zanzibar, Arabia, India and Ceylon.

 

Front cover of book on Dr. Dillon

 

            Having completed this adventuring on the high seas, the story continues as Dillon joins his great buddy, Lieutenant Verney Cameron on an expedition sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society in London to find Dr. David Livingstone, who had not been heard of in Africa for over two years.

            Was Livingstone sick?  He had a history of suffering serious maladies in Africa. 

    OR   Had Livingstone “gone native”?  Good men had been known to disappear before, in this fashion.

    OR  Was Livingstone even alive?  His proposed explorations had included travelling through territory where cannibalism, boiling victims alive, had previously been recorded.

            The two Naval Officers set out, were soon joined by two further companions and over 300 porters, many soldiers with arms, and donkeys and dogs.  They tramped through marshes, across swift-flowing rovers and through hostile territories, only to find Livingstone had recently died.  His body’s journey to Westminster Abbey is described in the book, as well as the death of some expedition members.

            Research for this book took ten years.  6 cousins followed the explorers’ trail through Tanzania, and their original photographs fill the pages, as do original sketches by Dillon, maps, mini-biographies, and reproduction of diary passages written by Dillon on the oceans of the world.  Cameron wrote a book in 1877 about the expedition and his Across Africa is fully quoted in this new book, as are a number of original letters held by the author, all used skilfully to describe events accurately.  

CHECK IN AGAIN.   JOIN US IN FOLLOWING DILLON'S TRAIL