The Explorers: A Story of Fearless Outcasts, Blundering Geniuses, and Impossible Success
Author of titles about Christopher Columbus, James Cook, and David Livingston, Dugard here delves into the explorer as a personality type. Acknowledging a debt to a similar inquiry, mountaineer Wilfrid Noyce’s The Springs of Adventure (1959), Dugard structures his title around a famous expedition, Richard Burton and John Speke’s 1857–58 quest to discover the source of the Nile. Using seven traits to illustrate their characters as explorers, Dugard discusses the events of their journey in terms of each man’s—as the book’s chapters are headed—curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline, and perseverance. As Burton and Speke encounter problems typical in discovery annals—daunting terrain, illness, privation, and mutual acrimony—Dugard develops the seven traits along several tracks, including psychology, physiology, and other adventurers who exemplified the trait under discussion. Thus, his narrative can jump from introversion to dopamine, and from Burton-Speke to Ernest Shackleton’s courageous perseverance to rescue his crew from Antarctica in 1914–16. Such a varied shuffling of subjects should keep the exploration audience locked into Dugard’s portrait of the discoverer archetype. --Gilbert Taylor