He Risked Death as First American to Explore Africa's Deepest Parts | National Geographic

We have to go back to who William Stamps Cherry was at the age of 20. He does head out for Africa against everybody's advice, who said, "You're going to die over there." He went into Africa in 1889 and went further in the Congo than any other white man had ever gone—30,000 miles over two trips into the Congo. My grandfather was an African Explorer at the age of 20. He wasn't talked about much, you know. He was kind of like, you know, "Oh, there's the tall grandfather," shot that, and that was it.

As a kid, they were just under my bed, and they’re too heavy for, you know, a kid to pull around. But when he got them up, we had like the little tribute hearing-type of thing we had for grandfather. This was a young man who, when he was a young boy, had read the stories of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone. His background included floating down the Missouri River on a raft, much like the Huckleberry Finn stories of Mark Twain. He was a boy, an American boy of the land.

He was educated and trained in mechanical arts, and as a mechanic and a machinist, his forte was steam engines. He knew how to tear apart steam engines and rebuild them out of nothing. Most of the people he ran into along the way basically popped his balloon real fast and said, "You're going to die," because he had malaria, he had the lack of knowledge of the area, and he just—well, he persevered.

William Stamps Cherry spent a number of years in this heart of darkness—this area of the continent of Africa that had no name at the time. This area is today called the Central African Republic. He was like half of the end of one world and half of the new world coming in—half old-world pioneer and explorer and hunter, half new-world businessman and entrepreneur. He left the boyish penchant for hunting animals and floating down rivers on rafts and living off the land and took a very serious look at what destiny had given him, which was an opportunity to study a continent and its peoples, its rivers, its lands, its wildlife, the powers that were there, the colonization, the great scramble of carving up the land.

He wrote about it and he talked about it until the world changed, and no one was much interested in any of that anymore. The book he had hoped to write never got written. He had his way of doing things, and publishers had their way of doing things. When push came to shove, he just said, "The heck with it. I don't need it. I've been there. I've done it." Grandfather, I think, just decided, “Well, I’ve got a family now. There’s not a big interest in Africa right now.”

The story just got lost, and I think grandfather just lost maybe the enthusiasm to get it done. It’s a sad thing when you think of someone that had such an incredible life because he could have been literally forgotten from history, and it would have been a shame because he made history without a doubt. [Music]