How far would you go for love?

In 1898, when his girlfriend’s father asked what he had done to prove himself worthy of marriage, 22-year-old Ewart Grogan responded by walking across Africa.

His 4,500-mile trek is one of the greatest unsung tales in the history of African exploration. Yet Grogan’s trail has never been repeated—until now.

Months before his own marriage, award-winning travel and science writer Julian Smith became the first person to retrace this groundbreaking route from the Indian Ocean to the wilds of Sudan.

The last great journey of the Golden Age of Explorers took the courageous Cambridge student from the coast of what is now Mozambique through the Great Rift Valley into the deadly swamps of the Sudd.

Along the way Grogan battled tropical disease, starvation, charging elephants, reluctant porters and hungry cannibals.

Africans called him Bwana Chui, “The Leopard,” for his piercing yellow eyes and iron determination.

Eventually—barely—Grogan made it, stumbling back to civilization after two years in the bush.

It worked. Not only did he find fame and fortune waiting back in London, but also Gertrude Coleman, whom he married without delay.

The resulting book, Chasing the Leopard: Across Africa For Love, Glory and the Sheer Bloody Hell of It, will weave Smith’s firsthand experiences along the route with excerpts from Grogan’s own 1905 account.

From Lake Tanganyika to the Mountains of the Moon, past lush volcanos and reed-choked swamps, through threatened game reserves and countries torn by poverty, sickness and war, the journey remains a cross section of a continent balanced between chaos and hope.

Both a grand adventure in the classic tradition and an intensely personal account, Chasing the Leopard will examine topics as diverse as the economic exploitation of Africa by foreign interests, the endangered mountain gorillas of the Ruwenzori Mountains, and the precarious relationship between the tribes of Rwanda, which Grogan noted a century ago.

It will also explore the common ground between a 22-year-old Victorian at the twilight of the 19th century and a 35-year-old American at the beginning of the 21st—both unmarried and eager for adventure, each hoping a woman will still be waiting when he returns.

Click on country names for photographs

The Route

Grogan’s overland route spans modern Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda and Sudan.

It begins at Beira, Mozambique and follows the Zambezi River into southern Malawi, continuing through Blantyre and the Shiré highlands to the southern end of Lake Malawi.

After passing the length of the lake made famous by the missionary David Livingstone, the trail continues to Lake Tanganyika. Transportation down the longest lake in the world is aboard the steamer MV Liemba, originally a WWI German warship whose story inspired The African Queen.

En route are Ujiji, once a remote crossroads for explorers, slavers and fortune-seekers, and the chimpanzees at Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, made famous by Jane Goodall.

Grogan’s route continues through the tiny, war-torn countries of Burundi and Rwanda, where he found “a hideous nightmare of horrors” in a land devastated by cannibals. It leads around the eastern shore of Lake Kivu, where the bodies of victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide were dumped.

Next stop is the lush Rwenzori Mountains, Africa’s highest range, where endangered mountain gorillas cling to a precarious existence. From Lake Kivu the journey continues past Lake Edward to Lake Albert on the border of Uganda and the DRC.

In northwestern Uganda, the Victoria Nile spills over Murchison Falls, now a national park with some of the highest concentrations of animals on the continent. Aid workers, refugees and armed rebels replace tourists farther north.

The end of Grogan’s journey almost proved his undoing. In southern Sudan he and his dwindling party enter a “howling waste in a wilderness of swamps” known as the Sudd.

Sick, injured and desperate, they find themselves long past the point of no return in the land of the fierce Dinka tribe. Days from collapse, they stumble onto a military outpost south of Sobat and are saved.

Grogan returns by ship to Cairo and then to England, where he meets the Queen, lectures at the Royal Geographic Society and marries Gertrude, his partner for life.

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