700 Men

SEVEN HUNDRED MEN - Back Cover

Zanzibar, 1887. Hamisi bin Amir is twenty-three years old, broke, and looking for work. When Henry Morton Stanley - the most famous explorer alive - arrives hiring porters for an expedition into the Congo, Hamisi signs on alongside his best friend Salim and a quiet former soldier named Baruti. The pay is good. The job is simple: carry loads, walk for two months, come home.

The job is not simple.

What follows is one of the most catastrophic expeditions in history. Seven hundred men march into the Ituri Forest - a jungle so dense the sun does not reach the ground - to rescue a colonial governor who does not want to be rescued. The two-month crossing takes five. The food runs out. The arrows are dipped in poison. The officers go mad. And the men who carry the loads, whose names appear in no diary and no history, die by the hundreds while Europe celebrates the adventure.

Told in the voice of a man the historical record forgot, Seven Hundred Men is a story of friendship tested past its limits, of empires built on the backs of the unnamed, and of what happens when a man must choose between saving his friend and saving himself.

Based on the true events of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1887-1889.