Stanley was a U.S. traveler born in Wales, educated in the poorhouse, and adopted by a New Orleans merchant who gave him his name. He fought in the Confederate army and after the war became a newspaper correspondent. He was commissioned by the New York Herald to go in search of David Livingstone in 1871. Stanley based one of his most popular books, Through the Dark Continent (1878), on a series of diaries in which he recorded the progress of his expedition of 1874--77. He presented the day-to-day account of his journeys undertaken to discover the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers, his circumnavigation of Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, and his dangerous trip down the Congo River to Boma.