William Winwood Reade

Born in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1838, William Winwood Reade was a "scion of a wealthy landed family". Having failed at Oxford University and, despite having composed two novels, "failed in any conventional sense as a novelist", Reade decided to begin geographical exploration.[2]

Thus, at age 25, using his private funds and with sponsorship from the Royal Geographical Society, he departed for Africa, arriving in Cape Town by paddle steamer during 1862. After several months of observing gorillas and travelling through Angola, Reade returned home and published his first travel account, Savage Africa. Although criticised for its juvenile style, the book is notable for its anthropological inquiries,[2] as well as for its exculpatory passages concerning the slave trade and its prophecy of an Africa divided between Britain and France in which black Africans have become extinct.[3]

In 1868 Reade secured the patronage of London-based Gold Coast trader Andrew Swanzy to journey to West Africa. After failing to get permission to enter the Ashanti Empire, Reade set out north from Freetown to explore the areas past the Solimana capital of Falaba. He was detained in Falaba by the local King Seedwa, who imprisoned him for three months under conditions of physical and mental hardship. Legend has it that King Seedwa set four gruelling tasks for Reade each day of his captivity, all of which Reade completed with aplomb. [2][4]

Though Reade travelled over some unexplored territory, his findings excited little interest among geographers, due mostly to his failure to make accurate measurements of his journey as his sextant and other instruments had been left behind at Port Loko. However, his experiences of West Africa were not entirely lost to science, thanks to his correspondence with Charles Darwin.[5] Darwin subsequently used information given by Reade for his publication The Descent of Man (1871).[6]

Soon after Reade's return, he published his The African Sketch-Book (1873), an account of his travels that also recommended greater British involvement in West Africa. Reade returned to Africa in 1873 to serve as a correspondent for the Ashanti War, but died not long after.[7] He was buried in Ipsden churchyard, Oxfordshire, close to the family home.

According to one historian, the book became a kind of "substitute bible for secularists" in which Reade attempts to trace the development of Western civilisation in terms analogous to those used in the natural sciences.[8] He uses it to advance the philosophy of political liberalism and social Darwinism.[9] The final section of the book provoked enormous controversy due to Reade's "outspoken attack on Christian dogma" and the book was condemned by several magazines. In 1872 William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, denounced The Martyrdom of Man as one of several "irreligious works" (the others included work by Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and David Friedrich Strauss).[9]

Reade was not an atheist, as some of his critics maintained; he had a "presumptive belief in a Creator, but one ineffable and unapproachable, far beyond the grasp of the human intellect or the reach of petty human prayers".[2] He was a social Darwinist who believed in the survival of the fittest and wanted to create a new civilisation, contending that "while war, slavery, and religion had once been necessary, they would not always be so; in the future only science could guarantee human progress".[9] Nevertheless, the book "drew attention to the immense tale of suffering and waste involved in the theory of evolution".[10]

V. S. Pritchett lauded The Martyrdom of Man as "the one, the outstanding, dramatic, imaginative historical picture of life, to be inspired by Victorian science".[9] Since The Martyrdom of Man had, by Victorian standards, a relatively sympathetic account of African history, it was approvingly cited by W. E. B. Du Bois in his books The Negro (1915) and The World and Africa (1947).[11]

Cecil Rhodes, an English-born South African politician and businessman, said that the book "made me what I am".[9] Other admirers of The Martyrdom of Man included H. G. Wells, Winston Churchill,[12] Harry Johnston, George Orwell, Susan Isaacs,[13] A. A. Milne and his son Christopher Robin,[14] and Michael Foot.[12]