That anyone should have made such a journey was remarkable, but that Spicer did so was astonishing. It required him to journey at the head of a ragtag team of 28 adventurers and military misfits and in charge of two 40-foot mahogany motor launches he named HMS Mimi and Toutou from London to Cape Town and then overland for more than 2,000 miles, dragging the boats by rail, oxen, traction engine and muscle power through trackless jungles and over the 6,000-foot-high Mitumba Mountains on the way to launching them on Lake Tanganyika. In real life there was no love interest, but the hero, Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, 'the oldest lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy,' was at least as engaging a character as Charlie, and his coming to any military engagement with the Germans was if anything even more unbelievable. When her brother is killed, Rose vows vengeance on the Germans and browbeats the essentially pacific Charlie into taking his ancient boat, the African Queen, on an impossible journey downriver to attack a German gunboat, the Koenigin Luise (which Charlie called the Louisa), plying the fictional Lake Wittelsbach. There, you may remember, Bogart's drunken Charlie Allnut teams up with Hepburn's Rose Sayer, sister of a British missionary in what was German East Africa (now Tanzania) at the outbreak of World War I. Yet the real story is in some ways more fascinating than the movie. Anyone who picks up this book with the idea that he is about to be introduced to the real-life equivalents of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn is bound for disappointment. But neither novel nor movie bears more than a passing resemblance to the reality. Forester had a vague idea of the events Foden describes in this book when he came, in 1935, to write the novel on which the film was based, and the director John Huston may have known something of them when in 1951 he adapted James Agee's screenplay. Giles Foden's enjoyable book comes with the movie-style tag line: 'the incredible true story that inspired the classic film 'The African Queen.' ' Strictly speaking this is true.

The african queen novel