On 27 May 1879, the steamer Chinsura arrived at the port of Stone Town in Zanzibar with the Irish adventurer Frederick Carter and four Indian elephants on board. Starting at Mumbai in India, they had completed the first leg of one of the most ambitious colonial ventures of the 19th century: to establish a training school for elephants at Karema on the shores of Lake Tanganyika so that the animals could be used by the expedition’s paymaster, King Leopold II of Belgium, to extract Africa’s abundant natural resources. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, explains the writer and journalist Sophy Roberts in this fascinating history-cum-travelogue. In her much-praised previous book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Roberts used a quixotic quest for abandoned musical instruments to illuminate 250 years of Siberia’s history. With this new book, she follows in Carter’s footsteps to uncover a forgotten episode in a familiar tale of colonial greed, ineptitude, hypocrisy and folly. The events recalled fed into the ‘Scramble for Africa’, in which the European powers carved up almost 90 per cent of the continent.

It is a tragic tale and Roberts tells it beautifully. While she’s careful not to cast gun-for-hire Carter as a hero, the reader can’t help but marvel at his fortitude and courage as she describes him leading his unwieldy cavalcade of bearers, mahouts and elephants through East Africa’s unforgiving terrain