The African Queen was published by John Lane (The Bodley Head) in 1935. Rose Sayer is a missionary’s sister stranded in German East Africa when World War I breaks out in 1914. Charlie Allnutt is a Cockney mechanic who operates a thirty-foot steam launch — the African Queen — carrying supplies to remote missions. When German soldiers destroy Rose’s mission and her brother dies, she and Charlie escape downriver on the launch.
Rose conceives a plan: they will navigate the river to its outlet in a great lake where a German gunboat controls the water, and they will torpedo the gunboat using explosives improvised from the launch’s oxygen and hydrogen cylinders. Charlie thinks she is insane. But Rose’s will is indomitable, and Charlie — despite his drinking, his cowardice, his practicality — cannot resist her certainty.
The river journey is the novel’s substance: rapids, German forts to be passed at night, mosquitoes, tropical illness, the gradual transformation of both characters through the adventure. Rose becomes less prim, more physical, more alive. Charlie becomes less passive, more capable of courage. Their love affair — unlikely, unspoken for most of the journey, ultimately consummated — is one of the great romantic pairings in English fiction.
John Huston’s 1951 film (with Humphrey Bogart winning his only Oscar as Charlie and Katharine Hepburn as Rose) is so perfectly cast that it has overshadowed the novel — but Forester’s book is tighter, darker, and more psychologically complex than the film’s romantic comedy.
Collecting The African Queen
First edition (John Lane/The Bodley Head, London, 1935): Green cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition with jacket, fine/fine: $2,000–$6,000
- Without jacket, very good: $300–$800
- US first (Little, Brown, 1935): $500–$1,500