[3][4] Participants on the expedition included Australian sharpshooter Leslie Tarlton; three American naturalists, Edgar Alexander Mearns, a retired U.S. Army surgeon; Stanford University taxidermist Edmund Heller, and mammalologist John Alden Loring; and Roosevelt's 19-year-old son Kermit, on a leave of absence from Harvard.

[5] The expedition also included a large number of porters, gunbearers, horse boys, tent men, and askari guards, as well as 250 local guides and hunters.

[8] Roosevelt also brought his Pigskin Library, a collection of 59 classic books bound in pig leather and transported in a single reinforced trunk.

[2] The Hamburg arrived at its destination at Naples, where the party boarded the Admiral, a German-flagged ship selected because it permitted the expedition to load large quantities of ammunition.

[10] While on board the Hamburg, Roosevelt encountered Frederick Courteney Selous, a longtime friend who was traveling to his own African safari, traversing many of the same areas.

Combined with marine, land and freshwater shells, crabs, beetles, and other invertebrates, not to mention several thousand plants, the number of natural history specimens totals 23,151.

Roosevelt interacted with renowned professional hunters and landowning families, and met many native peoples and local leaders, which he contrasted to African Americans, saying: "...it is pleasant to be made to realize in vivid fashion the progress the American negro has made, by comparing him with the negro who dwells in Africa untouched, or but lightly touched, by white influence.

[17] He later wrote a detailed account in the book African Game Trails in which he describes the excitement of the chase, the people he met, and the flora and fauna he collected in the name of science.

He notes (page 17) that "in the creation of the great game reserve through which the Uganda railway runs the British Government has conferred a boon upon mankind."