LIVINGSTONE, David. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; Including a Sketch of Sixteen Years' Residence in the Interior of Africa, and a Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast; Thence Across the Continent, Down the River Zambesi, to the Eastern Ocean. London, W. Clowes and Sons for John Murray, 1857.
8vo. Original brown blind-stamped cloth, spine lettered in gilt by Edmonds and Remnants with their binder's label on rear paste-down; pp. ix, 687, 8 (advertisements, dated November 1, 1857); folding wood-engraved frontispiece after J.W. Whymper, steel-engraved portrait of the author by William Holl after Henry Phillips, 22 wood-engraved plates by Whymper et al. After Alfred Ryder, Ford, Henry Need, et al., one folding wood-engraved geological section, and 2 folding lithographic maps by John Arrowsmith with routes added by hand in red (one in pocket inside rear cover), wood-engraved illustrations in the text, one full-page, wood-engraved title-vignette; a little rubbed, inner hinges strengthened at an early date, portrait with foxing, as usual, a few plates amd maps a little spotted, one plate with very short marginal repair; a good copy with an interesting provenance pertaining to exploration.
First edition, the issue without the extra leaves numbered 8* and 8+, and with wood-engraved illustrations, one of many parallel issues as the publisher Murray had to give the commission for the production of the plates to various printing establishments at the same time. 'Livingstone's services to African geography during thirty years are almost unequalled; he covered about a third of the continent from the Cape to the Equator and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. He made three great expeditions; in 1853-6 (described in this book), 1858-64 and 1865-1873, of which the first and the third are the most important. During these years he explored vast regions of central Africa, many of which had never been seen by white men before. He first discovered the Zambesi River at Secheke and followed it northwards, eventually reaching the west coast of Africa at Luanda, Angola, and the east coast at Quelimane, Mozambique, In 1855 he discovered the great falls of the Zambesi and named them the Victoria Falls. He explored the Zambesi, Shire and Ruyuma rivers and found the salt lake Chilwa and Lake Nyasa […] The geographical results of his journeys were of supreme importance, and made it possible to fill in great stretches of the maps of Central Africa which hitherto had been blank' (PMM). This remarkable work also alerted Victorian England to the extent of the slave trade in Central and Eastern Africa, and Livingstone's book corrected the popular misconception that the slave trade was dying out in Africa; through his researches and writings the Portuguese slave trade was virtually wiped out in Angola.
Provenance: This copy was presented by Charles Napier Sturt (1795-1869), soldier and relentless explorer of Australia from the late 1820s to 1845 (presented with the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal in 1847) to his son Evelyn Gawler Sturt in November 1857. Evelyn, a soldier as well, had been born in South Australia in 1840 and died in 1864 in Madhya Pradesh, India of cholera.
Abbey, Travel 347 (issue with lithographic plates); Czech, African p. 97 (issue with lithographic plates and map in rear pocket); Gay 3034; Ibrahim-Hilmy I, p.389; Mendelssohn I, pp. 908-910; PMM 341.
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