‘wild adventure, cool daring, and narrow escapes from death’
BALDWIN, William Charles.
African hunting and adventure from Natal to the Zambesi including Lake Ngami, the Kalahari Desert, &c. From 1852 to 1860 … Second edition.
London, Richard Bentley, 1863.
8vo, pp. x, 451, [1 (blank)]; with half-title, portrait frontispiece, and 47 illustrations including a folding map and 6 lithographic plates; some foxing, especially to frontispiece and title; overall good in twentieth-century half red morocco over red cloth, spine lettered and decorated in gilt; slight wear to extremities; inscription to front free endpaper ‘A. Smith Drawing Prize Christmas 1865 from his friend H.E. Harris'.
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African hunting and adventure from Natal to the Zambesi including Lake Ngami, the Kalahari Desert, &c. From 1852 to 1860 … Second edition.
Second edition recounting the African hunting expeditions of the famous hunter William Charles Baldwin (d. 1903), filled with ‘wild adventure, cool daring, and narrow escapes from death’ (Daily News, Dec. 1862).
‘A work of early sport and travel, this describes Baldwin’s journeys through Natal, Zululand, the Transvaal, Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, and Namaqualand to the Zambesi and the Victoria Falls (though not yet known as that). He hunted in the lands of the Amatongas and Zulus where he collected hippopotamus, lion, eland, rhinoceros, buffalo, kudu, and giraffe. Near Lake Ngami, he bagged elephant, then crossed the Tugela River on his way to the Zambesi (Victoria) Falls where he encountered buffalo and lion’ (Czech). ‘Mr. Baldwin’s experiences are written in a simple and unostentatious manner, but he went through more adventures than almost any other of the great South African travellers and hunters’ (Mendelssohn).
The present copy is the second English edition, published in the same year as the first English and American editions (the original title read simply African hunting from Natal …). It contains some handsome illustrations, the work of James Wolf and Johann Baptist Zwecker.
Czech, p. 12; Hosken, p. 10; Mendelssohn I, pp. 73-74.
