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The lands of Cazembe. Lacerda’s journey to Cazembe. In 1798 … also journey of the pombeiros P.J. Baptista and Amaro José, across Africa from Angola to Tette on the Zambeze. Translated by B.A. Beadle; and a résumé of the journey of MM. Monteiro and Gamitto. By Dr. C.T. Beke ...

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First edition thus containing three first-hand accounts of journeys across southern and central Africa translated into English, including Richard Francis Burton’s edition of the travel diaries of the Portuguese explorer Francisco de Lacerda (1753-1798). The signature to the title appears to be that of the naval officer and Arctic explorer Sir Erasmus Ommanney (1814-1904), a member of the expedition organised to search for the remains of John Franklin.

The publication of this volume was prompted by the interest ‘excited by the recent letters of Dr. Livingstone concerning the country of the Cazembe and neighbouring regions of Central Africa’ (p. [iii]). The bulk of the work is comprised of Burton's edition of Francisco José Maria de Lacerda e Almeida's diaries, letters, and memoranda relating to his expedition to Cazembe (or Kazembe, in modern-day Zambia) in 1798, together with supplementary material, which Burton also translated from the Portuguese. Burton's text (which occupies pp. 1-164 of the volume) was originally intended to be accompanied by two appendices: ‘Notes on How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa: Travels, Adventures and Discoveries, by Henry M. Stanley’ and ‘Being a Rejoinder to the “Memoir on The Lake Regions of East Africa Reviewed, in Reply to Captain Burton's letter in the Athenaeum, No. 1899” by W.D. Cooley’. However, since they were of ‘a controversial and critical nature’ (Penzer), they were rejected by the Royal Geographical Society and then privately published by Burton as Supplementary Papers to the Mtáwá Cazembe (Trieste, 1873).

The second work in this book, beginning at p. 165, is an English translation of the diaries of Pedro João Baptista, an Angolan slave and explorer who made the first recorded transcontinental transit of Africa in 1815, accompanied by fellow Angolan slave Amaro José. The third and final work, beginning at p. 245, is a summary recounting the 1831 expedition of the Portuguese explorers José Maria Corrêa Monteiro and Antonio Candido Pedroso Gamitto, the second Portuguese mission to the kingdom of Kazembe.

Casada 85; Hosken p. 34; Penzer pp. 89-90.

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