In Memoriam, From the departed author’s sister
GILL, William.
The river of golden sand: being the narrative of a journey through China and eastern Tibet to Burmah ... Condensed by Edward Colborne Baber … Edited, with a memoir and introductory essay, by Colonel Henry Yule …
London, John Murray, 1883.
8vo, pp. [2], 332, [6 (advertisements)]; with half-title, frontispiece portrait of the author, 2 plates (1 folding), 30 woodcut illustrations and diagrams in the text, and 1 folding coloured map; a few light marks; very good in original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt vignettes to spine and upper cover, grey endpapers; slight wear to extremities, upper cover slightly marked; ‘H.C. Houndle’ inscribed to front endpaper, below which a pasted note inscribed ‘With kindest remembrances from F.E.M. Gill'.
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The river of golden sand: being the narrative of a journey through China and eastern Tibet to Burmah ... Condensed by Edward Colborne Baber … Edited, with a memoir and introductory essay, by Colonel Henry Yule …
Second condensed edition recounting the author’s 1877 expedition through China and Tibet to Burma, featuring new illustrations and a memoir of Gill, with a dedicatory inscription from the author’s sister to the front free endpaper.
An unsuccessful Conservative candidate for Hackney in the 1874 election, Gill took his snub on the chin by deciding to dedicate himself fully to exploration: he had previously explored Central Asia and Iran in 1873. In 1876, he set sail for China, arriving in Beijing in September and spending a number of weeks exploring the northeast. In November he took a steamer to Shanghai, from where, in January of the following year, he set out towards Burma with the eventual hope of returning to India via steamship. Progressing up the Yangtze river, Gill reached Chengdu in May – from where he mounted a number of expeditions into the unexplored mountains to the north – before setting off southwards (this time in a sedan chair carried by his porters), following the trade route to Jinsha Jiang and Dali before reaching Bhamo, in Burma, on the first of November. The scientific results of this journey were first published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1879 and earned Gill the gold medal from the Society; a more popular narrative of the expedition designed for the reading public was published the following year as The River of Golden Sand.
The present copy is a second edition of this work, dated 1883, a year after Gill’s death (the unfortunate Gill was kidnapped and murdered by Bedouins at Wadi Sudr while crossing the Sinai desert). The work was reissued due to the request of Gill’s sister, one of his most ardent supporters, who desired a new illustrated edition as a memorial to her brother. Alongside an abridged version of the main travel narrative, the work features a memorial to Gill and a modified and updated version of the original geographical introduction – both by Henry Yule – as well as new illustrations either taken from rough sketches by Gill himself or taken from Gustav Kreitner’s 1881 account of Béla Széchenyi’s expedition to the same region.
