SHIPWRECK, SLAVERY, DIAMONDS, AND A CITY OF GOLD
[IMAGINARY VOYAGE.]
Admirable Travels of Messieurs Thomas Jenkins and David Lowellin through the unknown Tracts of Africa: with the Manner how Lowellin lived eight Years on an uninhabited Spot; and, having sustained Attacks from the wild Beasts and Savages, returned safe to London, in September, 1784, after having been fourteen years in those extensive Regions.
London, ‘for the Benefit of Robert Barker, an unfortunate blind man’, 1785.
8vo, pp. 48, including a woodcut frontispiece; fore-edges of title-page, C3, and E2 shaved with minor loss (but sense easily recoverable), else a good copy in later half marbled calf.
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Admirable Travels of Messieurs Thomas Jenkins and David Lowellin through the unknown Tracts of Africa: with the Manner how Lowellin lived eight Years on an uninhabited Spot; and, having sustained Attacks from the wild Beasts and Savages, returned safe to London, in September, 1784, after having been fourteen years in those extensive Regions.
Rare, a lively chapbook novella of adventures and tribulations in Africa, fusing elements of a Robinsonade with a brief utopia.
The narrator is David Lowellin (b. 1726), who at the age of eighteen absconds with his father’s money to Virginia, where he becomes a shoemaker’s apprentice at West Point. Returning to Wales in 1749 to find his parents dead, he gambles the rest of a large estate away in London then heads to sea as a merchant and in the navy until 1770, when he lies his way into Dutch service bound for the East Indies (along with Thomas Jenkins). Wrecked in a storm, they run aground on the coast of Africa and are taken by a party of ‘some hundreds of Blacks, or Negroes’, who feed them plantain, yams and monkey (both raw and cooked), then deliver them to an ‘Indian’ leader, who is ‘mild, humane, and gentle … using us more like companions than slaves’. Their new master takes them to the capital city, where they trade their European goods for gold and slaves (which they then lose in the chaos that ensues after they demonstrate of use of firearms). Setting off north, they encounter elephants, monkeys, and buffalo; ‘We once thought we saw a lion at a distance, but were not certain; however, a leopard came full in view’. They barter with the inhabitants, but as they go further north are set upon by a large group (see the frontispiece), killing some and losing several horses.
Finally they hit the Sahara, where Jenkins dies, but not before asking forgiveness for his role in Lowellin’s downfall (it was he who led him into gambling debt). Heading east Lowellin settles in an isolated spot, taming birds, cultivating crops, and collecting gold and diamonds, remaining there seven years without human contact. In 1782 he is discovered by soldiers who speak some broken French, and taken blindfold to the elegant city of the ‘Five Tribes’, its grand octagonal buildings decorated with gold and other metals. Its topography, industry and egalitarian society are described, as are its laws, on which Lowellin comes a cropper when the ‘innocent freedom’ he employed ‘in making love to a female’, sees him imprisoned for life. Luckily for him, this is commuted to banishment, and he is educated on the proper mode of courtship, then escorted out of the kingdom, and makes his way home.
The first edition of the Admirable Travels was published in 1782 (ESTC records three printings, in a total of four copies), followed by an edition of October 1783, and then present edition (NLW, Wisconsin, and a copy wanting the frontispiece at the British Library). As Gove notes, the titles are inflationary – with each edition the length of Lowellin’s sojourn increases, and the dates in the text changed. All are printed ‘for the benefit of Robert Barker, an unfortunate blind man’, who is also mentioned at the end of the text; Barker appears in the imprint of a number of chapbooks from 1777 to 1792, but he may not have existed.
ESTC T112182; Gove p. 377.
