I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where i like
MELLAND, Frank Hulme, and Edward H.
Cholmeley. Through the heart of Africa: being an account of a journey on bicycles and on foot from northern Rhodesia, past the Great Lakes, to Egypt, undertaken when proceeding home on leave in 1910.
London, Constable & Company Ltd., 1912.
8vo, xvii, [1], 305, [3]; with 1 folding map and 80 illustrations on 46 plates; some light foxing throughout; a good copy in original orange cloth with gilt vignette to upper cover and gilt lettering to spine, top edge gilt; spine slightly sunned and marked with some wear to head and foot, light marks to covers; previous owner’s inscription on front free endpaper.
Added to your basket:
Cholmeley. Through the heart of Africa: being an account of a journey on bicycles and on foot from northern Rhodesia, past the Great Lakes, to Egypt, undertaken when proceeding home on leave in 1910.
First edition recounting the 1910 journey of two colonial administrators from northern Rhodesia through German East Africa, across Lake Victoria, and along the Nile River into South Sudan, a journey totalling more than 2,500 miles.
The bicycle has become a popular tool for the average commuter intent on returning home from work as fast as possible, but it is less often used when one’s home is several thousand miles (and a number of jungles, mountain ranges, and lakes) from one’s place of work. This feeble excuse did not stop Frank Melland and Edward Cholmeley, two officials stationed in northern Rhodesia who decided in 1907 to return to England, from saddling up for an epic journey on two wheels (with an occasional boat ride in between) from Mpika in modern-day Zambia to Khartoum in the Sudan. ‘Passing through German East Africa near the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the pair bagged leopard and numerous crocodile. In the Bogoma forest near the Albert Nyanza, elephant was hunted, with additional chapters on hunting elephant in the Masindi District in Uganda. An interesting work of travel and sport complete with numerous bicycle breakdowns’, is Czech’s typically dry verdict. Truly a classic of early twentieth-century colonial African cycling literature.
Czech, p. 113.
