around the Saharan rocks the rugged richardson roamed
RICHARDSON, James.
Narrative of a mission to central Africa performed in the years 1850-51, under the orders and at the expense of Her Majesty’s Government …
London, Chapman and Hall, 1853.
2 vols, 8vo, pp. xxviii, 343, with 1 folding map; [2], viii, 359, [1 (blank)]; a little foxing, occasional light marks; good in original brown cloth, spines lettered in gilt, covers blocked in blind, yellow endpapers; repairs to spines and hinges, small losses to spines, some marks to covers, corners bumped, old adhesions to pastedowns.
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Narrative of a mission to central Africa performed in the years 1850-51, under the orders and at the expense of Her Majesty’s Government …
First edition recounting the English explorer, missionary and abolitionist James Richardson’s 1850-1851 expedition through central Africa, including the first known crossing of the Libyan Hammada al-Hamra, or ‘Red Plateau’.
Supported by the Bible Society, Richardson first came to North Africa in 1845 with the hope of propagating Christianity and ending the slave trade. In that year he also made his first expedition, heading southwest from Tripoli to the Libyan city of Ghat, where he introduced himself as the ‘Consul for the English’ and met Sheikh Hatita. In 1850, he returned to Africa as leader of an expedition featuring the German explorers Heinrich Barth and Adolf Overweg. Beginning, once again, in Tripoli, the party crossed the Sahara via Murzuk, Ghat, and Agades, in the course of which they also traversed the stony ‘Red Plateau’ in the northwest Sahara. Beyond Agades the explorers separated, with Richardson travelling eastwards towards Bornu. He was not, however, to survive the journey: falling ill with presumed heatstroke combined with ‘injudicious use of medicines’ in late February 1851, he soon succumbed to his illness at Zinder in early March.
Richardson had already published one account of his Saharan travels, his Travels in the great desert of Sahara in 1848. This, his second work (and first posthumous one) was compiled and edited from his surviving journals by the explorer and travel-writer Bayle St. John, who had himself only just returned (to Paris, where he worked for the Daily Telegraph) from a two-year stay in Egypt.
Howgego R13.
