MISSIONARY TRAVELS AND RESEARCHES IN SOUTH AFRICA 1857 DAVID LIVINGSTONE 1ST ED.

MISSIONARY TRAVELS AND RESEARCHES IN SOUTH AFRICA 1857 DAVID LIVINGSTONE 1ST ED.

£550.00

Tax included.

[LIVINGSTONE, DAVID]. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; Including a Sketch of Sixteen Years' Residence in the Interior of Africa, and a Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast; Thence Across the Continent, Down the River Zambezi, to the Eastern Ocean. London: John Murray, 1857.

First edition. Leather-bound; hardcover; octavo (22.5cm x 14cm x 4.5cm); pp. ix, [1], 687, maps. English text. Bound in handsome contemporary half calf gilt; marbled boards, page edges and endpapers; folding lithograph frontispiece and forty-three engraved illustrations, including one folding cross-section plate; two folding maps to the rear; printed footnotes; rear appendices. Printed by W. Clowes and Sons. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure with the hinges and joints intact, the covers well-preserved. Interior with some light scattered foxing, mostly to endpapers, and a previous owner signature neatly inked to verso front endpaper. A handsome copy.

Notes: First edition of one of the most important books on African exploration. Missionary Travels is one of the emblematic accounts of African exploration in the 19th century and the foundation of the Livingstone legend. He "both embodied and transcended the nineteenth-century tension between religion and science, and it was this which accounted for the scale and complexity of his career in Africa" (ODNB). The book describes the first of his three major expeditions, "in which he followed the Zambezi, discovering Victoria Falls in the process, as well as the Shire and Ruyuma rivers, ranging from Angola in the west to Mozambique in the east. During these years he explored vast regions of central Africa" (PMM). "David Livingstone, the Scottish medical missionary, is known to history as the greatest explorer of his age and a dedicated humanitarian who devoted his life to the eradication of the African slave trade. He was a national hero to his contemporaries and time has confirmed his reputation as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the eminent Victorians, both in his achievement and in his influence." - George Myrtle.