Livingstone and His African Journeys (Elspeth Huxley)

Elspeth Huxley, Livingstone and His African Journeys. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974.

Royal octavo (25 x 17 cm), hard cover, dustwrapper, 224 pages, well illustrated in monochrome and colour.

The slightest foxing on the endpapers and edges of the text-block, small price written in pen on the front free endpaper. Very good condition.

David Livingstone's adventurous journeys in Central Africa put more on the map of the Dark Continent than any other explorers. He was the first European to cross the African continent, covering at least 30,000 miles and charting about a million square miles of unknown territory. He traced the course of this Zambesi to its source, discovering the Victoria Falls; he mapped the Central African river system and discovered Lake Nyasa and the Shirwe Highlands. Livingstone was not only an explorer and a geographer but an anthropologist, botanist, ethnologist, and astronomer and, above all, medical missionary. As a poor boy from Glasgow, he had taught himself Greek, Latin and mathematics to qualify himself to study medicine and divinity, so that when he arrived at Cape Town in 1840 as a 27-year-old missionary doctor, he had already cultivated a tenacity of purpose that was to see him through feats of unbelievable endurance during the next 30 years.

Elspeth Huxley, a highly-acclaimed writer on Africa, portrays Livingstone as a modest, selfless man who died disappointed that he had not made more definitive discoveries and had failed to convert the Africans to Christianity. But it was through his work that the British penetrated the heart of Africa; that the world was informed of the appalling slave trade there; and that the church missionaries moved into the great areas of forest, swamp and desert of Africa.