Africana Reprint Library 

Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration

W. B. Lord and Thomas Baines

Hardcover

First Edition 1975

Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration W. B. Lord and Thomas Baines
AFRICANA REPRINT LIBRARY #3

WILLIAM LORD and Thomas Baines intended Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration to be a wide-ranging manual of instruction on the art of surviving in, and enjoying, the great outdoors of the nineteenth century. In this, they succeeded admirably. Not only is the book a detailed and, even today, a very useful work of reference, but it is also a splendid literary tour de force which represents the best in Victorian publishing and authorship.

Pooling their considerable experience of strange lands, Lord and Baines produced an encyclopaedia of practical living for the aspirant explorer of a hundred years ago. Everything is explained : wagons and boats, horses and oxen, tents and firearms, hunting and fishing, observing and collecting, carpentry and metal-working; camping requisites, bush cuisine, medical improvisation, the best ways to cross rivers, to move heavy objects, to build huts. The work is lavishly illustrated with wood-engravings by Baines.

Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel and Exploration is the third volume in the Africana Reprint Library series. First published in serial form between 1868 and 1871, it appeared in hard cover in 1871 and again, in a revised edition, in 1876. This is a facsimile reproduction, in a slightly reduced format, of the later edition and incorporates a new case design (based on one of the original serial covers) and an outstanding bibliographical introduction by Mr Frank Bradlow of Cape Town.