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 Zambesi, to the eastern ocean. by LIVINGSTONE, David

London, John Murray, 1857.Contempoary calf, spine gilt (sl. rubbed; one hinge sl. dam. but holding). With folding wood-engraved frontispiece depicting the Victoria Falls by Whymper, engraved portrait (margins foxed), a folding cross section, 2 folding maps by John Arrowsmith and 42 wood-engraved plates and illustrations. X,687pp.This first edition appeared in various issues the same year. - An account of Livingstone's first expedition (1853-1856). With the help of the Makololos, a South African tribe, Livingstone planned to explore the whole of southern Africa as far as Angola. The missionary had become an important explorer. As the first European, he traveled on the Zambezi to Kazembe in a pirogue, a fast water vessel made from a tree trunk. In order to escape from the slave traders of Portuguese Africa, Livingstone traveled via Cassange and Bihé to Luanda, a Portuguese port and the capital of Angola, where he arrived completely exhausted on 31 May, 1854. As soon as he had recovered from his fever, he undertook a trek to Lake Dilolo, discovered the source of the Kasai, a left tributary of the Congo, and arrived in Linyanti, the capital of the Makololos. In the course of the major Zambezi expedition that followed he discovered the Victoria Falls, the falls of the middle Zambezi, in 1855 (Waldmann, Ecyclopedia of world explorers, p.226). 'Livingstone's services to African geography. are almost unequalled. he explored vast regions of central Africa, many of which had never been seen by white men before' (Printing and the Mind of Man 341). 'Perhaps the most famous of all African exploration books' (Czech p.168). - Some foxing as usual , first fly-leaf missing, otherwise fine.Mendelssohn I, p.908-10; SAB III, p.136; Gordon-Brown p. 190-191; Hess & Coger 3067.