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…

xxiv, 732 pp. 4-page terminal publisher ad. 8vo. Original brown blind-stamped boards, gilt titles, two fold-out map follows text, single fold-out map in text, engravings throughout text (including a tsetse fly on the title page, included because Livingstone discovered it, and linked it to the spread of disease in cattle). One of a number of 1858 printings of this work. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "Doctor David Livingstone (19 March 1813–1 May 1873) was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and explorer in central Africa. He was the first European to see Victoria Falls (Mosi-oa-Tunya), to which he gave the English name in honour of his monarch, Queen Victoria. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' Perhaps one of the most popular national heroes of the late-nineteenth century in Victorian Britain, Livingstone had a mythic status, which operated on a number of interconnected levels: that of Protestant missionary martyr, that of working-class 'rags to riches' inspirational story, that of scientific investigator and explorer, that of imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader and advocate of commercial empire. His fame as an explorer helped drive forward the obsession with discovering the sources of the Nile River that formed the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of the African continent. At the same time his missionary travels, 'disappearance' and death in Africa, and subsequent glorification as posthumous national hero in 1874 led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European 'Scramble for Africa.'"