THE NILE TRIBUTARIES OF ABYSSINIA AND THE SWORD HUNTERS OF THE HAMRAN ARABS

“New Edition”. With a Frontispiece colour map, 24 wood-engraved plates from the author’s own sketches and a colour folding map. 8vo, original dark green cloth ruled and decorated in black on upper cover, spine lettered, ruled and decorated with a giraffe in gilt. xix, 413, 44 pages of ads. An unusually fine copy, the cloth very bright and fresh, internally clean and solid, the map also fine with a few small spots of foxing, prize plate to free-fly.

Edizione: very scarce in such fine condition and one of the seminal works on the exploration of the nile sources. baker, burton, and speke had by this time finally proved (or so they thought) that the source of the white nile lay in the lakes albert and n'yanza. in this volume baker traces his discovery of the sources of the lower nile in the atbara river and the blue nile in abyssinia (present day ethiopia and somalia). “the value of the work of exploration during this fourteen months' journey and of the observations proving the nile sediment to be due to the abyssinian tributaries was publicly recognised by. [the] royal geographical society. baker had also during the period gained for himself experience as an explorer, mastered arabic, and acquired the use of astronomical instruments." (dnb).samuel baker’s discovery of the albert nyanza, the origin of the nile, was fundamentally one of the most significant discoveries of the 19th century and certainly the most important of baker’s long and illustrious career.<br> the importance of the debate over the source of the nile, combined with baker's very readable writing style, made his books enormously popular, with the result that they were reprinted a great many times over the following years.