Livingstone, the Pathfinder, by Basil Mathews
Very Rare 1913 first edition.
Livingstone, the Pathfinder, by Basil Mathews ... with Seventeen Illustrations by Ernest Prater, Twenty-Four Other Pictures and Photographs and Three Maps.
Hardcover
Publisher: London; Henry Frowde, 1913 first edition.
Hardback. Very good copy in the original gilt-blocked pictorial cloth with definite age related wear and tanning especially on the first pages. Spine bands and panel edges slightly rubbed and dust-toned as with age. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight bright clean and strong. ; 215 pages; Pictorial page inserted between page 92 and 93 loose.
David Livingstone 19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. Livingstone was married to Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century Moffat missionary family. Livingstone came to have a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. As a result, Livingstone became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
Livingstone's fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade. "The Nile sources", he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil." His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of Africa. At the same time, his missionary travels, "disappearance", and eventual death in Africa—and subsequent glorification as a 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".
