INNER AFRICA LAID OPEN

First Edition: 149 pages, folding map, half brown calf with brown cloth sides, edges dyed brown, a very good copy.

(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Cooley, William Desborough (1795?–1883), Roy Bridges (https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6201)  'Cooley, geographer and controversialist, was probably born on 16 March 1795 in Dublin, the son of William Cooley (b. 1772/3), a Dublin barrister, and grandson of the architect Thomas Cooley. Educated privately and then from 1811 to 1816 at Trinity College, Dublin, he developed an interest in the history of discovery, physical geography and surveying, and the mathematics which went with it, the last interest leading to later publications on Euclid.......He offered his services to the Edinburgh Review as a controversial writer on Irish subjects but the editor restricted him to geographical and African subjects on which he contributed eleven major reviews in three years. One of these, in 1835, revealed the existence of the then unknown Lake Tanganyika and distinguished what later became known as the Bantu and their languages. At this time Cooley was in contact with W. F. W. Owen and J. B. Emery, who had surveyed east Africa's coasts, and with two visiting Arab traders and their African servants who knew the interior. Collating their information with what little was available from Portuguese sources and from ancient authorities and then ‘rectifying’ it all, Cooley built up a picture of east Africa's geography which was set out in a major article with a map for the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1845 and elaborated in a book, Inner Africa Laid Open, in 1852. Practical exploration now began to show that some of the details were wrong but Cooley became notorious for refusing to accept travellers' findings. He denied, for example, that there was snow on the summits of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya (though he had revealed the existence of these mountains) and he insisted that lakes Tanganyika and Malawi were connected as one water. When Livingstone mentioned particular Ngoni peoples, he said they did not exist.'

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography, volume 1, pages 379/80, 'In this book Mr. Cooley examines the accounts of travellers in Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa, with special reference to the elucidation of the mystery that surrounded the central regions of the Continent and the Lake District. He compares the journeys of the Pombeiros, Krapf, Lacerda, Oswell, Livingstone, and other travellers, and incidentally refers to the emigrant Boers, the Lake Ngami regions, and other portions of the more southerly parts of South Africa. A great part of the ground covered is now included in Rhodesia. London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852