SEVEN YEARS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Translated by Ellen E. Frewer with about 200 original illustrations and a map

First Edition: 2 volumes, xi, 426 + xi, 479 pages, frontispiece in each volumes (volume 1 a portrait of the author), folding colour map, numerous engraved plates and illustrations in the text, bookplates on the front paste down end papers, original pictorial brown cloth titled gilt on the upper cover and spine, a very a good set.

Editor's note to the reprint edition, Johannesburg, 1975. He remarks in his Preface, " From the days of my boyhood I had been stirred with the desire to devote myself in some way to the exploration of Africa.” Holub was eminently qualified to undertake travel in the Africa of his day. He was a doctor of medicine, a zoologist, a botanist, a hunter and taxidermist, an artist and cartographer, an avid collector of specimens and, above all, a keen observer. Where Livingstone broke new ground Holub followed to consolidate, to record, to add detail to the broad canvas painted by his eminent predecessor.

Holub describes his first three expeditions to the remoter regions of southern Africa in the 1870's. Emil Holub's compelling ambition was to follow in the footsteps of Dr Livingstone and, specifically, to reach Luanda by way of the Zambesi valley and across Angola. That he failed in his principle objective does not diminish his stature as a traveller-explorer nor, indeed, the fascination which modern readers will derive from his meticulous accounts of the journeys, the third of which took him to the upper reaches of the Zambesi River.