Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797.

Two demy 8vo volumes; contemporary gilt-ruled calf, recornered and rebacked in morocco; decorative gilt-ruled raised bands and lettering to spines; pp. xx + 551, xvi + cviii + 301; large, folding map, with routes in colours, in second volume, and two sketch maps and a diagram.  Light wear to extremities; short, marginal tear to folding map, which is a little creased; occasional fox spot; bookplates of Aldenham House, Hertfordshire, to each pastedown; signed by George Henry Gibbs, with the date 1826, on the first blank in each case.  Very early octavo edition, in contemporary bindings. 

The explorer was killed on his second expedition to trace the flow of the Niger, when, with the last survivors of his party, he was ambushed at Bussah.  The events of this second journey are related from Park's journals and other sources in Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, here in the 1816 first octavo edition, the first, large-format, edition having appeared in the previous year.  'The memory of this red-bearded stranger, firing so desperately from his fast moving boat, haunted the inhabitants of the villages along the great bend of the river.  Fifty years later Heinrich Barth, the first traveller to explore that stretch of the Niger in detail, heard stories of his fate which "proved what an immense excitement the mysterious appearance of this European traveller, in his solitary boat, had caused among the surrounding tribes."' - Christopher Lloyd, The Search for the Niger.