SCOUTING ON TWO CONTINENTS

First edition: 370 pages, frontispiece portrait of the author, 30 plates, original maroon cloth gilt, embossed stamp of the Munger Africana Library on the title page, a very good copy.

Frederick Russell Burnham (1861 - 1947) became a scout and tracker in the Apache Wars of the American Southwest, acquiring in the desert and canyon country of Arizona and New Mexico the skills of tracking, endurance and the ability to move unseen across hostile terrain that would define his career and, through an extraordinary relationship with Robert Baden-Powell influence the history of youth movements throughout the world.

It was in southern Africa that Burnham found his largest stage. Arriving in Rhodesia in the early 1890s, he served in the First Matabele War of 1893 and the Second Matabele War, the Matabeleland and Mashonaland campaigns of 1896, where he first encountered Baden-Powell. The two men recognised in each other a shared philosophy of scouting: the idea that the skilled individual observer, moving quietly through landscape and reading its signs, was a decisive military asset. Their friendship and mutual influence would bear fruit when Baden-Powell, drawing explicitly on Burnham's example and methods, founded the Scout movement in 1907. Burnham is one of the founding spirits of Scouting ,a fact Baden-Powell acknowledged openly and repeatedly.

Burnham's African adventures did not end with the Matabele Wars. He served in the Second Boer War, where his exploits as a scout behind Boer lines achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic that made him one of the most celebrated soldiers of the age. Theodore Roosevelt, who counted Burnham among his personal heroes, described him as 'an embodiment of the American pioneer spirit', high praise from a man not given to understatement. Rudyard Kipling, who was if anything less restrained in his enthusiasms, was similarly captivated.

The title's reference to two continents, North America and Africa, is a  narrative that moves with extraordinary energy between the Apache frontier and the Rhodesian veldt, between the Klondike gold rush and the Boer War. The parallels Burnham draws between the American West and the African interior, between Apache and Ndebele, between canyon and kopje, between the ethics of the frontier scout in both hemispheres, give the book a dimension that raises it above the level of simple adventure memoir.