Early European geographies of southern Africa

Cooley, William Desborough. Inner Africa Laid Open.

€ 2.000,00

First edition of this work on the southern regions of the African continent, attempting to sketch a landscape heavily influenced - but little understood by - Europeans. Its author William Cooley was an Irishman who had himself travelled to some parts of Africa, and in his work he attempts to sketch some of his own routes as well as the journeys of Livingstone and other more famous names through sub-equatorial Africa.

Cooley was famous for his stubborn insistence on a few major errors in African geography, such as his opinion that there could be no snow-capped mountains on the continent (despite being presented with evidence of Mount Kilimanjaro), or that Lake Nyasa (also known as Lake Malawi) and Lake Tanganyika formed a single body of water. However, he spoke Kiswahili and was instrumental in debunking a famously (but, to this day, debatably) fraudulent account of a voyage through Africa by Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Douville (1797-1837).