First edition, first impression. 176pp, sparsely illustrated in black and white. Green cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering to spine. Maps on endpapers. 8vo. Cloth a little rounded at corners and spine ends, bump on lower leading corner else volume is neat, clean, bright and tight. In its original, slightly shelf worn, dust wrapper, a little rubbed and bumped on edges.
Biography of the colourful and gifted traveller Mansfield Parkyns. Sent down from Cambridge, Parkyns left England in the 1840s in search of the source of the White Nile, travelling through Egypt and Abyssinia - but his real talent was in immersing himself in local life and cultures, which led him to abandon his Western ways and to, as Lady Palmerston remarked, make 'the most successful attempt by a man to reduce himself to the savage state'.
