Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries in Western Africa..

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With Plates and a Map. In a nice, fairly recent red-tan half leather with marbled boards, gilt tooling. Spine has raised bands, attractive gilt tooling, titles in gilt to tan leather labels. Internally NO inscriptions, frontispiece pull out route map is clean and complete, faint browning to title page as a result of frontispiece, text block edges uncut, 7 other full page, attractive, B&W plates, 465 pp, new endpapers. A stunning copy of a very rare and collectable title. The last few pages are a listing of his Meteorological Journal. Laing, Alexander Gordon (1794-1826), army officer and explorer in Africa, was born in Edinburgh on 27 December 1794, the eldest son of William Laing, a schoolmaster and the founder of a classical academy in Edinburgh, and his wife, Margaret, the daughter of William Gordon of Glasgow Academy. With teaching on both sides of his family, Laing seemed destined for a career of scholarship. He entered Edinburgh University at the age of thirteen, and, on graduating at seventeen, became a schoolmaster. But, having joined one of the local volunteer corps then being formed, he opted for a military life, was commissioned in 1810 ensign in the Prince of Wales's Edinburgh volunteers, and in 1811 went to Barbados, where his uncle was deputy quartermaster-general. In 1813 he was appointed ensign in the York light infantry, a corps which served in the West Indies, and in 1815 was promoted lieutenant. After the corps was disbanded at the peace, Laing exchanged into the 2nd West India regiment in Jamaica. He fell ill with a liver complaint, was sent to Honduras, and then returned home, where he was put on half pay in 1818. In 1820 he was brought back into the 2nd West India regiment and posted to Sierra Leone, where in 1822 he transferred, as captain, to the Royal African Colonial Corps. In 1822 Laing set out with a small escort up the Rokel River, through the mountainous Koranko country to Falaba, where he was well received by the ruler. He went on and found the source of the Rokel, but though he viewed the upland where the Niger rises he was not allowed to go on and had to return disappointed. He was, however, able to establish, by taking its height, that the Niger could not, as some still supposed, possibly flow into the Nile. His Travels, published in 1825, give a lively account of his adventures, including not only observations on the customs of the peoples he encountered, illustrated with his own rather amateurish drawings and a good map, but also an oral history of Solima Yalunka back to the seventeenth century, useful to later historians. Laing was transferred to the Gold Coast in 1823 and edited the first newspaper to be published there. Then, stationed on the frontier, he participated in some skirmishes with the Asante army before the disastrous battle of Nsamanko, in which MacCarthy and almost all his men were killed. Now in poor health, he was sent home to report the news of the defeat to the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, with whom, to the annoyance of his senior officers, he ingratiated himself. In 1824 he was sent, with the local rank of major, on an official mission to seek the elusive Niger. His surviving letters and papers, edited by E. W. Bovill, were finally published by the Hakluyt Society in 1964.