- Seller's Description:
- 1932. 8vo., 23cm, xix, 218p., on laid paper, This Edition Limited to Forty Copies, this be No. 6., bound in full vellum, t.e.g., rest uncut, mainly unopened, with new crushed morocco label stamped in gilt and with new linen slipcase, a fine copy (tgc) First Penguin Press edition, a reprint of Jobson's historical work, first published in 1623, it is one of the earliest English protests against the African slave trade. Jobson provides a fascinating, and for the time remarkably dispassionate, description of the life and manners of the West African native peoples. He relates the story of the second voyage to the Gambia undertaken for 'The Company of Adventurers of Africa Trading into Africa', formed by Sir Robert Rich, under a charter granted by King James I in 1618. It is a remarkably detailed description of African culture, living conditions and rituals at a time when the interior was largely unknown. This is probably the first separate English account of a travel to the interior of Africa. Boies Penrose, in Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420-1620, mentions 'Africa, unlike Asia, has little in the way of English accounts of travel in this early period; perhaps a mere handful of relations are all that call for comment. ' He then outlines the four major English accounts of travel in Africa: Wyndham and Lok in the 1555 collection of Eden; Robert Baker (printed in the 1589 Hakluyt); Andrew Battel (printed in Purchas); and Jobson's The Golden Trade, which was the only account to be published separately.
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