The Project Gutenberg EBook of Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa
Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1, by James Richardson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1
Under the Orders and at the Expense of Her Majesty's Government

Author: James Richardson

Release Date: November 27, 2005 [EBook #17164]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NARRATIVE OF A MISSION ***

Produced by Carlo Traverso, Annika Feilbach and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
http://gallica.bnf.fr)

[Transcriber's note:
This text contains characters with macrons and breve accents. For this
Latin-1 version, they have been transcribed using [=x] for characters
with macrons, and [)x] for breve accents, where x is the accented
character.

Some inconsistencies in the dates have been corrected in chapters XV and
XVI:
September 29th has been changed to August 29th, October 1st to September
1st, and October 4th to September 4th.]

NARRATIVE OF A MISSION TO CENTRAL AFRICA
PERFORMED IN THE YEARS 1850-51,

UNDER THE ORDERS AND AT THE EXPENSE OF HER MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT.

BY THE LATE JAMES RICHARDSON,
AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN THE GREAT DESERT OF SAHARA."

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193 PICADILLY.

MDCCCLIII.

LONDON:
Printed by G. Barclay, Castle St. Leicester Sq.

PREFACE.

The task of the Editor of these volumes has been principally one of
arrangement and compression. The late lamented Mr. James Richardson left
behind him a copious journal, comprised in eight small but
closely-written volumes, besides a vast heap of despatches and scattered
memoranda; and, at first sight, it seemed to me that it would be
necessary to melt the whole down into a narrative in the third person.
On attentively studying the materials before me, however, I perceived
that Mr. Richardson had written in most places with a view to
publication; and that, had he lived, he would soon have b