Travels in the great desert of the Sahara, in the years of 1845 and 1846, containing a narrative of personal adventures, during a tour of nine months through the desert, amongst the touaricks and other tribes....

London: Richard Bentley, 1848. With 3 engraved plates (2 of which are frontispieces) a large folding map, and 24 text woodcuts. Contemporary half morocco and marbled boards; foxing limited to endpapers, overall in excellent shape. First edition of this account of Richardson's first expedition to Africa. The idea, to reach the “celebrated Oasis of Ghadames . . . amidst the most appalling desolations of the Great Saharan Wilderness,” came to Richardson via the accidental reading of a brochure on a table in the Algiers public library. This glance resulted in a journey from Tunis and Tripoli in Libya to Ghadames and Ghat in the middle of the Sahara, chronicled in his Travels in the treat desert of Sahara. Readers travel with Richardson and his group through cities, trader routes and more oases, learning the language, the culture, and the religion of the people whom they encounter. It is as fascinating and rich as any nineteen th-century travel narrative.

A review in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society states: “These volumes are useful contributions to our knowledge of the interior of the imperfectly known regions of Northern Africa; and they describe some hundreds of miles of desert routes over which no Europeans had previously passed, as well as several of the cities of the Desert, of which we had not before received accounts from European visitors” (Vol. 18, p. lix). Indeed, Richardson returned to the area in 1850 to cross the elevated plain of the Hammada, the first European to ever do so. It was on that journey that he died of a mysterious illness.

Richardson (1806-1851) was an English explorer with an ambition to propagate Christianity and suppress slavery in Africa. He frequently refers to the trans-Saharan slave trade and the position of slaves in local Tuareg communities.