Inscribed “ From the Author“ at the top of the title-page, and with ownership inscriptions of both Cordelia Laing & B. E Laing.
After a short career in education, Laing joined the Prince of Wales’s Edinburgh volunteers in 1810. He was first posted to Barbados, Jamaica, and then Honduras where ill-health was a problem. He’d recovered sufficiently by 1820 to be posted to Sierra Leone and two years later was made captain of the Royal Africa Corps.
“Laing’s posting to Africa awakened a long-desired dream of exploring the interior and finding the still uncharted Niger. Soon after his arrival he was sent by the governor, Sir Charles MacCarthy, on two successive missions to Forecariah in the coastal country (later Guinea) north of Sierra Leone, to mediate in a war between two rulers which was disrupting trade” (ODNB). He later discovered the source of the Rokel River and from his observation deduced that the Niger could not join 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, but also an oral history of Solima Yalunka back to the seventeenth century, useful to later historians” (ibid). Now rather scarce, this account includes images of the Solima and Koranko people never before encountered by Europeans.
Later he was the first to cross the Sahara from North to South but was severely wounded in an affray, lost his hand, and was eventually brutally strangled.
