Thomas Baines ranked only just below Livingstone, Stanley and Park in the hierarchy of Victorian explorers in Africa. His talents, however, were not confined to the making of discoveries: he was also a prolific writer and a fine painter, map-maker and naturalist. Born in King's Lynn, England, in 1820, Baines began to make a name for himself as an artist with the British forces in the Eastern Cape of  South Africa during the Kaffir Wars. Thereafter he undertook several arduous journeys north, through what later (in the 1890s) became Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to the Zambesi river, joined Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition and, in 1862, visited the Victoria Falls by way of South West Africa. In 1868 he was engaged by a British commercial firm to investigate the newly-discovered gold fields of Tati and "Matabililand" north of the Limpopo. His prospecting expeditions, which took him as far as the Hartley Hills, 60 miles from present day Salisbury (now Harare), provide the material for this book. The work is notable for its fascinating first-hand reports

 

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