The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia and the Sword Hunters of the Hamran Arabs

by Samuel White Baker

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Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel

312 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Sir Samuel White Baker of Britain founded a settlement at Ceylon in 1848, explored the region of the Blue Nile from 1861 to 1862, and as the first such European, reached Albert in 1864.

Baker served as an English officer, naturalist, big game hunter, engineer, writer, and abolitionist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_...

Reviews

[Monty Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of this was fascinating and enjoyable. As a travel narrative it is very vivid and engrossing. Sometimes it is very funny – such as the episode when he tries to hire a woman to help with the laundry but ends up having to purchase her as a slave who thinks she is to become his wife, which causes much mirth to his real wife, who accompanies the author on all his travels. (It is a pity he doesn’t tell us more about her – she was purchased as a slave herself, in an Ottoman slave market, and became Lady Baker in circumstances of the utmost romance; she led a very remarkable life and was clearly a most extraordinary woman).

The narrative abounds in curious vignettes, such as his observation that the men who lived along the Atbara bathed naked in full view of the women “just as we do at Brighton and other English bathing towns.” This is doubly curious, not least because the naked bathers in the Atbara were Muslim, but also because this was still an era where naked sea bathing along English shores was the norm – only the ladies wore bathing costumes.

There is, however, one disturbing factor about this otherwise fascinating travelogue which caused me increasing disquiet and revulsion: the author’s enthusiasm for killing animals. True, he almost always ensures that what he kills ends up being eaten, but the verve with which he deals out death and suffering is pathological, and his detailed descriptions of bullets shattering spines or lodging in lungs is repetitious and unpleasant. I ended up rather disliking him – in spite of his wit, his remarkable self composure in trying circumstances, his brilliant resourcefulness, and his wonderful wife.