Footing With Sir Richard’S Ghost

About This Book

Condition & Size

Footing with Sir Richard’s Ghost

Patricia Glyn

Large Paperback

Signed by the author

5mm tear on the first page

In 1863, English gentlemen Sir Richard George Glyn and his brother Robert came to Africa, lured to the continent by its big game and the astounding cascade that David Livingstone had recently ‘discovered’ and named the Victoria Falls.

The brothers set off from Durban and, despite terrible trials, reached the Falls four and a half months later, becoming the fourth foreign party to do so. The men nearly died of thirst, they got lost in the cruel Kalahari, they faced mutiny and abandonment by their staff, and they had close encounters with some of Africa’s most dangerous animals.

Richard kept a diary of their extraordinary odyssey, a journal that inspired his and Robert’s great-great-grand niece, Patricia Glyn, to shadow their expedit But unlike her ancestors, Patricia did the journey entirely on foot. Accompanied by her little African dog, Tapiwa, this remarkable woman walked nearly 2 200 kilometres, following her forebears’ route along the 19th-century wagon trails that once snaked along the great rivers of the subcontinent. Trudging through deep desert sand, battling through thick thornveld and walking unarmed in Big Five territory, she met Africa’s gracious rural people, consorted with Zimbabwe’s notorious `war veterans’ and sought out the descendants of the people who had helped Richard and Robert through their most trying times.

Keeping strictly to the timetable set by Richard, she moved when his wagons moved, and stopped when they did – reaching the Falls on exactly the same day as her ancestors had, 142 years before her. This is the story of two brave adventures told through two illuminating, interwoven diaries.

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