[Illustration: NATIVE GROUP. Damaras. Ovampo. Drawn on Stone by W. L. Walton. Printed by Hullmandel & Walton. John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1853] THE NARRATIVE OF AN EXPLORER IN TROPICAL SOUTH AFRICA. BY FRANCIS GALTON, ESQ. WITH COLOURED MAPS, PLATES, AND WOODCUTS. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1853. LONDON: BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. PREFACE. The following pages contain the description of a part of Africa hitherto unknown to Europeans, but which has recently been travelled over and explored by the Author. His journey was a tedious and a very anxious one, but happily brought to a close without loss of life or serious accident to any member of his large party, which altogether amounted to nearly forty men. The result of this excursion has been to fill up that blank in our maps which, lying between the Cape Colony and the western Portuguese settlements, extends to the interior as far as the newly discovered Lake ’Ngami. The country of the Damaras—warlike, pastoral Blacks—was in the first instance explored; beyond them he found a broad tract, inhabited by aboriginal Hottentots; and, again, to the north of these, the Ovampo, a race of intelligent and kindly negroes, who are careful agriculturists, and live in a land of great fertility. On his return southwards, a quick journey was made into the interior, near the line of the southern tropic, until a road, which had recently been travelled from the borders of the Cape Colony to Lake ’Ngami, was reached, and in this way a practicable route between the Lake and the Atlantic was proved to exist. Few new objects of natural history were either collected or heard of, as the tract in question was for the most part a high barren plateau, that supported but little variety of either animal or vegetable life.