Four Thousand Miles of African travel

In 1870, Alvan Southworth, ever in pursuit of stirring adventure, went to Egypt as a correspondent for the New York Herald to report on the lavish court of its ruler, Ismail Pasha, and to investigate the upper reaches of the Nile. He soon realized there was a larger story: the state-sanctioned slave trade in Egypt’s territory of Sudan. To understand contemporary Sudan, it helps to read its history in his eye-witness accounts of slave markets, trade routes, traders and their tactics, slave raids, and the near total devastation of vast parts of Sudan.  His map, “The Nile Slave District showing where the Slaves are captured and the Routes by which they are carried off” shows the actual locations of many slave camps. Also included are two maps; twenty plates (lithographs); a reproduction of Southworth’s official statement, in Arabic, that he purchased Barilla, an Abyssinian slave girl, to set her free; and a drawing of the city of Ourah, capital of the Sultanate of Wadai (Darfur).