Of all the coastal fringes of Africa, the western-facing Atlantic coast has remained the most inaccessible to humanity for the longest time. Even today, despite the commendable efforts of numerous explorers in the second half of our century to illuminate those shores and their hinterlands, extensive stretches of even the most immediate coastal areas still await thorough exploration and precise description. However, nowhere else are the notorious typical conditions of Africa in terms of geography, hydrography, climate, and politics, which have earned it the designation of the most clumsy, inaccessible, unhealthy, and uncultivated continent, as highly pronounced as on its Atlantic side.

Nevertheless, as Herodotus recounts in his historical work, as early as 600 BC, Phoenician sailors, on the orders of the Egyptian king Necho, sailed from the Red Sea around the African mainland and returned to Egypt through the Pillars of Hercules, thus gaining knowledge of the entire west coast of Africa.

This book is an unchanged reprint of the original edition from 1898.