Other Non-Fiction Nesbitt, L. M.: Exploration of Abyssinian Danakil: V1.1, 6 Jan 2013

[bobcdy]

This book tells the results of Nesbitt's exploration of the Danakil desert in 1928. It won him the Murcheson Award presented by the Royal Geographic society. Before his sucessful expedition, several earlier attempts by Europeans to cross the area had proved disasterous with all of the expeditions' members murdered by Danakil tribes. In the book, he described the hellish conditions encountered, with shade temperatures often above 150°F. The area is chiefly located in Eithiopia near the Red Sea.

According to a 1935 review "In beauty of style, in freedom from any trace of personal exploitation, and in vividness of description “Hell-Hole of Creation” ranks among the finest books of travel." (Ellsworth Huntington, Saturday Review of Literature)

L. M. Nesbitt (1891-1935) was born in Rome, the grandson of an English officer who had settled there in 1848 on retiring from the Bengal army. He grew up in Italy but left at the age of 18 to enter the Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, England. From there he went to Africa, worked in various mines, received a certificate as a mine surveyor and manager of the first-class, and experimented in gold mining. He returned to Italy in 1916. Soon afterwards he began a roving career which took him first into the English army, then to the United States, Cuba, Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, and finally back to Africa. In Africa, after a brief period reporting on platinum in western Abyssinia, he undertook to fulfill a life-long dream of his: that of exploring a land never before seen by Europeans. He died in an airplane crash in 1935.

In version 1.1, I've slightly modified the geological map by indicating the approximate locations of the Ethiopian escarpment - the western boundary of the Danakil area (in jagged lines), and Nesbitt's route in a thin red line (if viewed on color reader or in a slightly different gray-colored line on gray-scale reader).

Downloads before version 1.1: 34

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