Seventeen Trips Through Somáliland: A Record of Exploration and Big Game Shooting, 1885 to 1893 — Annotated, with a Glossary (Somali Digital Archives Historical Series)

Between 1885 and 1893, Captain H. G. C. Swayne of the Royal Engineers made seventeen journeys through the new Somali Coast Protectorate — surveying the ranges the 1840s officers only saw from the sea, crossing the waterless Haud, visiting conquered Harar as the guest of Ras Makonnen (father of Haile Selassie), and reaching the Webbe Shabéleh river, the goal the doomed First Somali Expedition of 1855 never attained.

His book became the era’s standard account of Somaliland — its clans and law, its caravan economy joining world markets, its politics squeezed between two empires — and, in its famous fauna chapters, an accidental baseline of conservation history: the last eyewitness record of the northern elephants and rhinos at abundance.

This is its first annotated edition: introduction, chapter headnotes, ninety editorial notes cross-referenced to Before Burton and Speke in Somaliland (Series Nos. 1–2 — the same coast, clans, and rulers fifty years earlier), Swayne’s own 62 footnotes preserved, and a glossary mapping his renderings to modern Somali orthography. The complete 1895 first edition, nothing omitted.

Volume 3 of the Somali Digital Archives Historical Series: the documentary record of the Somali nineteenth century, restored, annotated, and returned to its readers.