Jungle Ways.

SEABROOK, William B.

$350.00

Item Number: 124947

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931.

Signed limited first edition of occultist and cannibal William Buehler Seabrook’s account of his travels along the Ivory Coast and through West Africa where he witnessed witchcraft, cannibalism and human sacrifice. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated, tissue-guarded frontispiece. One of 315 extra-illustrated numbered copies signed by the author on the limitation page of which 274 were for sale, this is number 198. Near fine in the original slipcase which is lacking the bottom panel.

In 1930, Seabrook embarked on a journey from the Ivory Coast to Timbuktu on the South edge of the Sahara desert and back, visiting several now major cities including Bandiagara, Mopti, Timbuktu, Mali, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, and Grand-Bassam. In West Africa, he spent time with a native tribe that engaged in the ritualistic cannibalism, a subject he was fascinated by and wished to both experience and document. He later admitted that the tribe would not allow him to participate in the ritual but that he later obtained human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself.