THOMAS BAINES (1847)

Artist, explorer, naturalist, and author who spent most of his life in southern Africa.

Love of adventure took him in 1842 to Cape Colony, where he later served as the first official war artist during the Eighth Frontier War (1850-53). His success as an artist led to his joining an expedition to northern Australia in 1855 and won him an invitation to take part in Zambezi expedition under David Livingstone in 1858.

In 1861 Baines accompanied the British hunter and explorer James Chapman in his travels from what is now South West Africa (Namibia) to Victoria Falls (on the modern Zimbabwe-Zambia border), a journey on which his drawings ad his book Explorations in South-West Africa (1864) were based.

With his fame established, he opened a studio in London in 1865. Returning to Africa in 1868, he led an expedition to explore the goldfields of Matebeleland where he won mining concessions, which later were acquired by Cecil Rhodes.

Baine´s accurate map, scientific data, and illustration of the scenery and people were published posthumously in The Gold Regions of South-Eastern Africa (1877).