William Winwood Reade

[2] Thus, at age 25, using his private funds and with sponsorship from the Royal Geographical Society, he departed for Africa, arriving in Cape Town by paddle steamer during 1862.

Although criticised for its juvenile style, the book is notable for its anthropological inquiries,[2] as well as for its exculpatory passages concerning the slave trade and its prophecy of an Africa divided between Britain and France in which black Africans have become extinct.

After failing to get permission to enter the Ashanti Empire, Reade set out north from Freetown to explore the areas past the Solimana capital of Falaba.

[2][4] Though Reade travelled over some unexplored territory, his findings excited little interest among geographers, due mostly to his failure to make accurate measurements of his journey as his sextant and other instruments had been left behind at Port Loko.

[6] Soon after Reade's return, he published his The African Sketch-Book (1873), an account of his travels that also recommended greater British involvement in West Africa.

[2] According to one historian, the book became a kind of "substitute bible for secularists" in which Reade attempts to trace the development of Western civilisation in terms analogous to those used in the natural sciences.

[2] He was a social Darwinist who believed in the survival of the fittest and wanted to create a new civilisation, contending that "while war, slavery, and religion had once been necessary, they would not always be so; in the future only science could guarantee human progress".

[12] Reade's other secularist work, The Outcast (1875), is a short novel about a young man who must deal with being rejected by his religious father and the death of his wife.