Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs

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Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs (April 14, 1831 - June 2, 1896) was a German geographer, explorer and adventurer. He was born at Vegesack, near Bremen. Rohlfs was the first European to cross Africa north to south. His route took him from Tripoli through the Sahara desert, over Lake Chad, along the Niger River to the Gulf of Guinea from 1865-1867. He was to the second European explorer to visit the region of the Draa River in the south of Morocco. In 1874 Rohlfs set out from Dakhla Oasis intending to reack Kufra. In February he was sixty miles north of Abu Ballas (Pottery Hill) in the Western Desert. Accompanied by Karl Zittel and a surveyor called Jordans, Rohlfs and his colleagues experienced a downpouring of rain - a rare occurrence in the desert, seemingly only happening every twenty years. Rohlf's team restocked and watered their camels and left a cairn at the place he had named Regenfeld (Rainfield) ^[1]. He wrote:

• Reise durch Marokko (1869)
• Land und Volk in Afrika (1870)
• Von Tripolis nach Alexandria (1871)
• Quer durch Afrika (1874-75)
• Beiträge zur Entdeckung und Erforschung Afrikas (1876)
• Reise von Tripolis nach der Oase Kufra (1881)
• Quid Novi ex Africa (1886)

[edit] Notes

1. ^ W.B. Kennedy Shaw, Long Range Desert Group, Greenhill Books 2000

[edit] External links

• Works by Gerhard Rohlfs at Project Gutenberg