author

A. (Alfred) Arkell-Hardwick

1878–1912

An adventurer turned travel writer, he moved from life at sea and years in East Africa to the early world of aviation. His surviving work captures the restless energy of a man whose life was cut short in a 1912 flying accident.

1 Audiobook

An ivory trader in North Kenia : $b the record of an expedition through Kikuyu to Galla-land in east equatorial Africa; with an account of the Rendili and Burkeneji tribes

An ivory trader in North Kenia : $b the record of an expedition through Kikuyu to Galla-land in east equatorial Africa; with an account of the Rendili and Burkeneji tribes

by A. (Alfred) Arkell-Hardwick

About the author

Alfred Arkell-Hardwick was an English author and adventurer born in Hackney in 1878. Library records for An Ivory Trader in North Kenia identify him as Alfred Arkell-Hardwick, born in 1878, and the book was published in 1903.

His best-known book, An Ivory Trader in North Kenia, is a firsthand account of an expedition through Kikuyu and into what the book calls Galla-Land in East Equatorial Africa, with material on the Rendille and Burkeneji peoples. Contemporary newspaper summaries of his life say he went to sea as a teenager and later spent years traveling widely, which helps explain the mix of travel, hunting, and frontier observation in his writing.

Later in life he was associated with early aviation. A historical industry source records that by 1911 he was listed as an aeronautical engineer, and that he died on December 15, 1912, in the Handley Page monoplane crash that also killed Lieutenant Wilfrid Parke.