An early example of the travel-writing genre, William Bosman's collection of letters, originally written in Dutch and first published in English in 1705, describes the geography and political and natural history of the coast of Guinea. This 1907 edition is presented as a facsimile of the 1705 version, retaining the original typography. Bosman (born in 1672) went to Africa at the age of sixteen in the service of the Dutch West India Company, and spent fourteen years on the Gold Coast. This collection of twenty letters, written to his uncle in the Netherlands, remains an important source of information about this area of west Africa in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Bosman's accounts are highly descriptive, and his writings cover all aspects of the area, from its flora and fauna to its political, social and legal systems, its enterprising natives and its climate and diseases.