MIMI AND TOUTOU GO FORTH

Michael Joseph, London, 2004, 1^st/1^st.  ISBN 0-7181-4555-0.  Hard cover, 320 pages including Catalogue of Vessels, Bibliography, and Acknowledgements.  Very good plus; tiny ding on bottom edge, slight lean to spine, remainder mark on bottom edge.  Dust jacket price clipped, with a bit of edge wear at top rear panel and a few small tears with associated creases.  ‘At the start of World War I, German warships controlled Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa.  The British had no naval craft at all upon “Tanganjikasee”, as the Germans called it.  This mattered:  it was the longest lake in the world and of great strategic advantage.  In June 1915, a force of twenty-eight men was despatched from Britain on a vast journey.  Their orders were to take control of the lake.  To reach it, they had to haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of Mimi and Toutou through the wilds of the Congo.  The twenty-eight were a strange bunch – one was addicted to Worcester sauce, another was a former racing driver – but the strangest of all of them was their skirt-wearing, tattoo-covered commander, Geoffrey Spicer-Simson.  Whatever it took, even if it meant becoming the god of a local tribe, he was determined to cover himself in glory.  But the Germans had a surprise in store for Spicer-Simson, in the shape of their secret “supership” the Graf von Gotzen …’ (from front flap)