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SPARRMAN, Anders.
A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope,
towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, and Round the World: but chiefly into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffres, from the Year 1772, to 1776. Translated from the Swedish Original.
Publisher: London, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1786
Stock code: 18319
Price: £2,500 Currency Conversion
Second Edition, Corrected. A botanist and disciple of Linnaeus, Sparrman's desire to travel was stimulated by an early trip as a surgeon on a Royal Swedish East India Company ship to Canton via the Cape. Further opportunities were thwarted by his lack of funds. However, in 1771 his friend Capt. Ekeberg of the RSEIC obtained for him the position of tutor to the children of M. Kerst sub-Governor of the Cape. Once settled there his intention to undertake an expedition to the interior was interrupted by the arrival at the Cape of Cook on his Second Voyage, who Sparrman accompanied as assistant to the naturalist Johann Georg Forster, experiences which he recounts but briefly here. On his return in 1775 he had accrued sufficient funds to finance his own expedition and "... set out overland from the Cape... in the company of a South African named Immelmanm paralleling the Southern coast and visiting the regions of Swellerdam, Mossel Bay and the country to the north of Port Elizabeth. His furthest east was the Great Fish River." [Howgego] Theal describes this as the C18th's "most trustworthy account of the Cape Colony and the various races of people residing in it." He made the first study of the Bushmen and relates many incidents illustrating the hospitality of the Dutch farmers and their "dense ignorance" of matters outside their own country. Also alludes to the "cruelty of the treatment of the slaves by the lower classes of the colonists." [Mendelssohn] On his return to Sweden he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and appointed as conservator of the museum. Later returned to Africa as part of an expedition to the West Coast searching for suitable locations for Swedish settlement. Attractive contemporary armorial sepia-printed bookplates of Smith, motto "temperato splendeat usu", to the front pastedowns.
2 volumes, quarto. (222 × 272mm). Bound in contemporary lightly sprinkled tan full calf, sympathetically rebacked, smooth spine, double gilt ruled compartments, red-brown morocco labels. Folding map and 10 engraved plates. Some light browning, short closed tear to the map, boards a little rubbed, but overall a very good copy.
