THE CAPE AND ITS COLONISTS : WITH HINTS TO SETTLERS (1848)

Publisher's red blindstamped cloth binding.

219pp. Lithographic frontispiece "View of Grahamstown". The green cloth variant of this title has "View of Cape Town" as frontispiece.

Repaired original binding with the binder's ticket on rear paste down and dated 1969.

'Mr. Nicholson came out to the country with every intention of permanently settling there, and he purchased a farm of 35,000 acres, with a small homestead, for £2000, the property being considered one of the best in the district of Graaff-Reinet. Finding, however, that the discomforts of the life in the veld were too much for his wife, he handed over the farm to his brother, and proceeded to Cape Town, and subsequently to England.

During his residence in Cape Town, and in the course of his journeys, the author saw a good deal of the Cape Colony. He frequently refers to what he evidently considered the exaggerated account of the prosperity of the Cape farmers published by Mr. Chase in the volume entitled "The Cape of Good Hope, &c., 1843," and he observes that the latter did not think fit to publish in the Gazette particulars of "the insolvency, ruin, and selling up . . . of the very meritorious and enterprising individuals," of whose prosperity he had been an exponent only a few months previously; he goes on to say that the failure of these men was simply due "to the profitless nature of the occupation, on an extensive scale, in this country." Mr. Nicholson deprecates the efforts of the Colonial missionaries, and asserts that he never could find a single so-called convert "who could give . . . an intelligent answer even on the first principles of their adopted creed."

With regard to the Boers, it is maintained that "the hasty, fanatical, and oppressive manner in which the emancipation of the slaves was conducted" in the Cape Colony, had converted "these previously loyal subjects into bitter enemies," who "most bitterly reprobated the exaggeration and falsehood which had . . . been spread abroad on their general treatment of the coloured races, by interested missionaries, and other purveyors of horrors."' - Mendelssohn Vol.II, page 101