A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope

Two Volumes, for R. Morison and Son, Booksellers of Perth; G.Mudie, Bookseller, Edinburgh; and Jack Lackington, Moorfields, London; author is Professor of Physic at Stockholm, Fellow of the Royal Society of Sciences in Sweden, and Inspector of its Cabinet of Natural History, translated from the Swedish original, with plates, half leather with marbled boards, 110 x 180mm, condition; very good.

Sparrman was a pupil of Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who essentially worked out the biological binomial nomenclature known as Linnaean taxonomy. Linnaeus arranged for him to visit the Cape as a naturalist and he sailed for South Africa arriving on the 3rd April 1772. Unexpectedly he joined Captain Cook on the 'Resolution'  as assistant  naturalist on the second of Cook's great circumnavigations of the world. He returned  to the Cape,  in 1775, and resuming his residence, saved money towards an extended journey into the interior.

He set out on 25th July 1775 for Caledon, proceeding to Swellendam and Mossel Bay,  crossing the Attaquas Kloof and then the Langkloof, reaching the Great Fish River near Cookhouse. He returned on the 15th April 1776 and shortly afterwards sailed for Europe.

Sparrman was an accurate and veracious observer whose reports on subjects social, ethnological, zoological and botanical are interspersed in the detailed narrative of his journey. (Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, volume 10)

This book is a result of his journeys, appearing in Swedish in 1783 and subsequently in German, English, Dutch and French. This was an important contribution to knowledge as it gave for the first time an account of a large part of the settled interior that had previously been unknown to the outside world.

This edition was published in 1789, for and behalf of three booksellers, after the second edition by G.G.J. and J. Robinson in 1786.