THE CAPE AND ITS COLONISTS:

219 pages, lithographic frontispiece View of Cape Town which is foxed, original green cloth with blind decoration on both covers and spine, titled gilt on the spine, boards marked and worn, spine is frayed at the top and bottom, light foxing on several pages and on the edges, front and back hinges are weak

Two bookplates on the front endpapers, one of Edna and Frank Bradlow.

Mendelsohhn (Sidney) South African Bibliography, volume 2, page 101, ‘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, 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.’