GLEANINGS IN AFRICA

With a full and comprehensive account of the system of agriculture adopted by the colonists: soil, climate, natural productions, &c, &c, &c. 

Interspersed with observations and reflections on the state of slavery in the southern extremity of the African continent. 

In a series of letters from an English officer, during the period in which that colony was under the protection of the British Government. 

Illustrated with engravings. 

First Edition: xxi + 320 pages, folding engraved frontispiece repaired at one fold and laid down on paper, 9 engraved plates, contemporary tree calf rebacked and with a red leather title label, marbled endpapers with two bookplates, all edges gilt, a very good copy. 

Africana Notes and News, Volume V, No. 1, page 20, On the subject of the identity of the author Margaret Kannemeyer writes, 'From the text one learns little about his actual doings and duties which can place him, beyond the fact he arrived in June, 1800, and remained until at least the autumn of 1801, and visited the districts North East of Cape Town. The 'letters' are certainly not part of a genuine correspondence (the epistolary form was a fashionable and easy one in which to write a popular travel book), and one doubts whether the writer was in fact in the army or not. I have not been able to identify a ship arriving in June, 1800, but in May of that year transports brought troops from England. (Theal: Records of the Cape Colony III, 152 and 190). 

Though the book is of comparatively little value as a record of facts, and of less as literature, it has the merit of all contemporary material for historical reconstruction, because it reflects a past mood and attitude of mind, and without that one cannot understand events in their true perspective. The drawings are far more interesting than the text. For all their crude naivety they are full of life and incident, and there is no shirking of technical problems (even when the draughtsman had not the capacity to solve them).' 

The plates include the frontispiece which is a fine folding aquatint of the Loss of H.M.S. Sceptre in Table Bay; A Bullock Wagon of Hottentot Holland Crossing a Mountain; Whale Fishing near the Cape; A Caffre Chief attacking a Lion; and Shooting the Steen Bok in the Neighbourhood of the Cape. 

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography volume 1, page 609: 'A short account of the Cape before the period of the rule of the Batavian Republic. The writer of the series of thirty-nine letters which are comprised in the volume was evidently a strong opponent of slavery, and a large part of the work is devoted to the exposition of his views on the matter, and a sketch of the various forms of slavery that have existed from ancient times.’ 

A South African Bibliography, volume 2, page 356, lists another edition published in 1806