JOHAN DANIEL BUTTNER'S ACCOUNT OF THE CAPE:

161 pages. Pictorial paper covered boards.

Buttner (1690-1730) joined the VOC and was posted to the Cape, first as a soldier, and later as a surgeon. He served briefly in Batavia and returned to the Cape in 1723. He married Engela Loubser, and served the Cape community as a physician with a dispensary in his thatched roof house in Bergdwaarsstraat (modern St George's Street). Buttner was a diarist who left an account of his overseas travels, his stay at the Cape and his travels within southern Africa. He was particularly interested in the Khoisan and he provides considerable information on what he observed himself as well as accounts from other travellers about them. He identifies clans living around the Cape and provides specific information about where they lived in terms of how many hours from Cape Town (for example, Saldanha Bay was 28 hours travel away); who their leaders were; and detailed accounts of their lives. He also compiled a rudimentary dictionary of their language. After his sudden death, his diaries were transcribed from German by Joachim van Dessin (the diaries were eventually returned by his widow to his family in Germany). Van Dessin's collection is one of the cornerstones of the SA National Library holdings and thus these early accounts of travel and people became accessible to future generations.