antiquarian bookseller - Peter Harrington

Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller Catalogue 57: Travel Section 2: Africa and the Middle East to Persia
85. (SOUTH AFRICA)
Wyld’s Military Sketch Map of Zulu
Land, Transvaal, and the Adjoining
Territories.
London, James Wyld, 1879 [39113] £650
Coloured lithographic map, dissected into 20 panels and
mounted on linen, opens 730 × 550 mm, folds down into
the original brown pebble-grained cloth boards with paper
label on the upper board. A little browned, a few marginal
pin-holes, but overall very good, binding a little rubbed and
soiled, housed in recent oatmeal linen drop-back box.
Extremely attractive map, highly useful in the
interpretation of the campaign. James Wyld the younger
had been educated at the Royal Military Academy at
Woolwich but joined his father’s firm which specialised
in maps of areas of topical interest, such as a map of
Afghanistan with notes and the routes of troops at the
time of the First Anglo-Afghan War, and maps of the
Ottoman empire and Black Sea at the time of the Crimean
War. They were much used by by politicians and others in
public life.
86. SPARRMAN, Anders.
A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope,
towards the Antarctic Polar Circle,
and Round the World: but chiefly
into the Country of the Hottentots
and Caffres, from the Year 1772, to
1776. Translated from the Swedish
Original.
London, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1786 [18319] £2500
2 volumes, 4to. (222 × 272mm). Bound in contemporary
lightly sprinkled tan full calf, sympathetically rebacked,
smooth spine, double gilt ruled compartments, red-brown
morocco labels. Folding map and 10 engraved plates.
Attractive contemporary armorial sepia-printed bookplates
of Smith, motto “temperato splendeat usu”, to the front
pastedowns. Some light browning, short closed tear to the
map, boards a little rubbed, but overall a very good copy.
Second Edition, Corrected. A botanist and disciple of
Linnaeus, Sparrman’s desire to travel was stimulated by
an early trip as a surgeon on a Royal Swedish East India
Company ship to Canton via the Cape. Further opportunities
were thwarted by his lack of funds. However, in 1771 his
friend Capt. Ekeberg of the RSEIC obtained for him the
position of tutor to the children of M. Kerst, sub-Governor
of the Cape. Once settled there his intention to undertake
an expedition to the interior was interrupted by the arrival
at the Cape of Cook on his second voyage, whom Sparrman
accompanied as assistant to the naturalist Johann Georg
Forster, experiences which he recounts but briefly here.
On his return in 1775 he had accrued sufficient funds to
finance his own expedition and “ … set out overland from
the Cape … in the company of a South African named
The most
trustworthy
account of
the Cape
Colony
Immelman paralleling the Southern coast and visiting the
regions of Swellerdam, Mossel Bay and the country to the
north of Port Elizabeth. His furthest east was the Great
Fish River” (Howgego). Theal describes this as the 18th
century’s “most trustworthy account of the Cape Colony
and the various races of people residing in it.” He made
the first study of the Bushmen and relates many incidents
illustrating the hospitality of the Dutch farmers and their
“dense ignorance” of matters outside their own country.
Also alludes to the “cruelty of the treatment of the slaves
by the lower classes of the colonists” (Mendelssohn). On
his return to Sweden he was elected to the Academy of
Sciences and appointed as conservator of the museum.
Sparrman later returned to Africa as part of an expedition
to the West Coast searching for suitable locations for
Swedish settlement.
Howgego S154; Mendelssohn II, pp.414–5; NMM I, 211.