Dr Anders Sparrman: Travelling with the Labouring Poor in the Late Eighteenth-Century Cape

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines an account by Dr Anders Sparrman, who visited the Cape of Good Hope in the 1770s, with the view of utilising travel accounts as historical evidence. Late eighteenth-century travel accounts of the Cape have attracted the attention of geographers and literary scholars, who focus on the emergence of naturalist history. Drawing on Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt has linked naturalist classificatory schemes, promoted by scientific travellers such as Sparrman, to Euroimperialism and the assertion of a male bourgeois authority. This work elucidates the emergence of modern theories of nature, representations of colonised strangers, and the unequal relations of imperialism. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to what travellers have written about the labouring poor on whose labour their transcontinental journeys rested. This article reads Sparrman's account against the grain by examining his anecdotes of the sailors, servants, guides and wagon drivers he encounters. These stories, which diverge from the naturalist focus of the narrative, reveal a great deal about changing views of colonialism. They also complicate our understanding of race and class in an imperial context by pointing to a multi-racial underclass fellowship, centred on the sharing of commodities such as tobacco and brandy, in the Cape colony and beyond.