Eighteenth-century natural history, travel writing and South African literary historiography

Abstract

Travel writing in South Africa in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a highly self-conscious genre, aimed at the European elite, and closely linked to the leading intellectual and political movements of its time. Its major protagonists came from a variety of countries and many were major figures in scientific discovery. The German Peter Kolb(e)(n) (1675–1725/6) and Frenchman Nicholas Louis de La Caille (Delacaille, de la Caille, De Lacaille) (1713–62) were astronomers; the Swedes Anders Sparrman (1748–1820) and Carl Thunberg (1743–1828) were naturalists with a particular interest in botany; the Scot William Paterson (1755–1810) was a soldier and botanist; the Surinamborn Frenchman Francois Le Vaillant (also known as Levaillant) (1752–1824) was primarily an ornithologist. Other figures had strong links to colonial administration: Johannes de Grevenbroek was the secretary of the Dutch East India Company Political Council at the Cape in the late seventeenth century; Robert Gordon (1743–95) was of Scots origin but working for the Dutch government as a military commander at the Cape; while the Englishman John Barrow (1764–1848) was a geographer and colonial civil servant with a strong interest in land surveying. There were other important travel writers, notably the only important female figure, Lady Anne Barnard (1750–1825), wife of the British Governor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose work has enjoyed more attention than any of the other figures although her diaries remained unpublished until the twentieth century.