Thomas Baines’s Contribution to 19th Century South African Cartography

Abstract

The name of Thomas Baines (1820–1875) is well known in the realms of art and exploration, and his nearly 400 extant oil paintings, watercolors, and sketches form one of the most important contributions of all time to South African art. What is less known is that he was also a competent cartographer who left behind an important legacy of route maps of the inner regions of the then unknown nineteenth-century southern Africa. This facet of his oeuvre has received scant attention in his biographies, and the two articles which deal with his cartographic endeavors, are both limited to discussions of his manuscript maps of the Route of the Gold Fields Expedition to Matabeleland of 1869–1872. This paper attempts to give a more complete account of Baines’s cartography and discusses his cartographic work as an integral aspect of his life as a resourceful explorer who mapped parts of the South African landscape with the same dedication he bestowed on his artworks.