Scientific Travellers, Colonists, and Africans: Chains of Knowledge and the Cape Vernacular, 1770–1850

• Main Author: Beinart, William
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2003
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199261512.003.0002; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/51979860/isbn-9780199261512-book-part-2.pdf

Abstract Anders Sparrman arrived at the Cape from Sweden aged 24 in 1772. He had studied with Linnaeus, the renowned Swedish botanist, qualified as a doctor, and, as a young man, travelled to East Asia.1 After a sojourn in Cape Town, he spent nearly two years as an assistant naturalist on Captain Cook’s Resolution, travelling to the Polynesian islands and the Antarctic. He returned in 1775 to make a nine-month journey through the rural Cape collecting botanical and zoological specimens. Sparrman was not the first eighteenth-century scientific traveller to record the Cape environment, nor was he necessarily the most accurate. But his book, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, published in English in 1785, was widely read and often cited in subsequent travel texts. It included sharp insights about colonial society, and he evinced considerable sympathy towards the indigenous Khoisan people. Sparrman sought explicitly to discuss the natural world and was amongst the first to record environmental problems.