[Item #60629] Travels in South Africa. Undertaken at the Request of the Missionary Society. COLONIZATION, EMPIRE.

Travels in South Africa. Undertaken at the Request of the Missionary Society

Andover: Flagg and Gould, 1816. First American Edition. (Preceded by a London edition, 1815). Octavo. Contemporary full calf; xv,398pp; engraved frontispiece portrait, folding map and six inserted leaves of plates, not reckoned in pagination. Moderate external wear; strip of flaying to leather on front board; crown chipped at edges and a bit soft; uniform toning to contents with expected offsetting to plates and scattered foxing; complete, Good and sound.

Campbell was sent by the directors of the London Missionary Society to inspect their South African settlements in June, 1812; the expedition, covering more than 2000 miles over a two-year period, took Campbell into the interior of the country, where visited numerous Boer settlements including Bethelsdorp, Snewburg, Klaar Water, Namaqualand and Damaraland. Of the Boers of the interior, he noted that "...most of them have nothing to do, in consequence of living by their cattle without cultivating the ground. This idleness produces a sottishness and stupidity evident in many of their vacant countenances." Along the way, Campbell "...gave [new] names to a number of villages, lakes, rivers and mountains, which have all disappeared, and the nomenclature of the scenes of his travels, as given in his map, is absolutely unrecognisable" (Mendelssohn). Campbell undertook a second mission in 1821, and published a separate account of that voyage in 1822, under the same general title. MENDELSSOHN p.255. WORK p.203.

Price: $300.00

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