The Sherwill Journals, 1840-1843: Voyages and Encounters in the Eastern Cape of Southern Africa

This volume brings together newly discovered personal journals from the mid-19th century, presented here with their original illustrations. The youthful Sherwill brothers, inheriting a family flair for science and adventure from their 18th century astronomer grandfather, Dr James Lind, and their mountaineering father, recorded their colonial travels between 1840 and 1843. These years represent a vital period of change in British domestic and colonial history, which provides the background to their minute observations of the flora, fauna and inhabitants of Southern Africa and the oceans on either side of it. One brother sets out to explore the Eastern Cape from Port Elizabeth to Colesville on the Orange River, following in the footsteps of earlier travellers, reporting on a vast land of seemingly empty veldt, which is already a deep bone of contention between Bushman, Bantu, Boer and British settler. The other describes his eventful voyage home to England from Calcutta on a sailing ship with unusual Victorian self-analysis.