Overview

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.

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9781527546691

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June Harvey is a graduate of the University of Exeter, UK, and has lived and travelled extensively in Africa. She is the co-author (with Stephen Craven) of two articles concerning the mountaineering and caving exploits of Walter Sherwill, The Visit of Lieutenant Walter Stanhope Sherwill (1815-1890) to Cango Cave, South Africa, on 9 November 1840 in Cave and Karst Science (2012) and An Early Cape Mountaineer: Walter Stanhope Sherwill in 1840, Concerning Walter's Climbing of Two Well-known South African Peaks in Die Joernaal van die Bergklub van Suid-Afrika (2013). She was also invited to give a talk in Cape Town in March 2019 explaining the details of Sherwill's African and Himalayan climbs to the members of the Mountain Club of South Africa.

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