Anders Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope... from the Year 1772 to 1776 (English edition), with his Mappa Geographica Promontorii Bonae Spei, surveyed 1775-76 and published 1779
printed travel account · consulted 2026-08-13
- Type
- printed travel account
- Repository
- Internet Archive, full text of the English edition
- Reference
- Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, chapters on the interior; map dated A:o 1775-76 delineavit, A:o 1779 edidit
- Consulted
- 2026-08-13
The citation as it was given
CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH THE 1775 ROLL, AND IT SETTLES WHERE THE SNEEUWBERG IS. Sparrman travelled the Cape interior from 25 July 1775 to 15 April 1776, the same season the Council was reading the Bruijnshoogte petition. Two passages bear directly on this project. ON THE LOCATION: 'Sneeuwbergen, which lie to the NORTH OF CAMDEBO, are so called from the snow with which in the winter-time the highest of them are said to be covered.' That is the modern Sneeuberge, north of Graaff-Reinet, and it is stated by a witness of the period rather than inferred from a modern map. ON WHETHER ANYONE LIVED THERE: 'The lower Sneeuwbergen, or Snow-mountains, are INHABITED THE YEAR THROUGHOUT; but on the higher range of hills the winters are severe enough: this circumstance is said to make the colonists remove into the plains below in Camdebo.' So the Sneeuwberg of the 1775 roll was settled country, eleven years before the drostdy of Graaff-Reinet existed and eighty before Murraysburg was laid out. The two Jan Oosthuijsens being 'aan- en op- den Sneeuwberg' is entirely consistent with the period. HE ALSO GIVES THE COLONISTS' OWN REGIONAL VOCABULARY: 'Camdebo, Rogge- and Bokke-velden, the great Carrows &c. all which, taken together... are, from their qualities, distinguished by the colonists by the name of CARROW-VELD.' And he describes the frontier war in the same breath as the country: the bosjesmen 'particularly such as live round about Camdebo and Sneeberg'. WHAT HE DOES NOT SAY, and it is worth recording because it is the negative this project keeps having to re-test: THE KOUP IS NOWHERE IN HIS TEXT. No Koup, no Gouph, no Ghowp, and the single 'Kau' is klipkaus, an abalone. His MAP carries KAU VELD between the Rogge Veld and Cango, which is where the Koup lies, but the printed narrative never goes there. His route ran Caledon, Mossel Bay, Attaquas Kloof, the Little Karoo, the Langkloof and east to the Great Fish, so the map's interior is drawn 'ex propriis observationibus ET INCOLARUM RELATIS' - partly from what inhabitants told him. The Kau Veld of that map is therefore report, not survey. [TO VERIFY] THE MAP CARRIES A REGION NAME NOTHING ELSE HERE CARRIES: ANTHON VELD, lettered between the KAU VELD and the CAMDEBO VELD, north of Cango and the Swartberg. That is the country on this district's northern side. It has been looked for in three corpora and is in none of them. Sparrman's own narrative does not contain the word at all - the only 'Anton' strings in 1.57 million characters are Canton and wantonly. The Council of Policy resolutions 1651-1795 return 97 Anthon/Antoni strings and NOT ONE is a place: they are Anthonij van Doornen, Antonij van Doorn, Anthonij Thomassen, Anthoni Balf and other men. The TANAP MOOC8 inventories return nothing. So it stands as a map-only name, which is the same footing as KAU VELD on the same sheet, and the same caution applies: this interior was drawn partly 'ex Incolarum relatis', from what inhabitants reported, so a name on it is somebody's usage rather than an administrative term. Whose usage, and whether it is a veldkornetskap called after a man, a rendering of a Khoi name, or a mishearing carried into an engraving, is LEAD-0184. [TO VERIFY] VOLUME ONE, read 13 Aug 2026, ADDS TWO THINGS. IT CONFIRMS THE SOUTHERN SWARTBERG INDEPENDENTLY. Sparrman writes of the warm bath that 'It is at the foot of the Zwarteberg (or black mountain, as it is called) that the bath is situated', with a plain shut off from the sea by granite behind it. That is Caledon, and it is the same Zwarte Berg the Council's C220 puts a warm bath against. Two independent sources, so the two-Swartbergs finding does not rest on this project's reading of one word. AND IT GIVES THE MUSTER GEOGRAPHY: 'A still larger corps, composed of the inhabitants of Camdebo, Schneeuwberg, Bockeveld, Roggeveld, Ana[ma]quay and the other places in that part of the country, are drawn up every year at STELLENBOSCH where the landdrost of these districts has his residence', while Roodezand and the country eastward answered to Zwellendam. That sits beside SRC-423's jurisdictional tangle rather than against it. HIS SENTENCE ON THE COMMANDOS is quoted in S040 and is the period's own language: the bosjesmen are 'pursued and exterminated like the wild beasts, whose manners they have assumed. Others of them again are kept alive, and made slaves of.' *** CORRECTED ON VOLUME TWO. THE CLAIM ABOVE THAT ANTHON VELD AND KAU VELD ARE ABSENT FROM SPARRMAN'S NARRATIVE IS WRONG. *** Both are in it, once, in his description of the Camdeboo: 'From the information and accounts that were given me, I have laid down in my map two different roads, by which people may go to the Cape through Camdebo, both from Agter Bruntjes-hoogte and from the Sneeuwbergen. THE NORTH ROAD IS SAID TO GO TO ANTHON-VELD, KAU-VELD, AND BOKKE-VELD. The southern way goes downwards to Oliphant's rivier.' THE SEARCH MISSED THEM BECAUSE OF THE OCR, not because they are not there: the text renders them 'Antbon- veld' and 'Kan-veld', b for h and n for u, and neither matches a search for Anthon or Kau. This is the third time in two days that a confident negative here has been a search artefact rather than an absence, and the first two were period spelling. This one is transcription damage, which is a different failure with the same shape: test the shape of the word, not only its spelling. WHAT THE PASSAGE ACTUALLY ESTABLISHES IS STRONGER THAN THE ABSENCE WAS. 'IS SAID TO GO' and 'from the information and accounts that were given me' are his own words for it, so the reported-not-surveyed reading no longer rests on the map's Latin - he says it himself. And he states plainly that he never got there: 'I was likewise obliged to give up all thoughts of visiting Sneeuwberg and Camdebo, on account of the disorder among the horses.' IT ALSO PLACES THE KAU VELD ON A ROAD. The north road from the Camdeboo to the Cape runs Anthon-veld, Kau-veld, Bokke-veld - which puts the Kau Veld between the Camdeboo and the Bokkeveld, and that is where the Koup lies. Sequence on a route is better evidence than resemblance of a name, and it is still not proof. [TO VERIFY] He describes the Camdeboo itself as 'an arid, flat, Carrow-like tract of country, inhabited by Christians, who are chiefly employed in rearing cattle', extending 'as far as the south side of the Sneeuw mountains' - which agrees with volume one's placing of the Sneeuberge north of it.
Kept verbatim. This project contradicts published genealogies and corrects a family's own oral tradition, so every claim has to be checkable by someone who was not in the room.
Nothing in the model cites this source yet.