The Van Riebeeck Society was founded in 1918 and has published nearly one or more volumes of Africana every year since then. Their “First Series” comprised fifty volumes. The volume under review here is the 44th publication in the “Second Series”. The editor or editors of these works are often handpicked by the Society because of their knowledge of, and expertise in, the subject of the text. They then work at their own expense to produce these scholarly and valuable books, often complete with exhaustive footnotes, illustrations, appendices and interpretation. This volume comes with an accompanying website as well as the original Dutch text and the English translation (on opposing pages).
This project began with a translation, by Dr. Thea Toussaint van Hove and the late Michael Lewis Wilson (both of whom worked at the Iziko South African Museum), from the original Dutch text into English of a journal by Carel Albregt Haupt, a member of Ensign August Frederik Beutler’s expedition in 1752. With this translation in hand, the Society turned to South African historians Hazel Crampton, who is currently working on a study of ancient southern African trade routes, and Dr. Jeff Peires, who is particularly well-known for his studies of the Xhosa people. Carl Vernon, a naturalist and geographer of the Eastern Cape, contributed his expertise through a detailed topographical exegesis of the expedition’s route. Vernon’s day-by-day reconstruction of the journey may be studied at www.vanriebeecksociety.co.za/docs/BeutlerAppsABCD.pdf.
All but a few of the Van Riebeeck Society volumes are relatively obscure diaries and journals that are familiar to only a handful of scholars. Even to the most knowledgeable of these, however, much of the information contained in these volumes would remain opaque and incomprehensible without a rigorous and meticulous study of the contents. Fortunately, such an in-depth analysis is conducted by the volume editors and much of the review that follows draws heavily upon the extensive introductory analysis by Crampton, Peires and Vernon.
Ensign Beutler was born in Dinkelbühl, Bavaria in 1720. His expedition to the Eastern Cape in 1752 is unique in that it was the largest sent out by the Dutch East India Company and that it was arguably the least informative. The expedition’s instructions, as set forth in a brief from the Cape governor, Ryk Tulbagh, were that, “[I]n so far as possible, to obtain thorough knowledge of the hitherto unknown condition of these interior lands and also of the nature of the people living there” (xiv). The expedition was also charged with making “good geographical and astronomical” observations by which “the new-found lands can afterwards be found again”. For unknown reasons, such daily observations were not made. The resulting coordinates submitted by Beutler, if plotted on a map drawn by the expedition’s surveyor and cartographer, Carel David Wentzel, take the expedition far to the east into the Indian Ocean. Volume co-editor Vernon Forbes offers an alternative set of co-ordinates that more accurately approximates the expedition’s route.
The expedition’s failure to accurately map its route was not its only shortcoming. Governor Tulbagh expressed his disappointment in the expedition’s outcome in a letter to the Company Directors in February 1753, noting that, “The expedition returned without having discovered anything remarkable during their march … the chief objective in view has thus been defeated, namely to acquire a correct knowledge of the interior—and of the inhabitants” (xxv). C.P. Thunberg, the Swedish botanist who left an account of his travels around the Cape between 1772 and 1775, made the only independent (i.e., non-official) comments about Beutler’s expedition that we have. He ascribes the expedition’s failures, at least partly, to Beutler’s mismanagement and lack of commitment.
The volume’s editors provide a thorough discussion of all the areas in which the expedition failed to discover anything remarkable or to establish “even one meaningful relationship with an African leader” (xxix) among the Khoikhoi, Xhosa, Thembu and Oeswana San that it met. The editors have, however, also identified six themes throughout the journal, which, through a close reading of the text, provide unique glimpses of the Cape in the mid-1750s. These themes are: colonial expansion, drought, racial complexity, trade in iron and copper, flora and fauna. Thus, for example, the journal’s mention of Dutch names of individuals, farms and rivers beyond the colony boundary, to the east of modern Port Elizabeth, indicates just how rapidly the colony was expanding, with or without Dutch East India Company support. The journal also refers in entry after entry to the severe drought that afflicted the eastern Cape during this period and to the impact it had on the region’s inhabitants and livestock.
The editors’ discussion of the Cape’s racial diversity, gleaned from the journal’s entries, provides a modern (i.e., post-apartheid) analysis that jettisons pure white pioneers and pure black natives. They call attention, as J.A. Heese did many years ago with much controversy in his pioneering work on the origins of the Afrikaners, to the extraordinary diversity noted among the Afrikaner families—black foremother, wife of mixed blood, slave grandmother and persons of mixed ancestry passing as Dutch.Footnote 1 Journal entries also make clear that the great diversity resulting from Khoisan interaction and integration with white settlers on the western side of the frontier was paralleled by contacts between the Khoisan peoples with Nguni language speakers in the east. The fourth theme identified by the editors, the trade in iron and copper, focuses on the Xhosa participation in long-distance trade, which included drawing on the metalworking tradition among the Tswana to the north and establishing trade links as far east as Delagoa Bay. Finally, although Beutler’s expedition failed to carry out its instructions to make decent drawings of all strange animals, plants, herbs and other exotic flora encountered on the expedition (at least no drawings have been uncovered), the journal does contain valuable references to certain flora and fauna that are mentioned in no other mid-1700s sources.
In many ways, the journal of Ensign Beutler’s expedition is extremely disappointing. How much more valuable it would have been if he had closely followed Ryk Tulbagh’s instructions to complete such tasks as taking accurate daily coordinates and having drawings made of the exotic flora and fauna. But, it is what it is, and the volume’s editors have drawn a great deal of valuable information from it. They themselves point out that, except for an account written by survivors of the Hermanus Hubner hunting expedition in 1737 (included in this volume as Appendix 1), “The Beutler Journal is the very earliest written account of the eastern Cape in the eighteenth century to come down to us”. Besides the brief Hubner account, the journal was written almost at the midpoint of nearly a hundred years of silence between the account of the wreck of the Stavenisse in 1688 and A. Sparrman’s diary that first appeared in 1776.Footnote 2 The editors and the Van Riebeeck Society have done a great service by making it available and so accessible. However, it is not something to be read by everyone and will be most appropriate for graduate students and scholars of South African history in the seventeenth century.
