Authors: Stout, Captain Benjamin & Griffin, James
Title: Cape of Good Hope and its Dependencies: An Accurate and Truly Interesting Description of those Delightful Regions, Situated Five Hundred Miles North of the Cape etc.
with
The Real Facts Disclosed or the Only Real Guide to the Cape. A Correct Statement of the Advantages and Disadvantages Attendant on Emigration to the New Colony Forming Near the Cape of Good Hope etc.
Publisher: Thomas Davison & Duncombe
Date: 1820 & N.D but ca. 1819/20
Place: London & London
Dimensions: 8vo, 22.4cm x 14cm
xvi+144pp & 16pp.
Half leather over gray cloth boards. 5 Raised bands to spine, gilt titles to compartment labels, date stamped in gilt to foot of spine. Ex-library: South Africa House, London and Library of Parliament, Cape Town, with stamps to blank prelims. Ex-libris (Library of Parliament?) to front paste-down.
Leather lightly scuffed and rubbed. Foxing to blank prelims and terminal blanks, leaves of Griffin age toned. Japanese tissue repair to pp7&8 of Griffin. A hand coloured map of Algoa bay as frontispiece for Griffin, some offsetting to the title page.
Annotations in a contemporary hand to both volumes.
Both of these volumes were issued with a view to informing prospective emigrants in the 1820 settler cohort of the conditions at the Cape.
Benjamin Stout was a relative of American founding father John Adams. Stout provided this account of the wreck of the American East Indiaman Hercules to Smith in 1798, published under the title Narrative of the Loss of the Ship Hercules, recommending American settlement in the region, which was rejected. Stout's crew travelled overland, from the site of the wreck (which Theal puts "between the mouths of the Keiskama and Beka rivers" to Cape Town.
Mendelssohn, Vol 2 pp.445-446
The latter work by James Griffin consists of 16 pages, purporting to give the true facts on settlement under the government scheme of 1820 - discouraging both the person of means with capital to invest in South Africa and the destitute from emigrating.
To the prospective capitalist, Griffin warns: "Your advantages, then, if successful, may be comprised as follows - A good estate, producing every thing necessary for the support of yourself and your tenants in comfort together with wine and several other luxuries; also your storehouses, loaded with corn and wool, which you cannot make use of, and for which you cannot find a market."
And to the destitute emigrant:
"Trust me, my friends, it is much better to remain at home than thus to throw yourselves into the arms of perpetual slavery, unless, indeed, you are compelled to it by the most imminent hazard of starvation"
Scarce. Mendelssohn Vol 1 pp643
