The Botany and Anthropology of a Quaker Missionary
BACKHOUSE, James.
A narrative of a visit to the Mauritius and South Africa …
London, Hamilton, Adams, and Co.; York, John L. Linney, 1844.
8vo, pp. xvi, 648, lvi; with 2 folding maps, 16 plates, and 28 further smaller woodcuts; some light foxing, a few marks, small tear to fold-out map of Mauritius; good in recent brown morocco and cloth, spine lettered in gilt, top edge gilt.
First edition describing the travels of the Quaker minister, missionary, and amateur botanist James Backhouse (1794-1869) in Mauritius and South Africa.
Backhouse had previously spent a number of years in Australia with George Washington Walker (1800-1859), a fellow member of the ‘Society of Friends’. The pair reached Mauritius in 1838 and spent the following two and a half years visiting as many local mission stations as possible, covering a distance of some 6,000 miles. Although Backhouse’s primary object was aiding the local missionary efforts – the ‘discharge of a religious duty’, as he put it in his preface – he was also ‘a keen and quick observer, and very little seems to have escaped his notice’ (Mendelssohn). Of particular interest is the detailed information he provides concerning the way of life and customs of various native tribes, and his ‘countless botanical records’ (de Kock): Backhouse had as a young man spent much of his summer holidays studying botany and he was a friend and correspondent of the great botanist William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), who became the first director of Kew Gardens in 1841. As a result, Backhouse’s narrative is filled with precious (and preciously detailed) descriptions of what he called ‘a variety of secondary objects, which appeared worthy of notice’, and remains a source of valuable botanical and anthropological information concerning the Cape Colony in the first part of the nineteenth century.
Backhouse first published extracts of his journal upon his return to England in 1840-41; these formed the basis of the much larger and more picturesque account provided here. The volume includes two beautifully detailed maps of Mauritius and South Africa by the British geographer and map-seller James Wyld (1812-1887) – pieces worth collecting in their own right – as well as numerous woodcuts and engravings depicting wildlife, landscapes, and scenes of South African life.
De Kock I, pp. 31-2; Mendelssohn I, p. 62; South African Bibliography I, p. 107; Theal, p. 15.
