The Wild Sports of Southern Africa

Lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses charge across these hand-coloured lithographs, the plates that made William Corn...

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Lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses charge across these hand-coloured lithographs, the plates that made William Cornwallis Harris’s name and gave Victorian Britain its first vivid picture of the big game of the African interior. We offer the complete series of 26 plates and the accompanying map from the 1844 fourth edition of The Wild Sports of Southern Africa, each sold individually. Harris travelled beyond the Cape Colony in 1836–37, at the very moment the Great Trek was carrying Boer emigrants into the same country, and he recorded the sable antelope, which he was the first European to describe, alongside buffalo, eland, hippopotamus, ostrich and zebra. Just as striking are his portraits: Lingap, a Ndebele warrior; the king Mzilikazi; and the Tswana, Griqua and San people who guided and traded with his party. The map plots the expedition’s routes and locates both African communities and the newly arrived emigrant farmers across a region in rapid transformation.

Lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses charge across these hand-coloured lithographs, the plates that made William Cornwallis Harris’s name and gave Victorian Britain its first vivid picture of the big game of the African interior. We offer the complete series of 26 plates and the accompanying map from the 1844 fourth edition of The Wild Sports of Southern Africa, each sold individually. Harris travelled beyond the Cape Colony in 1836–37, at the very moment the Great Trek was carrying Boer emigrants into the same country, and he recorded the sable antelope, which he was the first European to describe, alongside buffalo, eland, hippopotamus, ostrich and zebra. Just as striking are his portraits: Lingap, a Ndebele warrior; the king Mzilikazi; and the Tswana, Griqua and San people who guided and traded with his party. The map plots the expedition’s routes and locates both African communities and the newly arrived emigrant farmers across a region in rapid transformation.

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