Manuscrit du XIXème siècle de 23 pages intitulé : Cap de Bonne Espérance. 1er cahier

Anonymous manuscript of 23 pages, complete as this first notebook, accompanied by a title leaf bearing a manuscript table of nine articles and entitled Cap de Bonne Espérance. 1er cahier. The title identifies it as a first notebook, although no continuation accompanies the present group. On one page, the text shows a visible revision, with a word crossed out and corrected; the manuscript therefore appears to be a working draft rather than a final fair copy. A small brown stain affects one page of the arrival narrative without impairing legibility.

The manuscript is preserved in loose sheets within a half dark blue morocco folder with marbled-paper boards, housed in a matching slipcase edged in dark blue morocco with marbled-paper sides and a gilt title to the spine.

The manuscript captures the Cape at a moment of transition that is still clearly visible: the port is now British, the gun salute is negotiated with the governor, and the English flag answers that of the ship. In the town, however, the author still finds traces everywhere of the former Dutch colony. This overlap of administrations, languages and customs gives the account its particular character: the traveller is discovering not so much a new city as a territory that has only recently passed from one empire to another.

Alongside these political and urban observations appears another face of the Cape, more social and more familiar to European travellers: Constantia. The wine he tastes there already belongs to a genuine geography of prestige, served on European tables and even during Napoleon’s exile on Saint Helena. The manuscript thus moves from military ceremony to the sociability of the wine estates, and then to the landscape itself with the ascent of Table Mountain.

Within the few pages of this notebook, the Cape appears in turn as a British port, a former Dutch town, a French stopping place, a celebrated wine district and a spectacular landscape. More than a simple account of a stopover, the text preserves a very concrete portrait of a place still divided between several histories.

To our knowledge unpublished, this notebook thus offers a first-hand account of the Cape, probably written in the 1820s, at a time when British administration was already firmly established while the town still retained everywhere the imprint of its Dutch past.