Stephen Gray
THE JOURNAL OF GUSTAF DE VYLDER (Van Riebeeck Society)
The latest (1998) volume in the Second Series of the Van Riebeeck Society’s noble list of publications has, in fact, been available to specialists from the National Archives of Namibia since 1992. But now, for a wider general readership, here is The Journal of Gustaf de Vylder: Naturalist in South-Western Africa (1873-1875), available to all society members (but also from bookshops, or directly from the Hon Secretary at PO Box 496, Cape Town, 8000).
This society has long been (since 1918, in fact) the poor man’s Brenthurst Press, annually serving up well-edited tranches of early Southern African historical documentation to its erudite supporters, and eventually to the collectors. Still going strong, one might say – and at prices that seem to be untouched by inflation.
This title is the latest in a cluster of the Swedish interest in the old Cape as a field of exploration. Included are the records of those grand 18th-century Linnaeans, Anders Sparrman and Carl Peter Thunberg, to which we have had access largely thanks to the editing- translating team of Ione and Jalmar Rudner. Then there was Johan August Wahlberg (from the late Chris Hummel). And now the Rudners are back with the rather obscure – but really unforgettable – De Vylder.
He was of Belgian extraction (born in 1827) and footled about the Swedish court as a wood-engraver and poet. He then threw it all up to go collecting for His Majesty King Oscar – or perish – in parts none had penetrated before, at least from the entomological point of view.
And in the heart of Great Namaqualand and Damaraland and Ovamboland, full of venturesome Swedes as it turns out, with his candle-flame contraption, he could achieve his ambition: luring insects yet unknown to Western science to wriggle on pins. In just one record night, he gleefully notes, he landed more than 500 new specimens. Grouchily, on his eventual return home, he added that he was often paid for each item less than the cost of the spirits to pickle it.
Discouraged, De Vylder never finished writing up these diaries. Some apparently are in bad shape, so that we may imagine the Rudners having had to reconstruct arduously. But whether his entourage, sometimes of 40, with a pantry of up to 1 000 livestock running alongside across the Etosha Pan, or alone in the Waterberg, chipping away at lichen, fossils, dinosaur prints … or ragging with Chief Mureti, his favourite among his many, graphically described trading partners … or cosseting little Joseph, his abandoned, adopted Bushman child, De Vylder certainly had a lively, button-holing manner and deftly turned a phrase.
Needless to say, for those devoted to pre-colonial South West, his record turns out to be the treasure. And how did they hunt an ostrich in the 1870s, after all? – Ride it down on horseback, and when it exhaustedly lays down its head, brain it with the stock of your riding-crop. Saves bullets and blood on the feathers.