On 24 June 1812, the Rev. John Campbell, a forty-six-year-old Congregational Minister from Scotland, boarded the Isabella convict transport ship at Gravesend in Kent, bound for Africa.

Formerly an ironmonger in Edinburgh, Campbell had been interested in Africa for decades – he had campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade, and was a friend of John Newton, the former slave trader who penned Amazing Grace.

Campbell had been the motivating force behind the Society for the Education of Africans, hoping that schooling in Britain might convert young Africans through Grace and the Gospel, enabling them to return and transform their home countries.

Leading Anglicans feared the impact of an Edinburgh education, resolving in 1799 that the 20 boys and 4 girls sent from Sierra Leone ‘should remain in safety from contamination with any heretical or socialistic ideals’, at an African Academy in Clapham, London.^⁠2

Ordained the minister of Kingsland Chapel in London in early 1804, Campbell met Martha, Mary and John, the South African visitors, shortly after they arrived with Rev. Kicherer [Chapter 2].

Although he had never been to the continent of Africa, Campbell had experience of preaching tours across the highlands and islands of Scotland, as well as the North of England.

What is more, Hinrich Lichtenstein had just published the English translation of his Travels in Southern Africa between the years 1803 and 1806, which included extremely unflattering descriptions of both van der Kemp and his missionary settlement Bethelsdorp.

This reflected suspicion among the settlers of what they called Bedelaarsdorp (Beggar’s village), partly due to the reluctance of its residents to labour on local farms.

Lichtenstein ridiculed both Van der Kemp’s adoption of local forms of dress, such as leather sandals, and questioned the marriages of both Van der Kemp and his fellow Bethelsdorp missionary, James Read, to extremely young non-white women.^⁠4

Campbell was tasked with visiting the mission stations in Africa to investigate. He was also asked:

… to establish such regulations… as might be most conducive to the attainment of the great end proposed – the conversion of the heathen, keeping in view at the same time the promotion of their civilization.^⁠5

Arriving at Cape Town after four months at sea, Campbell met friends including Kicherer, who had been minister of the Dutch Reformed Church at Graaf-Reinet since his return to South Africa. The Cape Colony had returned to British control in 1806 following a naval invasion during the Napoleonic wars, so Britain’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade applied there, at least in theory. Slavery, but also the trade in enslaved people, continued to operate however, and Campbell witnessed domestic slavery first hand at the Cape.

It was not until mid-February 1813 that Campbell set off to inspect the Society’s own mission stations, going first to Bethelsdorp at Algoa Bay in the eastern Cape, Van der Kemp’s mission since 1803.

Travelling from Cape Town with two wagons, drawn by teams of twelve and fourteen oxen, Campbell was almost entirely reliant on the expertise and know-how of his Khoekhoen guides.

The party was overseen by Cupido Kakkerlak (Cupid Cockroach in Afrikaans), who Campbell called the group’s ‘travelling director’^⁠8, a Khoe preacher from Bethelsdorp who had been baptised by Van der Kemp in 1801.^⁠9

In addition ‘Britannia’, a Gonaqua man, drove the other wagon, while ‘John’ and ‘Michael’ led the oxen and ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Sarah’ took care of cooking, washing, finding water as well as making regular coffees for the travelling party.

During the month long journey, Campbell formed an attachment to his companions, writing that they were:

far from being so barbarous a race as they are usually supposed to be by Europeans… They have nothing more savage about them than the peasants in England. I have seen families in London living in more dirty hovels than ever I saw Hottentots, and many in London have committed far more atrocious deeds than any I have ever heard the Hottentots charged with.

I think the Hottentot mind is better cultivated than the minds of many in the lower ranks in London; and I should expect to be much better served, and to be more safe in travelling with twenty Hottentots, than with twenty Europeans.^⁠10

The mission at Bethelsdorp was a rare place where Khoekhoen could live a fairly independent life within the colony, apart from when pressed to serve in the Cape Regiment – the majority of Khoekhoe not living at missions were forced to work as farm labourers. Vocational training seems to have been a strand at the mission, and William Corner, a Black missionary from Demerara, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean, had been training carpentry apprentices for around a year when Campbell arrived.

Cupido, who had been born around 1760 grew up on a farm, and did his time as a farm labourer. However, he became a key figure among the founders of Betheldorp, when land had been allocated for the mission by Batavian authorities in 1803-4.

At Bethelsdorp, Cupido worked for himself as a sawyer and wood trader, while his wife made soap for sale. Together they built up a herd of ten oxen and purchased a wagon. The church became increasingly important in Cupido’s life, and he was one of the first people at the mission to learn to read and write.

While he thought there was still room for improvement, Campbell concluded that during its first decade Bethelsdorp had become a self-sustaining Christian community of around a thousand people, with over two thousand cattle. A significant measure of this, in Campbell’s eyes, was the money they raised to support the poor and sick, as well as missionary work elsewhere.

From Bethelsdorp, a party of five wagons set off in April 1813, intent on examining potential mission sites in Albany, recently cleared of its human inhabitants by a combination of Khoekhoen and British troops during the fourth frontier war of 1811-12. It was while travelling through this recently depopulated landscape that Campbell first encountered large African mammals such as elephants and buffaloes.

It was the thirty Khoekhoen in the party, however, including two who had originally been part of the Zak River mission [Chapter 2], who did all the hunting, at times mounted on oxen. They skinned and cut up animals to make biltong (preserved meat) and presented Campbell with various trophies, including the horns of the first buffalo they shot. Somewhere along the way, Campbell seems to have acquired his own sheepskin cloak or kaross, which he appreciated on cold nights.

Arriving at Graaf-Reinet at the end of April, Campbell met Kicherer, Martha, Mary and John, but also William Burchell, a young botanist and collector who travelled in the interior of South Africa between June 1811 and April 1815.

Writing to his mother, just before he set off from Cape Town, Burchell declared:

I do not consider myself out of the way of making money, when I think of the value of what I shall be able to obtain in my journey. I have been informed that a skin of the Camelopard which was shot in that country where I am going to, was sold in England for fifteen hundred pounds and though I cannot hope that if I bring one home it will sell for half that sum, yet should I be so fortunate as to discover the Unicorn, which has been supposed to exist in this part of Africa, I have not the least doubt of making five times that sum.^⁠13

Discussed in the same breath as the unicorn, the giraffe had until recently been considered a quasi-mythical beast in Europe, known from Classical texts that described it as camel-like with the skin markings of a leopard – hence camel-leopard.

The first skin and skeleton to arrive in England had been collected at the Cape in the late 1770s by William Paterson, another Scotsman, and was presented by his patron Lady Strathmore to John Hunter, whose anatomy collections became the Hunterian Museum at London’s Royal College of Surgeons.^⁠14

At around the same time Robert Jacob Gordon, a Dutch born soldier from the Scotch brigade, sent a giraffe skin to Holland, and a few years later the French traveller François Le Vaillant sent another to Paris that ended up in the Natural History Museum in Paris.

Burchell had initially travelled into the interior from Cape Town with missionaries, using the Society’s stations as the stopping points on his journey. Like Campbell, he was dependent on Khoekhoen guides and key among them was Stoffel Speelman, recently discharged from the Cape Regiment.^⁠15

Like Cupido, Speelman took charge of the practical aspects of the journey, finding water for the cattle and doing most of the hunting – for food as well as Natural History collecting. Burchell trained his assistants to cut and remove skins in a way that would enable subsequent taxidermy. In a journal entry, Burchell stated that:

In order to encourage Speelman in being diligent to shoot birds for my collection I have promised him a rix dollar for every dozen skins I preserve: And to whoever shall bring down a camelopardalis, any thing of my bartering goods he may choose.^⁠16

Burchell and Speelman twice made the dangerous journey on the route they pioneered between Graaf Reinet and Klaarwater, across so-called ‘Bushmanland’, and Campbell intended to follow in their footsteps.

At Graaf-Reinet, Burchell advised Campbell, but also agreed that one of his party could join them as a guide. How much they discussed Natural History collecting is unclear, but Burchell’s wagons must have already been impressively full, since he collected a total of 63,000 items during his travels.^⁠17

Campbell’s party of three wagons and numerous livestock and dogs completed this journey in early June 1813 when they crossed what he called the ‘Great River’, later known as the Orange, and now mostly called the Gariep, a transliteration of the Khoe words Kai !Garib, meaning ‘great river’.

Campbell’s published account of the journey describes them entering what he called ‘Griqualand’, but at the time was no such thing. The people they were on their way to see called themselves ‘Bastaard Hottentoten’ or just plain ‘Bastaards’, in acknowledgement of their mixed ancestry.

During his visit, Campbell persuaded them to abandon this term on account of “the offensiveness of the word to an English or Dutch ear”, and to rename themselves Griqua, since the Khoekhoen group they were most descended from was the “Gurigriqua”.They also renamed Klaarwater (Clear Water), their main settlement, Griqua Town – now mostly known as Griekwastad.^⁠18 

The settlement was dominated at the time by the Kok and Barends families, fugitives from the expanding Cape Colony, who prospered by trading and raiding across the frontier. The advantages that guns and horses gave them over other residents of the African interior were considerable.

A mission had been established at Kok’s kraal in 1802, but relocated along with the people to Klaarwater shortly afterwards. By 1813 Campbell recorded a population of around 1300 Griquas, with another 1300 Corannas (another mixed Khoekhoen group) under their protection.

In the days that followed, Campbell was gratified when the newly constituted ‘Griqua’, having agreed to a code of laws, system of justice and his proposal they should adopt their own currency, decided to rename one of their satellite settlements Campbell in his honour.^⁠21

Following the Gariep downstream before travelling south through Namaqualand, Campbell’s party arrived back at Cape Town at the very end of 1813.

Meeting John Craddock, the Governor of the colony early in the new year, Campbell was granted additional land for a new mission in Albany which he optimistically named Theopolis, the city of God.^⁠22

Returning to Britain, Campbell arrived at Plymouth in May 1814, and immediately began speaking and preaching about his journey – the giraffe skin was sent to the London taxidermist Benjamin Leadbeater for preparation.

Early in 1815, Campbell published an account of his journey – the frontispiece of which shows its diminutive author sheltering from the African sun under an umbrella in a pose reminiscent of the contemporary ‘selfie’.

There, they would be able to gaze upwards at the towering giraffe, a decade before the first living giraffe made its way to the British Isles.^⁠25 A further note was added, soliciting further donations:

Ladies and gentlemen, possessed of any curious articles suited to this collection, and disposed to part with them, will greatly oblige the Society by presenting them to the Directors to enrich their Museum.

In April 1816 ‘idols of silver’ and copper arrived for the museum from Ballari in Karnataka, South India. In September, further ‘valuable curiosities’ from South Africa were announced.

These had been sent by Rev. Mr George Thom, who had travelled to South Africa with Campbell on his way to a missionary posting in Calcutta, but had been asked to remain in Cape Town as the Missionary Society’s agent. These items included:

skins of a large lion, tyger, leopard, ant-eater, wild boar, lynx, goo, spring buck, kangaroo. & C.; together with various kinds of serpents – the puff-adder, the camelion and La Masité (commonly called The Hottentot’s God).

Though most of these items, like the giraffe, spoke more to South Africa’s natural history than to its religious state, the Afrikaans name for the praying mantis made it clear that the religious understandings of southern African people were not unrelated to the country’s wild creatures.

Soon afterwards ‘London’ was appended to the Missionary Society’s official name, partly to distinguish it from the Anglican Church Missionary Society, established in 1799. However, this choice of name also seems to have connected to the Society’s acquiring a physical headquarters with an attached museum in the city.

In September 1817, following his return to London, William Burchell presented 43 animals skins, including a pair of giraffes, not to the Missionary Museum but to the British Museum. Upset by the way in which the skins were subsequently neglected and allowed to decay, he complained and a number were eventually prepared for display.