Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon spent just short of twenty years at the Cape. During that time he had amassed an enormous quantity of material, both visual and verbal, concerning the topography, fauna, flora, meteorology, geology and inhabitants of South Africa which, taken together, give an astonishingly complete and detailed overview of the country during the final decades of the Dutch East India Company's regime. His achievement is all the more remarkable in that he collected and classified it almost single-handedly, showing equal skills as a botanist, zoologist, ethnographer, linguist, geologist, cartographer and draughtsman, assisted only by a small group of untrained servants and semi-skilled soldiers.
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