Lieutenant George Augustus Frederick Buxton. 201 



Short as untoward circumstances rendered this travel- 

 ler's operations, he still had time to improve our maps, by 

 expunging from them tlie Fish River, and other smaller 

 streams. A detailed account of this all but fatal journey is 

 inserted at length in the Nautical Magazine for January 

 1846. 



Before leaving Africa, Mr Ruxton made himself acquainted 

 with the manners and customs of the natural inhabitants of 

 the almost inaccessible valleys of Snewbury, Meuweldt, and 

 the desolate tracts of Karoo, or desert, extending from the 

 northern boundary of Cape Colony northward nearly to the 

 tropic. He contributed to the Ethnological Society of Lon- 

 don, at its meeting of the 26th of November 1845, an able 

 paper on the interesting people who are known by the name 

 of Bushmen, — a race of human beings existing on locusts 

 and the larvae of insects, food sought by them as a luxury, 

 and deemed the greatest blessing, which, to the rest of man- 

 kind, is a plague and a pestilence. Desolate and forlorn as 

 is the condition of these poor creatures, Mr Buxton describes 

 his intercourse with them to be favourable to their morals, 

 and adds, " Well may they be now called outcasts, when it is 

 a matter of history that, in 1652, when the Dutch took pos- 

 session of the Cape, they had large herds of cattle, which the 

 Whites first obtained by barter, and ultimately by force, a sys- 

 tem of persecution which drove them from desert to desert, 

 ' their hand raised against every man, and every man's against 

 them.' " 



Nothing daunted by the peril of his first adventure in 

 Africa, and still having the same conception, to use the words 

 of the President of the Royal Geographical Society, of his 

 " daring project of traversing Africa in the parallel of the 

 southern tropic,"" he asked, again and again, from Her Ma- 

 jesty's Government some little assistance to enrich his private 

 resources, which ended in the application being referred to 

 the Geographical Society for its opinion, and that opinion be- 

 ing filed in the archives of the Colonial Office, — an opinion, 

 be it said, equally to the credit of the Society and of Mr 

 Ruxton, — expressed, without loss of time, strongly in its fa- 

 vour. Delay followed delay, which our adventurous traveller 



