41 8 Great and Small Game of Africa 



Dutch occupation of South Africa, to have been a scarce and very local 

 species, is to be looked upon as a near relative of the roan antelope, which, 

 although doubtless sprung from the same remote ancestry, had, during 

 ages of the past, become separated from its fellow-species and thus developed 

 somewhat different characteristics. Within the last two hundred years, 

 certainly, the true roan antelope has never been known south of the Orange 

 River. How and when the blaauwbok became separated from the rest of 

 its species, and pushed its way to the south - west littoral of the Cape 

 Colony, it is, of course, impossible to say. The early Dutch settlers 

 found it in the neighbourhood of Swellendam, about 130 miles east 

 of Cape Town, in a diversified and very beautiful piece of country 

 consisting partly of open flats, partly ot broken country — mountains, kloots, 

 and ravines. The blaauwbok was never known in any other part of South 

 Africa than the Drosdy, or division, of Swellendam, and there, probably, 

 within an area of 100 miles — a curiously confined habitat. The last 

 known specimen seems, from the information of Lichtenstein, to have been 

 killed in about the year 1799. But this antelope must have been very- 

 scarce for some time before. Barrow, a thoroughly competent observer, 

 who journeyed through Swellendam in 1797, mentions in his Travels 

 that none had then been heard of for ten years past. Indeed Barrow 

 believed that the animal was then quite exterminated. Le Vaillant, that 

 lively but not always accurate Frenchman, states in his book that he shot 

 a specimen in 1781, and gives a picturesque description of his hunt. 

 Unfortunately Le Vaillant's accounts are not always to be trusted. He 

 may have procured and probably did procure and bring home a skin ; in 

 fact I believe the specimen in the Paris Museum was brought by him to 

 Europe. But his narratives of sport are, to those who know his history, 

 not always convincing. 1 



1 Le Vaillant has been convicted of "faking" bird skins in the most outrageous manner, and his 

 accounts of adventure and hunting were stoutly denied and laughed at by his Dutch contemporaries at 



