X 
PREFACE. 
information of a Dutch navigator. It is' therefore hardly necessary to ob- 
serve, that, from such data^ it could not be otherwise than defective in most 
of the essential points that constitute the value of a sea-chart. A partial 
map of the colony by De la Rochet te has also been lately published, which 
is so far incorrect, even in the vicinity of the Cape, that the four-and-twenty 
rivers are made to flow in an opposite direction to that which is actually 
the case. 
In speaking of charts, it may not, perhaps, be considered unimportant 
to observe in this place, that the whole of the coast of South Africa, be- 
tween Algoa or Zwartkop's Bay, and that of De la Goa, stretches, in 
reality, much farther to the eastward, (making the continent in this part 
much wider,) than it is laid down in any of the sea-charts that have hitherto 
been published ; by several degrees more easterly than some of them make 
it. To this circumstance may, probably, have been owing the loss of the 
Grosvenor Indiaman, and many other ships that have been wrecked on the 
Kaffer coast : and by it may be explained the reason why ships, coming 
from the north-eastward, almost invariably fall in with the land, to the 
northward of Algoa Bay, a full degree or more before they make it by 
their observations or reckoning. Immediately beyond Algoa Bay the 
coast, in the charts, is usually made to trend to the north-east, and even to 
the northward of this point, whereas, in reality, it runs only east-north-east 
to the mouth of the Great Fish River, or Rio d'Infante, whose latitude at 
this place, by repeated observations, I found to be 33° 25' south ; and 
from hence to the mouth of the Keiskamma in the Kaffer country, the di- 
rection continues pretty nearly the same ; after which, and not before, the 
coast begins to trend more to the northward. At the mouth of this river 
1 had also an observation for the latitude, which I found to be 33° 12' 
south. The latitude of the true Cape point is 34° 22' south j so that, in 
the distance of about six hundred and fifty miles, the coast inclines to the 
northward no more than seventy miles from the parallel of the true Cape 
of Good Hope, which is very far from being the case in any of the sea or 
