Of voyages and embellishments

| Friday June 18, 2010 00:00

One of those smacking great must-reads, it has arrived unexpectedly like a comet in a dim sky. With shouts from Nadine Gordimer and Andr Brink enthusing over their advance copies, its special South African interest is guaranteed.

The author Per WŠstberg is Swedish, born in 1933. Perhaps locally he is known for his part in organising a conference of emerging African writers in Uppsala in 1967. Chaired by Es'kia Mphahlele, this watershed event elected to impose the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, which is one factor that has rendered our scope so diminished ever since. Nowadays WŠstberg chairs that dynamite panel the Nobel Committee for Literature and, like the hero of this work, has always maintained a special African concern.

Another fine shout for The Journey of Anders Sparrman (Granta) comes from Adam Hochschild, the outstanding historian of the abolition movement. A key episode in WŠstberg's surprising text in fact deals with an otherwise unheralded attempt by the Swedish crown to collar a share of the West African slave trade. The idea was to tie in their own plantation colony across the Atlantic without loss to competition. Sparrman was at last graphically to come out against the unspeakable abuses of raids and transportation. Stated by a man who had ventured about the Cape through the 1770s, and been among the first to circumnavigate Antarctica with Captain Cook, his condemnation carried some clout.

Sparrman himself was born in a dour country parish in 1748. At university he fell under the releasing spell of Latin and of Carl Linnaeus, who meant to classify not only a few bugs and blossoms, but the entire universe, according to his binomial system, and indeed succeeded.

His lively, likeable pupil Sparrman was dispatched Capewards as his collector, coincidentally with Carl Peter Thunberg. Later to prove a rival with his cargo of specimens, and equally thorough reports of flora and fauna hithero unknown to science (European science, that is), Thunberg's relationship with his younger competitor cries out for description. Both of them were, we now know, beaten to the Orange River by another Swede, Hendrik Wikar, not that his trek merits a mention, either.

Sparrman then was a zestful, endlessly nitpicky botaniser and also practised on the side as a medical man. He was the first to attempt a map of the Dutch colonial reach, striding forth with his boots giving in and adopting Bushman velskoene. He pinned dried beetles to his hat. All such exploring for a few copper dollars, with the reputation of a jaunty sex tourist and spy. The point was to discover the seeds of future crops that could cut down on Sweden's debilitating need to import.

Wastberg misses many alluring details of Sparrman's Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, especially that if Hanoverians and Livonians emigrated south from the German wars kept extinguishing the indigenous population, the loss to medical knowledge would be incalculable; that his staff refused to trap a honeyguide -- the illustrations of which made Sparrman famous at home -- because dissecting an actual sample would to them be sacrilegious, and how he had to be persuaded into a dawning eco-consciousness; of how civilisation abroad was little more than the spread of psalm-singing and syphilis.

Wastberg is at his brightest when actually quoting Sparrman verbatim, especially in his surviving letters to friends dashed off in the 'true sea-style, with divers phrases in common use among the gallant sons of Neptune'. So to this reader it seems inexplicable that he should also omit the graphic account by which we recollect Sparrman best. That is, how on Whit Monday, 1773, old Wolraad Woltemade and his carthorse rode out through the breakers of Table Bay to rescue shipwrecked sailors, pair by pair. As Sparrman stressed, meanwhile all the governor could volunteer, to prevent pilfering (Dutch East India) Company property, was a gallows on the beach.

The original text in English translation has been available from the Van Riebeeck Society in two hefty volumes since the 1970s, with hundreds of just the right footnotes by the late Vernon Forbes. All such fiddly impediments Wastberg may now skip, however, as his rendering of this luscious story is billed as a 'biographical novel', whatever that is. Having located the actual trunk Sparrman hauled about the planet, even to China, Wastberg found it empty. That means apparently that, wherever documentation fails, the cracks may be papered over with thumbsuck. Some may feel this renders his project suspect.

Where Wastberg's fantasy takes over, especially describing the unrecorded last three decades in Stockholm (Sparrman died in 1820), the literal-minded reader may well feel the lack of a source or two. Did Sparrman in his dotage, cheated of his rewards, really instead get to twirl his tongue round the nipple of his seamstress, and 'surge his seed into her'? All we really need to have recounted is that, like so many of the privileged in his backward society, where the infant mortality rate was 40percent, he departed this life bankrupt. And that he left a baby daughter unprovided for. Of course, a point perhaps too subtle for Wastberg, there is also the comment to be made that, while he forever fought the royal hierarchy with democratic reason, he never stopped taking that old slave crop, sugar, in his tea.

The translation by Tom Geddes is admirably readable, despite the usual howlers that should have been corrected.For example, Sparrman's furthest point from Cape Town at Agter Bruintjeshoogte is due east (not north).

Afrikaans would not yet be spoken for a century, neither is it gutteral (sic) Dutch. Sparrman stayed here not for eight months, but close to four years. Certainly he never exported from Africa a bear, an elk and an alligator, though a rhinoceros penis and a stuffed quagga may pass.

Misspellings will irk South African readers, obviously not taken into consideration as major buyers: 'Krysna', 'veldt' and more. So-called Hotnot adults are always referred to as 'boys'. But such is the usual attitude of overseas publishers and their know-all authors and agents towards those deprived quarters of the globe that dear Sparrman helped to connect up. (Mail & Guardian Online)