First ‘British Colonial Library’ edition. The author and civil servant Robert Montgomery Martin (c. 1800-1868) was born in Dublin, and ‘[h]is life was dominated by a self-appointed task – the study of the British empire, which Martin saw in terms of a vast free-trade area of new territories in allegiance to the British crown’ (ODNB). After training as a physician Martin worked in Sri Lanka before joining Captain William Fitzwilliam Owen’s surveying expedition to Africa as an Assistant Surgeon and Naturalist. Following further medical appointments in Australia and India, Martin returned to Ireland in 1830 and established himself as a writer and historian of the British Empire, whose publications, ‘although drawing on official sources, were influenced by his practical Christianity and by his association with leading intellectuals. He was a founder member of the Statistical Society of London (1834), the Colonial Society (1837), and the East India Association (1867). He opposed duelling, suttee, and slavery, advocated the abolition of flogging, and was active in the work of the Aborigines Protection Society’ (op. cit.).

In 1834-1835 ‘came his pioneering, five-volume History of the British Colonies’ (op. cit.), the fourth volume of which was titled Possessions in Africa and Austral-Asia (1835). The text of History of the British Colonies was then restructured, revised, and enlarged, and issued as The British Colonial Library, in which the first section of Possessions in Africa and Austral-Asia was published as History of Southern Africa: Comprising the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Seychelles, &c. A number of variant issues of the present title are recorded by the South African Bibliography, and in this copy the series-title bears the imprint of John Mortimer and the two maps have the imprint ‘Published by John Mortimer’.

This copy was formerly in the library of the Scottish landowner James Hunter at Hafton House, his house at Hunters Quay, Argyll and Bute. It was subsequently acquired by the noted collection of the explorer and bibliophile Quentin Keynes, who travelled extensively in Africa throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and collected a remarkable library of books and manuscripts relating to the exploration of Africa, particularly during the nineteenth century. Some of these works provided the basis for Keynes’s Roxburghe Club book The Search for the Source of the Nile: Correspondence between Captain Richard Burton, Captain John Speke and Others, from Burton’s Unpublished East African Letter Book; together with Other Related Letters and Papers (London, 1999) and his collection was also a resource that he drew upon for his own travels in Africa.

South African Bibliography III, p. 270.

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