William Cornwallis Harris
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
military engineer, artist and hunter.
Life and career
Born to James Harris of WittershamWittersham
Wittersham is a village and civil parish, part of the Isle of Oxney, south of Ashford in Kent, South East England, near Tenterden.The Domesday Book does not mention Wittersham, but it does assign the manor of Palstre to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. Palstre was only one of four places in the Weald,...
, Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
, William entered Addiscombe College at the age of fourteen. Two years later, in December 1823, he joined the East India Company
British East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
as second lieutenant in Engineers, Bombay Establishment. Over the following thirteen years, Harris was posted to several places in India and was able to pursue his taste for field sports and the depiction of wildlife. He was promoted to first lieutenant in 1824 and to captain ten years later.
In June 1836, Harris arrived at Cape Town
Cape Town
Cape Town is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality...
on the 1467-ton Buckinghamshire and stayed for two years in order to recover from a fever. He was fortunate to meet Dr. Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith (zoologist)
Sir Andrew Smith KCB was a Scottish surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist. He is considered the father of Zoology in South Africa having described many species across a wide range of groups in his major work, Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa.Smith was born in Hawick, Roxburghshire...
, freshly returned from a journey north on which he had visited Mzilikazi
Mzilikazi
Mzilikazi , also sometimes called Mosilikatze, was a Southern African king who founded the Matabele kingdom , Matabeleland, in what became Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. He was born the son of Matshobana near Mkuze, Zululand and died at Ingama, Matabeleland...
at Mosega. From the Cape, he arranged a hunting trip, which was to last from 1836 to 1837, to the Western Transvaal and Magaliesberg
Magaliesberg
The Magaliesberg is a mountain range extending from Pretoria in the north of the Gauteng Province to a point south of Pilanesberg, in the North West Province, South Africa...
with William Richardson of the Bombay Civil Service, who had been a fellow passenger on the voyage.
They sailed to Algoa Bay
Algoa Bay
Algoa Bay is a wide inlet along the South African east coast, some 425 miles east of the Cape of Good Hope. It is bounded in the west by Cape Recife and in the east by Cape Padrone. The bay is up to 436 m deep...
and made their way to Grahamstown
Grahamstown
Grahamstown is a city in the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa and is the seat of the Makana municipality. The population of greater Grahamstown, as of 2003, was 124,758. The population of the surrounding areas, including the actual city was 41,799 of which 77.4% were black,...
, where they outfitted their expedition and received helpful advice from the ivory traders David Hume
David Hume (explorer)
David Hume was a Scottish-South African explorer and big-game hunter.David Hume was born in Berwick, Scotland and went to South Africa with Benjamin Moodie's Scottish settlers in 1817. He became a pioneer trader, explorer and renowned big-game hunter...
and Robert Schoon. Their route took them across the Orange River
Orange River
The Orange River , Gariep River, Groote River or Senqu River is the longest river in South Africa. It rises in the Drakensberg mountains in Lesotho, flowing westwards through South Africa to the Atlantic Ocean...
to Kuruman
Kuruman
Kuruman is a town with 12,701 inhabitants in Northern Cape province of South Africa, famous for its scenic beauty and the Eye of Kuruman, a geological feature bringing water from deep underground to the surface in the Kalahari Desert....
. Here they met Robert Moffat
Robert Moffat
Robert Moffat was a Scottish Congregationalist missionary to Africa, and father in law of David Livingstone....
, who had befriended Mzilikazi and was able to provide Harris with useful information about the ruler. Mzilikazi received Harris' presents with pleasure and the expedition set off confidently for the Magaliesberg toward the south-east.
Here they experienced at first hand the struggles of the Voortrekkers
Voortrekkers
The Voortrekkers were emigrants during the 1830s and 1840s who left the Cape Colony moving into the interior of what is now South Africa...
against the Matabele. Harris came across his first Sable Antelope
Sable Antelope
The Sable Antelope is an antelope which inhabits wooded savannah in East Africa south of Kenya, and in Southern Africa.-Subspecies:There are four subspecies:* H. n. niger which is considered low risk conservation dependent...
(Hippotragus niger) in the Magaliesberg, and sent a description and specimen of the animal to the Zoological Society of London
Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats...
. David Hume had years earlier decided that it was possible to cross the Kalahari and reach Lake Ngami
Lake Ngami
Lake Ngami is an endorheic lake in Botswana north of the Kalahari Desert. It is seasonally filled by the Taughe River an affluent of the Okavango River system flowing out of the western side of the Okavango Delta. It is one of the fragmented remnants of the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi...
. Harris was of like mind and made known his willingness to go, but the geographical societies of Bombay and London decided to ignore him. He remained at Cape Town to the end of 1837, then for the next three years he resumed his work in Western India as field engineer to the Sindh
Sindh
Sindh historically referred to as Ba'ab-ul-Islam , is one of the four provinces of Pakistan and historically is home to the Sindhi people. It is also locally known as the "Mehran". Though Muslims form the largest religious group in Sindh, a good number of Christians, Zoroastrians and Hindus can...
Force.
From 1841 to 1843, Harris led a British diplomatic mission from Bombay to Sahle Selassie
Sahle Selassie
Sahle Selassie was a Meridazmach of Shewa , an important noble of Ethiopia. He was a younger son of Wossen Seged...
, Negus
Negus
Negus is a title in Ge'ez, Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic, used for a king and at times also a vassal ruler in pre-1974 Ethiopia and pre-1890 Eritrea. It is subsequently used to translate the word "king" in Biblical and other literature...
of Shewa
Shewa
Shewa is a historical region of Ethiopia, formerly an autonomous kingdom within the Ethiopian Empire...
, at the time an autonomous district of Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, with whom they negotiated a commerce treaty. They collected extensive scientific data during the trip. Harris was gazetted major in 1843 and was knighted in England the following year for his services. After being knighted, Harris acted as executive engineer at Dharwar Dion and Poona.
Harris married Margaret Sligo, whose father was George Sligo of Auldhame in Scotland, and whose uncle was General Sir James Outram
Sir James Outram, 1st Baronet
Lieutenant General Sir James Outram, 1st Baronet GCB KSI was an English general who fought in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and is considered a British hero.-Early life:...
. The marriage was childless.
Harris died at the age of 41 near Poona as a result of fever.
Harris was one of the more notable of the early Victorian travellers, and his illustrations of the large African fauna were the first to have any claim to accuracy. He hunted on a ruthless scale, even as he wrote with passion about the regions he traversed, and painted the animals he encountered with great attention to detail. He was not an outstanding artist, but his paintings and sketches have great charm and spirit and have considerably enriched natural history art.
Books
- Narrative of an Expedition into Southern Africa during the years 1836 and 1837. (1838)
- The wild sports of Southern Africa (1839)
- Portraits of the game and wild animals of Southern Africa (1840)
- The highlands of Aethiopia - 3 vols.(1844)
- Illustrations of the highlands of Aethiopia [1845]
Source
- Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa vol.5 (Nasou, Cape Town 1972) ISBN 0 625 00321 7
- Ethiopian Encounters: Sir William Cornwallis Harris and the British Mission to the Kingdom of Shewa (1841-3), exhibition catalogue (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam MuseumFitzwilliam MuseumThe Fitzwilliam Museum is the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge, located on Trumpington Street opposite Fitzwilliam Street in central Cambridge, England. It receives around 300,000 visitors annually. Admission is free....
, 2007)