John Barrow, Travels into the interior of Southern Africa (London: Cadell and Davies, 1801).
Barrow's was the first published map that attempted accurately to depict the entire Colony (which now extended to the Great Fish River, in the east, and the Koussie (now Buffels) River, in the North. It was a significant advance on Sparrman's map and signalled a new era of increasingly accurate printed maps of the expanding colony.
Barrow came to the Cape Colony in 1797 as the private secretary of Lord McCartney and undertook a number of extensive journeys in the colony. One of Barrow's declared goals was to map the colony; when the British took control of the Cape, many of the Dutch MS maps had been shipped to the Netherlands, so much of Barrow's map was an original contribution; his mapping method was that of the compass traverse, with distances estimated by the average speed of an ox-waggon over varying types of country. His latitudes were determined by solar observations at intervals of about 35 km, and his longitudes were estimated from dead-reckoning.
Barrow's map is considered the earliest relatively accurate map of the colony; nevertheless Koeman did not consider it much better than the secret Dutch MS maps. Barrow’s published map was widely disseminated and the information on it used by other cartographers and map publishers for many years (e.g. Aaron Arrowsmith); it was the first correctly to position the north-easterly upswing of the southern coastline at Algoa Bay.
Barrow's map was roundly criticised by Lichtenstein (map # 13) and Burchell (Map #14); it was also analysed in detail by Vernon Forbes (pp 134 - 135). Because of Barrow's mapping and scholarly approach to the geography and geology of the country, Forbes considered Barrow as the first geographer and geologist in South Africa. On the other hand, Barrow has been criticised for his prejudice against the Cape settlers and his indiscriminate criticism of other Cape visitors and travellers, who published books and/or maps of the region.
