Description

Alexander DUNLOP (?-1812).

Cape Town: November 24, 1809.

Manuscript in black ink on three pages of folded letter paper, last page blank, watermark: BUDGEN & WILMOTT 1809, 22,7 x 18,5 cm (8.8 x 7.3 inches), (slightly age-toned and stained, light folds slightly rubbed, a tiny hole in the lower outer corner).

Dear Sir

I wrote you a few days since respecting the Wine which will be sent from here, as soon as the Embargo is taken off from this Port, which has been occasioned by some unpleasant news received from India. A British Missionary who has been travelling for eleven years past in the interior of Africa has just returned to his place, and amongst other Curiosities, after great perseverance and infinity of Trouble, he succeeded in killing that most rare and almost unknown animal the Camelopardalis, and being a man of some taste he concluded that the skin would be of inestimable value to the Naturalist, and was at the expence [sic!] of bringing it the distance of Three Thousand Miles beyond the borders of this Colony to the Cape. He married into a Dutch family with whom I am most intimately acquainted, by which means I was so happy as to procure it. It is in the highest state of preservation, and shall spare no pains in keeping it so until I reach England. What renders it still more valuable, the bones of the Head and the hoofs are complete; when stuffed, it will stand upward of Twenty feet high: my motives for thus acquainting you, are, that neither my intention nor profession will enable me to retain it, I should therefore be obliged to you to take any opportunity of making the circumstance known to your numerous acquaintance, as perhaps amongst some of whom you may probably meet with a purchaser for me.

I have every reason to believe that I shall be in London some time in April, before which time I hope you will have tasted the Constatia and approve of my choice. I will leave such directions with Messrs Houghton & McDonald Merchants that you may be enabled to obtain anything you may in future want form this place, in the mean time, I am with every Apology for this freedom

Yours most respectfully

A. Dunlop Staff Surgeon.

P.S. I have had some idea of late of bringing with me if I should not incur the appellation of a Shewman, a complete animal of another Species, to wit, a Female Hottentot, the external conformation of whose body exceeds all human comprehension; indeed I was advised by my late worthy friend Mr. Cassels, Kings Advocate.

Sarah Baartman is today known for being showed at freak shows in the early 19th century and racist abuse of her body for almost two centuries after her death, when parts of her corpse and a cast of her naked body were used as museum exhibits.

Sarah was born in a Khoekhoe ethnic group of Gonaqua close to the Gamtoos River Valley in South Africa, either in the early 1770s or as late as 1789. Although never a slave, Saartje Bartman (Baartman, Bartmann), as she was known with a Dutch version of her name, served to white colonialists since her young age and eventually moved to Cape Town, where she settled in a slum and worked as a badly paid servant to Hendrik and Anna Cesars, both Free Black, whose ancestors possibly arrived as slaves from East and South Asia.

In her youth, Sarah gave birth to two or three children, all of which died. One was a result of a relationship with a military drummer, as the other one or two could be conceived in much rougher consequences, not unusual for the poor neighborhoods of Cape Town.

Due to a tough financial situation and unpaid debts Hendrik Cesars, eager to earn extra money, started showing Sarah as a “Hottentot Venus” after the British takeover of the Cape in 1806, at the Military Hospital for a small fee to the patients, thirsty to see the voluptuous curves and non-European features of indigenous women of South Africa, which they could until then only admire through somehow exaggerated images in contemporary populistic natural history books.

According to Anna, “Sara showed herself to those “who wished to see her.” But when the sailors in the hospital looked at Sara, they bound her in the ribbons of European desire to “know” the Hottentot Woman and in their own longings for sexual entertainment. She became a special kind of show, a Hottentot Venus.” (Crais, Clifton; Scully, Pamela. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (English Edition) (S.50-51). Princeton University Press. Kindle-Version).

In this time Cesars met and partly worked for Alexander Dunlop, a retired military doctor and now a doctor at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town. With his miserable salary Dunlop was also earning additional money with other sources as a tradesman.

Seeing a great chance to earn money with Sarah Baartman in Europe in the same way Cesars was making pennies at the Military Hospital, Dunlop, who was soon to be dismissed of his work at hospital of the Slave Lodge, convinced the latter to sign the contract to bring Sarah abroad. Both Sarah Baartman and Hendrik Cesars were illiterate and did not seem to understand the deal.

Enter our Letter.

The original plan by Alexander Dunlop, was to sell Sarah to one of the booming natural history museums in England. Sarah Baartman, which was by the time allegedly already called Hottentot Venus, was meant to be exported together with a skin of giraffe.

As a military surgeon trained in Britain, Dunlop was well aware of the exploitative potential of live human exhibits. London had a thriving entertainment trade in human and scientific curiosities, and a person from an almost mythical African race might provide an exceptional draw for novelty-hungry British audiences. (Holmes, Rachel. African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (English Edition) (Kindle-Positionen431-433). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle-Version).

After delaying arguments, when Sarah did not want to leave without Cesars, legal barriers (under the Hottentot Proclamation implemented in 1809, no Khoikhoi was permitted to leave the colony without the direct permit of the governor) and financial problems, Sarah Baartman, Dunlop and Cesars, accompanied by two coloured servant boys, sailed from Cape Town in March 1810 and arrived to England in May 1810 (dates in literature vary).
Dunlop rushed to William Bullock, a prominent antiquarian, collector and an owner of private museum, who had just moved from Liverpool and was establishing his museum in London, which was in 1812 opened as the Piccadilly Egyptian Hall. As Bullock bought the skin of the giraffe, that Dunlop brought with him, he refused to buy Sarah as a living exhibit.

After the plan to sell Sarah fell through, Dunlop and Cesars decided to exhibit Sarah themselves.

London was hardly an upgrade for Sarah, who was suddenly financially supporting herself, as well as Dunlop, Cesars and two boys, who came with them from South Africa, by exhibiting her body to the crowds as a “Hottentot Venus”, an exotic curvaceous female species from the wildness of Africa. Wearing a tight brown body suit, ethnic jewelry, clothing, sometimes a face mask and smoking a pipe, Sarah was shown to the audience and in exclusive private saloons for an entrance fee, followed by a watchful eye and sometimes a stick of Hendrik Cesars. For additional payment the visitors could touch her buttocks.

At home Sarah had to preform house chores for all the men living with her. Her situation was noticed by the British abolitionist society, with a suspicion, that she was kept as a slave, and on October 11, 1810, British abolitionist Zachary Macaulay (1768 –1838) interviewed Sarah at her home. Sarah did not complain about her life and the way she was earning her money and the imprints on the theater posters and playbills showed, that Sarah herself was the publisher of the advertisements for her shows. As Sarah was illiterate, that was somehow unlikely, and the situation was probably staged by Dunlop.

Sarah’s popularity in London was short lived. She performed last in April 1911, less than a year after her arrival to the country, when hopes of Dunlop and Cesars to became rich with exhibiting Baartman started fading quickly. Sarah toured British resorts and other cities in the next moths together with aging Dunlop and possibly Cesars. On December 1, 1811, Sarah, accompanied by Dunlop, was baptized in the Manchester Cathedral. Soon after he retired to the home of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, where he died in July 1812.

The movement of Sarah Baartman, who was without a regular income, after that is somehow unclear. She arrived to Paris in early September, 1814, where she was soon exhibited in Palais Royal, a center of social life, but also of brothels and dubious nightclubs, by a man called Riaux (also Réaux), an animal trainer, possibly connected with a man of the same name, who was in the time of Sarah’s living in Cape Town linked with the Slave Lodge and a circus in the same place. It has been speculated in literature, that in the last months of Sarah’s life, Réaux was also selling her as a sex worker and drove her to alcoholism.

In 1815, Paris was going through a rough political and economic situation with the return of Napoleon and the Second Treaty of Paris, signed on 20 November. The winter was even rougher and Sarah died after a short disease on a cold day on December 29, aged somewhere between 26 and late 30s.

Some months before Sarah’s death, in March 1815, Réaux arranged a meeting with a prominent French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769 – 1832) from the Museum of Natural History, who was vitally interested in Khoekhoen. Having seen a Khoekhoe boy in 1807, he was anxious to examine a woman of the same background, which would help him to prove his theory, that Khoekhoen are closer connected to apes than to humans. He interviewed and examined Sarah in March, but embraced the opportunity to do even closer examinations of her unclaimed body after her death. He made a detailed cast of her body, and exhibited the it next to her skeleton, brain and genitals in the museum. The visitors could see Sarah’s disrespectfully preserved remains in museums and exhibitions until 1974, when her skeleton was removed. The body cast was removed in 1976. She was properly buried in her homeland, in the Gamtoos Valley, on May 6 2002.

Dunlop’s referral to Sarah as “a complete animal of another Species” and “the external conformation of whose body exceeds all human comprehension“ in the present letter was in fact not an trying-to-be-witty remark, but a part of the contemporary scientific racism, with speculations by some of the leading scientist, that people like Sarah could be “the last race of the human species, or the negro race and the first of the apes” just above the orangutan (Crais, Clifton; Scully, Pamela. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (English Edition) (S.135). Princeton University Press. Kindle-Version).

The Letter in Focus

The letter, dated November 24, 1809, and mentioning a Female Hottentot, was written in the middle of Alexander Dunlop’s last negotiations with Cesars to bring Saartje to London and it is probably the earliest known document mentioning Baartman. Although the expression “Hottentot Venus” was a contemporary term used for some other Khoekhoe women encountered by European men, we could not trace, that Dunlop was connected with anyone else but Saartje.

The letter was written to an unknown recipient, probably in London. The words: “my motives for thus acquainting you, are, that neither my intention nor profession will enable me to retain it, I should therefore be obliged to you to take any opportunity of making the circumstance known to your numerous acquaintance, as perhaps amongst some of whom you may probably meet with a purchaser for me” suggest, that the recipient was not William Bullock, who later bought the skin, but one of his acquaintances.

Shortly after their arrival to London, Alexander Dunlop offered Sarah and the skin of a giraffe to Bullock, who was after founding the Liverpool Museum opening a new museum of curiosities Piccadilly Egyptian Hall in London.

The stuffed giraffe was later exhibited in the museum and depicted on engravings (for two examples see: print | British Museum and Clever and amusing – Jane Audas).

William Bullock, who refused to buy Sarah Baartman as an exhibit, testified at the court on November 24, 1811, exactly a year after the present letter was written, that Baartman had been brought to Britain by individuals who referred to her as if she were property.