Loyalty and its Reward; Or, Justice Versus Law, At the Cape of Good...
Ostracized for His Sympathy Towards Irish Convicts [Stanford, Sir Robert (1806-1877)]. Loyalty and its Reward; Or, Justice Versus Law, At the Cape of Good Hope, In the Nineteenth Century. Cape Town: Mathew, Chevens, And Bryant, Machine Printers, 1859. 255 pp. Leaves B1-3 (pp. 9-14) lacking and supplied in fascimile. Octavo (9-3/4" x 5-3/4"). Publisher's textured cloth, fragment of printed label to spine. Front board detached along with text block, backstrip loose and fraying, light rubbing to boards, moderate rubbing to extremities. Moderate toning to interior, light foxing and soiling in a few places, a few partial cracks to text block, all leaves secure, lower corner of leaf D4 (pp. 31-32) lacking with no loss to legibility. Contemporary underlining, corrections and annotations throughout in a single hand. $750. * Only edition. In September 1849, the Neptune, a ship carrying 282 convicts, most of whom were Irish, sailed to Cape Town in an attempt to turn the colony into a penal settlement. The Neptune was prevented from docking by the local inhabitants, who did not want to host a penal colony and felt that Irish prisoners were particularly undesirable. The blockade lasted for five months before the captain gave in and transported the prisoners to Tasmania. The crew and prisoners were ferried supplies in the interim by Robert Stanford, a prominent area landowner originally from Ireland who sympathized with the convicts. Stanford and his family were shunned by the community for this advocacy. The immense economic and personal losses Stanford suffered as a result forced him to leave his estate and return to England. He was knighted by Queen Victoria and awarded a compensatory ?5,000. The present volume is a highly sympathetic account of the affair from Stanford's perspective, though it is unclear whether he wrote or compiled it. The copious and interesting annotations were clearly made by someone familiar with the primary documents in the case and Stanford's decision-making process during the affair. We located a copy with very similar (but not identical) annotations, possibly in the same hand, at the British Library. This title is scarce. In addition to the British Library copy, OCLC locates 6 copies, 1 outside South Africa, none in North America.
Price: $750.00
Book number 74367