3 letters from Sir Thomas Maclear (Royal Observatory Cape Town) to Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cornwallis (Collier) Michell, Suveyor General at the Cape.

Refers to “the gigantic engineering task you have grappled with.”

According to a note in Evans, page 45, Herschel persistently spelt Michell’s name wrong. It would appear that Maclear did too.

Sir Thomas Maclear (17 March 1794 - 14 July 1879) was an Irish-born Cape Colony astronomer who became Her Majesty's astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope.

Maclear had a keen interest in amateur astronomy, and would begin a long association with the Royal Astronomical Society, to which he would be named a Fellow. In 1833, when the post became vacant, he was named as Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived there aboard the Tam O'Shanter with his wife and five daughters, to take up his new duties in 1834. He worked with John Herschel until 1838, performing a survey of the southern sky, and continued to perform important astronomical observations over several more decades.

Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Collier Michell, KH (29 March 1793 in Exeter – 28 March 1851 in Eltham, London), later known as Charles Cornwallis Michell, was a British soldier, first surveyor-general in the Cape, road engineer, architect, artist and naturalist.

Michell illustrated the Narrative of a Voyage of Observation among the Colonies of Western Africa (1835) by his son-in-law, Sir James Edward Alexander.

183mm x 225mm

R12,500